IANAL; I just play one on a television show that has never been filmed, but here is what I would send back:
Ms. Skeel,
I apologize if there has been a misunderstanding. As any Dummy knows, certain words and phrases that originated as trademarks have become so integrated into our language that it becomes difficult to distinguish the two. Examples of this phenomenon include Kleenex, Frisbees, Xerox copies and some phrases I can't recall because no one remembers the companies with which they were once associated.
At issue here is a question of usage. We have not infringed upon your trademarks because your trademarks refer to guides for people who are genuinely stupid in a general, all-encompassing sense. Our guide, on the other hand, is intended for intelligent people who just happen to be ignorant in one particular area -- "slacking," in this case.
Again, I apologize if this was confusing for you, but I invite you to read my book, written just for people like you, entitled "Common Sense for Complete Imbeciles."
Have a pleasant day, and I wish you the best of luck in learning to read my book.
They discover OmniWeb, which underlines misspelled words in textarea boxes as you type
Slashdot readers suddenly begin complaining that the editors have "forgotten" how to spell "properly."
Seriously, I would wait on buying a TiBook if I were you. Apple crippled the processors in every model after the first generation. An 800-mhz TiBook with 32 megs of video ram may outperform a 500-mhz TiBook (8 megs vram, which makes a difference OS X) on most tasks, but the 500-mhz TiBook from January 2001 still encodes MP3s faster than the latest models. There's something fundamentally wrong with that. I would wait until Apple can produce a laptop that soundly outperforms its Jan 2001 model.
In the late 1500's, everyone knew that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones. After all, Aristotle had said so. That an ancient Greek scholar still held such sway was a sign of how far science had declined during the dark ages. Galileo Galilei, who held a chair in mathematics at the University of Pisa, was impudent enough to question the common knowledge.
The man's job was holding a chair? This explains everything. No wonder he understood gravity so well. His arms must have tired and he kept dropping the thing.
People who have the most menial, boring jobs have the most time to intimately study commonly-ignored things like gravity.
In the late 1500's, everyone knew that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones. After all, Aristotle had said so. That an ancient Greek scholar still held such sway was a sign of how far science had declined during the dark ages. Galileo Galilei, who held a chair in mathematics at the University of Pisa, was impudent enough to question the common knowledge.
Aristotle would have predicted that the velocity of a rolling ball was constant: double its time in transit and you would double the distance it traversed. Galileo was able to show that the distance is actually proportional to the square of the time: Double it and the ball would go four times as far.
The common wisdom held that white light is the purest form (Aristotle again)...
Article summary: Three out of ten great scientists rose to prominence by proving Aristotle was an idiot. Dissing Aristotle is a sure fire way to impress your friends in scientific circles.
The mission to Jupiter will be interesting. First of all the gravity is much stronger than the Earth's. Second, there are contant lightning storms throughout the entire planet like nothing we see on earth. Then there's the fact that the surface of Jupiter isn't even solid.
So I suppose, after decades of technological improvements, we COULD get someone there, but what then?
This is why those of us who cannot contribute to the technology that will enable us to get there must spend the intervening years tracking down spammers. Then when we are ready to launch the mission, we send them all the following message:
Congratulations! You have been chosen to be an explorer on NASA's maiden voyage to Jupiter. All expenses paid!
Then we stick them in a ship run by WindowsXP, DRM and Trusted Computing hardware ("It looks like you're trying to replicate a sandwich. Your replicator is secure. To unlock it, please register by calling..."). If they ever do reach Jupiter, they'll be flattened and we'll be free of spam. I really put way too much thought into this.
Man1: I wonder if we're goin' to the first moon or the second moon. Man2: WHAT second moon? You're drunk. Man1: No, I read it on Slashdot. Slashdot says there's a second moon. There might even be a third. Man2: (drags man1 out through the back door and points at the sky) What is that? Man1: The moon. Man2: Do ya see any other moons up there? Man1: No. Man2: But you're going to believe there are a bunch of other moons because some crackhead Web site told you so? (man1 looks perplexed, but doesn't say anything, so man2 grabs his drink and guzzles it) Come on, let's go to a nudie bar. There's lotsa moonin' there, but no more drinking for you!
All the planned new attention -- close-up picture sessions, hits by pinpricking penetrators, radar sweeps of the cratered terrain, and even snag-and-bag rock collecting by automated machinery -- puts the Moon back on the exploration map
So we may yet uncover that weird black monolith under the Moon's surface. I had assumed that NASA already discovered it, but chose to tell us the Moon was a boring, desolate place to divert our interest while they put together a mission to Jupiter. I'm still disappointed that we're behind schedule, but maybe now someone will release an MP3 of the freaky music the monolith emits.
You should read this Slashdot posting about this really bad thing they did. Man, that was unbelievable. To think that they actually got away with that... Fortunately, they'll never be able to censor Slashdot!
He's got a designated Lego room at home with designated storage bins, including one for Lego "human bits." He growls at his kids if they misfile Lego pieces.
At last count -- and yes, he does count -- the Robinson family's Lego inventory was nearing 100,000 pieces, a majority of which were tallied and itemized by type and colour on a computer spreadsheet.
This guy sounds like the Scrooge McDuck of Legos. He's the crotchety old man who growls at his kids when they mismanage part of his beloved collection. I'll bet he goes swimming in his Lego bin several times a day, and some evil witch has been trying forever to steal his number one piece.
I just can't believe how amazed people here are that someone would charge $621K or whatever to have their genome mapped. This is something that had not even been done for any human barely 2 years ago, and then only at the HUGE expense to governments all over the world, and now you can get it done for less than a million dollars ? Do these people realize how immense is the enterprise they can buy now, for less than a lot of houses that dot-commers were buying in the Bay area that same 2 years ago ?
The reason people are amazed that folks are paying over $600,000 for this is that it has no value for the vast majority of them. You can't definitively say when you're going to die, what diseases you're going to get or whether your kids will be criminals based on this. It has value to the scientific community, but none to the people who are paying for it.
What are they going to do? Put it up on their mantle and point to it when they have company? That's exactly why most of them are doing this:
"You know... that's my DNA over there. Yeah. Had myself sequenced... because... I'm cool like that. Yeah. Did I ever tell you about my plan to replace the Internet... with modems? Yeah."
If they're using Costello to promote DRM, this won't become all that widespread. If they start using combination NSYNC/Britney Spears album, then we're in trouble. Because then the world will be saturated with DRM, noise pollution and the pitter patter of little Britneys banging out their first album against the crib.
Late last night I finally uploaded my news aggregator, "Buddy: Your Digital Retriever," to SourceForge. So as luck would have it, Google had to choose today to pseudo-launch its news feature.
I've been aware of the Beta for some time. The search feature has been great, but the portal left much to be desired. It was basically a cluttered list of five sources for each news story. This new layout seems better, though it still leaves me wondering which stories are supposed to be the most newsworthy. And I see a fundamental problem with Google's approach.
Taking a cross section of all the news that's out there is not going to result in good coverage. One of the big differences between a good newspaper, like The New York Times, and a poor one, like The New York Daily News, is the collection of stories the editors choose. The Daily News needs to get its readers fired up to sell papers, so it covers the most provocative stories it can find and sensationalizes them. The Times has the luxury of knowing its readers trust it to inform them of the most important news.
I know it sounds like an elitist position -- "we know what's best for you." I was once accosted at a party by a USA Today employee who began ranting about how arrogant it was of my paper to assume people wanted to read about human rights abuses in Africa. I asked him what we should be featuring and he detailed a series of articles his paper ran on business travellers who get laid by stewardesses at 30,000 feet. I didn't argue with him, but I felt somewhat more confident that we were choosing the right stories.
If Google covers the news based on what's out there (which is primarily of the USA Today variety), as opposed to applying news values, its offering won't be very informative. It may appeal to the largest number of people who confuse entertainment with news, but I think most Slashdotters will find it very shallow.
There's also the question of Google's "partnerships" with news sites and how that will affect the rankings.
While I still like the news search feature, I prefer the collection of shell scripts I just released. They grab the top headlines and blurbs from a number of major newspapers and put them together on one page, organized by newspaper, so you can browse "trusted" news sites quickly without having to wade through cumbersome javascript navigations, flash ads, registration. You still visit the newspapers' Web sites to read the stories that interest you, but this way you get to check out the merchandise before you commit to jumping through the content owner's hoops.
My aggregator also provides updated lists of all the headlines that have appeared on the wire services in the last several hours. The editors at the news sites are watching these same lists for updates when breaking news occurs... even the major sites that have a large number of reporters. They can't cover everything themselves, and they need to have some coverage until their reporter can get to the story.
It also covers computer news sites like Slashdot (note: the list is currently very Mac-centric because the shell scripts require Curl to trick servers into thinking the download program is a Web browser... I'll try to do the same with wget for Linux, but that's not ready yet), grabs sports scores, the weather report, comic strips, and fetches slippers.
If you're using Mac OS X, or you're willing to install Curl on your Linux box, give it a try. It's free and it's open source.
We would like to cut you in on a deal that will earn you a very fast computer with Windows for only $900. What we need you to do is go to your local store and buy our X-1000 PC for $1,500. Don't worry about the price. We will reimburse you. Remove your X-1000 PC UPC code and mail it to us with your name, address, date of birth, social security number, household income and preferred shoe size, and we will send you a check for $600.
Sincerely.
XXXXX Marketing Department
So he buys the PC, clips the UPC and sends them his data. But no check arrives. Not even a burly, ill-tempered Czech mafia guy with a baseball bat. So he writes to them demanding his check, or Czech.
Dear Valued Customer,
You did not provide the proper X-1000 UPC code in your mailing. Please send us the correct UPC code and we will send you your check.
So he writes them back and tells them there are no other UPC codes on the PC.
Dear Valued Customer,
We are sorry to inform you that you have apparently purchased the wrong computer, and since you have removed the UPC code, you cannot return yours to the store. We do not keep UPC codes we receive on file, so we cannot return it to you. We recommend you go back to the store and buy the correct X-1000 PC. If you send us the correct UPC code this time, we are authorized to send you a check for $700 since you purchased two computers. Please hurry, as this offer is only good for 60 days.
Sound familiar? There's a thin line between 419 scams and "accepted American business practices." Either way, there are plenty of gullible people just waiting to be exploited.
The third handheld is the Tungsten W, pictured here, which is a GPRS smartphone (although it does not have a built-in speaker or microphone).
Let me get this straight: Palm is going to release a "smart phone" without a speaker or microphone? They're sold seperately as a headset?
This sounds more like a "smart marketing phone," but it doesn't surprise me. Walking down the Palm Accessories aisle at Frys, I sometimes get the sense that Palm's accessories division is really bloated and desperate. I hope this doesn't become a trend: "You simply must buy our new 32.6-gigahertz cordless phone (speaker, microphone, and other electronics not included)!"
It looks like we slashdotted their content server, but not the Web server:
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/
The URL cannot be located on this server.
Please click on : http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/,to redirect.
In other words, "our index page is missing. Please go to our index page to find what you were looking for."
SSO: The Corruptor of Good Companies
on
Passport vs. Plan 9
·
· Score: 3, Informative
SSO is like "The Ruling Ring" in Lord of the Rings. Anyone who wears it will be overcome by its evil power and will ultimately be driven to enslave the End Users (a people closely related to humans).
I once joined a startup that was based on a good idea that incorporated SSO, but the VP of Engineering swore to me the company would never abuse that power. Within months, marketing managers were telling me that end users "wanted" us to abuse SSO "for their own good." For legal reasons, I won't go into more detail, but the company I left was not the company I joined -- all because of the temptation SSO brings.
End Users believe that SSO is a gift from heaven because it allows them to mindlessly go through the "troublesome" task of authenticating themselves. This has several implications:
Authentication is designed to require you to use your brain. It's like the roughed-up pavement that precedes many toll booths, saying, "you're going to need to wake up now."
Authentication is designed to require you to use your brain. It helps ensure that you are the only one who has access to certain data. You should not be entrusting this to a conscience-free multinational who has no qualms about "sharing" your access with all its employees, partners and anyone who pays them enough money.
One of the places most consumers often see authentication forms are on shopping sites. When you are going to buy something, you have to go through the steps of entering your username and password, entering your credit card number, your address, etc. It's a protective speed bump that makes you think before you purchase. With SSO (or One-Click), you have no way of knowing when you've "authorized" a charge to your credit card. You assume that it's only when you click a button, but the fact is you've authorized the company to charge your card whenever it claims you want to buy something.
Single point of failure. Enough said.
Memory decay. When you use SSO, you tend to forget your user names and passwords because you don't need them. Then when your SSO provider does something you don't like and you decide to leave, you feel like you can't. You're trapped because you can't remember that data -- you think you need that service to continue accessing your other services. Even if the SSO service provides a method of retrieving your passwords, most users are unaware of it.
Then, of course, there are the tracking issues. The SSO provider will track all the sites you visit, sell that data and market appropriately. Common sense, yet commonly ignored by the common End User.
A wise wizard would do well to distance himself and everyone he can from this evil.
I can understand where these students are coming from.
When I was in elementary school, I found a secret decoder wheel in a box of... (checks box on shelf) Lucky Charms. I got so used to using it that I began encoding all my homework without thinking about it. My teachers didn't mind so long as I provided them with a secret decoder wheel of their own.
I was reading about encryption when I was in high school, and I would inadvertently switch into encoded mode, change the binary text to ASCII and write the corresponding binary string of numbers. Boy, was my English teacher mad when I turned in 20-page-long handwritten short essays... especially when I explained that the key was "mrs<omitted>sucks"
Still, the unencoded version used proper spelling and grammar, so there wasn't much she could do about it -- except send me to the principal's office. If these kids want to protect their intellectual property by encoding it (in their case, they're using L33t speak), they should at least adhere to proper grammar and spelling.
...for Robert De Niro's screenwriting contest. He may not be a scientist or an engineer by title, but his work/quest/crusade marks him as someone who will have more influence on the Internet and the computer industry than the vast majority of engineers.
CD/DVD drives are essentially centrifuges. As such, they are given to exploding at high speeds.
If you have a centrifuge that's imploding at high speeds, there's nothing wrong with the device -- there's something amiss with physics in your point in space. Get out of house and contact your nearest physicist right away.
you really start to get an idea that sun wants to beat MS like a red headed step child
Where have you been for the last decade or so? This is not news. Scott McNealy has been publicly drawing comparisons between Gates and Vader/Satan/other-evil-figures for years. McNealy's purpose in life is to destroy Microsoft.
... he's trying to help out underdeveloped areas in our own fucking country...
No, he's not. Let me repeat that. No, he's not.
Bill Gates doesn't give a $*!# about anyone but himself -- he's the sort who believes that anyone who doesn't have enough money to survive should die of natural selection. Donating a billion dollars is "the cost of doing business" when you have as much money as he has. It's PR.
Not like he's putting Linux on them or anything.
Putting Windows-equipped computers in libraries is an intangibly-profitable business move. By increasing the number of environments in which people use Windows, he conditions people to use Windows. It's also an endorsement. They'll assume that if Windows is good enough for the library, it's good enough for them. So when they're buying a computer of their own or talking to someone who is about to buy a computer (for more people get their news/information via word of mouth than via news outlets), Windows will be the obvious choice. Or when their schools or businesses try to switch to Linux or Macintosh, the ignorant morons will complain: "We want Windows."
Retail CDs will be distributed with a unique serial number with which the purchaser can register in order to receive such exclusives as prioritized concert ticket purchases and unreleased music.
Slashdotters should know better: registration is not a perk! Registration requires you to divulge information about yourself from which the record company can make additional profit.
There's nothing extra being offered here.
"Unique serial numbers" come with every AOL disk, but that doesn't make them any more valuable. It's a tracking tool for AOL that's also designed to make the mindless masses think they're getting into some secret club.
Bon Jovi says that registering will give you "the chance" to buy concert tickets before they go on sale to the public. But guess what? If you and 3 million other fans who bought the album have all registered, you're competing with each other for tickets. I'd say that makes that ticket sale pretty public. This is simply an effort to disenfranchise people who don't buy the latest album AND divulge whatever information the record company wants. Suddenly you're paying more (not just the price of the album, but with your personal info too) to see concerts, and you think you're getting more.
"Unreleased music" means music that wasn't good enough to make it onto the album. If the record company thought they were good enough to sell, it would have included them on the album instead of the other crap (most albums have 1-3 good songs at most, and the rest is just crap -- this unreleased music is the stuff that was worse than the crap).
Bon Jovi also promises access to exclusive areas of BonJovi.com. What a load of crap. Anything of value that shows up in this "exclusive area" is going to end up on Gnutella or Geocities within hours.
Slashdot Mirror
Ms. Skeel,
I apologize if there has been a misunderstanding. As any Dummy knows, certain words and phrases that originated as trademarks have become so integrated into our language that it becomes difficult to distinguish the two. Examples of this phenomenon include Kleenex, Frisbees, Xerox copies and some phrases I can't recall because no one remembers the companies with which they were once associated.
At issue here is a question of usage. We have not infringed upon your trademarks because your trademarks refer to guides for people who are genuinely stupid in a general, all-encompassing sense. Our guide, on the other hand, is intended for intelligent people who just happen to be ignorant in one particular area -- "slacking," in this case.
Again, I apologize if this was confusing for you, but I invite you to read my book, written just for people like you, entitled "Common Sense for Complete Imbeciles."
Have a pleasant day, and I wish you the best of luck in learning to read my book.
- Slashdot editors switch to Mac laptops
- They discover OmniWeb, which underlines misspelled words in textarea boxes as you type
- Slashdot readers suddenly begin complaining that the editors have "forgotten" how to spell "properly."
Seriously, I would wait on buying a TiBook if I were you. Apple crippled the processors in every model after the first generation. An 800-mhz TiBook with 32 megs of video ram may outperform a 500-mhz TiBook (8 megs vram, which makes a difference OS X) on most tasks, but the 500-mhz TiBook from January 2001 still encodes MP3s faster than the latest models. There's something fundamentally wrong with that. I would wait until Apple can produce a laptop that soundly outperforms its Jan 2001 model.People who have the most menial, boring jobs have the most time to intimately study commonly-ignored things like gravity.
er... make that two out of nine. Ah, it's all marketing anyway. Same point conveyed.
Congratulations! You have been chosen to be an explorer on NASA's maiden voyage to Jupiter. All expenses paid!
Then we stick them in a ship run by WindowsXP, DRM and Trusted Computing hardware ("It looks like you're trying to replicate a sandwich. Your replicator is secure. To unlock it, please register by calling..."). If they ever do reach Jupiter, they'll be flattened and we'll be free of spam. I really put way too much thought into this.
Man1: I wonder if we're goin' to the first moon or the second moon.
Man2: WHAT second moon? You're drunk.
Man1: No, I read it on Slashdot. Slashdot says there's a second moon. There might even be a third.
Man2: (drags man1 out through the back door and points at the sky) What is that?
Man1: The moon.
Man2: Do ya see any other moons up there?
Man1: No.
Man2: But you're going to believe there are a bunch of other moons because some crackhead Web site told you so? (man1 looks perplexed, but doesn't say anything, so man2 grabs his drink and guzzles it) Come on, let's go to a nudie bar. There's lotsa moonin' there, but no more drinking for you!
You should read this Slashdot posting about this really bad thing they did. Man, that was unbelievable. To think that they actually got away with that... Fortunately, they'll never be able to censor Slashdot!
What are they going to do? Put it up on their mantle and point to it when they have company? That's exactly why most of them are doing this:
"You know... that's my DNA over there. Yeah. Had myself sequenced... because... I'm cool like that. Yeah. Did I ever tell you about my plan to replace the Internet... with modems? Yeah."
If they're using Costello to promote DRM, this won't become all that widespread. If they start using combination NSYNC/Britney Spears album, then we're in trouble. Because then the world will be saturated with DRM, noise pollution and the pitter patter of little Britneys banging out their first album against the crib.
I've been aware of the Beta for some time. The search feature has been great, but the portal left much to be desired. It was basically a cluttered list of five sources for each news story. This new layout seems better, though it still leaves me wondering which stories are supposed to be the most newsworthy. And I see a fundamental problem with Google's approach.
Taking a cross section of all the news that's out there is not going to result in good coverage. One of the big differences between a good newspaper, like The New York Times, and a poor one, like The New York Daily News, is the collection of stories the editors choose. The Daily News needs to get its readers fired up to sell papers, so it covers the most provocative stories it can find and sensationalizes them. The Times has the luxury of knowing its readers trust it to inform them of the most important news.
I know it sounds like an elitist position -- "we know what's best for you." I was once accosted at a party by a USA Today employee who began ranting about how arrogant it was of my paper to assume people wanted to read about human rights abuses in Africa. I asked him what we should be featuring and he detailed a series of articles his paper ran on business travellers who get laid by stewardesses at 30,000 feet. I didn't argue with him, but I felt somewhat more confident that we were choosing the right stories.
If Google covers the news based on what's out there (which is primarily of the USA Today variety), as opposed to applying news values, its offering won't be very informative. It may appeal to the largest number of people who confuse entertainment with news, but I think most Slashdotters will find it very shallow.
There's also the question of Google's "partnerships" with news sites and how that will affect the rankings.
While I still like the news search feature, I prefer the collection of shell scripts I just released. They grab the top headlines and blurbs from a number of major newspapers and put them together on one page, organized by newspaper, so you can browse "trusted" news sites quickly without having to wade through cumbersome javascript navigations, flash ads, registration. You still visit the newspapers' Web sites to read the stories that interest you, but this way you get to check out the merchandise before you commit to jumping through the content owner's hoops.
My aggregator also provides updated lists of all the headlines that have appeared on the wire services in the last several hours. The editors at the news sites are watching these same lists for updates when breaking news occurs... even the major sites that have a large number of reporters. They can't cover everything themselves, and they need to have some coverage until their reporter can get to the story.
It also covers computer news sites like Slashdot (note: the list is currently very Mac-centric because the shell scripts require Curl to trick servers into thinking the download program is a Web browser... I'll try to do the same with wget for Linux, but that's not ready yet), grabs sports scores, the weather report, comic strips, and fetches slippers.
If you're using Mac OS X, or you're willing to install Curl on your Linux box, give it a try. It's free and it's open source.
This sounds more like a "smart marketing phone," but it doesn't surprise me. Walking down the Palm Accessories aisle at Frys, I sometimes get the sense that Palm's accessories division is really bloated and desperate. I hope this doesn't become a trend: "You simply must buy our new 32.6-gigahertz cordless phone (speaker, microphone, and other electronics not included)!"
Do you get to hear that jerk in the theater who has already seen the movie twelve times and is ruining the whole thing?
Only you can't throw your popcorn at the subtitles.I once joined a startup that was based on a good idea that incorporated SSO, but the VP of Engineering swore to me the company would never abuse that power. Within months, marketing managers were telling me that end users "wanted" us to abuse SSO "for their own good." For legal reasons, I won't go into more detail, but the company I left was not the company I joined -- all because of the temptation SSO brings.
End Users believe that SSO is a gift from heaven because it allows them to mindlessly go through the "troublesome" task of authenticating themselves. This has several implications:
- Authentication is designed to require you to use your brain. It's like the roughed-up pavement that precedes many toll booths, saying, "you're going to need to wake up now."
- Authentication is designed to require you to use your brain. It helps ensure that you are the only one who has access to certain data. You should not be entrusting this to a conscience-free multinational who has no qualms about "sharing" your access with all its employees, partners and anyone who pays them enough money.
- One of the places most consumers often see authentication forms are on shopping sites. When you are going to buy something, you have to go through the steps of entering your username and password, entering your credit card number, your address, etc. It's a protective speed bump that makes you think before you purchase. With SSO (or One-Click), you have no way of knowing when you've "authorized" a charge to your credit card. You assume that it's only when you click a button, but the fact is you've authorized the company to charge your card whenever it claims you want to buy something.
- Single point of failure. Enough said.
- Memory decay. When you use SSO, you tend to forget your user names and passwords because you don't need them. Then when your SSO provider does something you don't like and you decide to leave, you feel like you can't. You're trapped because you can't remember that data -- you think you need that service to continue accessing your other services. Even if the SSO service provides a method of retrieving your passwords, most users are unaware of it.
- Then, of course, there are the tracking issues. The SSO provider will track all the sites you visit, sell that data and market appropriately. Common sense, yet commonly ignored by the common End User.
A wise wizard would do well to distance himself and everyone he can from this evil.I can understand where these students are coming from.
When I was in elementary school, I found a secret decoder wheel in a box of... (checks box on shelf) Lucky Charms. I got so used to using it that I began encoding all my homework without thinking about it. My teachers didn't mind so long as I provided them with a secret decoder wheel of their own.
I was reading about encryption when I was in high school, and I would inadvertently switch into encoded mode, change the binary text to ASCII and write the corresponding binary string of numbers. Boy, was my English teacher mad when I turned in 20-page-long handwritten short essays... especially when I explained that the key was "mrs<omitted>sucks"
Still, the unencoded version used proper spelling and grammar, so there wasn't much she could do about it -- except send me to the principal's office. If these kids want to protect their intellectual property by encoding it (in their case, they're using L33t speak), they should at least adhere to proper grammar and spelling.
</sarcasm>
...for Robert De Niro's screenwriting contest. He may not be a scientist or an engineer by title, but his work/quest/crusade marks him as someone who will have more influence on the Internet and the computer industry than the vast majority of engineers.
"Yes Towelie, you will have to choose between saving your friends... and getting high."
Oh, and don't forget your Okama GameSphere.
If you have a centrifuge that's imploding at high speeds, there's nothing wrong with the device -- there's something amiss with physics in your point in space. Get out of house and contact your nearest physicist right away.
Bill Gates doesn't give a $*!# about anyone but himself -- he's the sort who believes that anyone who doesn't have enough money to survive should die of natural selection. Donating a billion dollars is "the cost of doing business" when you have as much money as he has. It's PR.
Putting Windows-equipped computers in libraries is an intangibly-profitable business move. By increasing the number of environments in which people use Windows, he conditions people to use Windows. It's also an endorsement. They'll assume that if Windows is good enough for the library, it's good enough for them. So when they're buying a computer of their own or talking to someone who is about to buy a computer (for more people get their news/information via word of mouth than via news outlets), Windows will be the obvious choice. Or when their schools or businesses try to switch to Linux or Macintosh, the ignorant morons will complain: "We want Windows."Go back to Redmond, astroturfer.
There's nothing extra being offered here.
"Unique serial numbers" come with every AOL disk, but that doesn't make them any more valuable. It's a tracking tool for AOL that's also designed to make the mindless masses think they're getting into some secret club.
Bon Jovi says that registering will give you "the chance" to buy concert tickets before they go on sale to the public. But guess what? If you and 3 million other fans who bought the album have all registered, you're competing with each other for tickets. I'd say that makes that ticket sale pretty public. This is simply an effort to disenfranchise people who don't buy the latest album AND divulge whatever information the record company wants. Suddenly you're paying more (not just the price of the album, but with your personal info too) to see concerts, and you think you're getting more.
"Unreleased music" means music that wasn't good enough to make it onto the album. If the record company thought they were good enough to sell, it would have included them on the album instead of the other crap (most albums have 1-3 good songs at most, and the rest is just crap -- this unreleased music is the stuff that was worse than the crap).
Bon Jovi also promises access to exclusive areas of BonJovi.com. What a load of crap. Anything of value that shows up in this "exclusive area" is going to end up on Gnutella or Geocities within hours.
Step away from the Kool-Ade, people.