There is a consumer base that will enjoy, and buy, whatever is played on the radio enough. This is because they listen to or buy music to be included in the group of others who do; basically, to have something to talk about with their "friends" amid this culture of lonesomeness. It's the same reason people talk about celebrities (and buy magazines containing supplements to their celebrity knowledge base.)
OK, I'll buy it. So what's immoral about that? Sounds like these lonesome people are getting what they want.
The immorality of paying radio station disc jockeys to air music did not become apparent until investigations by Federal Trade and Federal Communication Commission.
Pardon my naivety, but exactly what is so "immoral" about it? I've never really understood that. "I've got a radio station. You've got a song. Let's talk." Seems perfectly natural to me.
A radio station could play a song a hundred times, or a million. If everybody hates the song, they're still going to hate it no matter how many times it gets aired. Meanwhile, the record company is out a pile of cash. It almost sounds like a win-win for the consumer.
Obviously, bribing magazines for good reviews seems like a different matter...but the radio thing -- and especially the choice of the word "immoral" -- is kind of lost on me.
I'm not sure you can lay the blame for this at Microsoft's doorstep. Maybe you can, but maybe nVidia has just been incompetent in developing drivers for an OS that has been in general release for months now. Seriously, if a graphics card company can't write drivers for a graphics card, something is wrong.
BTW, the reviewer mentioned that he had to roll back to an early-version nVidia driver because he got stuttering video with the newest drivers. I had this problem, too. What happened is that nVidia shipped the earlier versions of its drivers with the Inverse Telecine option turned off. In the new drivers, it defaults to on -- and that's what causes the stuttering video in MCE. Pull up the nVidia Control Panel, go to the "Video & Television" options, select the "Enhancements" panel, and uncheck the box that says "Use Inverse Telecine." Video will play smoothly again.
Well, if you're a lawyer than you know that the standard for criminal courts is proof beyond reasonable doubt. If I say I don't have a hundred dollars and you search my home, look under my mattress, find my bank statements and call the bank, and you never find a hundred dollars... that would probably "prove" the non-existence of my money for most juries.
The important point, however, is that the standard for proof is evidence. A DA's malicious grin doesn't count.
The DA just smiles at you and says... "I'd like to see the hidden container inside that TrueCrypt volume. My forensicist says oftentimes people do that with TrueCrypt."
You say "umm... there isn't a hidden container... there's nothing more there..."
The DA continues to smile. "Prove it to me."
"Tell you what, how about I just admit that I still beat my wife, instead?"
People have died before from an overdose of aspirin. It doesn't matter if you're on trial for murder or not -- if the victim didn't die from aspirin, having a bottle of aspirin in your medicine cabinet is not evidence.
Then again, it wouldn't be too hard to bribe a witness to come forward and say, "I know for a fact that he has a hidden container in that volume, he told me so on such-and-such a date..."
Right... were they tired of making money? Or maybe they didn't make any money for the network? That seems more likely. So they creatively decided to stop the series because there were no interest from advertisers.
Then again, it would be pretty weird for SciFi to arbitrarily cancel Battlestar when they've already greenlighted a spinoff series. If you want to come up with cynical conspiracy theories, I'd buy the one that says they didn't want to pay what Olmos was asking for another season, but none of these actors are exactly superstars with Hollywood knocking down their doors.
Funny, but in all seriousness this never works. At an old job I had an outgoing voicemail message that literally said, "If you are calling to follow up on an email you sent earlier, please hang up now." And still, damn near every single message I received was a cheerful person saying, "Hi, I was just calling to follow up on an email I sent you this morning..." Some of these people would call multiple times, again and again throughout the day. I know because I'd keep seeing their caller ID pop up on my phone. When it's somebody's job to try to reach you, that's what they'll do.
Agreed. I enjoyed the first season and the second. The third was just horrible, all the way through. I found myself pounding the arms of the couch wishing I could scream at the writers, "Just get rid of the Others already! Just write them out of the show, all of them!" I can't imagine a show could take more of a wrong turn than Lost has. And the season finale doesn't give me much hope for season 4.
I think you missed the part where he immediately explained, "That's what people said about me in my twenties."
He was talking about always being the one to leak information about upcoming products that was supposed to be kept secret. It was a way to avoid the question about whether smartphones etc. are just computers in other form factors. Presumably he knows about some work that Apple is doing with computers in alternative form factors and he has to keep mum about it.
According to the article, what they're doing is exploiting the fact that most paper has been washed with fluorescent agents to enhance its whiteness, and so will tend to fluoresce somewhat anyway. (It's the same way they make "color safe bleach": It's not bleach. It's fluorescent dye.)
What they may be doing is using the matte properties of printer toner to dull the fluorescent sheen of most of the paper by applying a difficult-to-detect stochastic pattern over the ostensibly white areas of the printout. The areas that are still completely white will seem to fluoresce compared to the areas that have been colored "eggshell white" by the printer. But that's just a guess.
Step 1. Develop a simple document security measure that can be detected using UV light. Step 2. Invent a way so that anybody can reproduce the same security measure using readily-available equipment, without special inks. Step 3. ??? Step 4. Profit!
Oh wait. I guess step 3 would be "start counterfeiting things."
Speak for yourself. Some of us find our personal code of ethics important to follow whether someone is watching or not.
Or another example: Have you ever had someone say to you, "You're crazy; I would have taken the money"? Right there you not only have an observer, but one who is actively trying to reinforce a code of ethics that is different from your own.
For another, just because altruism stimulates (some of) the same brain parts that sex and good food stimulate, doesn't mean that altruism is not "higher moral behavior". If higher moral behavior didn't stimulate neurons that we feel as pleasure, then higher moral behavior wouldn't feel good. Why not? Does god hate pleasure? Must all pleasure come from doing wrong? What kind of sick, immoral person thinks like that?
I've heard a lot of puritans try to claim that sex is "doing wrong," despite evolutionary evidence to the contrary. This is the first time I've ever heard someone try to make the case that it would be wrong for an organism to enjoy a good meal, though.
Either that, or maybe you're just ranting without really trying to understand the article.
That's assuming, of course, that you can use the old template. The new versions might contain changes to the modified files that can't be simply copied over.
They might. In practice, they seldom seem to -- Wordpress may change but the APIs seem pretty stable. But, yeah, this is one of the things that makes Wordpress sort of a PITA.
The default login screen for Wordpress does indeed automatically inform you of new updates. The problem is, it doesn't really seem to explain them properly. If I load it up right now, there's a notice telling me that Wordpress 2.2 was released 9 days ago. If I originally installed Wordpress longer than 9 days ago, this notice should be enough to tip me off that there's a new version available. Nowhere, however, does it explain that the 2.2 release supercedes the 2.1.3 release and that the 2.1.3 release should be considered insecure. In fact, immediately prior to the notice about the 2.2 release is a notice saying that the latest security update to the 2.1.x tree is available. Many people would be willing to upgrade their Wordpress install to get security updates. Fewer, I suspect, would be willing to upgrade to a full point version release just for kicks.
Wordpress provides an easy-to-use interface to do this, but it doesn't help anything if you upgrade your system. Your look and customizations will go "poof!" the moment you untar that new version.
Actually, this isn't true -- provided you use some common sense about how you customize your Wordpress blog. It doesn't make a lot of sense to go ahead and apply all your customizations to a theme called "default," for example (though I'm sure that lots of people do this). When you go and untar the new version, the "default" theme will be overwritten, as you point out. But if you had taken the time to make a copy of the default theme before you started mucking with it -- into a directory called, I dunno, "mytheme," perhaps -- your theme wouldn't get overwritten by anything in the tarball and your look and customizations would still be there as soon as you upgraded your database.
More of a hassle, I suspect, is that a lot of people run Wordpress on CPanel hosts -- CPanel is a popular server management platform that lets shared hosting customers control their sites without shell access -- and CPanel does not make it particularly easy to upgrade Wordpress. On a lot of hosts I've seen, for example, the function to extract a tarball is configured to never overwrite any files. So far as I can see, the only way to upgrade Wordpress is to rename your current install to a directory called "wordpress-old" or something, then extract the tarball, then copy over all of your modifications by hand using a Web-based file manager. I imagine this is pretty much beyond the capabilities of many Wordpress users. (But then, nobody is forced to maintain their own blog software. I suspect many do it out of a misguided sense of "leet"-ness.)
Or you can go with DSL. Good luck if you don't live right next to the CO.
In San Francisco, at least, they seem to be doing something about this. Apparently the definition of what a "central office" is has changed. Apparently it no longer needs to be some kind of big building; instead it might be an innocuous-looking box at the end of the block. Somebody who's a telco insider will have to give more details than that, because I only know what I was told by one field tech. That, and the fact that about eight years ago I moved from an apartment at one end of this street to one at the other, and then a couple years ago I moved again, back a few blocks up the same street. The first time I moved I kept my same phone number. The second time I moved the phone company told me that I could not keep the same phone number; in fact, I couldn't even have the same prefix. I can only assume that this is to allow the local phone company to roll out DSL more aggressively here in the City.
For some people, they are "messages from their friends" and they will go nuts if they figure out that actual junk was filtered as spam. Of course, lets not go too harsh, there could be people trading family photos like that and that 12 kb jpeg becomes really precious.
Yeah, but like I said... a well-trained copy of SpamAssassin seems to have no trouble discerning the difference. It seems most image spam has some kind of text or even HTML configuration that gives it away... especially when Bayesian filters are coupled with RBL tests and some custom rules from e.g. SpamAssassin Rules Emporium. This diabolical new method of spam really isn't making it past my filters, for the most part... and never has. No OCR required.
There is no such thing as a defensive patent; that just does not make any sense at all.
It does make some degree of sense. If I suspect that Company A might assert a patent against me, I might make sure that I'm holding some patents that I'm pretty sure I can assert against Company A. In the event that Company A decides to take the route of the courts, I can then make it clear that I won't go down without a fight -- I will defend myself -- including making sure that, even if their patent suit is successful, it probably won't have the full outcome that Company A was expecting, because I will probably have a valid counter-suit.
It's kind of like you saying there's no such thing as a defensive nuclear missile. You can't use nukes to shoot the enemy's nukes out of the sky, true... but your nukes can prevent them from nuking you in the first place.
Seriously, I once read something about using OCR software to "read" images that come through in e-mail to make sure that they don't contain stock spam or penis pump messages. Who thinks this is really necessary? Has anyone you know really gotten so frustrated with the limited font choices in regular e-mail that they started composing their messages in Photoshop?
Trained Bayesian filters seem to have no problem at all spotting image spam.
Here's to Rambo IV, where he goes back and kicks the ass of the Tabliban guys he freed in III.
You do know that the reason Sly was in Australia in the first place was probably because he was on his way to Thailand to film Rambo IV -- right? (Actual new title: "John Rambo.") The topic under discussion this time is Burma, not Afghanistan. Just FYI.
My AT&T CallVantage VoIP service is not "routed through the existing phone wiring." It can be done, but in fact they don't encourage it ("not supported"). What you get when you sign up is a box called a Telephony Adapter (TA) that can either plug into a router or act as the gateway between the router and your Internet connection. The TA has two phone jacks on the back -- that's where the "existing wiring" comes in. You use standard phones, but they're plugged into special equipment.
And, to the OP's point, a VoIP phone that needs a router, a cable modem, and a TA in order to function, all of which have to be plugged into AC power, is not a phone that's powered over the telephone line. What he wants is the kind of service you get from a POTS line, where a blackout doesn't also make your phone service disappear. I use a UPS battery myself, but that's nowhere near the same thing as being able to rely on the gigantic jet fuel-powered backup generators at the phone company.
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OK, I'll buy it. So what's immoral about that? Sounds like these lonesome people are getting what they want.
Pardon my naivety, but exactly what is so "immoral" about it? I've never really understood that. "I've got a radio station. You've got a song. Let's talk." Seems perfectly natural to me.
A radio station could play a song a hundred times, or a million. If everybody hates the song, they're still going to hate it no matter how many times it gets aired. Meanwhile, the record company is out a pile of cash. It almost sounds like a win-win for the consumer.
Obviously, bribing magazines for good reviews seems like a different matter...but the radio thing -- and especially the choice of the word "immoral" -- is kind of lost on me.
I'm not sure you can lay the blame for this at Microsoft's doorstep. Maybe you can, but maybe nVidia has just been incompetent in developing drivers for an OS that has been in general release for months now. Seriously, if a graphics card company can't write drivers for a graphics card, something is wrong.
BTW, the reviewer mentioned that he had to roll back to an early-version nVidia driver because he got stuttering video with the newest drivers. I had this problem, too. What happened is that nVidia shipped the earlier versions of its drivers with the Inverse Telecine option turned off. In the new drivers, it defaults to on -- and that's what causes the stuttering video in MCE. Pull up the nVidia Control Panel, go to the "Video & Television" options, select the "Enhancements" panel, and uncheck the box that says "Use Inverse Telecine." Video will play smoothly again.
Well, if you're a lawyer than you know that the standard for criminal courts is proof beyond reasonable doubt. If I say I don't have a hundred dollars and you search my home, look under my mattress, find my bank statements and call the bank, and you never find a hundred dollars ... that would probably "prove" the non-existence of my money for most juries.
The important point, however, is that the standard for proof is evidence. A DA's malicious grin doesn't count.
"Tell you what, how about I just admit that I still beat my wife, instead?"
People have died before from an overdose of aspirin. It doesn't matter if you're on trial for murder or not -- if the victim didn't die from aspirin, having a bottle of aspirin in your medicine cabinet is not evidence.
Then again, it wouldn't be too hard to bribe a witness to come forward and say, "I know for a fact that he has a hidden container in that volume, he told me so on such-and-such a date..."
Then again, it would be pretty weird for SciFi to arbitrarily cancel Battlestar when they've already greenlighted a spinoff series. If you want to come up with cynical conspiracy theories, I'd buy the one that says they didn't want to pay what Olmos was asking for another season, but none of these actors are exactly superstars with Hollywood knocking down their doors.
Funny, but in all seriousness this never works. At an old job I had an outgoing voicemail message that literally said, "If you are calling to follow up on an email you sent earlier, please hang up now." And still, damn near every single message I received was a cheerful person saying, "Hi, I was just calling to follow up on an email I sent you this morning..." Some of these people would call multiple times, again and again throughout the day. I know because I'd keep seeing their caller ID pop up on my phone. When it's somebody's job to try to reach you, that's what they'll do.
Agreed. I enjoyed the first season and the second. The third was just horrible, all the way through. I found myself pounding the arms of the couch wishing I could scream at the writers, "Just get rid of the Others already! Just write them out of the show, all of them!" I can't imagine a show could take more of a wrong turn than Lost has. And the season finale doesn't give me much hope for season 4.
I think you missed the part where he immediately explained, "That's what people said about me in my twenties."
He was talking about always being the one to leak information about upcoming products that was supposed to be kept secret. It was a way to avoid the question about whether smartphones etc. are just computers in other form factors. Presumably he knows about some work that Apple is doing with computers in alternative form factors and he has to keep mum about it.
You jest, but have you been paying attention to the exchange rates between U.S. and Canadian dollars lately?
According to the article, what they're doing is exploiting the fact that most paper has been washed with fluorescent agents to enhance its whiteness, and so will tend to fluoresce somewhat anyway. (It's the same way they make "color safe bleach": It's not bleach. It's fluorescent dye.)
What they may be doing is using the matte properties of printer toner to dull the fluorescent sheen of most of the paper by applying a difficult-to-detect stochastic pattern over the ostensibly white areas of the printout. The areas that are still completely white will seem to fluoresce compared to the areas that have been colored "eggshell white" by the printer. But that's just a guess.
"Herd cats"...? AGAIN with the furry references!
Step 1. Develop a simple document security measure that can be detected using UV light.
Step 2. Invent a way so that anybody can reproduce the same security measure using readily-available equipment, without special inks.
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Profit!
Oh wait. I guess step 3 would be "start counterfeiting things."
Or another example: Have you ever had someone say to you, "You're crazy; I would have taken the money"? Right there you not only have an observer, but one who is actively trying to reinforce a code of ethics that is different from your own.
I've heard a lot of puritans try to claim that sex is "doing wrong," despite evolutionary evidence to the contrary. This is the first time I've ever heard someone try to make the case that it would be wrong for an organism to enjoy a good meal, though.
Either that, or maybe you're just ranting without really trying to understand the article.
They might. In practice, they seldom seem to -- Wordpress may change but the APIs seem pretty stable. But, yeah, this is one of the things that makes Wordpress sort of a PITA.
The default login screen for Wordpress does indeed automatically inform you of new updates. The problem is, it doesn't really seem to explain them properly. If I load it up right now, there's a notice telling me that Wordpress 2.2 was released 9 days ago. If I originally installed Wordpress longer than 9 days ago, this notice should be enough to tip me off that there's a new version available. Nowhere, however, does it explain that the 2.2 release supercedes the 2.1.3 release and that the 2.1.3 release should be considered insecure. In fact, immediately prior to the notice about the 2.2 release is a notice saying that the latest security update to the 2.1.x tree is available. Many people would be willing to upgrade their Wordpress install to get security updates. Fewer, I suspect, would be willing to upgrade to a full point version release just for kicks.
Actually, this isn't true -- provided you use some common sense about how you customize your Wordpress blog. It doesn't make a lot of sense to go ahead and apply all your customizations to a theme called "default," for example (though I'm sure that lots of people do this). When you go and untar the new version, the "default" theme will be overwritten, as you point out. But if you had taken the time to make a copy of the default theme before you started mucking with it -- into a directory called, I dunno, "mytheme," perhaps -- your theme wouldn't get overwritten by anything in the tarball and your look and customizations would still be there as soon as you upgraded your database.
More of a hassle, I suspect, is that a lot of people run Wordpress on CPanel hosts -- CPanel is a popular server management platform that lets shared hosting customers control their sites without shell access -- and CPanel does not make it particularly easy to upgrade Wordpress. On a lot of hosts I've seen, for example, the function to extract a tarball is configured to never overwrite any files. So far as I can see, the only way to upgrade Wordpress is to rename your current install to a directory called "wordpress-old" or something, then extract the tarball, then copy over all of your modifications by hand using a Web-based file manager. I imagine this is pretty much beyond the capabilities of many Wordpress users. (But then, nobody is forced to maintain their own blog software. I suspect many do it out of a misguided sense of "leet"-ness.)
OR the third. (Come on, you know the score.)
In San Francisco, at least, they seem to be doing something about this. Apparently the definition of what a "central office" is has changed. Apparently it no longer needs to be some kind of big building; instead it might be an innocuous-looking box at the end of the block. Somebody who's a telco insider will have to give more details than that, because I only know what I was told by one field tech. That, and the fact that about eight years ago I moved from an apartment at one end of this street to one at the other, and then a couple years ago I moved again, back a few blocks up the same street. The first time I moved I kept my same phone number. The second time I moved the phone company told me that I could not keep the same phone number; in fact, I couldn't even have the same prefix. I can only assume that this is to allow the local phone company to roll out DSL more aggressively here in the City.
Yeah, but like I said ... a well-trained copy of SpamAssassin seems to have no trouble discerning the difference. It seems most image spam has some kind of text or even HTML configuration that gives it away ... especially when Bayesian filters are coupled with RBL tests and some custom rules from e.g. SpamAssassin Rules Emporium. This diabolical new method of spam really isn't making it past my filters, for the most part ... and never has. No OCR required.
It does make some degree of sense. If I suspect that Company A might assert a patent against me, I might make sure that I'm holding some patents that I'm pretty sure I can assert against Company A. In the event that Company A decides to take the route of the courts, I can then make it clear that I won't go down without a fight -- I will defend myself -- including making sure that, even if their patent suit is successful, it probably won't have the full outcome that Company A was expecting, because I will probably have a valid counter-suit.
It's kind of like you saying there's no such thing as a defensive nuclear missile. You can't use nukes to shoot the enemy's nukes out of the sky, true ... but your nukes can prevent them from nuking you in the first place.
You don't even need to be that uptight.
Seriously, I once read something about using OCR software to "read" images that come through in e-mail to make sure that they don't contain stock spam or penis pump messages. Who thinks this is really necessary? Has anyone you know really gotten so frustrated with the limited font choices in regular e-mail that they started composing their messages in Photoshop?
Trained Bayesian filters seem to have no problem at all spotting image spam.
You do know that the reason Sly was in Australia in the first place was probably because he was on his way to Thailand to film Rambo IV -- right? (Actual new title: "John Rambo.") The topic under discussion this time is Burma, not Afghanistan. Just FYI.
My AT&T CallVantage VoIP service is not "routed through the existing phone wiring." It can be done, but in fact they don't encourage it ("not supported"). What you get when you sign up is a box called a Telephony Adapter (TA) that can either plug into a router or act as the gateway between the router and your Internet connection. The TA has two phone jacks on the back -- that's where the "existing wiring" comes in. You use standard phones, but they're plugged into special equipment.
And, to the OP's point, a VoIP phone that needs a router, a cable modem, and a TA in order to function, all of which have to be plugged into AC power, is not a phone that's powered over the telephone line. What he wants is the kind of service you get from a POTS line, where a blackout doesn't also make your phone service disappear. I use a UPS battery myself, but that's nowhere near the same thing as being able to rely on the gigantic jet fuel-powered backup generators at the phone company.