That's a great site. I almost bought from one of those "merchants" until I saw the laundromat he was selling his $3,000 hi-def videocams from. I went with B&H instead.
The only way to counter this effect is to have a larger base (i.e. at least more the 50%) of educated and critical thinking people in a society. And maybe for the first time in history we might have the chance to get closer to this goal.
You're chasing a ghost. It's not possible by definition. For instance, you can say on TV "We have a crisis in this country. Almost half - half, I say - of the population has less than average intelligence. We need to fix it. Now!"No matter what is done, this cannot be changed. The sad thing is, I would bet you could actually attract funding to fix this so-called problem.
No matter what you do, by definition half of the population is going to be subpar in anything you can name. The only hope is to put in charge a subset of the population which is smarter than average. As an example, I expect the readership of Slashdot to be such a population...
What I would think is "The only way to counter this effect is to have... [the]... educated and critical thinking people in a society vote in greater proportion than the rest." This is why I seethe when I see the get out the vote crowd on dumbed-down TV channels exhorting the beer crowd to vote, even if it means adding hundreds of thousands of random, ill-informed votes.
In practice with my domains, I find that the registrars only check the email address when they do their whois checkups. Therefore, I recommend registering with a random name, make up a company name)... & get a PMB if privacy is at all important to you.
Use an alternate email address just for your domains, & check once a month.
Remember the whole Hotmail fiasco in late '97 when Microsoft acquired it? The whole thing was running on UNIX and ran just fine. They tried to replace it with NT servers, and it just couldn't stand up under the weight no matter how much hardware they threw at it.
It still can't stand up to the weight. Have you tried using Hotmail in the middle of the day and get those SERVER TOO BUSY errors? If it even responds!
I think we're talking about two different things. I'd made the assumption that the shoplifter wouldn't be going through checkout. Many would instead attempt to carry the items past the entrance instead of going through checkout. However, a good percentage do make a small cover purchase to throw off any cameras or guards that might have been following. I was suggesting that if RFID were to be used for anti-theft as you mentioned, simple jamming of the RF might be enough to defeat it, as opposed to the attempt to destroy the tag itself as other posters have suggested. At this point in time, almost all stores are still scanning barcodes anyway at checkout, otherwise re-barcoding wouldn't work and we wouldn't be here.
A common cellphone jammer should do it. I saw one operate and not only did it block both CDMA and GSM, but also g wifi, a GPS receiver, and it also knocked off XM radio at a distance of six meters. These all operate in the 1800-2500mhz range. You can even hear the ECM output signal on an AM radio.
Back in the day, there was the concept of Internet keywords which is basically the same as this. RealNames tried it and repeatedly tried to sell me RealNames registration for $100 per year. Eventually they gave it to me for free. I don't remember it driving much business.
Meanwhile AOL was getting $300,000 per year for certain Keywords(sm). Then as now it was a horrible idea. Realnames folded after losing Microsoft which had hooked Realnames into IE.
Welcome to the wonderful world of DHTML and div layers.
How do you turn that shit off in Firefox. I'd like to see something that toggles it. I went back to IE with Popup Cop (a $20 plug-in) because it's the only thing with a toggle control that stops the fly-in ads. Tried in pwinsider.com and tek-tips.com and some other sites that mug innocent surfers. (you might have to turn the slider all the way to Paranoid to block all the crap).
Hello RIAA: Getting my money is a privilege, not a right.
Great point. Consider that RIAA "pirates" money in a multiplicity of ways.
-If you buy ANYTHING advertised on radio, part of your purchase price goes to RIAA and the labels, because the station has to pay ASCAP licensing in order to play music. Therefore, you pay and kiss rapstar ass EVEN IF YOU HATE THE MUSIC.
-A similar scenario exists in stores which play background music. The store has to pay for a license and when you buy anything in there, you kiss RIAA ass, EVEN IF YOU HATE THE MISIC.
-Furthermore, when you go to clubs and restaurants, part of your bill goes into RIAA pockets. At least here you have a choice to go to places which play music you like. But still, a disproportionate amount of money is diverted away from productive local businesses.
-RIAA thinks you should buy recordings over and over because there is no replacement policy. For instance, I bought Pink Floyd on vinyl LP, and again when it scratched, then cassette tape, (anyone remember the RIAA freak-out in the 70s about tape), then CD, then CD again when it no longer played, then CD again as they came out with the Gold Edition and then the Millenium Edition and then the Aluminum Edition and there is no end in sight. Pardon me if I download a copy because I am too lazy to rip.
Of course the RIAA doesn't think any of this is gravy, and that is why they don't live and think like normal people. It was a beuatiful business model for the 1950s, when the equivalent of megabytes could only be delivered via fragile media, but times have changed and quite simply they don't do enough to justify charging $15 for albums any more. I'm not saying their product should be free. What I am saying is them need to be satisfied with less cocaine, uglier hookers and last year's Bentley.
Don't forget some ebook readers that have the author looking over your shoulder at everything you read (and when & where). I once bought one, but was so creeped out I forced a refund from my cc company. eBook Gold
Seagates are now made in China. Quietest drives BTW. IBM is out of the drive business - sold everything to Hitachi not long after that fiasco. The problems with the pixie dust drives, in particular the 40gb ones are well-documented. I had two RMA'd -- but IBMs were great because they failed slowly and gave you time to backup. You could almost hear the magnetic coating flaking off as you saved, saved, saved. I use quite an array of drives & the only ones that gave me trouble besides those Deskstars were an 80gb Deskstar that does not thermally recalibrate correctly and only runs if kept with a fan aimed at it, a piece of shit Hitachi 60gb laptop drive that was insanely noisy on thermal recalibration, and two Microdrives - also IBM. I currently have good luck with Toshibas in the laptops, and WD and Seagate 3.5" drives. The 400gig is very quiet, and the antistatic containers they come in are reusable.
No it's domain squatters. Try and get any name that makes sense anymore and it belongs to a squatter. No combination of any two English words is unregistered. So now lots of nonsense words are being manufactured.
Thankfully most people have enough sense not to buy from squatters, so these squatters have to try to derive revenue by posting lame "search" pages on the domain spaces they occupy. But I guess once in a while someone stupid enough to buy does so and pays their registry bills.
I guess after this there will be a goldrush to register all the words in the Swahili dictionary...
It attracts marketers like flies to shit. By turning it off, I avoid 99 percent of obnoxious ads.* It's just too easy. I especially like that little F that Flashblock displays - it's like a big F*ck You to marketers.
*The remaining 1 percent can be made less annoying by setting looping graphics to loop once only. That way my epilepsy doesn't trigger just because some marketer with MS Paint wants me to think I can get free Ipods.
You're leaving out the best fringe benefit of Okla: AWESOME strip clubs full of all-American goddesses who rub all over you for a dollar: places where the "strip" doesn't involve stripping you out of cash.
I never have figured out how that is the case, when the clubs in Calif have you separated from the stage by a moat filled with alligators and the "strippers" who are mostly mexicans or asian H1-B or student visa overstays wear chain-mail "lingerie" and shake you down for dollars, dances and drinks no matter how far in the back you sit.
The non-replaceable battery is an INHERENT FLAW in the iPod design
I believe the inherent flaw is the rechargeability itself. There are any number of mp players that run on alkalines. That saves a lot of time and hassle on trips, especially if you do a lot of foreign travel.
You don't have to bring a charger, and a voltage converter, and locate a wall outlet, and suffer downtime charging -- just change the battery & go. What a concept. I don't see a lot of white headphones still working near the end of the flight.
Battery life and flash storage has improved substantially. I have a Forge and it lasts 14 hours on one AAA. There's no need to carry around a laptop drive anymore, except to impress others as cool.
What I'm saying is that 90 percent of the laser energy being reflected BACK AT YOU might cause some damage. If your laser can deliver 150kw, well, you do the math. The whole idea of IR lasers as weaponry strikes me as stupid. Yet anytime I try to bring common sense to a bunch of Star Wars freaks on Slashdot, I get modded down.
Laser offensive weaponry is JUST PLAIN DUMB. How far does that beam go in less than perfect atmospherics? How do you prevent beam divergence at ranges of tens of miles? How do you hold your millimeter-wide beam on target long enough to accomplish burn-through, when you consider all that filtration? And then it has to defeat the anti-laser finish on the target.
No, IR laser is not going to work in any place except the movies. Maybe it would in atmosphere at short ranges, if it operated in the x-ray spectrum, but then the operator faces another set of hazards.
I can see the headline now: Air Force "reflects" on decision to purchase sexy new laser, after a test backfires when attempting to shoot down a mirrored missile...
But the spammers don't care, all they want is cash.
It's more than that. Everybody wants cash. But spammers are psychopaths who see themselves as more valuable than all other humanity put together, and do not care if the $1000 they earn by spamming actually costs others $1,000,000.
The world is much better off if they were locked up permanently or dead.
Similarly, any company which hires such people is probably also better off missing.
I submit that virus writers have a psychological disability. It is simply the lack of regard for other people. In psychology terms it is called "psychopathic tendencies."
Psychopaths are manipulative, charming, glib, deceptive, parasitic, irresponsible, selfish, callous, promiscuous, impulsive, antisocial, and aggressive individuals who have no concern for the welfare of others, experience little remorse or guilt as a result of their injurious and antisocial behavior, do not tolerate delay of gratification, and persevere despite punishment; psychopaths are mostly male and are less than 1% in the general population; approximately 11% of the forensic psychiatric population and 23% of the correctional population are psychopaths.
The rest of the programming world seems to satisfy its intellectual challenges just fine without attempting to harm other people and indeed society itself.
Any company dumb enough to hire these individuals on the basis of resumes listing criminal activity absolutely deserves what it gets.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a great site. I almost bought from one of those "merchants" until I saw the laundromat he was selling his $3,000 hi-def videocams from. I went with B&H instead.
You're chasing a ghost. It's not possible by definition. For instance, you can say on TV "We have a crisis in this country. Almost half - half, I say - of the population has less than average intelligence. We need to fix it. Now!"No matter what is done, this cannot be changed. The sad thing is, I would bet you could actually attract funding to fix this so-called problem.
No matter what you do, by definition half of the population is going to be subpar in anything you can name. The only hope is to put in charge a subset of the population which is smarter than average. As an example, I expect the readership of Slashdot to be such a population...
What I would think is "The only way to counter this effect is to have
Looks like Gates has dug up the corpse of Sidewalk, sewn it back together, and is now presenting it as something shiny and brand new.
In practice with my domains, I find that the registrars only check the email address when they do their whois checkups.
Therefore, I recommend registering with a random name, make up a company name)... & get a PMB if privacy is at all important to you.
Use an alternate email address just for your domains, & check once a month.
Remember the whole Hotmail fiasco in late '97 when Microsoft acquired it? The whole thing was running on UNIX and ran just fine. They tried to replace it with NT servers, and it just couldn't stand up under the weight no matter how much hardware they threw at it.
It still can't stand up to the weight. Have you tried using Hotmail in the middle of the day and get those SERVER TOO BUSY errors? If it even responds!
I think we're talking about two different things. I'd made the assumption that the shoplifter wouldn't be going through checkout. Many would instead attempt to carry the items past the entrance instead of going through checkout. However, a good percentage do make a small cover purchase to throw off any cameras or guards that might have been following. I was suggesting that if RFID were to be used for anti-theft as you mentioned, simple jamming of the RF might be enough to defeat it, as opposed to the attempt to destroy the tag itself as other posters have suggested. At this point in time, almost all stores are still scanning barcodes anyway at checkout, otherwise re-barcoding wouldn't work and we wouldn't be here.
A common cellphone jammer should do it. I saw one operate and not only did it block both CDMA and GSM, but also g wifi, a GPS receiver, and it also knocked off XM radio at a distance of six meters. These all operate in the 1800-2500mhz range. You can even hear the ECM output signal on an AM radio.
They didn't upload shit. They hotlink & pull the pics right off my server. Nothing is more fun than detecting this and substituting a goatse pic.
Back in the day, there was the concept of Internet keywords which is basically the same as this. RealNames tried it and repeatedly tried to sell me RealNames registration for $100 per year. Eventually they gave it to me for free. I don't remember it driving much business.
Meanwhile AOL was getting $300,000 per year for certain Keywords(sm). Then as now it was a horrible idea. Realnames
folded after losing Microsoft which had hooked Realnames into IE.
Welcome to the wonderful world of DHTML and div layers.
How do you turn that shit off in Firefox. I'd like to see something that toggles it. I went back to IE with Popup Cop (a $20 plug-in) because it's the only thing with a toggle control that stops the fly-in ads. Tried in pwinsider.com and tek-tips.com and some other sites that mug innocent surfers. (you might have to turn the slider all the way to Paranoid to block all the crap).
What if the port is only opened for a brief moment by the camper? Say for only a packet or two.
Wouldn't a firewall (e.g. Zonealarm) pick up and/or block the outgoing traffic?
Hello RIAA: Getting my money is a privilege, not a right.
Great point. Consider that RIAA "pirates" money in a multiplicity of ways.
-If you buy ANYTHING advertised on radio, part of your purchase price goes to RIAA and the labels, because the station has to pay ASCAP licensing in order to play music. Therefore, you pay and kiss rapstar ass EVEN IF YOU HATE THE MUSIC.
-A similar scenario exists in stores which play background music. The store has to pay for a license and when you buy anything in there, you kiss RIAA ass, EVEN IF YOU HATE THE MISIC.
-Furthermore, when you go to clubs and restaurants, part of your bill goes into RIAA pockets. At least here you have a choice to go to places which play music you like. But still, a disproportionate amount of money is diverted away from productive local businesses.
-RIAA thinks you should buy recordings over and over because there is no replacement policy. For instance, I bought Pink Floyd on vinyl LP, and again when it scratched, then cassette tape, (anyone remember the RIAA freak-out in the 70s about tape), then CD, then CD again when it no longer played, then CD again as they came out with the Gold Edition and then the Millenium Edition and then the Aluminum Edition and there is no end in sight. Pardon me if I download a copy because I am too lazy to rip.
Of course the RIAA doesn't think any of this is gravy, and that is why they don't live and think like normal people. It was a beuatiful business model for the 1950s, when the equivalent of megabytes could only be delivered via fragile media, but times have changed and quite simply they don't do enough to justify charging $15 for albums any more. I'm not saying their product should be free. What I am saying is them need to be satisfied with less cocaine, uglier hookers and last year's Bentley.
just have the settings so that it doesn't try to scan every single file that comes in
So in other words you turn it off. That's one way to speed up things.
Don't forget some ebook readers that have the author looking over your shoulder at everything you read (and when & where). I once bought one, but was so creeped out I forced a refund from my cc company.
eBook Gold
It's the only way to get around those popups.
How the hell are they doing that and how do you block them without turning off javascript. (Mozilla 1.7.11)
Seagates are now made in China. Quietest drives BTW. IBM is out of the drive business - sold everything to Hitachi not long after that fiasco. The problems with the pixie dust drives, in particular the 40gb ones are well-documented. I had two RMA'd -- but IBMs were great because they failed slowly and gave you time to backup. You could almost hear the magnetic coating flaking off as you saved, saved, saved. I use quite an array of drives & the only ones that gave me trouble besides those Deskstars were an 80gb Deskstar that does not thermally recalibrate correctly and only runs if kept with a fan aimed at it, a piece of shit Hitachi 60gb laptop drive that was insanely noisy on thermal recalibration, and two Microdrives - also IBM. I currently have good luck with Toshibas in the laptops, and WD and Seagate 3.5" drives. The 400gig is very quiet, and the antistatic containers they come in are reusable.
No it's domain squatters. Try and get any name that makes sense anymore and it belongs to a squatter. No combination of any two English words is unregistered. So now lots of nonsense words are being manufactured.
Thankfully most people have enough sense not to buy from squatters, so these squatters have to try to derive revenue by posting lame "search" pages on the domain spaces they occupy. But I guess once in a while someone stupid enough to buy does so and pays their registry bills.
I guess after this there will be a goldrush to register all the words in the Swahili dictionary...
It attracts marketers like flies to shit. By turning it off, I avoid 99 percent of obnoxious ads.* It's just too easy. I especially like that little F that Flashblock displays - it's like a big F*ck You to marketers.
*The remaining 1 percent can be made less annoying by setting looping graphics to loop once only. That way my epilepsy doesn't trigger just because some marketer with MS Paint wants me to think I can get free Ipods.
You're leaving out the best fringe benefit of Okla: AWESOME strip clubs full of all-American goddesses who rub all over you for a dollar: places where the "strip" doesn't involve stripping you out of cash.
I never have figured out how that is the case, when the clubs in Calif have you separated from the stage by a moat filled with alligators and the "strippers" who are mostly mexicans or asian H1-B or student visa overstays wear chain-mail "lingerie" and shake you down for dollars, dances and drinks no matter how far in the back you sit.
I don't know if you use D-SLRs, but if you do, take a look at the Canon 20D.
The optional battery grip takes AAs & is perfect for those trips to the outback. And the grip makes it look cool!!!
The non-replaceable battery is an INHERENT FLAW in the iPod design
I believe the inherent flaw is the rechargeability itself. There are any number of mp players that run on alkalines. That saves a lot of time and hassle on trips, especially if you do a lot of foreign travel.
You don't have to bring a charger, and a voltage converter, and locate a wall outlet, and suffer downtime charging -- just change the battery & go. What a concept. I don't see a lot of white headphones still working near the end of the flight.
Battery life and flash storage has improved substantially. I have a Forge and it lasts 14 hours on one AAA. There's no need to carry around a laptop drive anymore, except to impress others as cool.
What I'm saying is that 90 percent of the laser energy being reflected BACK AT YOU might cause some damage. If your laser can deliver 150kw, well, you do the math. The whole idea of IR lasers as weaponry strikes me as stupid. Yet anytime I try to bring common sense to a bunch of Star Wars freaks on Slashdot, I get modded down.
Laser offensive weaponry is JUST PLAIN DUMB. How far does that beam go in less than perfect atmospherics? How do you prevent beam divergence at ranges of tens of miles? How do you hold your millimeter-wide beam on target long enough to accomplish burn-through, when you consider all that filtration? And then it has to defeat the anti-laser finish on the target.
No, IR laser is not going to work in any place except the movies. Maybe it would in atmosphere at short ranges, if it operated in the x-ray spectrum, but then the operator faces another set of hazards.
I can see the headline now: Air Force "reflects" on decision to purchase sexy new laser, after a test backfires when attempting to shoot down a mirrored missile...
& yes, defending against laser is that simple.
But the spammers don't care, all they want is cash.
It's more than that. Everybody wants cash. But spammers are psychopaths who see themselves as more valuable than all other humanity put together, and do not care if the $1000 they earn by spamming actually costs others $1,000,000.
The world is much better off if they were locked up permanently or dead.
Similarly, any company which hires such people is probably also better off missing.
I submit that virus writers have a psychological disability. It is simply the lack of regard for other people. In psychology terms it is called "psychopathic tendencies."
Psychopaths are manipulative, charming, glib, deceptive, parasitic, irresponsible, selfish, callous, promiscuous, impulsive, antisocial, and aggressive individuals who have no concern for the welfare of others, experience little remorse or guilt as a result of their injurious and antisocial behavior, do not tolerate delay of gratification, and persevere despite punishment; psychopaths are mostly male and are less than 1% in the general population; approximately 11% of the forensic psychiatric population and 23% of the correctional population are psychopaths.
The rest of the programming world seems to satisfy its intellectual challenges just fine without attempting to harm other people and indeed society itself.
Any company dumb enough to hire these individuals on the basis of resumes listing criminal activity absolutely deserves what it gets.