Your joking, right? Or isn't ironic that this poster is complaining both about dupes and a story the editors missed when in fact the story he mentions actually appeared.
Actually you do get spam from Gratis. Lots of it. And they will scam you. I got put on hold by them for no good reason and they refused to hear my complaint. Their reason was that one of my referals had multiple accounts. The reason she had multiple accounts is the Gratis website was full of bugs and her account couldn't be edited after it was first created. So because she had the wrong address she had to start over and make a new account. Of course she was honest and used the same name, how could that be considered cheating? They could just count her one completed offer as legitimate and ignore her other partial accounts. So even though I had 5 legitimate referals the whole things was cancelled by Gratis because of their own website problems.
If Microsoft started anti-piracy campaigns in Asia it would be the biggest boon to OSS. First government and universities would have to switch, then businesses and finally home-users. And I'm sure they'd engineer Linux game distros for the PC bars.
Right now it's just too easy to get away with piracy, but that could change the moment governments decide to crack down on it.
What is wrong with letting the government know where one goes if one has nothing to hide? Is it the fear that the government will suddenly start restricting movement or require permission to go somewhere ahead of time? This sounds like a lot of paranoia to me. Some rich guy with too much time on his hands can decide he wants to fight it, but I'd rather choose my battles more carefully.
...Don't buy things with restrictive licenses. If people don't rush in droves to buy the latest games/media with draconian copyright protection enforcement then the developers will learn a lesson to simply bite the bullet and produce DRM-less CDs and copy-protection-less games. If they lose some money from piracy they will gain more from satisfied customers. I won't buy another game from Valve after my disappointment with HL2 not running out of the box because of a poor Steam connection. Likewise I won't buy CDs or media in file formats that I know to have severe restrictions on them. I don't resort to piracy anymore either because I don't care to become an outlaw just for the sake of such meager offerings from the entertainment industry these days. Rather I'll save my money and buy the few things I find really worthy.
Are they really idiots? How else do you propose for them to finace their dubious content? If it is worth downloading for so many people it is obviously worth something. If they are dinosaurs, who will replace them and how?
I live in China where netbars are plenty. The hourly fee roughly corresponds with the hourly salary of the type of people who play there. But that fee is only $.12 US. In the US where most of the potential customers for this type of business own their own PCs, why would they pay $3 or $5 an hour to play on someone else's PC? Especially when they don't have that total control over the system and games. Instead, I believe most hard-core gamers would have lan parties at home or go to a gaming event like Million Man Lan where they can bring their own computers. That is why cybercafes are so few in America. For the 73" screens, though, I think they can attract a good crowd simply for the novelty's sake.
Do you think $9.2 million can kill or even seriously hurt Paypal? Didn't eBay buy Paypal for $1.5B? Seriously, $9.2 million is much less than $1 per customer, considering most eBay users are also Paypal customers.
"The plan of allocation designates $1 million of the Net Settlement Fund to a "Statutory Damage Fund," to be distributed equally among all Fund Claimants who are not Dispute Resolution Claimants."
If you want to claim these damages, you must mail them a letter with your signature. So I suggest you don't bother as the amount of the stamp will likely be greater than the amount of the settlement damages paid.
Are we working on trusted computing platform in the open source community or is the whole idea flawed? Maybe "trusted computing" is just an euphemism for a system that allows corporations to charge consumers more and more for less and less. Like copy-protected CDs could be said to be more "trusted"--by the companies that produce them. Those companies could produce hardware that only plays copy-protected CDs and doesn't allow copying, but it wouldn't add any value for the consumer.
It seems that the challenge to the open source community is doing what we can to bring back value to crippled hardware/software. Trust should be someting a corporation has to earn in the consumer's mind, not the other way around. It should be the job of companies to devise schemes to verify the identities of their consumers. Like SpamNet was devised to protect our inboxes from spam, companies could devise collaborative ways of protecting themselves against fraud.
What about the Telephone Consumer Protection Act? The one that says telemarketers can't call a residence with an autodialer and artificial or prerecorded voice messages. And that they must maintain a "Do Not Call" list for anyone who requests removal from their calling list.
This Act does not limit free speech IMHO, because it allows for non-profit or political calls, but it does protect the consumer from the nuisance and harassment of telemarketers. Now all we need is a form of the law for email and web browsers.
<META name="generator" content="Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who hath generated all">
Talk.origins has a thread about this site that claims the author could be Kyle Goldman who is on the list of newsgroup members and has homepages that point to the parodies: Here and
old version
Anyone still uncertain?;)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe his house is a beowolf cluster. His site is surviving a slashdotting after all...
Your joking, right? Or isn't ironic that this poster is complaining both about dupes and a story the editors missed when in fact the story he mentions actually appeared.
Actually you do get spam from Gratis. Lots of it. And they will scam you. I got put on hold by them for no good reason and they refused to hear my complaint. Their reason was that one of my referals had multiple accounts. The reason she had multiple accounts is the Gratis website was full of bugs and her account couldn't be edited after it was first created. So because she had the wrong address she had to start over and make a new account. Of course she was honest and used the same name, how could that be considered cheating? They could just count her one completed offer as legitimate and ignore her other partial accounts. So even though I had 5 legitimate referals the whole things was cancelled by Gratis because of their own website problems.
100% private eh?
...I mean was anyone surprised when they saw the blog: "Dude, working at McDonald's blows".
If Microsoft started anti-piracy campaigns in Asia it would be the biggest boon to OSS. First government and universities would have to switch, then businesses and finally home-users. And I'm sure they'd engineer Linux game distros for the PC bars.
Right now it's just too easy to get away with piracy, but that could change the moment governments decide to crack down on it.
Yeah, if we slashdot the TV the Nielson ratings boxes will surely smolder.
What is wrong with letting the government know where one goes if one has nothing to hide? Is it the fear that the government will suddenly start restricting movement or require permission to go somewhere ahead of time? This sounds like a lot of paranoia to me. Some rich guy with too much time on his hands can decide he wants to fight it, but I'd rather choose my battles more carefully.
...Don't buy things with restrictive licenses. If people don't rush in droves to buy the latest games/media with draconian copyright protection enforcement then the developers will learn a lesson to simply bite the bullet and produce DRM-less CDs and copy-protection-less games. If they lose some money from piracy they will gain more from satisfied customers. I won't buy another game from Valve after my disappointment with HL2 not running out of the box because of a poor Steam connection. Likewise I won't buy CDs or media in file formats that I know to have severe restrictions on them. I don't resort to piracy anymore either because I don't care to become an outlaw just for the sake of such meager offerings from the entertainment industry these days. Rather I'll save my money and buy the few things I find really worthy.
Are they really idiots? How else do you propose for them to finace their dubious content? If it is worth downloading for so many people it is obviously worth something. If they are dinosaurs, who will replace them and how?
We're all getting a little tired of hearing about that bit of legislation.
No wonder you do, you have a free ipods link in your sig. You didn't realize that they were selling your address to every spammer under the sun?
I'm also in China. Google News has been unresponsive for the past couple weeks or so.
I live in China where netbars are plenty. The hourly fee roughly corresponds with the hourly salary of the type of people who play there. But that fee is only $.12 US. In the US where most of the potential customers for this type of business own their own PCs, why would they pay $3 or $5 an hour to play on someone else's PC? Especially when they don't have that total control over the system and games. Instead, I believe most hard-core gamers would have lan parties at home or go to a gaming event like Million Man Lan where they can bring their own computers. That is why cybercafes are so few in America. For the 73" screens, though, I think they can attract a good crowd simply for the novelty's sake.
Do you think $9.2 million can kill or even seriously hurt Paypal? Didn't eBay buy Paypal for $1.5B? Seriously, $9.2 million is much less than $1 per customer, considering most eBay users are also Paypal customers.
Everyone is entitled to statutory damages:
"The plan of allocation designates $1 million of the Net Settlement Fund to a "Statutory Damage Fund," to be distributed equally among all Fund Claimants who are not Dispute Resolution Claimants."
If you want to claim these damages, you must mail them a letter with your signature. So I suggest you don't bother as the amount of the stamp will likely be greater than the amount of the settlement damages paid.
In this case, simple is better. If enough "no"s are heard the poster will realize the utter ridiculousness of his question.
No
It's so hard to win on Tetrinet. I always thought the winners cheated using bots, but now this tells me that isn't possible.
Are we working on trusted computing platform in the open source community or is the whole idea flawed? Maybe "trusted computing" is just an euphemism for a system that allows corporations to charge consumers more and more for less and less. Like copy-protected CDs could be said to be more "trusted"--by the companies that produce them. Those companies could produce hardware that only plays copy-protected CDs and doesn't allow copying, but it wouldn't add any value for the consumer.
It seems that the challenge to the open source community is doing what we can to bring back value to crippled hardware/software. Trust should be someting a corporation has to earn in the consumer's mind, not the other way around. It should be the job of companies to devise schemes to verify the identities of their consumers. Like SpamNet was devised to protect our inboxes from spam, companies could devise collaborative ways of protecting themselves against fraud.
What about the Telephone Consumer Protection Act? The one that says telemarketers can't call a residence with an autodialer and artificial or prerecorded voice messages. And that they must maintain a "Do Not Call" list for anyone who requests removal from their calling list.
This Act does not limit free speech IMHO, because it allows for non-profit or political calls, but it does protect the consumer from the nuisance and harassment of telemarketers. Now all we need is a form of the law for email and web browsers.
Do a quick search on Jack Holgroth and the National Association of Christian Game Theoreticians. Neither return any results.
From the source code:
Talk.origins has a thread about this site that claims the author could be Kyle Goldman who is on the list of newsgroup members and has homepages that point to the parodies:
Here and old version
Anyone still uncertain?
Email addresses of "OBJECTIVE: Christian Ministries" members:
jimcarlson@ilovejesus.net -- real domain name of real, free, web-based email (address unverified)
amiller@minister.com -- site not up, whois shows owned by afternic, a domain reseller
timtax777@msn.com -- address unverified, could be fake
tfranklin@antioccult.org -- site doesn't show, whois shows no owner, Register domain here
diamondjack@nacgt.org -- register nagct.org here
cobm16273@aol.com -- see MSN address above
holby4life@christianemail.net -- site not up, whois says registered to Strang Communications; this "member's" homepage is hosted for free
drdinosaur@covenant.org -- Richard Paley does not appear on the covenant.org site staff-contact page
zounds@groovy.nu -- domain forwards to a Danish site
I could go on, but I think you see the point. A hoax, but an elaborate one.