And, as was pointed out on Thursday on NPR, statistics like those are always suspect. If you ask all of the people in areas where cable is readily available, you are likely to get a high response rate. Cable isn't available everywhere.
I know I will never willingly purchase cable. I get The Simpsons on broadcast and I'm satiated. If broadcast goes away, I guess I'll find something else to do with the area that my TV occupies.
The C and Objective-C compilers no longer accept the "Naming Types" extension (typedef foo = bar); it was already unavailable in C++. Code which uses it will need to be changed to use the "typeof" extension instead: typedef typeof(bar) foo. (We have removed this extension without a period of deprecation because it has caused the compiler to crash since version 3.0 and no one noticed until very recently. Thus we conclude it is not in widespread use.)
Or rather, gcc version >= 3.0 is not in widespread use.
If not deceptive their intentions are still misleading. You've distilled and generalized their reasoning down to one, though no doubt very likely, possibility; they are purchasing my personal information.
Wait I thought I was purchasing an LCD monitor.
The company isn't being open about what the purpose of this rebate is for, other than to give me a discount, ostensibly because they want my business. That seems deceptive to me.
Sure, I could just not buy it, but that dodges the issue at hand. I think you're ignoring the part where they advertise this price. It's the price in bold, on all the flyers, in the bigger font. Somewhere below you'll spot the compulsory "with mail-in rebate" slogan, of course.
It doesn't make it any less of a scam. Why not just give the customer the lower price at point of sale? Oh right, in order to try to relieve them of some extra cash.
As a side note, I should say that this article prompted me to investigate the status of my delinquent rebate. (which was actually filed 3 months ago, I was confused about the date) It seems that the "Express group" has finally qualified my rebate and allegedly mailed the check on 4/14/03. Here's hoping that it doesn't get "lost.";)
Both were "8 week" rebates, which is why it was relevant that I sent them in at the same time.
As shepd pointed out, it's also true that many companies farm out their rebate function to others. I know in the past I've received correspondence from a "Fullfullment" company as opposed to the one I purchased the product from.
As far as where I buy my products, I find that you almost can't avoid the rebate scam when you buy from a brick-and-mortar store like BestBuy or CompUSA. I know of, and have used, the alternative where you purchase online but that's even more of a roulette wheel.
I was beginning to think I was the only one who wasn't happy about being a rebate slave.
About 2 months ago I bought a Samsung LCD and an ATI 9000. Both came with rebates, both were properly filled out and sent in at the same time. I have received the ATI rebate, but Samsung is out to lunch. Naturally, the ATI rebate was much less than the Samsung.
If you run a firewall, all the more reason to upgrade to 2.4. Netfilter is far superior to ipchains, in my opinion.
Of course, you may not currently need stateful inspection, but you don't even have the option with 2.2. If you come to a point where you do, you're out of luck. (unless there is a current reliable backport out there, which is possible)
So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life. That's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage.
That's kind of a misleading statement. It's not a firewall's fault that you allow port 25 through, and is a perfectly normal setup. Of course, you setup your sendmail box on a DMZ interface, don't you?
You can consider the machine trashed, but at least anything sensitive is hopefully sitting on a different unreachable network segment.
I can't wait until I have no choice but to buy some hardware that's not compatible with anything I might possibly already own. What's even cooler is that I get to do my part and add my obsoleted hardware to our local dump.
P.S.: It would be nice to get the computing companies to do a bit more in the way of reuse. I don't think it's a good idea to use until there's no more, and then just move on to a new resource.
Unfortunately, the LA Times site requires registration.
Somebody should make a blanket username/password combo for slashdot users. At the very least, you can throw their statistics out of wack. Or maybe they can draw some new ones.;)
Surely any with a shred of decency would have no problem in completely blocking access to that site.
Again, I agree. Freedom issues aside, I'm just saying this is a lot to ask of ISPs who may not actually be able to perform the blocks as required. Sometimes it's not even a question of whether you can find the appropriate router, in the appropriate region to put on an ACL. The router may not be adequately outfitted with hardware to handle extra ACL processing. Or even null routes. Are we in a position to require, by law, ISPs to upgrade their hardware/software in regions that need special blocks put in place?
No one's saying it's not a noble effort to reduce child porn. The problem is a major logistical one for ISPs. Most of them work with the mindset that they are carriers, nothing more. This means they don't usually have granularity in the controls over where their customers go by region. null routing all traffic to a site is usually cake, but only traffic from Pennsylvania adds a wrinkle. Sure, it can be solved given time, money, and resources, but it's a big problem for ISPs now since they are being required by law to do this, and probably don't have extra resources just lying around.
Yeah, that's why we have to act fast and back the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Protection Act. Without it, we won't get content from Television companies because they will be too afraid to make it, fearing industry destructive pirating.
Under request from some people, especially those in Germany (where apparently eBay germany is more strict with respect to scraping) I changed bidwatcher's User-Agent to something more resembling Mozilla.
I too was surprised that no one had mentioned eBay, and I have also read that EULA.
eBay actually sells an API but I'd say the pricing is a little less than lucrative for an open project like bidwatcher. I suppose one could craft a server that bid for a bunch of users and charge them for use and recoup the cost. Can't let the users have the API controls in their clients though, because they can quickly run up your bill with eBay, as they charge *per access*.
Slashdot Mirror
...in a few years time, if that package you ordered takes a loooong time to get delivered...
Heh. So what's the excuse now? Every third package I receive ends up with some mysterious delays, no matter who the carrier is.
I think this will just be another diversion in the full house of diversions that truck drivers must exercise.
Maybe it could even save your webserver from melting when it's posted on /.
It will do nothing for your uplink though.
I'd guess that in most instances of the slashdot attack, line saturation is your biggest factor.
They want to pirate mp3s and pr0n and that's about it.
Haven't you been paying attention? It's called sharing mp3s and pr0n.
For real. It's called screen-scraping.
And, as was pointed out on Thursday on NPR, statistics like those are always suspect. If you ask all of the people in areas where cable is readily available, you are likely to get a high response rate. Cable isn't available everywhere.
I know I will never willingly purchase cable. I get The Simpsons on broadcast and I'm satiated. If broadcast goes away, I guess I'll find something else to do with the area that my TV occupies.
"...it is nice to see recognition given to one of the most expressive and best acted roles in recent films."
Fucking nerds.
The C and Objective-C compilers no longer accept the "Naming Types" extension (typedef foo = bar); it was already unavailable in C++. Code which uses it will need to be changed to use the "typeof" extension instead: typedef typeof(bar) foo. (We have removed this extension without a period of deprecation because it has caused the compiler to crash since version 3.0 and no one noticed until very recently. Thus we conclude it is not in widespread use.)
Or rather, gcc version >= 3.0 is not in widespread use.
Yeah, no one will be able to compile their own x86 GNU/Linux binary.
After being laid they couldn't wait to start blowing "whistles".
The telemarketing biz doesn't sound so bad after all.
If not deceptive their intentions are still misleading. You've distilled and generalized their reasoning down to one, though no doubt very likely, possibility; they are purchasing my personal information.
Wait I thought I was purchasing an LCD monitor.
The company isn't being open about what the purpose of this rebate is for, other than to give me a discount, ostensibly because they want my business. That seems deceptive to me.
Sure, I could just not buy it, but that dodges the issue at hand. I think you're ignoring the part where they advertise this price. It's the price in bold, on all the flyers, in the bigger font. Somewhere below you'll spot the compulsory "with mail-in rebate" slogan, of course.
It doesn't make it any less of a scam. Why not just give the customer the lower price at point of sale? Oh right, in order to try to relieve them of some extra cash.
As a side note, I should say that this article prompted me to investigate the status of my delinquent rebate. (which was actually filed 3 months ago, I was confused about the date) It seems that the "Express group" has finally qualified my rebate and allegedly mailed the check on 4/14/03. Here's hoping that it doesn't get "lost." ;)
Both were "8 week" rebates, which is why it was relevant that I sent them in at the same time.
As shepd pointed out, it's also true that many companies farm out their rebate function to others. I know in the past I've received correspondence from a "Fullfullment" company as opposed to the one I purchased the product from.
As far as where I buy my products, I find that you almost can't avoid the rebate scam when you buy from a brick-and-mortar store like BestBuy or CompUSA. I know of, and have used, the alternative where you purchase online but that's even more of a roulette wheel.
I was beginning to think I was the only one who wasn't happy about being a rebate slave.
About 2 months ago I bought a Samsung LCD and an ATI 9000. Both came with rebates, both were properly filled out and sent in at the same time. I have received the ATI rebate, but Samsung is out to lunch. Naturally, the ATI rebate was much less than the Samsung.
If you run a firewall, all the more reason to upgrade to 2.4. Netfilter is far superior to ipchains, in my opinion.
Of course, you may not currently need stateful inspection, but you don't even have the option with 2.2. If you come to a point where you do, you're out of luck. (unless there is a current reliable backport out there, which is possible)
Rather be forgotten, than remembered for giving in.
So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life. That's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage.
...one that can bypass firewalls...
That's kind of a misleading statement. It's not a firewall's fault that you allow port 25 through, and is a perfectly normal setup. Of course, you setup your sendmail box on a DMZ interface, don't you?
You can consider the machine trashed, but at least anything sensitive is hopefully sitting on a different unreachable network segment.
I can't wait until I have no choice but to buy some hardware that's not compatible with anything I might possibly already own. What's even cooler is that I get to do my part and add my obsoleted hardware to our local dump.
P.S.: It would be nice to get the computing companies to do a bit more in the way of reuse. I don't think it's a good idea to use until there's no more, and then just move on to a new resource.
</rant>
Unfortunately, the LA Times site requires registration.
;)
Somebody should make a blanket username/password combo for slashdot users. At the very least, you can throw their statistics out of wack. Or maybe they can draw some new ones.
Surely any with a shred of decency would have no problem in completely blocking access to that site.
Again, I agree. Freedom issues aside, I'm just saying this is a lot to ask of ISPs who may not actually be able to perform the blocks as required. Sometimes it's not even a question of whether you can find the appropriate router, in the appropriate region to put on an ACL. The router may not be adequately outfitted with hardware to handle extra ACL processing. Or even null routes. Are we in a position to require, by law, ISPs to upgrade their hardware/software in regions that need special blocks put in place?
And yes, I live in a land with no constitution, cameras on every street corner, and elective dictatorship and bad dentistry blah blah blah.
I thought you said you didn't live in the U.S.?
No one's saying it's not a noble effort to reduce child porn. The problem is a major logistical one for ISPs. Most of them work with the mindset that they are carriers, nothing more. This means they don't usually have granularity in the controls over where their customers go by region. null routing all traffic to a site is usually cake, but only traffic from Pennsylvania adds a wrinkle. Sure, it can be solved given time, money, and resources, but it's a big problem for ISPs now since they are being required by law to do this, and probably don't have extra resources just lying around.
Yeah, that's why we have to act fast and back the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Protection Act. Without it, we won't get content from Television companies because they will be too afraid to make it, fearing industry destructive pirating.
Under request from some people, especially those in Germany (where apparently eBay germany is more strict with respect to scraping) I changed bidwatcher's User-Agent to something more resembling Mozilla.
I too was surprised that no one had mentioned eBay, and I have also read that EULA.
eBay actually sells an API but I'd say the pricing is a little less than lucrative for an open project like bidwatcher. I suppose one could craft a server that bid for a bunch of users and charge them for use and recoup the cost. Can't let the users have the API controls in their clients though, because they can quickly run up your bill with eBay, as they charge *per access*.