Seriously. If only all the people who wanted to play semi-serious non-frag-fest 12-year-old Counter-Strike could get together in one place, it would be *wonderful*.
So you're saying that it's absolute luck that I've been blessed with no spam? Despite being on the net for 11 years now?
You're claiming that whether or not my e-mail address ends up in a spammers hands is entirely due to events beyond my control?
Bullshit!
I'm claiming that most people are either too stupid or simply not educated enough about the issue to have made the right choices day after day to avoid spam.
Including you.
I was fighting UCE and posts that exceed the Briebart index back before you were in diapers. I was on the net when the green card message was sent. Who are you to off-handedly dismiss my insight?
Here's a hint. Don't give spammers your e-mail address in the first place.
Don't give it to shady businesses or websites, don't give it to amateur websites run by people you don't know, don't give it to small or medium sized businesses, don't give it to well known or big online or meat-space companies that have a reputation of being irresponsible in such matters, and don't give it to anyone whose privacy/non-use clauses don't look sincere or aren't backed by anyone you know.
And munge your e-mail address when used on Usenet.
That's it. I haven't gotten ONE SINGLE piece of spam in 4 years. I give my e-mail address to my friends and co-workers, the only people in the world who need it. It's on my website which is hosted from my ADSL line on dyndns.org, and it's never been reaped. It's in my profile at some online-groups and semi-private blog places (my CS clan's web-forum for example), and they've never been reaped.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!
All that we need is a honest to goodness education campaign by the ISPs to clue in their lusers.
>> First the possible. A quick, back of a napkin >> calculation shows that a supernovae at around 3 >> light years would appear roughly as bright as the >> sun (depending on the circumstances).
You also forgot about what would happen 10-100 years later, when the actual blast wave of debris reached us.
Betelgeuse, which is around 500 LY away, may make travel in our solar system impossible (or a lot more costly) for a hundred years.
Now I'm pissed. Why *shouldn't* the people who load this site down the most pay their share? Why *SHOULD* the average viewer pay the SAME AMOUNT as someone who loads 50 times as many pages, who loads the servers 50 times as much and costs 50 times as much bandwidth???
No-one would EVER suggest that gasoline stations have a "yearly fee" for everyone and anyone. Delivering the product does have a direct per-unit cost.
Furthermore, I see tons of people who figure that they're "earning something" by posting. What is this, a job for you? You mean you're not posting because you enjoy posting? Because you enjoy talking with your fellow readers? Because you enjoy the pride of having a post positively moderated? The SERVICE allowing you to discuss, post, moderate, filter the comments, and be the center of attention once in a while when you say something others think is worthwhile - this isn't it worth anything to you?
(As it turns out and as Rob's statistics show, MOST of your posts aren't read by the majority of the quarter million users! Maybe your posts in general aren't worth diddly. Maybe it's simply not economical, bandwidth vs content, to )
If you think the price is too high for what you get out of it, then start a competing service where the price is lower (and see how long you last). Put your actions where your mouth is.
If you think that you're "contribution" is worth so much, start a competing service where things are run the way you think they should be.
If you've got some feedback, an opinion, fine, I'm not dissing you. If you think x-cents per 100 KB/page-of-text is too high, fine. You're allowed an opinion, and a choice as a consumer.
But if you're whining and screaming your lungs out like child because you figure you've been so badly done by.... tough.
BTW: If you hadn't noticed, the space where they're putting the ads, that was all empty white space to begin with!!! NOTHING MUCH HAS CHANGED!
And I have to wonder, if Slashdot *had* used any of your hair-brained schemes, how many of you would *still* be screaming your lungs out about the "horrible failings and unfairness" of whatever they chose. (Some people are just like that.)
I actually have a moderator point right now, but I want the Slashdot team to notice this because I haven't seen the filters defeated this effectively in ages. So I'm not going to mod you down.
First you say that what is good for one company that makes a product for us to enjoy is good for all of us.
Then you say that what is good for some other companies making a product for us to enjoy is bad for us.
Do you mind explaining? *Why* is giving so much MORE of our money to the Disney Corporation for products derived from a simple mouse character invented 80 years ago so much better for us that giving money to companies who can produce the same content at 1/10th the cost?
Sure it made sense for the first 20 years, because without promising that to Walt he might not have never bothered in the first place, and corporations might not have invested in producing Mickey Mouse product lines.
But that's clearly over now. Now it's time to start encouraging and providing money to *other* ideas, instead of funnelling our money into the Mickey Rat black hole.
Yes, with progress, people have to change jobs. You learn that in your first couple weeks in an Econ 101 course. It's up to us as a society to prevent changing jobs from being a sucky experience.
The second thought, is that if I devote my life to a project and produce a great work, shouldn't I be able to enjoy the spoils and decide the future of that great work? Shouldn't I be able to go to my grave, comforted by the fact that my magnum opus will provide for my children's future?
You mean in your first 70 years with the work you didn't earn enough to create a nest egg?
You mean that every day you and other "creators" go to work right now you are strongly motivated by the fact that your great great grandchildren might be able to live off of what you're doing now?
Just where in hell did anyone get the idea that their children and their children's children deserved to live for free off of their parent's short working lives?
How does that benefit the world?
How many people "devote their lives to a great work"? And while you were working on you're "life's one great work", where did you get your food and shelter for you and your family? And how the hell does this all fit in with the fact that you sold your rights to Vivendi Universal for $2000 and now they've "got the rights" for 100+ years? How the hell does that benefit the world?
It's an area graph. *Everything* in purple is now under public domain, everything in grey is private.
The linear increase along the Y axis is a first-principles approximation to the fact that there is more and more copyrighted works created in each coming year than the last.
The reason that the increase in purple starts from zero is due to the fact that each time there is an extension, you have to go back a further 20 years to observe stuff that is expiring, and the further back you look the smaller amount of stuff there is that is expiring, because 20 extra years further back there was less stuff being produced. Right now you have to look backwards *how* many years to find stuff that's expiring?
It illustrates a principle, everyone would agree that the exact numbers (percentage of works that are in the public domain and absolute numbers of works in and out of the public domain) will not match this graph.
> Without them it wouldn't exist in the first place.
INCORRECT.
The object of copyright and patent laws is simply information and expressed ideas. Just because you thought of it or wrote it down doesn't mean no-one or nothing else could. It just means you were probably the first human to bother to do so.
The difference between 2 bits of data and 1000 bits of data (a page of text) is 998 bits. Somewhere out there in the universe is a block of matter or energy which currently encodes anything you could type in a page. Just because you can come up with the idea for a page full of nothing but AAAA's doesn't mean you're the only creature or thing in the universe that could. Yes, as ideas and expressions of thoughts become more complex, it is less likely that someone else would have expressed them. However it does not change the funadamentals of the situation. Information is simply information.
The water screw would have eventually been invented by someone. So obviously whoever invented it first should not be given rights to the idea in perpetuity. The only reason we give them *ANY* rights at all is because it is worth something to humanity to have a *reason* for people to try and come up with useful ideas and expressed information.
There is *NOTHING* fundamental in the universe which says YOU should have the sole rights to any form of information or idea, for any amount of time.
Tracing route to www.google.com [216.239.39.101]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 10 ms 10 ms 10 msDELETED TO PROTECT IDENTITY
2 10 ms 10 ms 10 msDELETED TO PROTECT IDENTITY
3 10 ms 10 ms 10 msDELETED TO PROTECT IDENTITY
4 10 ms 10 ms 10 msPOS4-3.XR2.TOR2.ALTER.NET [152.63.131.142]
5 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms0.so-0-0-0.TL2.TOR2.ALTER.NET [152.63.2.77]
6 10 ms 20 ms 20 ms0.so-6-0-0.TL2.CHI2.ALTER.NET [152.63.13.22]
7 10 ms 20 ms 20 ms0.so-2-0-0.XL2.CHI2.ALTER.NET [152.63.67.110]
8 10 ms 20 ms 20 msPOS7-0.GW7.CHI2.ALTER.NET [152.63.67.185]
9 10 ms 20 ms 20 msexodus-OC12-CHI2.customer.alter.net [157.130.114.114]
10 10 ms 20 ms 20 msbbr01-g4-0.okbr01.exodus.net [216.34.183.97]
11 30 ms 40 ms 40 msbbr01-p2-0.whkn01.exodus.net [206.79.9.134]
12 30 ms 40 ms 40 ms216.74.171.2
13 60 ms 40 ms 40 msbbr01-p3-0.stng02.exodus.net [209.185.9.102]
14 30 ms 41 ms 40 msdcr01-g2-0.stng02.exodus.net [216.109.66.1]
15 30 ms 40 ms 40 mscsr11-ve241.stng02.exodus.net [216.109.66.90]
16 30 ms 40 ms 40 ms216.109.88.218
17 40 ms 40 ms 40 msdcbi1-gige-1-1.net.google.com [216.239.47.46]
18 30 ms 41 ms 40 mswww.google.com [216.239.39.101]
They were forced into bankrupcy and have been mucking their way through the courts for how long, so they've been on the hook for almost 10 years now (since SoftImage began screwing around with them), and they only got $200 grand!?!?
I've had my Canadian ADSL account for nearly 3 years how, and I have never EVER received even one single spam!
Here's little hint:
The secret is to not give your e-mail address to the spammers IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!
Sorry for the yelling, but it's just so basic!
Don't give your primary e-mail to shady characters or joe-blow websites, or small businesses business or even big businesses like mp3.com that engage in UCE. Don't post to newsgroups without munging your e-mail address. Even basic munging works wonders.
Putting your e-mail addy on a private webpage may or may not be ok. I've had mine on my personal homepages for years, and no spam. Others report the opposite. And of course if you've got a "common" email address, like joe@somethingorother.com, or if you're ISP/e-mail provider is a compromised/spamhause, you're screwed. But 90% of people shouldn't have a problem. Am I the only person with a brain?
(Too bad I didn't read Slashdot on Saturday, I could have saved a ton of you some hassle.)
With the second amended complaint, we were able to add a complaint for vicarious infringement against AOL for the development of the Gnutella file transfer protocol by its Nullsoft division. Gnutella is Napster without a central processing hub. By setting up a "sting" operation, one of our investigators was able to track the infringement of several works by Harlan and Isaac Asimov using Gnutella. This presents interesting issues regarding the responsibility for the release of software which effectively pollutes the intellectual property environment.
That's taken from a writeup by Ellison's Attorney.
J.H.C. Creating *any* type of software which allows individuals to share information opens you up to legal liability for what *other* people do with it?
"I'll tell you what though, I'm really uneasy about the relationship of DivXNetworks and Project Mayo. If their relationship was more clearly stated, I'd at least know what's going on. But it's so vague that it leaves me with *tons* of unanswered questions.
Months ago when I went through there sites, it was clear that DivXNetworks was feeding off of Project Mayo, it reminded me of Sun's "Open Source" license where Sun maintains all rights and sucks back in all improvements into their proprietary base.
I got the strong feeling that Project Mayo was there simply to ride on the "Open Source / DivX;) / haxor" wave and get their "OpenDivX" implementation out there and into lots of peoples hands, so that they have first mover advantage for DivXNetworks and their proprietary business model.
*Now* I go there, and there's almost no mention of the relationship between the two, just the hyperlink at the bottom. Who the hell knows how much of Mayo is actually a sham/front/facade for DivXNetworks, or what their agenda is.
Grrrrrrr. More and more wmv's, asf's, rm's, avi's, and other stuff are refusing to play on my Windows system. One almost has to go out and hunt down every damn codec and new player in existence. And who wants to have all that crap on your system?
Drool. I remember the first time I saw the full-page Zeus ad in an Amiga Magazine. What was it, something outrageous like expandable to 64-128 MB of memory? A HUGE stack of 8 or 16 SIMM slots. This when 1MB was "expanded" and 8MB was "a lot".
I still have my A500 plus GVP A530 memory/accelerator/HD combination. I remember the first night in 199(1/2/?) that I plugged the A530 in and pulled up 8 simultaneous applications and dragged the screens part-way down to show them all. Wordprocessor, that famous delux paint program that had all the neat features (whats-its-name), a demo running god knows how many colors with shimmering slithering video tricks, a mod in Protracker, the bouncing Amiga ball, and some others.
Unbelievable.
If someone were to create a lineup of home PC systems from 85 through to modern times, and then insert an Amiga in full demo mode into 1988 or 1991, it would look *SO* out of place, with all the colors, music, and ultra smooth multi-tasking. It would be obvious even to the dim witted that someone somewhere had overlooked something big.
> Does OpenDivX (www.divx.com or whatever) use the mentioned patents for decoding MPEG2 video?
Not sure.
I'll tell you what though, I'm really uneasy about the relationship of DivXNetworks and Project Mayo. If their relationship was more clearly stated, I'd at least know what's going on. But it's so vague that it leaves me with *tons* of unanswered questions.
A month or more ago when I went through there sites, it was clear that DivXNetworks was feeding off of Project Mayo, it reminded me of Sun's "Open Source" license where Sun maintains all rights and sucks back in all improvements into their proprietary base.
I got the strong feeling that Project Mayo was there simply to ride on the "Open Source / DivX;) / haxor" wave and get their "OpenDivX" implementation out there and into lots of peoples hands, so that they have first mover advantage for DivXNetworks and their proprietary business model.
*Now* I go there, and there's almost no mention of the relationship between the two, just the hyperlink at the bottom. Who the hell knows how much of Mayo is actually a sham/front/facade for DivXNetworks, or what their agenda is.
I'm sick of seeing two small wedges on wheels roll around like they were being driven by drunk mice, with matches only lasting 60 seconds, usually ended by some kind of mysterious mechanical failure. I'm sick of seeing "house robots" and "obstacle courses".
I want to see two robots fight one another, nothing else.
I want to see a plain empty gravel pit, with no crowds. I want to see two robots go in, and only one come out. I want to see four class systems. Weight classes, cost classes, power classes, and armaments classes.
Power Classes:
- Batteries
- Unlimited
Armaments Classes:
- Mechanical weapons only
- liquid/flamable-fuel/sub-cm-projectile based weapons allowed*
- Unlimited class, large caliber projectiles, explosives and shaped charges, and EMP weapons allowed.
The weight and costs classes will have to be set depending on just how many people are willing to compete in them, and considering that now most people have to face the real possibility of having their bot totalled in-game.
May the best team win.
And this time, the losers really do go to the scrapheap!
I quit watching it the night they showed me some super-human psychopath cave in the chest cavities of some random innocent family with a steel baseball bat, with so much sudden violence that this *huge* pool of blood floods the room.
I was there to watch Sci-fi. Not some stupid freakshow horror crap.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't go looking for paradise, you won't find it.
Seriously. If only all the people who wanted to play semi-serious non-frag-fest 12-year-old Counter-Strike could get together in one place, it would be *wonderful*.
http://www.xlii.com/csfaq.cfm
http://www.xlii.com/pstandard.cfm
http://www.xlii.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=17
.
No, overall global climate is not *totally* chaotic. Only in a certain limited way.
IE: No matter *what* that damn butterfly in the Amazon does, that alone will *not* cause the earth to be 1000 degrees hotter, EVER.
But my uncle might, he's a golf fanatic. This thing doesn't look that bad (it's not a 3 iron, it's a driver) and even looks quite usable.
In fact, I'm thinking of sending this url to my Aunt right now!
So you're saying that it's absolute luck that I've been blessed with no spam? Despite being on the net for 11 years now?
You're claiming that whether or not my e-mail address ends up in a spammers hands is entirely due to events beyond my control?
Bullshit!
I'm claiming that most people are either too stupid or simply not educated enough about the issue to have made the right choices day after day to avoid spam.
Including you.
I was fighting UCE and posts that exceed the Briebart index back before you were in diapers. I was on the net when the green card message was sent. Who are you to off-handedly dismiss my insight?
Here's a hint. Don't give spammers your e-mail address in the first place.
Don't give it to shady businesses or websites, don't give it to amateur websites run by people you don't know, don't give it to small or medium sized businesses, don't give it to well known or big online or meat-space companies that have a reputation of being irresponsible in such matters, and don't give it to anyone whose privacy/non-use clauses don't look sincere or aren't backed by anyone you know.
And munge your e-mail address when used on Usenet.
That's it. I haven't gotten ONE SINGLE piece of spam in 4 years. I give my e-mail address to my friends and co-workers, the only people in the world who need it. It's on my website which is hosted from my ADSL line on dyndns.org, and it's never been reaped. It's in my profile at some online-groups and semi-private blog places (my CS clan's web-forum for example), and they've never been reaped.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!
All that we need is a honest to goodness education campaign by the ISPs to clue in their lusers.
>> First the possible. A quick, back of a napkin
>> calculation shows that a supernovae at around 3
>> light years would appear roughly as bright as the
>> sun (depending on the circumstances).
You also forgot about what would happen 10-100 years later, when the actual blast wave of debris reached us.
Betelgeuse, which is around 500 LY away, may make travel in our solar system impossible (or a lot more costly) for a hundred years.
Doh!!! Sorry, I'm thinking of Betelgeuse.
It was my understanding that it might make space travel "too dangerous" for a hundred years, as the debris reaches us.
A hundred years without space travel. I mean right now I guess it wouldn't be a big deal, but in a thousand years it might be!
.
Hmmm, looks a lot like a verbatim copy of someone's post here on Slashdot:
http://www.dotcomscoop.com/article.php?sid=263
Now I'm pissed. Why *shouldn't* the people who load this site down the most pay their share? Why *SHOULD* the average viewer pay the SAME AMOUNT as someone who loads 50 times as many pages, who loads the servers 50 times as much and costs 50 times as much bandwidth???
No-one would EVER suggest that gasoline stations have a "yearly fee" for everyone and anyone. Delivering the product does have a direct per-unit cost.
Furthermore, I see tons of people who figure that they're "earning something" by posting. What is this, a job for you? You mean you're not posting because you enjoy posting? Because you enjoy talking with your fellow readers? Because you enjoy the pride of having a post positively moderated? The SERVICE allowing you to discuss, post, moderate, filter the comments, and be the center of attention once in a while when you say something others think is worthwhile - this isn't it worth anything to you?
(As it turns out and as Rob's statistics show, MOST of your posts aren't read by the majority of the quarter million users! Maybe your posts in general aren't worth diddly. Maybe it's simply not economical, bandwidth vs content, to )
If you think the price is too high for what you get out of it, then start a competing service where the price is lower (and see how long you last). Put your actions where your mouth is.
If you think that you're "contribution" is worth so much, start a competing service where things are run the way you think they should be.
If you've got some feedback, an opinion, fine, I'm not dissing you. If you think x-cents per 100 KB/page-of-text is too high, fine. You're allowed an opinion, and a choice as a consumer.
But if you're whining and screaming your lungs out like child because you figure you've been so badly done by.... tough.
BTW: If you hadn't noticed, the space where they're putting the ads, that was all empty white space to begin with!!! NOTHING MUCH HAS CHANGED!
And I have to wonder, if Slashdot *had* used any of your hair-brained schemes, how many of you would *still* be screaming your lungs out about the "horrible failings and unfairness" of whatever they chose. (Some people are just like that.)
LOL.
I actually have a moderator point right now, but I want the Slashdot team to notice this because I haven't seen the filters defeated this effectively in ages. So I'm not going to mod you down.
Wait wait wait wait.
First you say that what is good for one company that makes a product for us to enjoy is good for all of us.
Then you say that what is good for some other companies making a product for us to enjoy is bad for us.
Do you mind explaining? *Why* is giving so much MORE of our money to the Disney Corporation for products derived from a simple mouse character invented 80 years ago so much better for us that giving money to companies who can produce the same content at 1/10th the cost?
Sure it made sense for the first 20 years, because without promising that to Walt he might not have never bothered in the first place, and corporations might not have invested in producing Mickey Mouse product lines.
But that's clearly over now. Now it's time to start encouraging and providing money to *other* ideas, instead of funnelling our money into the Mickey Rat black hole.
Yes, with progress, people have to change jobs. You learn that in your first couple weeks in an Econ 101 course. It's up to us as a society to prevent changing jobs from being a sucky experience.
The second thought, is that if I devote my life to a project and produce a great work, shouldn't I be able to enjoy the spoils and decide the future of that great work? Shouldn't I be able to go to my grave, comforted by the fact that my magnum opus will provide for my children's future?
You mean in your first 70 years with the work you didn't earn enough to create a nest egg?
You mean that every day you and other "creators" go to work right now you are strongly motivated by the fact that your great great grandchildren might be able to live off of what you're doing now?
Just where in hell did anyone get the idea that their children and their children's children deserved to live for free off of their parent's short working lives?
How does that benefit the world?
How many people "devote their lives to a great work"? And while you were working on you're "life's one great work", where did you get your food and shelter for you and your family? And how the hell does this all fit in with the fact that you sold your rights to Vivendi Universal for $2000 and now they've "got the rights" for 100+ years? How the hell does that benefit the world?
It's an area graph. *Everything* in purple is now under public domain, everything in grey is private.
The linear increase along the Y axis is a first-principles approximation to the fact that there is more and more copyrighted works created in each coming year than the last.
The reason that the increase in purple starts from zero is due to the fact that each time there is an extension, you have to go back a further 20 years to observe stuff that is expiring, and the further back you look the smaller amount of stuff there is that is expiring, because 20 extra years further back there was less stuff being produced. Right now you have to look backwards *how* many years to find stuff that's expiring?
It illustrates a principle, everyone would agree that the exact numbers (percentage of works that are in the public domain and absolute numbers of works in and out of the public domain) will not match this graph.
> Without them it wouldn't exist in the first place.
INCORRECT.
The object of copyright and patent laws is simply information and expressed ideas. Just because you thought of it or wrote it down doesn't mean no-one or nothing else could. It just means you were probably the first human to bother to do so.
The difference between 2 bits of data and 1000 bits of data (a page of text) is 998 bits. Somewhere out there in the universe is a block of matter or energy which currently encodes anything you could type in a page. Just because you can come up with the idea for a page full of nothing but AAAA's doesn't mean you're the only creature or thing in the universe that could. Yes, as ideas and expressions of thoughts become more complex, it is less likely that someone else would have expressed them. However it does not change the funadamentals of the situation. Information is simply information.
The water screw would have eventually been invented by someone. So obviously whoever invented it first should not be given rights to the idea in perpetuity. The only reason we give them *ANY* rights at all is because it is worth something to humanity to have a *reason* for people to try and come up with useful ideas and expressed information.
There is *NOTHING* fundamental in the universe which says YOU should have the sole rights to any form of information or idea, for any amount of time.
This is what it should look like:
C:\>tracert www.google.com
Tracing route to www.google.com [216.239.39.101]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 10 ms 10 ms 10 msDELETED TO PROTECT IDENTITY
2 10 ms 10 ms 10 msDELETED TO PROTECT IDENTITY
3 10 ms 10 ms 10 msDELETED TO PROTECT IDENTITY
4 10 ms 10 ms 10 msPOS4-3.XR2.TOR2.ALTER.NET [152.63.131.142]
5 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms0.so-0-0-0.TL2.TOR2.ALTER.NET [152.63.2.77]
6 10 ms 20 ms 20 ms0.so-6-0-0.TL2.CHI2.ALTER.NET [152.63.13.22]
7 10 ms 20 ms 20 ms0.so-2-0-0.XL2.CHI2.ALTER.NET [152.63.67.110]
8 10 ms 20 ms 20 msPOS7-0.GW7.CHI2.ALTER.NET [152.63.67.185]
9 10 ms 20 ms 20 msexodus-OC12-CHI2.customer.alter.net [157.130.114.114]
10 10 ms 20 ms 20 msbbr01-g4-0.okbr01.exodus.net [216.34.183.97]
11 30 ms 40 ms 40 msbbr01-p2-0.whkn01.exodus.net [206.79.9.134]
12 30 ms 40 ms 40 ms216.74.171.2
13 60 ms 40 ms 40 msbbr01-p3-0.stng02.exodus.net [209.185.9.102]
14 30 ms 41 ms 40 msdcr01-g2-0.stng02.exodus.net [216.109.66.1]
15 30 ms 40 ms 40 mscsr11-ve241.stng02.exodus.net [216.109.66.90]
16 30 ms 40 ms 40 ms216.109.88.218
17 40 ms 40 ms 40 msdcbi1-gige-1-1.net.google.com [216.239.47.46]
18 30 ms 41 ms 40 mswww.google.com [216.239.39.101]
Trace complete.
They were forced into bankrupcy and have been mucking their way through the courts for how long, so they've been on the hook for almost 10 years now (since SoftImage began screwing around with them), and they only got $200 grand!?!?
I've had my Canadian ADSL account for nearly 3 years how, and I have never EVER received even one single spam!
Here's little hint:
The secret is to not give your e-mail address to the spammers IN THE FIRST PLACE!!!
Sorry for the yelling, but it's just so basic!
Don't give your primary e-mail to shady characters or joe-blow websites, or small businesses business or even big businesses like mp3.com that engage in UCE. Don't post to newsgroups without munging your e-mail address. Even basic munging works wonders.
Putting your e-mail addy on a private webpage may or may not be ok. I've had mine on my personal homepages for years, and no spam. Others report the opposite. And of course if you've got a "common" email address, like joe@somethingorother.com, or if you're ISP/e-mail provider is a compromised/spamhause, you're screwed. But 90% of people shouldn't have a problem. Am I the only person with a brain?
(Too bad I didn't read Slashdot on Saturday, I could have saved a ton of you some hassle.)
J.H.C. Creating *any* type of software which allows individuals to share information opens you up to legal liability for what *other* people do with it?
They can't possibly win this point against AOL.
Yup. Thanks, you've cleared up and confirmed a few of my own suspicions that I had some time ago.
Taken from an earlier post of mine:
Grrrrrrr. More and more wmv's, asf's, rm's, avi's, and other stuff are refusing to play on my Windows system. One almost has to go out and hunt down every damn codec and new player in existence. And who wants to have all that crap on your system?
Like a herd of cats.
Drool. I remember the first time I saw the full-page Zeus ad in an Amiga Magazine. What was it, something outrageous like expandable to 64-128 MB of memory? A HUGE stack of 8 or 16 SIMM slots. This when 1MB was "expanded" and 8MB was "a lot".
I still have my A500 plus GVP A530 memory/accelerator/HD combination. I remember the first night in 199(1/2/?) that I plugged the A530 in and pulled up 8 simultaneous applications and dragged the screens part-way down to show them all. Wordprocessor, that famous delux paint program that had all the neat features (whats-its-name), a demo running god knows how many colors with shimmering slithering video tricks, a mod in Protracker, the bouncing Amiga ball, and some others.
Unbelievable.
If someone were to create a lineup of home PC systems from 85 through to modern times, and then insert an Amiga in full demo mode into 1988 or 1991, it would look *SO* out of place, with all the colors, music, and ultra smooth multi-tasking. It would be obvious even to the dim witted that someone somewhere had overlooked something big.
> Does OpenDivX (www.divx.com or whatever) use the mentioned patents for decoding MPEG2 video?
Not sure.
I'll tell you what though, I'm really uneasy about the relationship of DivXNetworks and Project Mayo. If their relationship was more clearly stated, I'd at least know what's going on. But it's so vague that it leaves me with *tons* of unanswered questions.
A month or more ago when I went through there sites, it was clear that DivXNetworks was feeding off of Project Mayo, it reminded me of Sun's "Open Source" license where Sun maintains all rights and sucks back in all improvements into their proprietary base.
I got the strong feeling that Project Mayo was there simply to ride on the "Open Source / DivX;) / haxor" wave and get their "OpenDivX" implementation out there and into lots of peoples hands, so that they have first mover advantage for DivXNetworks and their proprietary business model.
*Now* I go there, and there's almost no mention of the relationship between the two, just the hyperlink at the bottom. Who the hell knows how much of Mayo is actually a sham/front/facade for DivXNetworks, or what their agenda is.
A temper tantrum.
That's what their behaviour reminds me of.
I'm sick of seeing two small wedges on wheels roll around like they were being driven by drunk mice, with matches only lasting 60 seconds, usually ended by some kind of mysterious mechanical failure. I'm sick of seeing "house robots" and "obstacle courses".
I want to see two robots fight one another, nothing else.
I want to see a plain empty gravel pit, with no crowds. I want to see two robots go in, and only one come out. I want to see four class systems. Weight classes, cost classes, power classes, and armaments classes.
Power Classes:
- Batteries
- Unlimited
Armaments Classes:
- Mechanical weapons only
- liquid/flamable-fuel/sub-cm-projectile based weapons allowed*
- Unlimited class, large caliber projectiles, explosives and shaped charges, and EMP weapons allowed.
The weight and costs classes will have to be set depending on just how many people are willing to compete in them, and considering that now most people have to face the real possibility of having their bot totalled in-game.
May the best team win.
And this time, the losers really do go to the scrapheap!
(*) go-go-gadget sand-blaster!
One thing I've just noticed. How did we get up to user number half-a-million so damn fast? Very suspicious.
In ages past my posts would get an occasional +1 moderation. Lately absolutely none have. Even a few I thought were quite good.
Hmmmmmmm. Time to start meta-moderating a lot more often.
No kidding.
I quit watching it the night they showed me some super-human psychopath cave in the chest cavities of some random innocent family with a steel baseball bat, with so much sudden violence that this *huge* pool of blood floods the room.
I was there to watch Sci-fi. Not some stupid freakshow horror crap.