EmigrantDirect certainly sells addresses - this happened to me as well, and continues to happen. They hemmed and hawed about someone calling me back, but never did, and their call center seems to have caught on and is intentionally vague and will never let you speak to someone, they'll just promise callbacks.
Actually, if you just slouch down, it's not a problem. The next time you're in economy, slouch with your butt as close to the forward edge of the seat, and stretch your legs out until you hit the luggage bar underneath the seat in front of you. It's not terrible, and it removes this problem of the seat reclining.
I'm 6'4" and have regularly flown from the Eastern seaboard of the US to various cities in China. Flying sucks, but it sure as hell beats the alternatives. Plus, planes don't waste fuel - they're actually much more efficient than cars or trucks in terms of gallons per mile and the amount of people and cargo they can carry. Not to mention the time/value of money savings.
I've never understood the irrational annoyance that people get when someone in front of them reclines their seat - who fucking cares? Just recline your seat too, then you're back where you started, and a little more comfortable to boot.
I've flown long flights (at least 12 hours on a single hop) for 24 years, and been over six feet tall for the last 9 of them, and I've never had ANY knee damage, not to mention irreversible knee damage.
Isn't the question more along the lines of "What CAN'T be done with a SSN?" Seriously - almost every financial transaction needs this number, which as far as I know wasn't ever supposed to be a national ID number. It seems like the overarching importance of a SSN is what makes identity theft so easy. There have been several times where I've not had all the security information when talking to a representative on the phone, but the fact that I knew my SSN trumped everything.
One of the major problems with this article is that he's using alarmist statistics that make no sense to shore up his point.
Now, I agree with his point - corporate control of the availability of broadband is a bad thing, particularly when you take away the right of individuals to resell or pool resources with others.
The problem is that the US will always, has always, and should always lag other countries in broadband penetration due to one factor: population density. You can't compare Singapore with Minnesota, or Korea with the Midwest USA.
The use of misleading statistics to support an otherwise good point is juvenile and makes you look stupid.
Encryption in China is illegal, but the general rule of thumb in China is that foreigners are not handled very roughly.
That said, I've set up people who want to have decent access to news outlets and generally anonymize themselves on the TOR network, which is a great project from the folks at the EFF.
TOR (http://tor.eff.org/) uses onion routing to bounce you around within their cloud of secure servers, which makes it very difficult to see who you are, where you're going, and where you came from. You can tunnel almost anything over it, and it's open source.
I've found it to be very fast (even on China's slower internet connections), and those who use it love it.
I'm not saying that I agree/disagree with the ban, I'm simply saying that people need to know what they're talking about when they discuss something. Especially ridiculous is the parent post of my first reply who accuses someone of ignorance while clearly demonstrating he doesn't comprehend any of the debate.
I agree we need to keep the law and religion separate. I also know that the key to doing this is complete and accurate understanding of all sides in a debate such as this.
Re:"New stem cell harvesting was outlawed in the U
on
US Stem Cells Contaminated
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
While I agree with you that the religious right constituency is misinformed with regards to many things, abortion related or ortherwise, you are equally misinformed.
The religious right position on life is that life begins at conception (when a sperm and egg unite). Under this definition, any embryo destroyed is most certainly an abortion.
This is the crux of the entire stem cell issue (from the religious right standpoint), and I'm amazed you don't understand this concept, yet choose to talk about this issue as if you are well informed.
It's got a long way to go as far as enterprise features.
There is no clustering support in PostgreSQL (and I mean real clustering, not some Java hack where transactions are shipped off to two separate DB servers, both of which don't know they're part of a cluster). This is pretty much a show stopper as far as using PostgreSQL in the company I work for, as high availability is a large concern, and any downtime would be serious.
In previous versions of PostgreSQL, the pg_dump and pg_restore tools were not very good - dumps that included tables or views often would fail on reimport because PostgreSQL wouldn't know the order in which to import everything. You also had to pass in a number of options on the command line just to get a dump that made sense, and large object support was kind of clunky.
That said, I still use PostgreSQL for many many projects and have used PostgreSQL for many years. It's a great product, but it isn't near Oracle in terms of enterprise level features.
While much of the sentiment following the bombing was a genuine expression of emotion from many Chinese, it was only encouraged and exacerbated by the government.
Chinese university students were bussed in by the government to where the US Embassy and consulates were located, and encouraged to violently protest. The result was a damaged embassy and a severely damaged consulate in Chengdu.
The government would certainly never allow any sort of protest it didn't approve of 100% and the opinions of anyone who didn't agree with the protests were not alowed publically.
Wow. I've been playing in rock bands for 8 years and I've met maybe 4-5 guys in that entire time who'd straight up prefer the best solid state amp vs. the best tube amp. What kind of music do you play out of curiosity?
Going along with this, I'd say that my browsing/surfing/emailing experience is just more enjoyable using a mac. The interfaces on Safari and Mail are cleaner, and there are many small touches like the drag and dropability of both applications. The experience is definitely superior than using linux (I've used Debian on the desktop for a year) due to the higher availability of quality plugins, just for starters. I'd be hard pressed to find a Windows user who didn't think the visual interface was superior than a Mac, not to mention the absence of spyware like the parent mentioned.
It's clear that you've never developed a major website that has advanced CSS/DHTML functionality.
Those two elements make it impossible to reconcile any app of complexity with a single codebase. For this reason, Oddpost made the right decision and just forked their development efforts into making each browser's implementation perfect.
Note that I'm particularly focusing on DHTML, and apps of complexity. The little training CGI programs you've written don't apply here.
I realize this was a joke, etc. but if realistically, it would be your friends in China who would be in trouble in this scenario.
Encryption is illegal in China, and its use is guaranteed to at least provoke interest by authorities. This is why stegonagraphy has proved to be popular among human rights and anti-Chinese government groups.
Actually, you're demonstrating how little you know about true marketing by acting as if a name can be bad.
The number one rule of marketing is that there is no such thing as bad press. Every time I see an absolutely awful commercial on TV, I'll talk about it with my friends, and we'll all agree that the commercial was terrible.
Except it isn't - it's brilliant.
We're all sitting around talking about a commercial we would have otherwise forgotten.
The same principle applies here - if you get a clever or memorable name, that is infinitely more marketable than some made-up corporate name that sounds like a new Viagra replacement.
Stop acting like you're so commercial savvy when you clearly don't have a clue. There are plenty of huge "stupid" company and product names....how about Google? Packeteer? Apple? They all turned out ok.
Re:Already in use
on
Hardened PHP
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm not extremely familiar with mod_perl, but I do lots of work in PHP.
The reasons I like PHP better than perl for web development is the fact that you can escape in and out of execution (yes, this can be and is often abused) and I like how PHP wraps some of the more unreadable aspects of perl (like extracting arguments, etc) and has nice session support.
Also, PHP seems to have a lot of standard web stuff rolled in by default. I know that you can configure perl to be whatever you want it to be, but back before I had access to my own servers whose environment I could control, this mattered a bit more.
Anyway, just my two cents - it really comes down to personal preference between the two in my opinion - lots of the major disctinctions have gone away in the last couple of years.
The day that China leads anyone or anything in "green" or eco-friendly behavior will be a long way away.
The poster couldn't seriously think that motorized vehicles are more earth friendly than a bike, probably the most efficient method of transportation around.
My guess is that you've never dealt with kernel level code.
The average person will never know how, nor care to fix kernel level bugs, or any code-level bug, for that matter.
I'd say it's pretty reasonable to assume that every person in the world who has attended school has taken some math, but nobody knows or cares how to do advanced calculus, even though math has been a part of our culture for hundreds of years.
This could be the most insightful post I've read yet in this discussion.
To any normal observer, the MIT student comes off looking like the idiot - he's simply whining about something he can't do and then acting like a cocky little shit by talking about designing HDTVs and CSS descramblers.
This kind of interview just emphasizes to everyone in the business world how idiotic linux zealots are since he completely neglected the core issues of fair use and property rights, and instead got into a trivial and stupid argument that any non-technical reader would be hard pressed to follow.
The simple fact is that it's not Valenti's job to provide a DVD player for linux.
Yes, life existed before cellphones. Yes, he doesn't NEED to have one at all times, but equally stupid is this "insightful" guy acting like having a kid is no big deal.
There's a couple of points in the BBC article that are very misleading, which I'd like to draw attention to.
The worst issue is when the lady being interviewed says "Everywhere we go there are good internet connections." This statement needs to be qualified, since a good "broadband" internet connection in China is typically on par with a decent dialup setup in the US. Most Chinese cities have less bandwidth than a typical large state university. The city I lived in until recently only had 2 T3 lines for the entire urban area of 7 million people. A broadband connection would manage downloads of 4k a second at 2 in the morning, and maybe 1k or less during the day.
Also, I get the impression that she's using canned comparisons that one might use when talking to investors in this article - her anecdote about no heat but a great internet connection is no doubt accurate (China until recently did not allow central heating south of the Yangtze river) but is needlessy sensational if you really know what's going on.
Likewise, the fact that she's never given bribes is almost undoubtedly a lie, or she's taking advantage of the fact that doing business in China involves the use of many tactics that would commonly be referred to as bribes in the US.
Just a few minor points - the reality is of course that China will become a much more active participant in internet related activities, so the overall point of the article I agree with.
This has been pretty much my experience as well. I've found that every computer I've used which belonged to a home user/college student in the last year was ridden with spyware.
Girls seem to average around 250-350 infections, while guys tend to be around 150-250. This is anecdotal for sure, but it's what I've observed. Draw your own conclusions.
I've found that the best solution is to switch users to Mozilla-Firefox (most spyware automatically infects default installs of IE just by visiting the page), install Spybot S&D to run daily, and also install Adaware to check consistently.
This combined with a stern lecture on the evils of Kazaa and arbitrarily running attachments has seemed to help the problem some (still not solved) for most of the people I regularly come in contact it.
Slashdot Mirror
EmigrantDirect certainly sells addresses - this happened to me as well, and continues to happen. They hemmed and hawed about someone calling me back, but never did, and their call center seems to have caught on and is intentionally vague and will never let you speak to someone, they'll just promise callbacks.
Actually, if you just slouch down, it's not a problem. The next time you're in economy, slouch with your butt as close to the forward edge of the seat, and stretch your legs out until you hit the luggage bar underneath the seat in front of you. It's not terrible, and it removes this problem of the seat reclining.
I'm 6'4" and have regularly flown from the Eastern seaboard of the US to various cities in China. Flying sucks, but it sure as hell beats the alternatives. Plus, planes don't waste fuel - they're actually much more efficient than cars or trucks in terms of gallons per mile and the amount of people and cargo they can carry. Not to mention the time/value of money savings.
I've never understood the irrational annoyance that people get when someone in front of them reclines their seat - who fucking cares? Just recline your seat too, then you're back where you started, and a little more comfortable to boot.
I've flown long flights (at least 12 hours on a single hop) for 24 years, and been over six feet tall for the last 9 of them, and I've never had ANY knee damage, not to mention irreversible knee damage.
Get real.
Isn't the question more along the lines of "What CAN'T be done with a SSN?" Seriously - almost every financial transaction needs this number, which as far as I know wasn't ever supposed to be a national ID number. It seems like the overarching importance of a SSN is what makes identity theft so easy. There have been several times where I've not had all the security information when talking to a representative on the phone, but the fact that I knew my SSN trumped everything.
One of the major problems with this article is that he's using alarmist statistics that make no sense to shore up his point.
Now, I agree with his point - corporate control of the availability of broadband is a bad thing, particularly when you take away the right of individuals to resell or pool resources with others.
The problem is that the US will always, has always, and should always lag other countries in broadband penetration due to one factor: population density. You can't compare Singapore with Minnesota, or Korea with the Midwest USA.
The use of misleading statistics to support an otherwise good point is juvenile and makes you look stupid.
Encryption in China is illegal, but the general rule of thumb in China is that foreigners are not handled very roughly.
That said, I've set up people who want to have decent access to news outlets and generally anonymize themselves on the TOR network, which is a great project from the folks at the EFF.
TOR (http://tor.eff.org/) uses onion routing to bounce you around within their cloud of secure servers, which makes it very difficult to see who you are, where you're going, and where you came from. You can tunnel almost anything over it, and it's open source.
I've found it to be very fast (even on China's slower internet connections), and those who use it love it.
You're missing the point.
I'm not saying that I agree/disagree with the ban, I'm simply saying that people need to know what they're talking about when they discuss something. Especially ridiculous is the parent post of my first reply who accuses someone of ignorance while clearly demonstrating he doesn't comprehend any of the debate.
I agree we need to keep the law and religion separate. I also know that the key to doing this is complete and accurate understanding of all sides in a debate such as this.
While I agree with you that the religious right constituency is misinformed with regards to many things, abortion related or ortherwise, you are equally misinformed.
The religious right position on life is that life begins at conception (when a sperm and egg unite). Under this definition, any embryo destroyed is most certainly an abortion.
This is the crux of the entire stem cell issue (from the religious right standpoint), and I'm amazed you don't understand this concept, yet choose to talk about this issue as if you are well informed.
It's got a long way to go as far as enterprise features.
There is no clustering support in PostgreSQL (and I mean real clustering, not some Java hack where transactions are shipped off to two separate DB servers, both of which don't know they're part of a cluster). This is pretty much a show stopper as far as using PostgreSQL in the company I work for, as high availability is a large concern, and any downtime would be serious.
In previous versions of PostgreSQL, the pg_dump and pg_restore tools were not very good - dumps that included tables or views often would fail on reimport because PostgreSQL wouldn't know the order in which to import everything. You also had to pass in a number of options on the command line just to get a dump that made sense, and large object support was kind of clunky.
That said, I still use PostgreSQL for many many projects and have used PostgreSQL for many years. It's a great product, but it isn't near Oracle in terms of enterprise level features.
Just a little clarification.
While much of the sentiment following the bombing was a genuine expression of emotion from many Chinese, it was only encouraged and exacerbated by the government.
Chinese university students were bussed in by the government to where the US Embassy and consulates were located, and encouraged to violently protest. The result was a damaged embassy and a severely damaged consulate in Chengdu.
The government would certainly never allow any sort of protest it didn't approve of 100% and the opinions of anyone who didn't agree with the protests were not alowed publically.
Wow. I've been playing in rock bands for 8 years and I've met maybe 4-5 guys in that entire time who'd straight up prefer the best solid state amp vs. the best tube amp. What kind of music do you play out of curiosity?
I wish someone would mod the parent up. The final sentence about pirated VS.NET versions being used to compile OSS is dead on.
Going along with this, I'd say that my browsing/surfing/emailing experience is just more enjoyable using a mac. The interfaces on Safari and Mail are cleaner, and there are many small touches like the drag and dropability of both applications. The experience is definitely superior than using linux (I've used Debian on the desktop for a year) due to the higher availability of quality plugins, just for starters. I'd be hard pressed to find a Windows user who didn't think the visual interface was superior than a Mac, not to mention the absence of spyware like the parent mentioned.
It's clear that you've never developed a major website that has advanced CSS/DHTML functionality.
Those two elements make it impossible to reconcile any app of complexity with a single codebase. For this reason, Oddpost made the right decision and just forked their development efforts into making each browser's implementation perfect.
Note that I'm particularly focusing on DHTML, and apps of complexity. The little training CGI programs you've written don't apply here.
Get a clue, stop talking out of your ass, kthx.
I realize this was a joke, etc. but if realistically, it would be your friends in China who would be in trouble in this scenario.
Encryption is illegal in China, and its use is guaranteed to at least provoke interest by authorities. This is why stegonagraphy has proved to be popular among human rights and anti-Chinese government groups.
Actually, you're demonstrating how little you know about true marketing by acting as if a name can be bad.
The number one rule of marketing is that there is no such thing as bad press. Every time I see an absolutely awful commercial on TV, I'll talk about it with my friends, and we'll all agree that the commercial was terrible.
Except it isn't - it's brilliant.
We're all sitting around talking about a commercial we would have otherwise forgotten.
The same principle applies here - if you get a clever or memorable name, that is infinitely more marketable than some made-up corporate name that sounds like a new Viagra replacement.
Stop acting like you're so commercial savvy when you clearly don't have a clue. There are plenty of huge "stupid" company and product names....how about Google? Packeteer? Apple? They all turned out ok.
I'm not extremely familiar with mod_perl, but I do lots of work in PHP.
The reasons I like PHP better than perl for web development is the fact that you can escape in and out of execution (yes, this can be and is often abused) and I like how PHP wraps some of the more unreadable aspects of perl (like extracting arguments, etc) and has nice session support.
Also, PHP seems to have a lot of standard web stuff rolled in by default. I know that you can configure perl to be whatever you want it to be, but back before I had access to my own servers whose environment I could control, this mattered a bit more.
Anyway, just my two cents - it really comes down to personal preference between the two in my opinion - lots of the major disctinctions have gone away in the last couple of years.
The day that China leads anyone or anything in "green" or eco-friendly behavior will be a long way away.
The poster couldn't seriously think that motorized vehicles are more earth friendly than a bike, probably the most efficient method of transportation around.
My guess is that you've never dealt with kernel level code.
The average person will never know how, nor care to fix kernel level bugs, or any code-level bug, for that matter.
I'd say it's pretty reasonable to assume that every person in the world who has attended school has taken some math, but nobody knows or cares how to do advanced calculus, even though math has been a part of our culture for hundreds of years.
An excellent point. The guy obviously has no idea how to write or construct a thought outside of a programming environment.
This could be the most insightful post I've read yet in this discussion.
To any normal observer, the MIT student comes off looking like the idiot - he's simply whining about something he can't do and then acting like a cocky little shit by talking about designing HDTVs and CSS descramblers.
This kind of interview just emphasizes to everyone in the business world how idiotic linux zealots are since he completely neglected the core issues of fair use and property rights, and instead got into a trivial and stupid argument that any non-technical reader would be hard pressed to follow.
The simple fact is that it's not Valenti's job to provide a DVD player for linux.
How the fuck was this moderated as insightful?
Yes, life existed before cellphones. Yes, he doesn't NEED to have one at all times, but equally stupid is this "insightful" guy acting like having a kid is no big deal.
I mean, damn, some things are just important.
This is just idiotic. The point that the parent is missing is that Google doesn't care about bandwidth/space.
They've FIVE THOUSAND servers. They're the most searched site in the world. Like bandwidth or storage could ever be a problem with them.
Get a clue. Thanks.
There's a couple of points in the BBC article that are very misleading, which I'd like to draw attention to.
The worst issue is when the lady being interviewed says "Everywhere we go there are good internet connections." This statement needs to be qualified, since a good "broadband" internet connection in China is typically on par with a decent dialup setup in the US. Most Chinese cities have less bandwidth than a typical large state university. The city I lived in until recently only had 2 T3 lines for the entire urban area of 7 million people. A broadband connection would manage downloads of 4k a second at 2 in the morning, and maybe 1k or less during the day.
Also, I get the impression that she's using canned comparisons that one might use when talking to investors in this article - her anecdote about no heat but a great internet connection is no doubt accurate (China until recently did not allow central heating south of the Yangtze river) but is needlessy sensational if you really know what's going on.
Likewise, the fact that she's never given bribes is almost undoubtedly a lie, or she's taking advantage of the fact that doing business in China involves the use of many tactics that would commonly be referred to as bribes in the US.
Just a few minor points - the reality is of course that China will become a much more active participant in internet related activities, so the overall point of the article I agree with.
This has been pretty much my experience as well. I've found that every computer I've used which belonged to a home user/college student in the last year was ridden with spyware.
Girls seem to average around 250-350 infections, while guys tend to be around 150-250. This is anecdotal for sure, but it's what I've observed. Draw your own conclusions.
I've found that the best solution is to switch users to Mozilla-Firefox (most spyware automatically infects default installs of IE just by visiting the page), install Spybot S&D to run daily, and also install Adaware to check consistently.
This combined with a stern lecture on the evils of Kazaa and arbitrarily running attachments has seemed to help the problem some (still not solved) for most of the people I regularly come in contact it.