a) Thousands of people have hundreds if not thousands of copies (heck I downloaded 600 MB of songs from them the day before they turned it off, that's 0.5 percent of everything they have right there),
b) The original artists still have their own copies and can go on to do what they want with them, case in point - G.O.T.E. (at one point a couple of these songs broke the top 10 on the Trance chart on mp3.com).
The disease he died of has a 95% cure rate when caught at the initial symptom. If you dismiss the initial symptom and wait until the secondary critical symptom appears which forces you to go see a doctor, it goes down to a 90% mortality rate, and they give you 3-6 months to live.
What's the initial symptom? Blood in your stool.
What's the secondary symptom 3-6 months latter that forces you to go to a hospital and ends up giving you only a 1 in 10 chance of living more than 6 more months? Total bowel blockage that results in emergency surgery to give you a colostomy.
All men over the age of 40 should get a colonoscopy regularly. No-one should assume that blood in their stool "will go away".
My Dad ignored his initial symptoms for 3-6 months. He's been dead 9 years now. Never saw my brother marry and have children. Never saw me get through grad school and get a great job.
In October I was trying to find a decent concert to take a girl to here in Toronto. Noticed the name 54-40 but couldn't remember what their music was like, so downloaded a few to see if I could stand them. Ended up taking a girl to the concert. Liked the performance a lot, ended up buying a couple CD's for her *AND* discovering that I really loved the two opening acts, one from Ontario the other from the UK, bought their CDs too.
If they sue me, I am *so* taking this to court. I was probably sharing mostly old mp3.com trance and obtained-freely-direct-from-the-artists music, very little "CRIA" music, but certainly the 54-40 files sat in my download directory for a few days and were uploaded to some other people.
More than that, I'll personally spend a few grand on some big-ass full page ads in the papers and try my hardest to get on CBC's Journal and W5, etc - explain the difference between "copyright violation" for profit and "intellectual property" dogma, radio stacking, percent of CD sales that artists get, etc etc - and personally show them my file-timestamps, ticket stubs, and CDs. Try and humiliate them into the ground.
I know of *NO-ONE* who is buying any less than they otherwise would have *just* because of p2p.
In the information age with transportation systems as they are, ideally there should be increased "economies of scale" and business should move to those who provide the best value (whatever combination of cheap, service, support, quality and product is optimal), and the huge massive amount of duplication of effort will be eliminated.
Unfortunately that *entirely* rests on consumers making educated choices and migrating to a small subset of "best of breed" service/product providers.
The fact that they aren't, and that Google rankings and adwords has this effect - is entirely due to the fact that consumers are stupid.
"Engineers who present analysis don't put their assumptions and uncertainties first and foremost"
Very true. This brings up an interesting point, I'm not sure if I can express it as succinctly as I want to.
It occurrs in "business" all the time - technical people (especially software) who when they are asked a direct question, attempt to answer in any way possible that presents the best brightest outlook. Any non-technical person who is listening will a) get bored b) tune out and c) not understand most of the tech-speak that's pouring forward towards them. And so they never do "recognize" the "but's" and "assumptions".
Instead of going on and on and on, when you are in a man-critical environment, the *only* thing you should be stating is - what is wrong. And in plain and simple enough language that a non-technical person can understand it.
"We have ZERO understanding and information as to what can happen if material of that size hits the leading edge at that stage in the launch - end of presentation."
That's the stupidest quote I've ever heard. "Computers don't fail, they do exactly what you program them to do." How does that help identify what went wrong, a specific bug or an endemic vulnerability in the process or bureaucracy to a class of errors or failure chains?
"There is no such thing as a no-fault error in engineering."
Again, a nice "quip" that does nothing to identify how to prevent such errors in the future. The Armed Forces and especially the Air Force are notorious for coming up with "scape goats" and doing nothing to actually prevent said classes of errors from occurring again.
You blame the one engineer, but the engineer has been SPECIFICALLY TRAINED by his environment and the bureaucracy to keep his mouth shut and take his lumps. This was the problem with the first shuttle disaster, this is the problem once again.
I'm sorry, someone like *you* is a part of the problem at NASA. You solve NOTHING.
"but the fact is none of those civilians was responsible for bombings"
Bull SHIT. If the nation you live in wages aggressive war, YOU are responsible. And I don't see why MY DAD AND BROTHER and 10 other of my friends should die to spare YOUR FAMILY's life. If we can kill 10 of you for each one of us, so much the better. If I could be CERTAIN that not killing you would not result in a longer war and more deaths of those not "in the wrong", then I'll consider it.
It wasn't a "police action", nor was the West assured of victory. It was TOTAL WAR. How many people a day were being killed in Death Camps, supported and run by the citizens of Germany?
I take great offense at any callous implication that just because it involved the deaths of a lot of people, that it was an "atrocity" for whom someone was "responsible" on our side.
"Not to mention the fact that your average coal burning plant simply doesn't have the potential to cause a catastrophe on the scale of Chernobyl"
Not all at once in one place.
Coal and Petrochemical based air pollution has killed tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands at younger ages than they would have otherwise died, and cars and tobacco have killed TENS OF MILLIONS of people this century, and yet you think that the HUNDREDS of reactors in current operation in North America whom haven't killed a SINGLE HUMAN BEING yet - are a bigger badder threat.
Stupid dumb public. And they bitch like hell when we try and keep their asses in High School all the way through until grade 12.
There was "no immediate threat" from Germany and Japan either. Nor from the Serbs, and all the warnings in the world couldn't get us SOBs in the UN (hell the entire world, Canada/USA included) to do anything to prevent Rwanda.
There's a reason that NATO is establishing a Fast Reaction Force, and is much more willing these days to send troops around the world.
You can't beat prevention. And you can't sit around on your a** placating tyranical mass murders forever. Eventually, you have to bit the bullet.
I will agree with you on one point, I never believed that they had WMDs, but I still supported the war in Iraq just on basic principles of fighting tyranny. Damn shame the US administration didn't have the guts to really debate the thing on first principles, instead of playing up the WMD angle.
I can easily argue the exact opposite. That Germany and France are doing exactly what England and France did leading up to WWII, "placating" and "dealing with" dangerous enemies who, if they had the power, feel no compunction in using it to conquer and destroy.
After you've tried "negotiating" and "talking" for a short while, the only subsequent proven *effective* response to tyranny and those that would threaten freedom through violence is through strength. And the only effective follow up is nation-building, ala Japan and Germany.
Seriously now - I've wiped out an entire anthill of ants that was living in the ground by the foundation of the house whose basement apartment I was renting. The key to wiping out hundreds of ants is a) persistence, and b) persistence. How many seconds are there in 10 minutes? 600. Guess how many ants I can kill in 10 minutes? As many as come out the door of the anthill. Neat thing about ants, you kill a few and the pheremone scents released during battle and death attract all the rest to "defend the colony". Sure there are some out foraging and deep in the colony that won't be there, but come back tomorrow and do it again, and do it for 4 days in the row - and poof, you've wiped out an entire anthill without using any chemicals or traps, with your bare little finger. Come back once a week all summer and kill the stragglers who are struggling to feed the un-seen queen, and eventually the queen starves to death - poof, colony gone.
Persistence and the willingness to do the job, that's all it takes.
Hey, if the RIAA thinks that they can sue all 60,000,00 of us file sharers, surely we can hunt down and exterminate a few hundred small time spammers!!
It was just the other week where a spammer was quoted as saying that profits were down and cost of business had quadrupled due to the efforts of spam-filtering and anti-spammers. We just need to finish the job off properly, as opposed to easing up and getting used to the status quo.
Years prior to this no-one outside of the tech community had a high awareness of spam. Now *everyone* agrees it's a vast menace. Now is the time to strike.
If they sue me, my first question to them over the phone will be:
"Do you want all my CDs back too, or shall I invite the press and burn them publicly? It's either/or - either I'm allowed to discover music on my own via p2p networks, or I burn all my CDs and never buy from your member companies again in my entire life, and I spend all my time playing video games, watching movies, composing my own damn free music, and promoting/distributing other people's free music. I do want half decent artists to be able to make a living at what they are doing, but I think your current system sucks. Take it or leave it."
Anti-virus software cuts the speed and responsiveness of your system when starting processes in HALF. As a person who is always starting and stopping tools and utilities and apps, putting in AV would be a big no-go for me.
I have a real firewall and a DSL Router, I don't use Outlook nor IE, my systems are patched, and I know how recognize the trust level to place in places I visit on the web and to scan every single thing I download from the net and save to my HDD before I toy with them.
I've been on the net since 92, I've never had a virus and I probably never will - and if I do I know I have the capability to recognize it (bandwidth monitors, activity lights, etc etc) and clean it.
I'll abandon any ISP who forces ALL of their users to run AV software. I will agree it would be a great idea for the unwashed masses. But I am clean and sharp:)
I like Bell Sympatico High Speed's approach here in Ontario. They're giving a 3-12 month trials of and then selling cheap subscription firewall/anti-virus/anti-spam software. They're efforts to "market" this stuff keeps their "unwashed masses" quite well informed about the dangers of the internet.
And everyone knows the first step to enlightenment is education.
for the longest time IE had a function were a site could just add itself.. to your bookmarks
It effectively still does, if you haven't patched your windows system in the past week or two.
Just yesterday I had an ad or something (*):
a) open my CD trays, b) re-set my homepage c) open notepad with some pre-defined text
The ad/new-homepage was selling security software, because obviously I had an insecure computer:)
At which point I had to go and get Microsoft's latest updates (it was a November bug with their JVM allowing arbitrary execution), and as well go get a piece of software that rips out this specific series of exploits (and it wasn't the two most popular ones that you are thinking of whose names I can't remember at the moment, which apparently can't handle the depth to which this new class of worms/whatever burrow into your system).
(*) I wasn't at any "untrustworthy" sites, must have been a malicious ad through the ad service being used, was unable to verify origin..
here's a tip for you.... you dont HAVE to use every single HTML tag. you can make a killer webpage that looks fantastic with HTML3.0 only
Damn straight.
I keep a couple copies of Netscape Gold, which is a perfectly acceptable plain-jane html WYSIWYG editor. That and jalbumn for the picture pages. Wordpad for tweaking html and adding simple content.
The content I put on my homepage is entirely centered around pictures from my life, but what's really amazing is just how INFREQUENTLY family and friends look at it. It's like a photo albumn, but they are not in my living room so they're not obligated to look at it, and they can very easily "put it off until tomorrow" and tomorrow never comes.
Neat thing is, if you keep adding bits and bits of interesting content, "keep it real" per se, eventually you will, without trying to, start showing up on google/msn searches for certain phrases!
My personal website gets between 30-50 hits per day for searches like "lake superior canada", "sarsfest", "canadian flag images", etc etc.
Reading my access log to see where people came from and who they are is fun and interesting (reverse dns and ip-to-address services, I only know two people in Sudbury so I can tell exactly which one of them is visiting my homepage, etc). Always end up seeing things to tweak/enhance on the site based on what I see in the logs.
I really need to pare down all the stuff on my main page though, it's grown to around 300 KB (yeah yeah, I know, maximum usable page size wrt user experiences is 80 KB).
Even with 3mbit/640kbit DSL I'm *not* going to give people on Slashdot a direct link to the url:)
with an obvious nasty side effect of requiring everyone to register their credit card details when they sign up
Oh no, then everyone would be more accountable! And the spimmers would be forced to use fraudulent credit cards, forcing them to choose to commit a much more serious offence.
Hmmm, no downside:)
Oh wait, kids would have to get their parents to sign them up. That wouldn't be cool.
Actually, the two world wars are only a small section of what happened in the last Century. Just after 9-11 I went looking around (my way of dealing with grief) and found a site that was a compendum of all the genocides of the past century.
In the past century, a QUARTER BILLION humans have been killed in genocides.
There were *tons* I had never heard of. The turks killed something like a couple million people in the last part of the first decade alone. (Hence all the bad feelings between Kurds and Turks.) You don't need a global war to slaughter millions of people. Ask Mr. Stalin.
We have fair use rights with other copyrighted material. We're allowed to save a copy on our VCR for personal use. We're allowed to keep that magazine that we bought.
It should apply to hypertext as well.
You should, no imho you ARE allowed to save a copy of a hypertext page for your own personal use. Heck your browser does it right now, the only difference between "temporary" and "permanent" is a couple bytes of configuration information.
Henceforth you can use your personal copy in order to excercise other fair use rights, like quoting the source work in subsequent copyrighted publications of your own.
Now *here* is an example of why fair use should, nay MUST be allowed - because otherwise it would allow "technological measures" to prevent citizens of a free nation from looking into their past at what others have "publicly stated" and said previously. (Yes, I consider a public-facing website to be a public forum - man we need that codified in law as well.)
Most importantly, this is a concrete example which *any* politician will be able to understand in an instant!!
Hmmmmm, seems like an even split between people who have had problems and who have not lately, at least here.
I ended up getting an mp3-CD player back then which is great for airplanes, hotels, beaches, buses - but is unusable for running/the-gym. So lately I've been pricing flash players. Now you've all got me wondering about an iPod again, guess I'll have to go and do my iPod research on their message boards all over again.
Of course now I have to consider a half dozen other manufacturers of HDD players...
grrrr, I'm very unhappy that nearing the year 2004 we still don't have a decent product review system. I thought epinions would take off, and with Amazon you get way too many reviews to parse for popular subjects and too many people giving dumbass stupid reviews or overly-gushing ones. We need a site that everyone uses and does some kind of complicated "personally-customized trust matrix" thing.
Oh well, I should just do what the average mook does, set a time limit for parsing reviews and opinions, then gamble with my money and hope for the best. If it blows, scream and return it:)
Much more productive than endlessly reviewing stuff hoping to discover the "perfect most optimal" choice, eh?
The skipping while playing is pretty iffy, because they are suggesting that the flash buffer is completely empty before the HD spins up to refill it, which is completely untrue.
I actually researched this a while ago because I wanted music while in the gym and while jogging.
It's widely known (and this was on Apple's own message boards) that the only iPods that are reliable and usable while jogging are the original 5GB models, the newer 10/15/20 GB models are not capable of playing without skips when you are jogging, not unless you take very careful measures in where and how you attach it to your body or hold it.
Hee hee - no actually I often do that in order to make the post look nicer, I like a bit of space between the stuff above and below, it's easier and quicker to "acquire" with the eyes.
It used to be on Slashdot that if you used br chars slashdot would strip them out before and after, so I got used to using periods. I guess I can now use br's. On some phpBB boards I have to use a dot colored white. etc etc On other phpBB boards I have to put paragraphs right up against the quoted sections because the board inserts a space of it's own. If I left a space in my comppose area there would be two spaces and it would look odd.
Slashdot Mirror
> All those songs, lost
They are not "lost".
a) Thousands of people have hundreds if not thousands of copies (heck I downloaded 600 MB of songs from them the day before they turned it off, that's 0.5 percent of everything they have right there),
b) The original artists still have their own copies and can go on to do what they want with them, case in point - G.O.T.E. (at one point a couple of these songs broke the top 10 on the Trance chart on mp3.com).
Or better yet, break into the guy's wireless network and seize control of the robot, get *it* to unlock the front door and/or loot the house.
> My grandfather died needlessly because of this.
I hear ya - my father died needlessly at age 55.
The disease he died of has a 95% cure rate when caught at the initial symptom. If you dismiss the initial symptom and wait until the secondary critical symptom appears which forces you to go see a doctor, it goes down to a 90% mortality rate, and they give you 3-6 months to live.
What's the initial symptom? Blood in your stool.
What's the secondary symptom 3-6 months latter that forces you to go to a hospital and ends up giving you only a 1 in 10 chance of living more than 6 more months? Total bowel blockage that results in emergency surgery to give you a colostomy.
All men over the age of 40 should get a colonoscopy regularly. No-one should assume that blood in their stool "will go away".
My Dad ignored his initial symptoms for 3-6 months. He's been dead 9 years now. Never saw my brother marry and have children. Never saw me get through grad school and get a great job.
I'm with you.
In October I was trying to find a decent concert to take a girl to here in Toronto. Noticed the name 54-40 but couldn't remember what their music was like, so downloaded a few to see if I could stand them. Ended up taking a girl to the concert. Liked the performance a lot, ended up buying a couple CD's for her *AND* discovering that I really loved the two opening acts, one from Ontario the other from the UK, bought their CDs too.
If they sue me, I am *so* taking this to court. I was probably sharing mostly old mp3.com trance and obtained-freely-direct-from-the-artists music, very little "CRIA" music, but certainly the 54-40 files sat in my download directory for a few days and were uploaded to some other people.
More than that, I'll personally spend a few grand on some big-ass full page ads in the papers and try my hardest to get on CBC's Journal and W5, etc - explain the difference between "copyright violation" for profit and "intellectual property" dogma, radio stacking, percent of CD sales that artists get, etc etc - and personally show them my file-timestamps, ticket stubs, and CDs. Try and humiliate them into the ground.
I know of *NO-ONE* who is buying any less than they otherwise would have *just* because of p2p.
In the information age with transportation systems as they are, ideally there should be increased "economies of scale" and business should move to those who provide the best value (whatever combination of cheap, service, support, quality and product is optimal), and the huge massive amount of duplication of effort will be eliminated.
Unfortunately that *entirely* rests on consumers making educated choices and migrating to a small subset of "best of breed" service/product providers.
The fact that they aren't, and that Google rankings and adwords has this effect - is entirely due to the fact that consumers are stupid.
Don't blame Google. Blame stupid consumers.
"Engineers who present analysis don't put their assumptions and uncertainties first and foremost"
Very true. This brings up an interesting point, I'm not sure if I can express it as succinctly as I want to.
It occurrs in "business" all the time - technical people (especially software) who when they are asked a direct question, attempt to answer in any way possible that presents the best brightest outlook. Any non-technical person who is listening will a) get bored b) tune out and c) not understand most of the tech-speak that's pouring forward towards them. And so they never do "recognize" the "but's" and "assumptions".
Instead of going on and on and on, when you are in a man-critical environment, the *only* thing you should be stating is - what is wrong. And in plain and simple enough language that a non-technical person can understand it.
"We have ZERO understanding and information as to what can happen if material of that size hits the leading edge at that stage in the launch - end of presentation."
"Bottom line: bureaucracies don't fail,"
That's the stupidest quote I've ever heard. "Computers don't fail, they do exactly what you program them to do." How does that help identify what went wrong, a specific bug or an endemic vulnerability in the process or bureaucracy to a class of errors or failure chains?
"There is no such thing as a no-fault error in engineering."
Again, a nice "quip" that does nothing to identify how to prevent such errors in the future. The Armed Forces and especially the Air Force are notorious for coming up with "scape goats" and doing nothing to actually prevent said classes of errors from occurring again.
You blame the one engineer, but the engineer has been SPECIFICALLY TRAINED by his environment and the bureaucracy to keep his mouth shut and take his lumps. This was the problem with the first shuttle disaster, this is the problem once again.
I'm sorry, someone like *you* is a part of the problem at NASA. You solve NOTHING.
"but the fact is none of those civilians was responsible for bombings"
Bull SHIT. If the nation you live in wages aggressive war, YOU are responsible. And I don't see why MY DAD AND BROTHER and 10 other of my friends should die to spare YOUR FAMILY's life. If we can kill 10 of you for each one of us, so much the better. If I could be CERTAIN that not killing you would not result in a longer war and more deaths of those not "in the wrong", then I'll consider it.
It wasn't a "police action", nor was the West assured of victory. It was TOTAL WAR. How many people a day were being killed in Death Camps, supported and run by the citizens of Germany?
I take great offense at any callous implication that just because it involved the deaths of a lot of people, that it was an "atrocity" for whom someone was "responsible" on our side.
"Not to mention the fact that your average coal burning plant simply doesn't have the potential to cause a catastrophe on the scale of Chernobyl"
Not all at once in one place.
Coal and Petrochemical based air pollution has killed tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands at younger ages than they would have otherwise died, and cars and tobacco have killed TENS OF MILLIONS of people this century, and yet you think that the HUNDREDS of reactors in current operation in North America whom haven't killed a SINGLE HUMAN BEING yet - are a bigger badder threat.
Stupid dumb public. And they bitch like hell when we try and keep their asses in High School all the way through until grade 12.
There was "no immediate threat" from Germany and Japan either. Nor from the Serbs, and all the warnings in the world couldn't get us SOBs in the UN (hell the entire world, Canada/USA included) to do anything to prevent Rwanda.
There's a reason that NATO is establishing a Fast Reaction Force, and is much more willing these days to send troops around the world.
You can't beat prevention. And you can't sit around on your a** placating tyranical mass murders forever. Eventually, you have to bit the bullet.
I will agree with you on one point, I never believed that they had WMDs, but I still supported the war in Iraq just on basic principles of fighting tyranny. Damn shame the US administration didn't have the guts to really debate the thing on first principles, instead of playing up the WMD angle.
I can easily argue the exact opposite. That Germany and France are doing exactly what England and France did leading up to WWII, "placating" and "dealing with" dangerous enemies who, if they had the power, feel no compunction in using it to conquer and destroy.
After you've tried "negotiating" and "talking" for a short while, the only subsequent proven *effective* response to tyranny and those that would threaten freedom through violence is through strength. And the only effective follow up is nation-building, ala Japan and Germany.
Seriously now - I've wiped out an entire anthill of ants that was living in the ground by the foundation of the house whose basement apartment I was renting. The key to wiping out hundreds of ants is a) persistence, and b) persistence. How many seconds are there in 10 minutes? 600. Guess how many ants I can kill in 10 minutes? As many as come out the door of the anthill. Neat thing about ants, you kill a few and the pheremone scents released during battle and death attract all the rest to "defend the colony". Sure there are some out foraging and deep in the colony that won't be there, but come back tomorrow and do it again, and do it for 4 days in the row - and poof, you've wiped out an entire anthill without using any chemicals or traps, with your bare little finger. Come back once a week all summer and kill the stragglers who are struggling to feed the un-seen queen, and eventually the queen starves to death - poof, colony gone.
Persistence and the willingness to do the job, that's all it takes.
Hey, if the RIAA thinks that they can sue all 60,000,00 of us file sharers, surely we can hunt down and exterminate a few hundred small time spammers!!
It was just the other week where a spammer was quoted as saying that profits were down and cost of business had quadrupled due to the efforts of spam-filtering and anti-spammers. We just need to finish the job off properly, as opposed to easing up and getting used to the status quo.
Years prior to this no-one outside of the tech community had a high awareness of spam. Now *everyone* agrees it's a vast menace. Now is the time to strike.
If they sue me, my first question to them over the phone will be:
"Do you want all my CDs back too, or shall I invite the press and burn them publicly? It's either/or - either I'm allowed to discover music on my own via p2p networks, or I burn all my CDs and never buy from your member companies again in my entire life, and I spend all my time playing video games, watching movies, composing my own damn free music, and promoting/distributing other people's free music. I do want half decent artists to be able to make a living at what they are doing, but I think your current system sucks. Take it or leave it."
The Austrian's didn't have the technology required to build nukes. We do. Candu's are the best power reactors in the world to produce plutonium :)
Anti-virus software cuts the speed and responsiveness of your system when starting processes in HALF. As a person who is always starting and stopping tools and utilities and apps, putting in AV would be a big no-go for me.
I have a real firewall and a DSL Router, I don't use Outlook nor IE, my systems are patched, and I know how recognize the trust level to place in places I visit on the web and to scan every single thing I download from the net and save to my HDD before I toy with them.
I've been on the net since 92, I've never had a virus and I probably never will - and if I do I know I have the capability to recognize it (bandwidth monitors, activity lights, etc etc) and clean it.
I'll abandon any ISP who forces ALL of their users to run AV software. I will agree it would be a great idea for the unwashed masses. But I am clean and sharp
I like Bell Sympatico High Speed's approach here in Ontario. They're giving a 3-12 month trials of and then selling cheap subscription firewall/anti-virus/anti-spam software. They're efforts to "market" this stuff keeps their "unwashed masses" quite well informed about the dangers of the internet.
And everyone knows the first step to enlightenment is education.
I think the industry as a whole would be *MUCH* better off looking for a technical solution rather than hoping for government intervention.
Ahhha, but what would force the industry to move forward together and adopt a "new" secure public key based electronic mail protocol?
Incompetent government intervention
Yeah baby, bring on the e-mail tax!!
for the longest time IE had a function were a site could just add itself .. to your bookmarks
:)
It effectively still does, if you haven't patched your windows system in the past week or two.
Just yesterday I had an ad or something (*):
a) open my CD trays,
b) re-set my homepage
c) open notepad with some pre-defined text
The ad/new-homepage was selling security software, because obviously I had an insecure computer
At which point I had to go and get Microsoft's latest updates (it was a November bug with their JVM allowing arbitrary execution), and as well go get a piece of software that rips out this specific series of exploits (and it wasn't the two most popular ones that you are thinking of whose names I can't remember at the moment, which apparently can't handle the depth to which this new class of worms/whatever burrow into your system).
(*) I wasn't at any "untrustworthy" sites, must have been a malicious ad through the ad service being used, was unable to verify origin..
here's a tip for you.... you dont HAVE to use every single HTML tag. you can make a killer webpage that looks fantastic with HTML3.0 only
:)
Damn straight.
I keep a couple copies of Netscape Gold, which is a perfectly acceptable plain-jane html WYSIWYG editor. That and jalbumn for the picture pages. Wordpad for tweaking html and adding simple content.
The content I put on my homepage is entirely centered around pictures from my life, but what's really amazing is just how INFREQUENTLY family and friends look at it. It's like a photo albumn, but they are not in my living room so they're not obligated to look at it, and they can very easily "put it off until tomorrow" and tomorrow never comes.
Neat thing is, if you keep adding bits and bits of interesting content, "keep it real" per se, eventually you will, without trying to, start showing up on google/msn searches for certain phrases!
My personal website gets between 30-50 hits per day for searches like "lake superior canada", "sarsfest", "canadian flag images", etc etc.
Reading my access log to see where people came from and who they are is fun and interesting (reverse dns and ip-to-address services, I only know two people in Sudbury so I can tell exactly which one of them is visiting my homepage, etc). Always end up seeing things to tweak/enhance on the site based on what I see in the logs.
I really need to pare down all the stuff on my main page though, it's grown to around 300 KB (yeah yeah, I know, maximum usable page size wrt user experiences is 80 KB).
Even with 3mbit/640kbit DSL I'm *not* going to give people on Slashdot a direct link to the url
with an obvious nasty side effect of requiring everyone to register their credit card details when they sign up
:)
Oh no, then everyone would be more accountable! And the spimmers would be forced to use fraudulent credit cards, forcing them to choose to commit a much more serious offence.
Hmmm, no downside
Oh wait, kids would have to get their parents to sign them up. That wouldn't be cool.
Actually, the two world wars are only a small section of what happened in the last Century. Just after 9-11 I went looking around (my way of dealing with grief) and found a site that was a compendum of all the genocides of the past century.
In the past century, a QUARTER BILLION humans have been killed in genocides.
There were *tons* I had never heard of. The turks killed something like a couple million people in the last part of the first decade alone. (Hence all the bad feelings between Kurds and Turks.) You don't need a global war to slaughter millions of people. Ask Mr. Stalin.
We have fair use rights with other copyrighted material. We're allowed to save a copy on our VCR for personal use. We're allowed to keep that magazine that we bought.
It should apply to hypertext as well.
You should, no imho you ARE allowed to save a copy of a hypertext page for your own personal use. Heck your browser does it right now, the only difference between "temporary" and "permanent" is a couple bytes of configuration information.
Henceforth you can use your personal copy in order to excercise other fair use rights, like quoting the source work in subsequent copyrighted publications of your own.
Now *here* is an example of why fair use should, nay MUST be allowed - because otherwise it would allow "technological measures" to prevent citizens of a free nation from looking into their past at what others have "publicly stated" and said previously. (Yes, I consider a public-facing website to be a public forum - man we need that codified in law as well.)
Most importantly, this is a concrete example which *any* politician will be able to understand in an instant!!
Hmmmmm, seems like an even split between people who have had problems and who have not lately, at least here.
I ended up getting an mp3-CD player back then which is great for airplanes, hotels, beaches, buses - but is unusable for running/the-gym. So lately I've been pricing flash players. Now you've all got me wondering about an iPod again, guess I'll have to go and do my iPod research on their message boards all over again.
Of course now I have to consider a half dozen other manufacturers of HDD players...
grrrr, I'm very unhappy that nearing the year 2004 we still don't have a decent product review system. I thought epinions would take off, and with Amazon you get way too many reviews to parse for popular subjects and too many people giving dumbass stupid reviews or overly-gushing ones. We need a site that everyone uses and does some kind of complicated "personally-customized trust matrix" thing.
Oh well, I should just do what the average mook does, set a time limit for parsing reviews and opinions, then gamble with my money and hope for the best. If it blows, scream and return it
Much more productive than endlessly reviewing stuff hoping to discover the "perfect most optimal" choice, eh?
Sigh...
The skipping while playing is pretty iffy, because they are suggesting that the flash buffer is completely empty before the HD spins up to refill it, which is completely untrue.
I actually researched this a while ago because I wanted music while in the gym and while jogging.
It's widely known (and this was on Apple's own message boards) that the only iPods that are reliable and usable while jogging are the original 5GB models, the newer 10/15/20 GB models are not capable of playing without skips when you are jogging, not unless you take very careful measures in where and how you attach it to your body or hold it.
Or we should find out who this one individual is, and get him on ever single spam list and fraudster's radar.
Him and all the exec's at the big companies. Then make sure the CTO's are "properly advised" by their head techies as to what needs to be done:
aka:
- don't buy Microsoft
- co-operate and support an IETF standard on authenticated e-mail
- etc etc.
Hee hee - no actually I often do that in order to make the post look nicer, I like a bit of space between the stuff above and below, it's easier and quicker to "acquire" with the eyes.
It used to be on Slashdot that if you used br chars slashdot would strip them out before and after, so I got used to using periods. I guess I can now use br's. On some phpBB boards I have to use a dot colored white. etc etc On other phpBB boards I have to put paragraphs right up against the quoted sections because the board inserts a space of it's own. If I left a space in my comppose area there would be two spaces and it would look odd.
Ok, let's try this html br thing again.