Re:Actual use of the idea..
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Pay Lars
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· Score: 1
> Take Ani Difranco, for example. most of her CDs are $25+ Canadian - far more than I > could afford. I'd be happy to cut her a check for however-much-she-actually-profits > plus a bit for each CD.
Ani is actually a bad example. Her record label, Righteous Babe Records, is owned and operated by -- guess who? Ani herself. She has turned down numerous deals to sign with a more established record label, and recently has started signing other artists to RBR.
I will note, however, that at the bottom of all of her albums is a little thing that says -- rather than "Unauthorized duplication prohibited by law" -- "Unauthorized duplication, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing." And in the liner notes to her double live CD, it says something to the effect of "Sorry this album is only on CD; if you want a tape, go make yourself one."
I'm imagining that the reason why Ani's music is so expensive in Canada is the hassles involved in a small label distributing in other countries. Perhaps it might be more cost-effective to order directly from RBR.
> Actually, I think this issue has already come up. In Heinlein's book "Stranger in a > Strange Land" mention is made of a "hydraulic bed". From the description, this bed > contains water and is used to gently float a patient to lessen chance of bed sores and > cause less pain to burn victims. This book was published in the late 1950's before > waterbeds (which is clearly what the hydraulic bed is) were invented.
I'll also point out that Heinlein first described the waldo. As a matter of fact, the waldo is *named* the waldo because of Heinlein's story "Waldo". When they were actually created in the physical world, the inventor, in a tip of the hat to the Grand Master, took the name, as a way of acknowledging Heinlein's input.
Yes, fan fiction is definitely subject to Sturgeon's Rule (which states that 90% of everything is crap). I'm sure there's some good fan fics out there, but I can't think of any right now.
Let me tell you, that is the truth. I work as assistant fan fiction editor at RPGamer, and some of the submissions we get are scary. At the same time, though, some of the stuff we get just blows me away. We're proud to host some of these stories; they're easily the quality of professional writing.
I'm also a fanfic author -- mostly for Japanese RPGs such as Final Fantasy 7 and Xenogears (blatant plug: Heaven Can Wait, our Xenogears fan site) and I can tell you that nine times out of ten, the reason I write fan fiction is because I'm dissatisfied with something about the game or about the story. The type of games that I tend to write for occasionally suffer from exceedingly poor translation; sometimes they were rushed at the end, or sometimes there are aspects of the plot that I feel weren't addressed properly. So I write it myself. I think a lot of fanfic authors -- certainly the ones that I know -- do the same.
Another good resource, fanfic-wise, is the FFML, the Anime/Manga Fanfic Mailing List. I don't remember the URL for the information page off the top of my head, but that list is another very valuable resource for authors and readers alike.
I guess what I'm really trying to say is that sure, a lot of fanfic out there is crap. But then again, a lot of published stuff is crap. (And most of TV is crap, but that's another story.) It's just that, like nearly anything else, the gems that are buried in the crap are more than worth wading through the crap. ^_^
>> After the column appeared, Jim revealed, WAVE America received more than 70,000 >> e-mails and a few mail bombs, and repelled a number of assaults on their >> system firewalls.
> Keep up the good work, slashdotters!:)
No, no, no!
I know that this was moderated up as funny -- but I can't let this go by. The way to get corporations' attention is NOT to mailbomb them, crack their firewalls, crack their anything, deface their web pages, etc, etc. Corporations (I should know, I work for a Very Large Insurance and Financial Corporation) will simply discard this sort of thing as an attack -- or worse, proving their very point, that the Internet is a dangerous and unstable place filled with dangerous and unstable people.
I've given thought on writing up a how-to along the lines of the Linux Advocacy document, only for dealing with major corporations and the US government. The key points that I cannot stress enough include:
-- Be polite. No one likes to be yelled at, and the person who reads your missive is likely to be an underpaid front-line customer service worker who has no clue what the issue is. I/was/ the underpaid front-line customer service worker for a long time. It, to put it bluntly, sucks.
-- Be explicit. State what the problem is, state why you have a problem with it. Give them the exact reasons. Corporations think in "risk vs. added value" -- "If I do this, what risk am I exposing myself to? What added value will I receive?" It's an entirely different way of thinking that's foreign to a lot of people I've met through/. simply because a corporation/will not stop doing something because it is wrong/. A corporation will only stop doing something if it is an unacceptable risk. When you contact a corporation, as JonKatz did in this case, you need to tell them exactly what your concerns are -- and what it might mean for the company.
-- Be specific. In two ways: first, give them as much detail as you can (as JonKatz did with the statistics he brought with him). Don't just give them opinions; back those opinions up. It's the difference between "Spam sucks" and "78% of people surveyed stated explicitly that they would never buy from a company that sent them unsolicited commercial email." (A good statistic to use here is the widely-held marketing bon mot that a happy customer will tell, on average, three people about the company's service, while an unhappy customer will tell 12 people.) Second, tell them what you want from them. Tell them what actions you want them to take. Don't just contact a company to bitch and moan -- tell them what will make you happy. Specifically ask for a personalized response; you might not get it, but it gets the point across that you are unhappy with things, and you wish to work towards resolution. Of course, one must also remember to...
-- Be reasonable. This is where JonKatz fell down in this case. Expecting Pinkerton to totally scrap WAVE (much as I would love for that to happen) is unreasonable, in their eyes. As they responded, they simply won't do it. Once a corporation has something in their head to do, they won't NOT do it. They will, if concerns are presented properly and the risks are explained to them in terms that they understand, which means in very small and non-technical detail.
And, above all else, be professional. Approach these companies as an equal -- and, if at all possible, as a customer of theirs. This means, at the least, proper spelling, grammar, and format. If you can't spell, or you have grammar problems, for God's sake get a friend to look over your comment for you. (I am willing to proofread for any/.er who is participating in a letterwriting campaign. Email address above is not spamproofed, contact me to arrange something.)
(Jon, if you're reading this -- I'd like to second the thought, stated above, that the next step is to contact Pinkerton's customers. The company might not drop the plan, but if they don't have anyone to sell to, the issue will be moot.)
> I've been getting answering machine spam at home, lately. No, I don't mean telemarketers.
Actually, you do mean telemarketers. What you suffer from, my friend, is something horrific and frightening in the telemarketing business -- it's known as the "predictive dialer". What it does is selects four to six numbers at once, dials them, and waits for one person to pick up. When that first number picks up, it cuts that line directly in to the live telemarketer's handset, while the other calls are disconnected.
Which is annoying to begin with, because the other five calls are/not/ discarded, but redialed (usually within 20 minutes or so). So if you ever wonder why your phone keeps ringing and there's no one there, you got a p-dialer call.
This is bad in and of itself, but the worst part of it is that companies decide, hey, why should I waste time calling these people back? So the five calls that don't go directly to a TM will get dropped into the recording queue. And the companies get around the fact that it's blatantly illegal by offering an option to speak with a live person, which doesn't mean a thing when the recording is talking to an answering machine.
How do I know this? *hangs head in shame* Don't ask, please don't ask. It was long ago (not really) and it was for money (a lot of money), and I'm much better now.
> Remember the old Mac commercial with the two guys in the office spending a week or > so customizing their office PC ``so we can be more productive''? The secretary's response > along the lines of ``If we're any more productive we'll be out of business'' > was right on the money.
I don't remember this commercial, but if it was indeed a Mac commercial, I'm afraid I have to laugh. Go check out the Jargon File definition of "macdink" -- the Mac used to encourage this sort of behaviour much more than the PC did! And let's not even get into what can be done with a copy of ResEdit and your System folder.
(Disclaimer: I love Macs. I have four of the little beasties. And I actually *do* like the customization features; but they *do* waste time. Badly.)
Where I work, we're running on NT (*feh*) and have been forbidden to customize the themes. No reasoning was given (personally, I think it's to keep us soulless drones, but that's just my opinion). Still, I've seen people sitting around and playing with their window colors, their icons, etc, etc, for hours, instead of reading/. to goof off like the rest of us usually do.
Was anyone at this conference? I would have been interested to see how Phil Zimmerman reacted to having his software renamed and included in Cryptonomicon. ^_^
Seriously, it's good to hear something like this. It's just another way to drive home the point that an author is not his characters.
> I had been spending some time looking for this, and the majorBBS program Crossroads... > sadly, crossroads still costs over 200 dollars
Well, if you're looking to purchase, I can't help you, but if you're looking to play, both TW and LORD are available at the User Friendly BBS, telnet bbs.ufies.org. Brought back memories when I logged on.:)
My personal favorite TW moment? When my corp and I managed to interdict Stardock via the application of a few strategically placed planets with level 6 citadels. Wake up at 4:30 just after system maintenance, warp the planets back into the appropriate space lanes, sit back and wait for the suckers to roll in...
I think that part of the reason why even nostalgia isn't enough to get me/really/ involved in the game again is because when I first played back in the early 90s, it was a local BBS, and my corp and I would frequently meet for coffee and strategy. Somehow, it's not the same when you don't know the people you're playing with face to face...
On a roughly similar note, does anyone remember Tele-Arena? the hours of forest-crawling... typing "a h" over and over again to attack that hobgoblin... the sorceress and the dart trick... hanging around in the arena doing hit/hit/heal with your best friend because you were both SO close to being able to buy a level up...
Man. If you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go sit in the corner and be all nostalgic. All I'd need now is the old MajorBBS forums and some of the buddies I met there, and I'd be set. (I've tried to explain this to my roommate, who was part of the '96 or so AOL wave. She just Does Not Get It...)
> And no matter how many abuse reports I send in, no matter how many times I send a letter to the administrative > contacts telling them that they are allowing people to exploit security holes (the open relays) in their mailservers to > send bulk e-mail to people, I've never once got any kind of reply other than a form letter.
You've obviously never had to send a spam complaint to Erols. All Praise Afterburner, He Of The Smoking Gun. ^_~
> So my question is, really, is there any way to get through to these people? Are the corporate ISPs so utterly clueless that > they can't comprehend the idea that spam is a Bad Thing? What does it take to get through to these corporations?
...I don't know. I'm lucky in that I don't get much spam -- despite that being my real address up there, non-spam-proofed, and that's the email address I use to post to Usenet (when I do) as well. I did for a while, but it just slacked off. My usual response to such things was a rather irritated-sounding letter along the lines of "Your user has greatly misunderstood the point of the Internet. Please re-educate him or her before he or she pees on the carpet once more." I didn't get non-form-letters back very often, either. To a lot of companies, spam-fighting is simply not a profitable way to spend their time; their business model is better served by trying to get more suckers^Wcustomers to subscribe and pay their fees.
One of my friends once made a joking suggestion that we should get together a bunch of scary BOFH types, and call them the Spam Patrol. Have them dig up spammers' real addresses, and show up at the spammer's home in black suits and dark sunglasses. Have them stop in to chat. The spokesperson would calmly and patiently explain why Spam is Bad -- theft of resources, cost-shifting, etc, etc. Meanwhile, the four or five other Scary BOFH Types would simply wander around the living room and comment about how nice a house it was, wouldn't it be a pity if, etc.
It might not work that much better, but it would definately blow off a/lot/ more steam.
(As for suggestions -- my only one would be to find an account somewhere that the admin runs the RBL. Hotmail is a/bad/ spam hole...)
As Linux (hopefully) moves more and more into the desktop, it's clear that one of the things that needs to be concentrated on is usability by the non-programmer and the non-geek.
With that in mind -- What elements were included in GNOME that were done, specifically, thinking from the ease-of-use standpoint? Did the team work from a "this would be cool, let's make it usable" viewpoint, or a "this would be usable, let's make it cool" one? Or has it been a little bit of both, and if so, when did it change?
> [Aside: The slashcode is out there, and would make a great basis for a site devoted to > announcing political protests, for anyone who wants to start one...]
I've considered doing this. My idea was to have a single site that would centralize "geek conscience" issues such as the DVD boycott, the Amazon boycott, the etoy/eToys debacle, etc, etc. It could be used as a resource to coordinate protests such as this at the same time that it would be a good resource to point non-geeks to. I can't count the number of times I've had someone invite me to a movie, only for me to say, "Sorry, I'm boycotting", and then have to explain over and over and/over/ again. I figured it would be very, very helpful to have a site that could be used as a central repository of information in as much or as little detail as a visitor wanted. Kind of a "okay, what's this all about" all the way down to "I'm boycotting Mattel, what products do I need to avoid now?"
Unfortunately, I'm overcommitted when it comes to time to begin with. Mrf. If anyone is interested in bouncing ideas for this project back and forth, email me and let me know.
The feature that *I* would like to see In the next netscape/Mozilla is one that allows a regex list to specify domains to allow or ignore cookies. I realize that I could do this with Junkbuster, but Junkbuster does some things I don't particularly care for so I don't run it. Adding this ability into the browser really is trivial given the overall complexity of the project.
This function is available in iCab, which is, alas, Macintosh-only. It's still in beta, but it's the best damn web browser I've ever seen. It knocks Mozilla out of the water. It's small, fast, contains an HTML validator that can display error reports, ties in to a whole slew of Mac-native applications such as BBEdit, has intelligent cookie and graphics handling, and -- which blew me out of the water -- lets you turn off the goddamn <BLINK> tag.
It's stable and incredibly useful. Future releases plan to support Java and CSS. I haven't opened Netscape or Mozilla since I downloaded it. If you've got a Mac, try it. I doubt you'll be disappointed.
Jumping in to reply here, but addressing several messages from this thread. Disclaimer: I carry my insurance licenses but I'm not doing anything with them and this is not insurance advice.
> I forget what the acronym stands for, but we've > got a law, C.O.B.R.A., that allows employees to > extend their health benefits, for a year IIRC, > at the employers group rate.
COBRA, or the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (it dealt with more than just insurance), provides that an employer must offer an employee who meets a 'qualifying event' the option to continue on the group plan for a certain amount of time after the 'qualifying event'. That amount of time is either 18 months or 36 months, depending on what said event is. Most common is termination of employment; the COBRA term after that event is 18 months.
Note that/you/ pay the premiums, and the law allows for the employer to charge up to 102% of the actual premium, to cover administrative overhead. COBRA/is/ very expensive to the employee, because the employee is suddenly paying all costs that previously the employer paid. (Yes, they pay/that/ much for your health insurance.) It has two benefits: no underwriting and no pre-existing condition 'blackout phase'. Your coverage simply continues uninterrupted.
There are instances where one wants to keep paying COBRA even though one has gotten health insurance at one's new job. For instance, if I quit the job I had tomorrow and got a job somewhere that offered me the same coverage, I would not bother with COBRA. However, if I got a job with insurance that would not cover pre-existing conditions for the first year (which is a much more common clause than complete coverage) it would be necessary for me to continue paying COBRA, because my asthma often requires a trip to the ER.
'Pre-existing condition', by the way, has a varying definition based on which health insurance carrier one is using and/or which state one resides in. Most common definition is 'a condition for which you have received medical treatment in the past 12 months'. Nearly all individual health policies and some group policies have pre-existing coverage blackout periods. (It's less common in group policies, because a group policy is a wider statistical and actuarial sample.)
No underwriting also means that they cannot deny you coverage based on your current health. Again, this ties back to the fact that a group policy is drawing from a wider sample, and for every person who is 50+, overweight, cigar-smoking, etc, there's a 20-something who runs 3 miles a day and eats plenty of fiber. This is a plus because if you do decide to go with an individual health policy, it can be tough as hell to find someone who wants to cover you.
Individual health insurance is not a single type of policy. There are a number of variables that can be factored in -- exclusion periods, deductibles, types of coverage, prescription plans, etc, etc. Any and all of these things may affect the price. Really, the thing to do is to talk to someone who knows what he or she is talking about, to make sure that you're not screwing yourself (and/or your family) over in exchange for a few bucks.
Who doesn't want a smart strong son? Or a pretty and smart daughter?
I direct you towards Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain, a sci-fi novel in which genetic engineering progresses to the point where it is possible to alter one's children's genes. The main character is genetically engineered so that she does not need sleep; she and many of her fellow Sleepless experience a great deal of backlash.
Obviously, this is not something that can be done in the present day -- it is fiction, after all -- but it presents some fascinating moral and ethical questions, and attempts to answer some of them. I found it fascinating.
So what's the difference between getting an email from some unknown person saying that you can order his book for $39.95, and getting a circular in your mailbox from some unknown person/company saying the same thing?
As has been mentioned in other replies else-thread -- the reason that spam is Bad is that it shifts the burden-of-cost of the advertising to the consumer, rather than to the person doing the marketing. I have not yet seen a link given to CAUCE, the Campaign to Abolish Unsolicited Commercial Email, but it is a highly informative site that can answer a lot of questions. Such as:
<QUOTE> "Why can't you just hit and be done with it?" Unfortunately, pressing Delete may make the problem disappear from your mailbox. But by the time you get to press the key, the costs associated with that piece of junk email have already been extracted from your pocketbook. Hitting Delete is a little like hitting the "snooze" button on your alarm clock: you may have bought the appearance that all is well, but it only works for a few minutes... and the more you hit it, the deeper in trouble you are. </QUOTE>
I've watched this debate play itself out many, many times before, and I have to say that I'm on the side of the anti-spammers.
Perhaps the best/.-centric analogy is if each reader had to pay Rob & co. for each comment viewed. I'll bet that if that happened, there'd be a whole lot more anger directed towards the Naked and Petrified folks -- why should we have to pay to see their garbage? Why should I have to subsidize someone else's advertising budget with my mail servers?
> 5k is not a lot of space to do anything useful in....for any amount of text, > it usually comes out more than that.
That's my thought exactly. I'm pondering entering this contest, but they're judging on content as well (as well they should be!) and I'm having a hard time coming up with something that will still ring in at under 5K with text and images and still be interesting.
It's interesting that this happens to come along now. I spent a good half an hour last night trying (mostly) patiently to educate a cow-orker of mine as to just, precisely,/why/ one should design pages that would be viewable in any browser. He proposed something to go onto a page that we both work on, I vetoed it because it relied solely on color changes to convey content, thus excluding Lynx users. His response -- and it floored me -- was 'Well, who uses that old sort of stuff these days anyway?'
Uh. Me. And everyone else who, like me, is still stuck on a dialup POTS line, lucky to even get 28.8 with a 56K modem due to the quality of said POS phone lines, browsing on a six-year-old slow-as-shit computer, and who doesn't want to sit around and wait 30 minutes for/. to load.
I don't really know when this turned into a browser accessability rant. *grin* It's certainly possible to design a page in less than 5K that looks like shit in, say, lynx. It's also possible to design a page that looks beautiful in any browser you view it in, but happens to take six years to load. I think what my point is, is that this contest -- while pretty awesome, and definately something that I'm going to be pondering my entry for -- misses the point to some extent. It shouldn't/just/ be attacking bloat; it should also be attacking broswer-specific, non-standards-compliant HTML.
Re:This review doesn't belong on Slashdot
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Review: "Scream 3"
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· Score: 2
> well, as pop culture can only be defined as that which is popular to the "majority" your advertising for MF is only helping them get there.
/. readers have never struck me as the majority. ^_~
Re:This review doesn't belong on Slashdot
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Review: "Scream 3"
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· Score: 1
Is Slashdot desiring to "expand its horizons" and now become a "popular culture discussion site"?
...Dear Lord, I hope not. I'm not one of the people who usually goes yelling 'This isn't news for nerds' every time something mildly non-technical gets posted, but really. Most geeks I know happened to find the Scream trilogy mildly interesting at best.
Hey Jon! Weren't you the one who was writing about how geeks are generally categorized by their distaste for popular media? I don't mean to bitch about the choice of article subject -- I generally find JonKatz's writing at least thought-provoking, even if I think he's full of shit -- but... well, to be honest, the last movie I saw in the theatres was The Matrix, and I'm refusing to go to the movies until this whole DVD thing gets settled, because I refuse to let my money go to that legal battle unless it's to the right side.
Of course, now I have Splatter Splatter by Moxy Fruvous (who are not pop culture, and should never be pop culture -- it would ruin their charm -- but who, nonetheless, are one hell of a band) stuck firmly in my head. "The windows shatter, then splatter splatter, cue soundtrack music from the up and coming band..."
> (BTW, any other Fruvous fans out there? Former Fruvous fans?)
Fruhead and proud of it! As a matter of fact, I'm wearing my "Hello 2000 with Moxy Fruvous" tshirt today. ^_~
Fruvous: the only band I know of who would have had a NON Y2K compliant PC on stage at their new year's show, just to see what happened to it at rollover. (To Murray's disappointment, nothing...)
> I'll finally get the chance to enter the time condensed realm and beat the damn game.
FFVIII? Good flipping luck, unless you've been playing with a walkthrough or have/really/ figured out the junction system -- that last battle is a bitch and a half. ^_~
The original point of my comment (as poorly made is it was) was more or less an astonishment that SurfWatch saw fit to block us in multiple categories, a designation usually reserved for the net's worst examples of filth.
I can relate.
I have a personal web site, that's located at www.cybernothing.org/~alanna. I work for a Large Corporation. Occasionally, I will want to view my web pages at work, to grab some information/check to see if the pages look decent under a higher screen resolution/etc/etc. I used to be able to, until one day I found that the proxy banned my site under the category of 'hate speech'.
Now, I will freely admit that the company has the right to block whatever they want to block, because it's their network, blah, blah. I was just amused at the category that they put me in, especially considering some of the other categories that should be appropriate -- such as sexual content (no, I don't host pr0n, but I do have certain sexually explicit writings on my site), entertainment, opinion (yes, that is actually a category), and the catch-all, 'non-business-related pages'.
I'm curious to know if any of the commercial filters also catches my page, just not curious enough to actually install any of them. I am, however, vastly amused in a sort of upset manner that the people who take care of our filtering software thought that my few little rants about the state of the world today constituted 'hate speech'.
Has anyone else had the experience of having their sites caught by filtering software? If so, were you upset, proud, baffled, or what?
> Dolphin will be a workhorse, but the way Nintendo is dealing with the development > community, you'll probably only be able to play 10 games based around Mario, Zelda, > or Donkey Kong.
The other reason to avoid Nintendo is their draconian content guidelines, which are a notorious source of amusement and derision in the RPG community. Such things as Final Fantasy IV (IIUS)'s infamous "You spoony bard"... Basically, you're not allowed to show anything having to do with sex or religion, you're not allowed to suggest at certain themes, etc, etc...
They might have changed things for the Dolphin -- I'm not entirely certain, as I've abandoned Nintendo -- but I was/so/ happy to hear that Squaresoft had jumped ship over to the original PSX. (And looking at FFVIII, I'm glad all over again...)
> Yep, Barrett would convince the judge, all right, with his gun-arm.
Rico, from Xenogears! Come on, don't you think that's what the stereotypical evil lawyer should look like -- tall, green and scaly, and able to punch a hole through a steel wall?
(No offense to any/good/ lawyers out there, of course.;)
Slashdot Mirror
> Take Ani Difranco, for example. most of her CDs are $25+ Canadian - far more than I
> could afford. I'd be happy to cut her a check for however-much-she-actually-profits
> plus a bit for each CD.
Ani is actually a bad example. Her record label, Righteous Babe Records, is owned and operated by -- guess who? Ani herself. She has turned down numerous deals to sign with a more established record label, and recently has started signing other artists to RBR.
I will note, however, that at the bottom of all of her albums is a little thing that says -- rather than "Unauthorized duplication prohibited by law" -- "Unauthorized duplication, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing." And in the liner notes to her double live CD, it says something to the effect of "Sorry this album is only on CD; if you want a tape, go make yourself one."
I'm imagining that the reason why Ani's music is so expensive in Canada is the hassles involved in a small label distributing in other countries. Perhaps it might be more cost-effective to order directly from RBR.
> Actually, I think this issue has already come up. In Heinlein's book "Stranger in a
> Strange Land" mention is made of a "hydraulic bed". From the description, this bed
> contains water and is used to gently float a patient to lessen chance of bed sores and
> cause less pain to burn victims. This book was published in the late 1950's before
> waterbeds (which is clearly what the hydraulic bed is) were invented.
I'll also point out that Heinlein first described the waldo. As a matter of fact, the waldo is *named* the waldo because of Heinlein's story "Waldo". When they were actually created in the physical world, the inventor, in a tip of the hat to the Grand Master, took the name, as a way of acknowledging Heinlein's input.
Yes, fan fiction is definitely subject to Sturgeon's Rule (which states that 90% of everything is crap). I'm sure there's some good fan fics out there, but I can't think of any right now.
Let me tell you, that is the truth. I work as assistant fan fiction editor at RPGamer, and some of the submissions we get are scary. At the same time, though, some of the stuff we get just blows me away. We're proud to host some of these stories; they're easily the quality of professional writing.
I'm also a fanfic author -- mostly for Japanese RPGs such as Final Fantasy 7 and Xenogears (blatant plug: Heaven Can Wait, our Xenogears fan site) and I can tell you that nine times out of ten, the reason I write fan fiction is because I'm dissatisfied with something about the game or about the story. The type of games that I tend to write for occasionally suffer from exceedingly poor translation; sometimes they were rushed at the end, or sometimes there are aspects of the plot that I feel weren't addressed properly. So I write it myself. I think a lot of fanfic authors -- certainly the ones that I know -- do the same.
Another good resource, fanfic-wise, is the FFML, the Anime/Manga Fanfic Mailing List. I don't remember the URL for the information page off the top of my head, but that list is another very valuable resource for authors and readers alike.
I guess what I'm really trying to say is that sure, a lot of fanfic out there is crap. But then again, a lot of published stuff is crap. (And most of TV is crap, but that's another story.) It's just that, like nearly anything else, the gems that are buried in the crap are more than worth wading through the crap. ^_^
>> After the column appeared, Jim revealed, WAVE America received more than 70,000
:)
/was/ the underpaid front-line customer service worker for a long time. It, to put it bluntly, sucks.
/. simply because a corporation /will not stop doing something because it is wrong/. A corporation will only stop doing something if it is an unacceptable risk. When you contact a corporation, as JonKatz did in this case, you need to tell them exactly what your concerns are -- and what it might mean for the company.
...
/.er who is participating in a letterwriting campaign. Email address above is not spamproofed, contact me to arrange something.)
>> e-mails and a few mail bombs, and repelled a number of assaults on their
>> system firewalls.
> Keep up the good work, slashdotters!
No, no, no!
I know that this was moderated up as funny -- but I can't let this go by. The way to get corporations' attention is NOT to mailbomb them, crack their firewalls, crack their anything, deface their web pages, etc, etc. Corporations (I should know, I work for a Very Large Insurance and Financial Corporation) will simply discard this sort of thing as an attack -- or worse, proving their very point, that the Internet is a dangerous and unstable place filled with dangerous and unstable people.
I've given thought on writing up a how-to along the lines of the Linux Advocacy document, only for dealing with major corporations and the US government. The key points that I cannot stress enough include:
-- Be polite. No one likes to be yelled at, and the person who reads your missive is likely to be an underpaid front-line customer service worker who has no clue what the issue is. I
-- Be explicit. State what the problem is, state why you have a problem with it. Give them the exact reasons. Corporations think in "risk vs. added value" -- "If I do this, what risk am I exposing myself to? What added value will I receive?" It's an entirely different way of thinking that's foreign to a lot of people I've met through
-- Be specific. In two ways: first, give them as much detail as you can (as JonKatz did with the statistics he brought with him). Don't just give them opinions; back those opinions up. It's the difference between "Spam sucks" and "78% of people surveyed stated explicitly that they would never buy from a company that sent them unsolicited commercial email." (A good statistic to use here is the widely-held marketing bon mot that a happy customer will tell, on average, three people about the company's service, while an unhappy customer will tell 12 people.) Second, tell them what you want from them. Tell them what actions you want them to take. Don't just contact a company to bitch and moan -- tell them what will make you happy. Specifically ask for a personalized response; you might not get it, but it gets the point across that you are unhappy with things, and you wish to work towards resolution. Of course, one must also remember to
-- Be reasonable. This is where JonKatz fell down in this case. Expecting Pinkerton to totally scrap WAVE (much as I would love for that to happen) is unreasonable, in their eyes. As they responded, they simply won't do it. Once a corporation has something in their head to do, they won't NOT do it. They will, if concerns are presented properly and the risks are explained to them in terms that they understand, which means in very small and non-technical detail.
And, above all else, be professional. Approach these companies as an equal -- and, if at all possible, as a customer of theirs. This means, at the least, proper spelling, grammar, and format. If you can't spell, or you have grammar problems, for God's sake get a friend to look over your comment for you. (I am willing to proofread for any
(Jon, if you're reading this -- I'd like to second the thought, stated above, that the next step is to contact Pinkerton's customers. The company might not drop the plan, but if they don't have anyone to sell to, the issue will be moot.)
> The more I look at "Intelectual", the more confused I become over how it should have been spelled.
"Intellectual"
HTH, HAND, etc, etc
> I've been getting answering machine spam at home, lately. No, I don't mean telemarketers.
/not/ discarded, but redialed (usually within 20 minutes or so). So if you ever wonder why your phone keeps ringing and there's no one there, you got a p-dialer call.
Actually, you do mean telemarketers. What you suffer from, my friend, is something horrific and frightening in the telemarketing business -- it's known as the "predictive dialer". What it does is selects four to six numbers at once, dials them, and waits for one person to pick up. When that first number picks up, it cuts that line directly in to the live telemarketer's handset, while the other calls are disconnected.
Which is annoying to begin with, because the other five calls are
This is bad in and of itself, but the worst part of it is that companies decide, hey, why should I waste time calling these people back? So the five calls that don't go directly to a TM will get dropped into the recording queue. And the companies get around the fact that it's blatantly illegal by offering an option to speak with a live person, which doesn't mean a thing when the recording is talking to an answering machine.
How do I know this? *hangs head in shame* Don't ask, please don't ask. It was long ago (not really) and it was for money (a lot of money), and I'm much better now.
> Remember the old Mac commercial with the two guys in the office spending a week or
/. to goof off like the rest of us usually do.
> so customizing their office PC ``so we can be more productive''? The secretary's response
> along the lines of ``If we're any more productive we'll be out of business''
> was right on the money.
I don't remember this commercial, but if it was indeed a Mac commercial, I'm afraid I have to laugh. Go check out the Jargon File definition of "macdink" -- the Mac used to encourage this sort of behaviour much more than the PC did! And let's not even get into what can be done with a copy of ResEdit and your System folder.
(Disclaimer: I love Macs. I have four of the little beasties. And I actually *do* like the customization features; but they *do* waste time. Badly.)
Where I work, we're running on NT (*feh*) and have been forbidden to customize the themes. No reasoning was given (personally, I think it's to keep us soulless drones, but that's just my opinion). Still, I've seen people sitting around and playing with their window colors, their icons, etc, etc, for hours, instead of reading
Was anyone at this conference? I would have been interested to see how Phil Zimmerman reacted to having his software renamed and included in Cryptonomicon. ^_^
Seriously, it's good to hear something like this. It's just another way to drive home the point that an author is not his characters.
> I had been spending some time looking for this, and the majorBBS program Crossroads...
:)
/really/ involved in the game again is because when I first played back in the early 90s, it was a local BBS, and my corp and I would frequently meet for coffee and strategy. Somehow, it's not the same when you don't know the people you're playing with face to face...
... the sorceress and the dart trick ... hanging around in the arena doing hit/hit/heal with your best friend because you were both SO close to being able to buy a level up ...
> sadly, crossroads still costs over 200 dollars
Well, if you're looking to purchase, I can't help you, but if you're looking to play, both TW and LORD are available at the User Friendly BBS, telnet bbs.ufies.org. Brought back memories when I logged on.
My personal favorite TW moment? When my corp and I managed to interdict Stardock via the application of a few strategically placed planets with level 6 citadels. Wake up at 4:30 just after system maintenance, warp the planets back into the appropriate space lanes, sit back and wait for the suckers to roll in...
I think that part of the reason why even nostalgia isn't enough to get me
On a roughly similar note, does anyone remember Tele-Arena? the hours of forest-crawling... typing "a h" over and over again to attack that hobgoblin
Man. If you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go sit in the corner and be all nostalgic. All I'd need now is the old MajorBBS forums and some of the buddies I met there, and I'd be set. (I've tried to explain this to my roommate, who was part of the '96 or so AOL wave. She just Does Not Get It...)
> And no matter how many abuse reports I send in, no matter how many times I send a letter to the administrative
/lot/ more steam.
/bad/ spam hole...)
> contacts telling them that they are allowing people to exploit security holes (the open relays) in their mailservers to
> send bulk e-mail to people, I've never once got any kind of reply other than a form letter.
You've obviously never had to send a spam complaint to Erols. All Praise Afterburner, He Of The Smoking Gun. ^_~
> So my question is, really, is there any way to get through to these people? Are the corporate ISPs so utterly clueless that
> they can't comprehend the idea that spam is a Bad Thing? What does it take to get through to these corporations?
...I don't know. I'm lucky in that I don't get much spam -- despite that being my real address up there, non-spam-proofed, and that's the email address I use to post to Usenet (when I do) as well. I did for a while, but it just slacked off. My usual response to such things was a rather irritated-sounding letter along the lines of "Your user has greatly misunderstood the point of the Internet. Please re-educate him or her before he or she pees on the carpet once more." I didn't get non-form-letters back very often, either. To a lot of companies, spam-fighting is simply not a profitable way to spend their time; their business model is better served by trying to get more suckers^Wcustomers to subscribe and pay their fees.
One of my friends once made a joking suggestion that we should get together a bunch of scary BOFH types, and call them the Spam Patrol. Have them dig up spammers' real addresses, and show up at the spammer's home in black suits and dark sunglasses. Have them stop in to chat. The spokesperson would calmly and patiently explain why Spam is Bad -- theft of resources, cost-shifting, etc, etc. Meanwhile, the four or five other Scary BOFH Types would simply wander around the living room and comment about how nice a house it was, wouldn't it be a pity if, etc.
It might not work that much better, but it would definately blow off a
(As for suggestions -- my only one would be to find an account somewhere that the admin runs the RBL. Hotmail is a
As Linux (hopefully) moves more and more into the desktop, it's clear that one of the things that needs to be concentrated on is usability by the non-programmer and the non-geek.
With that in mind -- What elements were included in GNOME that were done, specifically, thinking from the ease-of-use standpoint? Did the team work from a "this would be cool, let's make it usable" viewpoint, or a "this would be usable, let's make it cool" one? Or has it been a little bit of both, and if so, when did it change?
> [Aside: The slashcode is out there, and would make a great basis for a site devoted to ...]
/over/ again. I figured it would be very, very helpful to have a site that could be used as a central repository of information in as much or as little detail as a visitor wanted. Kind of a "okay, what's this all about" all the way down to "I'm boycotting Mattel, what products do I need to avoid now?"
> announcing political protests, for anyone who wants to start one
I've considered doing this. My idea was to have a single site that would centralize "geek conscience" issues such as the DVD boycott, the Amazon boycott, the etoy/eToys debacle, etc, etc. It could be used as a resource to coordinate protests such as this at the same time that it would be a good resource to point non-geeks to. I can't count the number of times I've had someone invite me to a movie, only for me to say, "Sorry, I'm boycotting", and then have to explain over and over and
Unfortunately, I'm overcommitted when it comes to time to begin with. Mrf. If anyone is interested in bouncing ideas for this project back and forth, email me and let me know.
This function is available in iCab, which is, alas, Macintosh-only. It's still in beta, but it's the best damn web browser I've ever seen. It knocks Mozilla out of the water. It's small, fast, contains an HTML validator that can display error reports, ties in to a whole slew of Mac-native applications such as BBEdit, has intelligent cookie and graphics handling, and -- which blew me out of the water -- lets you turn off the goddamn <BLINK> tag.
It's stable and incredibly useful. Future releases plan to support Java and CSS. I haven't opened Netscape or Mozilla since I downloaded it. If you've got a Mac, try it. I doubt you'll be disappointed.
Jumping in to reply here, but addressing several messages from this thread. Disclaimer: I carry my insurance licenses but I'm not doing anything with them and this is not insurance advice.
/you/ pay the premiums, and the law allows for the employer to charge up to 102% of the actual premium, to cover administrative overhead. COBRA /is/ very expensive to the employee, because the employee is suddenly paying all costs that previously the employer paid. (Yes, they pay /that/ much for your health insurance.) It has two benefits: no underwriting and no pre-existing condition 'blackout phase'. Your coverage simply continues uninterrupted.
> I forget what the acronym stands for, but we've
> got a law, C.O.B.R.A., that allows employees to
> extend their health benefits, for a year IIRC,
> at the employers group rate.
COBRA, or the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (it dealt with more than just insurance), provides that an employer must offer an employee who meets a 'qualifying event' the option to continue on the group plan for a certain amount of time after the 'qualifying event'. That amount of time is either 18 months or 36 months, depending on what said event is. Most common is termination of employment; the COBRA term after that event is 18 months.
Note that
There are instances where one wants to keep paying COBRA even though one has gotten health insurance at one's new job. For instance, if I quit the job I had tomorrow and got a job somewhere that offered me the same coverage, I would not bother with COBRA. However, if I got a job with insurance that would not cover pre-existing conditions for the first year (which is a much more common clause than complete coverage) it would be necessary for me to continue paying COBRA, because my asthma often requires a trip to the ER.
'Pre-existing condition', by the way, has a varying definition based on which health insurance carrier one is using and/or which state one resides in. Most common definition is 'a condition for which you have received medical treatment in the past 12 months'. Nearly all individual health policies and some group policies have pre-existing coverage blackout periods. (It's less common in group policies, because a group policy is a wider statistical and actuarial sample.)
No underwriting also means that they cannot deny you coverage based on your current health. Again, this ties back to the fact that a group policy is drawing from a wider sample, and for every person who is 50+, overweight, cigar-smoking, etc, there's a 20-something who runs 3 miles a day and eats plenty of fiber. This is a plus because if you do decide to go with an individual health policy, it can be tough as hell to find someone who wants to cover you.
Individual health insurance is not a single type of policy. There are a number of variables that can be factored in -- exclusion periods, deductibles, types of coverage, prescription plans, etc, etc. Any and all of these things may affect the price. Really, the thing to do is to talk to someone who knows what he or she is talking about, to make sure that you're not screwing yourself (and/or your family) over in exchange for a few bucks.
Who doesn't want a smart strong son? Or a pretty and smart daughter?
I direct you towards Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain , a sci-fi novel in which genetic engineering progresses to the point where it is possible to alter one's children's genes. The main character is genetically engineered so that she does not need sleep; she and many of her fellow Sleepless experience a great deal of backlash.
Obviously, this is not something that can be done in the present day -- it is fiction, after all -- but it presents some fascinating moral and ethical questions, and attempts to answer some of them. I found it fascinating.
So what's the difference between getting an email from some unknown person saying that you can order his book for $39.95, and getting a circular in your mailbox from some unknown person/company saying the same thing?
/.-centric analogy is if each reader had to pay Rob & co. for each comment viewed. I'll bet that if that happened, there'd be a whole lot more anger directed towards the Naked and Petrified folks -- why should we have to pay to see their garbage? Why should I have to subsidize someone else's advertising budget with my mail servers?
As has been mentioned in other replies else-thread -- the reason that spam is Bad is that it shifts the burden-of-cost of the advertising to the consumer, rather than to the person doing the marketing. I have not yet seen a link given to CAUCE, the Campaign to Abolish Unsolicited Commercial Email, but it is a highly informative site that can answer a lot of questions. Such as:
<QUOTE>
"Why can't you just hit and be done with it?"
Unfortunately, pressing Delete may make the problem disappear from your mailbox. But by the time you get to press the key, the costs associated with that piece of junk email have already been extracted from your pocketbook. Hitting Delete is a little like hitting the "snooze" button on your alarm clock: you may have bought the appearance that all is well, but it only works for a few minutes... and the more you hit it, the deeper in trouble you are.
</QUOTE>
I've watched this debate play itself out many, many times before, and I have to say that I'm on the side of the anti-spammers.
Perhaps the best
> 5k is not a lot of space to do anything useful in....for any amount of text,
/why/ one should design pages that would be viewable in any browser. He proposed something to go onto a page that we both work on, I vetoed it because it relied solely on color changes to convey content, thus excluding Lynx users. His response -- and it floored me -- was 'Well, who uses that old sort of stuff these days anyway?'
/. to load.
/just/ be attacking bloat; it should also be attacking broswer-specific, non-standards-compliant HTML.
> it usually comes out more than that.
That's my thought exactly. I'm pondering entering this contest, but they're judging on content as well (as well they should be!) and I'm having a hard time coming up with something that will still ring in at under 5K with text and images and still be interesting.
It's interesting that this happens to come along now. I spent a good half an hour last night trying (mostly) patiently to educate a cow-orker of mine as to just, precisely,
Uh. Me. And everyone else who, like me, is still stuck on a dialup POTS line, lucky to even get 28.8 with a 56K modem due to the quality of said POS phone lines, browsing on a six-year-old slow-as-shit computer, and who doesn't want to sit around and wait 30 minutes for
I don't really know when this turned into a browser accessability rant. *grin* It's certainly possible to design a page in less than 5K that looks like shit in, say, lynx. It's also possible to design a page that looks beautiful in any browser you view it in, but happens to take six years to load. I think what my point is, is that this contest -- while pretty awesome, and definately something that I'm going to be pondering my entry for -- misses the point to some extent. It shouldn't
> well, as pop culture can only be defined as that which is popular to the "majority" your advertising for MF is only helping them get there.
/. readers have never struck me as the majority. ^_~
Is Slashdot desiring to "expand its horizons" and now become a "popular culture discussion site"?
...Dear Lord, I hope not. I'm not one of the people who usually goes yelling 'This isn't news for nerds' every time something mildly non-technical gets posted, but really. Most geeks I know happened to find the Scream trilogy mildly interesting at best.
... well, to be honest, the last movie I saw in the theatres was The Matrix, and I'm refusing to go to the movies until this whole DVD thing gets settled, because I refuse to let my money go to that legal battle unless it's to the right side.
Hey Jon! Weren't you the one who was writing about how geeks are generally categorized by their distaste for popular media? I don't mean to bitch about the choice of article subject -- I generally find JonKatz's writing at least thought-provoking, even if I think he's full of shit -- but
Of course, now I have Splatter Splatter by Moxy Fruvous (who are not pop culture, and should never be pop culture -- it would ruin their charm -- but who, nonetheless, are one hell of a band) stuck firmly in my head. "The windows shatter, then splatter splatter, cue soundtrack music from the up and coming band..."
> As someone once said (don't ask who, I'm awful with names)...
I believe you are referring to Voltaire. Of course, I Could Be Wrong.
There's another quote that springs to mind -- and this one I don't remember the origin of:
"If you don't believe in freedom of speech for people you despise, you don't believe in freedom of speech at all."
> (BTW, any other Fruvous fans out there? Former Fruvous fans?)
Fruhead and proud of it! As a matter of fact, I'm wearing my "Hello 2000 with Moxy Fruvous" tshirt today. ^_~
Fruvous: the only band I know of who would have had a NON Y2K compliant PC on stage at their new year's show, just to see what happened to it at rollover. (To Murray's disappointment, nothing...)
> I'll finally get the chance to enter the time condensed realm and beat the damn game.
/really/ figured out the junction system -- that last battle is a bitch and a half. ^_~
FFVIII? Good flipping luck, unless you've been playing with a walkthrough or have
I can relate.
I have a personal web site, that's located at www.cybernothing.org/~alanna. I work for a Large Corporation. Occasionally, I will want to view my web pages at work, to grab some information/check to see if the pages look decent under a higher screen resolution/etc/etc. I used to be able to, until one day I found that the proxy banned my site under the category of 'hate speech'.
Now, I will freely admit that the company has the right to block whatever they want to block, because it's their network, blah, blah. I was just amused at the category that they put me in, especially considering some of the other categories that should be appropriate -- such as sexual content (no, I don't host pr0n, but I do have certain sexually explicit writings on my site), entertainment, opinion (yes, that is actually a category), and the catch-all, 'non-business-related pages'.
I'm curious to know if any of the commercial filters also catches my page, just not curious enough to actually install any of them. I am, however, vastly amused in a sort of upset manner that the people who take care of our filtering software thought that my few little rants about the state of the world today constituted 'hate speech'.
Has anyone else had the experience of having their sites caught by filtering software? If so, were you upset, proud, baffled, or what?
> Dolphin will be a workhorse, but the way Nintendo is dealing with the development
/so/ happy to hear that Squaresoft had jumped ship over to the original PSX. (And looking at FFVIII, I'm glad all over again...)
> community, you'll probably only be able to play 10 games based around Mario, Zelda,
> or Donkey Kong.
The other reason to avoid Nintendo is their draconian content guidelines, which are a notorious source of amusement and derision in the RPG community. Such things as Final Fantasy IV (IIUS)'s infamous "You spoony bard"... Basically, you're not allowed to show anything having to do with sex or religion, you're not allowed to suggest at certain themes, etc, etc...
They might have changed things for the Dolphin -- I'm not entirely certain, as I've abandoned Nintendo -- but I was
> Yep, Barrett would convince the judge, all right, with his gun-arm.
/good/ lawyers out there, of course. ;)
Rico, from Xenogears! Come on, don't you think that's what the stereotypical evil lawyer should look like -- tall, green and scaly, and able to punch a hole through a steel wall?
(No offense to any