And the driver of the Hemi looked upon the Fords and the Chevies and the GTOs in his rear view mirror (had to add that one, a friend of mine is the second owner of a '69 Ram Air IV Judge) and he saw that it was good.
If you don't believe me, try to find a copy of "The Guns of El Chupacabra." "Gigli" seems like an Academy Award winner in comparison.
I could only stand it for about half an hour, and that even though the executive producer is a friend of mine and gave me a numbered promotional copy. Some of the music is actually pretty good, but they should have just recorded the bands and fired everyone else.
Re:It's *so* obvious where this is wil go...
on
Virtual Girlfriend
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· Score: 1
Only 1997? Noob;-)
The version posted here had more of a unixy spin put on it, but the the "Wife 1.0" story predates the IBM PC. I don't know if it originated in the CP/M world, or Apple, or if it goes back even farther than that, but it was already quite old in 1997.
Re:It's not even that novel an idea
on
Virtual Girlfriend
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I lived in Japan for eight years, and you're quite right, there's nothing especially unique about this; it's basically just a Tamagotchi for people who are old enough to jerk off.
So, how to make it unique?
Just a little glue. The pieces are already all in Japan.
One of the many things that Japan is (in)famous for, and perhaps wishes it wasnt, is imekura (image clubs) and telephone clubs. An imekura is where you go for koosu-purei (course play) - sexual fantasy vignettes. For everyone salaryman who has ever wanted to be a train groper but had either too much decency or too little nerve, they have an answer: a train car mockup complete with an OL (or a young woman in a high school uniform, if that's your thing). They also have OL fantasies, nurses, the usual suspects. SM at some of them.
Then there are the telephone clubs. The girls are often high school girls, the customers are not high school boys. Go to the telephone club, use the phone, maybe get to make a date to meet up with a girl. If you meet up, money and bodily fluids will be exchanged.
In other words, Japan has no shortage of young women, high school girls (and even some jr. high school girls) willing to put out for money, either in a direct cash transaction or in exchange for expensive designer bags and such.
Enter (no pun intended) the virtual girlfriend.
You play the game. You buy her presents, do and say all the right things, etc. If you've been very good, a real, live meatspace girl (who has been getting her cut from all these virtual presents for the virtual GF) shows up.
She doesn't know your real name. You don't know hers. But she does know your history with the virtual GF and takes over the persona for a little while in meatspace. Maybe she'll go to some function with you. Maybe have dinner or go to a movie, have a meatspace date with the virtual girlfriend. Or maybe you just head straight to the love hotel, which is what she really showed up for: real-life sex with the virtual girlfriend. Whether this would require some additional presents (most likely the foldable kind that go in your wallet) or not would have to be worked out. If, or how much,she needed would probably depend on what kind of cut she was getting from those virtual presents.
Is this a troll or something? Heck no. Anyone who has lived in Japan for a while (and BTW, I love the place; none of this is trash-talking Japan, I'm just describing some things that are there. No, I don't go to those places; I'm married) knows that combining the virtual GF game with a meatspace temporary GF who just shows up for a no-strings-attached turn at a love hotel would be a huge hit. Not with the whole population, and maybe not long term, but for a year or two (maybe more), they'd make a killing.
Steps will have to be taken to ensure that neither the virtual BF (hereafter referred to as "the john") nor the virtual GF (hereafter referred to as "the ho") can find out the other's identity (nothing could stop the john and the ho from sharing this info if they wanted to; the important point is just to prevent the other person from knowing who your are without your consent), but the plan itself is fully workable.
And I won't even try to patent it;-) However, if anyone else does, you saw the prior art here:-)
This sounds like a "When did you stop beating your wife?' question. I've never trusted sponsored research, where "sponsored" is defined as "paid for by a private company which stands to benefit from the findings of said research" and "research" is not used in the sense of basic research, but the sense of "market research" or "opinion poll." Such "sponsored research" is tainted by the very fact of who sponsors it.
After all, when was the last time you saw "sponsored research" that found the sponsor's product/solution to be a pile of crap compared to a competing one?
Coming up with such a result would be the best way to ensure that:
1) It would be suppressed and buried forever in the sponsor's biggest and most secret safe, or just destroyed outright;
2) You'd never again be used for research by that sponsor, even if your findings were true and accurate. They weren't sponsoring you to find the truth, they were sponsoring you to find that their product or solution was the best, and you were expected to choose/manipulate data and load questions such that the desired conclusion would be "proven."
Sponsored research should more properly be called an extended press release.
Actually, that's not the case. Those rights are built on Judeo-Christian concepts of morals. Many, but not all, of our laws are built on those rights and morals. Greatly different cultures may have substantially different ideas of what is more and immoral, and their laws reflect that. Take a look at Islamic Sharia law for a good example of this.
A poster a few replies down advances the idea that not all of our laws are based on ethics, and cites seatbelt laws as an example, with the justification for them being that it unfairly burdens the emergency response system. The argument seems to be that this is based on pragmatics rather than ethics, but we can also argue that it's based on ethics/morals, because another motivation of the seatbelt law is that it unfairly burdens the taxpayers standing behind the emergency response and emergency medical systems to have to care for someone who drives without a seatbelt and is thereby much more seriously injured than he would otherwise be in an accident. That is, it's immoral/unethical/unfair to put the burden of your carelessness on society as a whole. Another way to address the situation would be for emergency crews to arrive at the scene, find you weren't wearing your seatbelt, then just pack up and drive away. Or to rescue you and take you to the hospital, but to bill you and/or your family for the full cost of the rescue.
Those measures are, of course, quite harsh and society would likely deem them unethical as well, so the compromise is to have mandatory seatbelt use laws and an enforcement mechanism for them (being fined if you are caught).
The same poster does have a good argument for pragmatics in the case of it not being illegal to lie to your mother, even though society generally considers that to be unethical. There is no such law at least in part because it would be utterly unenforceable, and even if it were enforceable, it would so clog the court system as to cause it to break down and be unable to handle serious crimes. Thus, society sometimes pragmatically judges that something which is unetihical or immoral ought not to be illegal because the law would be utterly unenforceable.
Well, having Bill Clinton in office was certainly helpful to Al Qaeda (Clinton was overall a far better president than I expected him to be, and that whole impeachment deal was a crock), but he was pretty soft on terrorism. Lob a missile here, a missile there, do no real damage. What was needed was a decisive reaction to Al Qaeda way back, which should have included an invasion of Afghanistan during Clinton's first term.
The last real war-fighting Democrats we had were FDR and Harry Truman. It's true that Johnson is the one who really ramped up US involvement in Viet Nam, however, he A) Didn't really want to do it, and B) Did it rather poorly. If the military had been given the mission in Viet Nam that they were given in Iraq (invade the country, shatter its army, and invest the capital, followed by the rest of the country), that mission would have been achieved. Since they were given an impossible mission, however, it had a predictable result.
John Kerry would no real war-fighting president. He's the kind of Democrat bin Laden wants in the oval office. You can bet he sure doesn't want Bush re-elected, and that alone is adequate reason to vote for Bush.
Yes, I know Kerry fought in Viet Nam and was decorated there, and Bush was in only in the Air Guard and never had an overseas tour. However, neither of those makes a person a war-fighting president or not. Indeed, I don't much care what Kerry, Bush, or anyone else did during the Viet Nam era, and neither should the rest of the voters. We should care what they are doing and seem capable of doing right now, and that's why I support Bush.
I think it's a shame that neither Colin Powell nor Condoleeza Rice are running for president; I believe them both to be far more qualified than either Kerry or Bush.
And if anyone on the Bush campaign is reading this, you need to jettison Cheney and put Rice on the ticket as VP. Really. Not only would she be a marvelously better VP than Cheney, she would easily beat any other contender to become Bush's successor in four years,
The terrorists are winning? Really? Maybe I've just missed the news, but I've been under the impression that Al Qaeda has not managed to mount on attack in the United States since the WTC attack.
The reason they haven't been able to do so is quite clear: because we are led by a highly capable president who knows how to fight a war and win it, many Al Qaeda members are now in US custody (good) or dead (better) and we have a lot of terrorists who would otherwise be trying to attack us at home or abroad tied up in Iraq, where they are dealing with a professional army and dying. This is a Good Thing.
If you take a look a little further back in history to WW II, you'll find that one of the major reasons we not only won the war but emerged as the dominant superpower when the shooting was done is that we made sure the combat took place on enemy soil. Hawaii (then a territory) was the only part of the United States to see major combat, and that happened only once.
We are quite correct to be following that pattern again. Let the fighting be in the terrorists' backyard, not ours. History books will quite possibly look back on this war and say that it was indeed WW III, as some commentators believe. And they will look back and see that one of the big reasons we decisively won it is because we fought it on our enemies' ground, not ours.
It is for that reason that President Bush will be getting my vote in November, something that I would otherwise not be inclined to give him. Certainly, I differ with him on a wide range of policies, despite the fact that I have been a registered Republican ever since I was old enough to vote. What we need most of all is a tough, war-fighting president who is willing to go it alone if necessary and who is not afraid to take the war to our enemies and kill them where they are. We have such a president. Everything that Kerry has said on this issue has convinced me that if he is capable of doing that at all (which I have doubts about), he is a good bit less capable of doing it than is our current president.
As for the issue of airline no-fly lists, they are certainly screwed up, and seem to go on nothing but a name. The Ted Kennedy on the list was not the Ted Kennedy who sits in the Senate, I've read, but just someone with a pretty similar name.
However, those lists are not the government's doing. The airlines maintain their own lists, and there is no central authority and maybe even no central list. There have been calls for there to be a single list, run by DHS, but that has not yet been done. I think it will clear up a lot of the confusion if they make such a list.
Actually, Port Chicago has been made a national memorial:
http://www.nps.gov/poch/index.htm
A pretty big deal actually was made of the explosion; there was a full board of inquiry and it did result in some procedural changes to the way ammunition was handled, as well as the reduction, still in 1944, of the number of blacks at ammunition depots reduced to 30% of staff. At Port Chicago, all of the loaders were black, only the officers were white.
Shamefully, the handful loaders who survived were court-martialed for mutiny because they refused to load ammunition until safety changes were made. While they were released from prison in 1946, well short of the long sentences they were given, that doesn't change the wrong that was done to them.
I don't know if I would recommend it to others or not, but one of the smartest things I've ever done in an interview situation is essentially the same thing the grandparent did - telling the mostly clueless HR person conducting the interview "To be honest, I don't think we have anything more to discuss" and walking out. I was voluntarily unemployed at the time, too, having resigned from my previous position without another one secured. (No, that wasn't a dumb move; I had my reasons and it turned out right.) What made me walk out was partly the clue level, or lack thereof; partly it was finding that their idea of an interview consisted not of an interview but of sitting down and taking a test (prime sign of a screwed-up corporate culture combined with a clue level low enough that no one can tell whether technical interviewees know what they are doing or not; I have never before encountered such a thing at a non-government job), and partly when she brought up that they were looking to pay about $25K per year (this was for a *nix admin job in LA). I already had my mind halfway out the door even before she mentioned that, and my feet got up and followed at that point.
Very shortly thereafter, I got a call from the company at which I am now very happily employed. It wasn't from HR. It was from the head of the development department, calling to set up a time for a telephone interview. That was then followed up with an in-person interview, and shortly thereafter, an offer letter. The first time I met, or even spoke with, anyone from HR was my first day on the job. That's how life ought to be.
And do you know what? Even our HR people have clue. I think they're great. Now how often do you hear anyone say that?:-)
Less than a year into this job, I've moved up to be a team leader, and now I make hiring decisions myself. And we still do it the way it was meant to be: we find our own applicants, look at *all* resumes, interview the best out of those, and let HR know which one we want to hire. Then they send out an offer letter and a drug test packet.
I still shake my head when I think of that other place, and I'm so happy I walked out on them. I know that may seem like a rash move, but really, if a job is such a poor fit that you just couldn't stand working there (especially if what makes it a poor fit is clueslessness), unless you are literally staring hunger in the face and have nothing to fall back on, you're better of walking out. Even if you have to move in with you parents for a little while to save money while you job hunt, do it. It beats taking a horrible job at a horrible company. Those kind of jobs just bring you down. They bring your attitude down. They often even bring your skillset down. And they may bring your chances of getting a better job down, too.
Hold out if you can. Move if you have to. Get into a job that is right for you, at a company that is right for you (and for which you are right, too) and you will prosper. You'll love to go to work. Even when the hours are long (this weekend I will have my first full days off in about two months, woohoo!) it won't seem bad.
Being rehabilitated doesn't imply working in IT. In fact, he might do better to get out of it anyway. He's young and can train for anything. He could retrain as a plumbe when he gets out, and if he's any good at it, he'll make more than most people in IT.
He might also want to look into being a mechanic, if he has the talent for it. Mechanics will need to know more and more about dealing with computer systems on vehicles every year.
There are lots of things he can do when he gets out. It doesn't have to be on computers. I'm in the email security field, and I will tell you flatly that there is no way I would consider hiring him. It's not a matter of the fact that he went to prison; it's a matter of the fact that I could not trust him.
If I were running a plumbing company, it wouldn't matter. But of course, I'd never let him near the office computers.
I'll get modded OT for this (or who knows? Maybe some will find it interesting enough to reward me even though it's OT), and you might want to skip this one if you care about topicality.
Have I tried to get a job lately? Well, if last fall counts as lately, yes. After voluntarily leaving my previous position, I had a new job offer in less than two months, and I only applied for a few positions before receiving that offer. Less than a year into this job, I have been promoted to the leader of my team and have recruited several new members.
I've hired four people in the last two months and will be hiring a fifth in the next month or so. Those four were all new positions. The one open now is to replace someone who was recruited away.
There's your anecdotal proof. For statistical proof, you might want to check on new job creation. It's happening. Not as fast as hoped for, but it's happening. The economy isn't shrinking, it's growing, and new job creation is proof of that. Does that guarantee you'll get a job (if you're unemployed now)? No. Getting a job, even in good times, means being in the right place at the right time with the right skillset. IT isn't the greatest skillset to have right now. Biotech is a much better one. The competition is rough, and if you're out of work I do feel for you, but there really are jobs out there. If you're in LA and need a job, post a link to your resume in reply to this; I'll take a look. No guarantees, but I do have a position open and I will read your resume.
Want more proof? The Fed just tightened rates again. They only do that when the economy is growing.
Yes, things are tough. Yes, there is still an over-supply of workers in the IT job market in many, if not all, parts of the United States. This is partly due to offshoring, and partly due to the fact that there are just simply too many people in the IT job market right now. The hiring craze that went on during the.com era, much of it by companies with absolutely unsustainable business models, was guaranteed to created this kind of a glut.
However, none of that is Bush's fault. He wasn't even president when the things that caused this situation were happening. It was already a done deal on the day he was sworn in.
Likewise, it's not Clinton's fault, either. He wasn't out there holding a gun to people's heads and forcing them to create impossible companies with ridiculous business models. Nor was he acting as a Silicon Valley Robin Hood, stealing from the rich VC firms and giving to the poor dot-com CEOs. They did that all on their own. Was Clinton responsible for stopping it? No. He was not even legally empowered to stop it.
The economy doesn't boom during times of war, although it booms for certain industries. If you have experience in, say, manufacturing artillery shells, you might find this a good time to be looking for work. War is a drag on the economy, although in the short term it can break a recession, as happened when WW II broke out. The boom, however, came *after* WW II, when millions of people got out of the military with money to spend. Pent-up civilian demand (so much was rationed during the war and cars were not manufactured at all in the United States) also contributed to the post-war boom,
Also, so far, the war we are engaged in now (and we will be engaged in this war for decades to come, regardless of who is elected president in November) has not been one that burns a lot of big-ticket items. Losses of tanks and aircraft have been few and far between. We are fighting an enemy with little ability to destroy either of those. We've probably lost more aircraft to accidents than to enemy fire.
WW II made war industries boom. Ships and aircraft were being built and lost at tremendous rates. Huge amounts of new military hardware was needed. So far in this war, there hasn't been such a need for new stuff. It's being fought with equipment the military already has. The only stuff they
Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. Cunt is a crude term for pussy. OK, pussy is a crude term too, but cunt is cruder.
Pussy is something you stick your dick in. Or at least, something I stick mine in.
Now you say Mitnick is a cunt. Are you implying that you want to stick your dick in Mitnick? Well, gee, thanks for sharing, but I think I'll just stick to pussy if it's all the same to you. And yes, I'm fairly certain that Mitnick != pussy.
You don't know much about class action suits, do you? Google a bit, then come back and tell us if you can find evidence of a class action lawsuit where anyone but the lawyers won. I think you know which way I'm betting on that.
I don't post pictures of my kids on any publicly accessible site for exactly that reason. They are either sent by email directly to family and friends, or put on a password-protected site (mostly the former; password-protected doesn't mean uncrackable).
Unless I'm totally missing something, the CAN-SPAM act does not require you to include a notice that states you are CAN-SPAM compliant, so there is no contradiction here.
Some spammers experimented with such a notice, perhaps believing it might fool people into thinking they were legit, but they were quickly disabused of that idea.
DMA members obey the law?! BAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Good thing I didn't have a mouthful of soda when I read that.
If you said "Some DMA members follow the law" I might go along with that, but the DMA is also rife with "enterprise" spammers, boiler room operators, fax blasters, and the like. CAN-SPAM is exactly the kind of law DMA would like, not because they follow or want to follow the law, but because they want the things they do anyway made legal, so that they can claim to be above-board. This is exactly what CAN-SPAM did for them.
CAN-SPAM has been very good for spammers. It hinders their operations not at all, while giving them a tremendous legal shield against state laws that were starting to give them real problems.
CAN-SPAM was supported by DMA and the spammers, and was opposed by the anti-spam side. Looking at it that way pretty much tells you all you need to know.
CAN-SPAM was a boon to spammers and has been a real problem for those who would stop them. It hasn't been bad for those of us who get paid to keep spam out, either, since spammers who might have been prosecuted under existing anti-spam laws are now practically untouchable.
Imagine if an association of serial rapists were able to lobby Congress to pass law that says it isn't rape if, after you break into the victim's apartment, hold her at knife-point and rape her, you give her a card with an address with a notice that says she does not wish to be raped in the future, and will thereafter not be raped by you. That does not, of course, constrain other rapists.
That's exactly what CAN-SPAM does for spammers and mailboxes. It gives the spammer a free shot at you for each mailing list. If you unsubscribe and they are being technically compliant, they will remove you from that list. None of their other ones, of course. You'll be marked as a live one on those.
If that dodge doesn't work, there's another. You send a letter saying you want to be unsubbed. They unsub you. Then they sell or trade a list of all those known good addresses who unsubbed to some other spammer, getting his list in return. Bang! They are in compliance and you are still in spam. A few weeks or months later, they repeat the list-swap hokey-pokey.
What's different now than before? Nothing, except state attorneys general who might have been able to prosecute or at least sue them before are now barred from doing so because CAN-SPAM legalized this behavior and struck down all state anti-spam laws.
Perhaps that should be amended to read "the majority of people that use software on Win, Mac, and other non-free operating systems." Of them, it is certainly true that most of them don't give a flying fsck about the license, and a good number of them are quiet willing to use warez, from which we can reasonably assume they don't care about compliance with the license either.
Among Linux users (and BSD users as well, although Linux users tend to be more "excitable" on this point), however, there are a great many people who care a great deal about the license. I sometimes used proprietary software if there is no acceptable alternative under a free license, but like a lot of people who use Linux, I will often choose a GPled (or other free-licensed) product over a proprietary one even if the proprietary one is better. The Free one just has to be "good enough" and under active development so that it is improving. Put another way, many of us will accept software that is far rougher and in a developmental stage as long as it is FOSS. If it's proprietary, we're going to demand more. Partly because of licensing and partly because if I'm paying for it, I should be able to reasonably expect that I am not paying to be a beta tester. Some of my gripe with proprietary software is that I have often found that no matter what the marketing spin says, it's so rough that in fact I *have* just paid to be a beta tester. When I want to beta stuff, I will volunteer. I certainly won't pay for the "privilege."
So yes, actually, many people do indeed give a flying fsck about the license on the software they use.
Yes, the fact that they are going to sell a proprietary version is precisely what will make it different for some people (and MySQL would be different for those people, too).
A developer who writes code and releases it under the GPL and only under the GPL and wants it to remain that way would not be likely to assign the copyright to Novell.
If it were me, I would grant *them* a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to use the code under the GPL. Maybe I would even grant them that license to use it in a proprietary program as well, as long as it was in the GPLed one too.
But sign over my copyright and then have *them* give *me* a perpetual royalty-free license to use my own code? Umm, I don't think so. Not unless I work for Novell developing Evolution code, in which case they already own it and don't have to give me any license at all.
Seriously, though, has anyone ever truly met someone who's bought something from spam?
Oh, yes. I see evidence of that all the time.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm an analyst at an email security company. We are very successful at filtering phishing scams, ads for enlargement products, pr0n, the usual suspects.
At least once a day, someone reports a phishing scam for eBay or their bank as being a mistakenly filtered legitimate mail. I always wonder if they did that before or after they went to the site and handed over their password and userid?
Several times, I've seen filtered mail from enlargement pill operations that was reported as mistakenly filtered, but which was very obviously not spam. It was real mail, sent from their actual mail servers, no obfuscation, to the person in question. Of course, you're never going to deliver anything selling VigRX through our network. The last time this happened was just a couple weeks ago, and I have to ask "How dumb was this guy?"
I mean, not only did he buy enlargement pills in the first place, but when the follow-up mail was filtered, he reported it as a mistake. Now, he has given total strangers his name, his company name, his work email address, and told them that he thinks he has a small dick and that he was dumb enough to fall for an enlargement pill spam. He's lucky that I'm a very ethical person and just deleted that mail from the queue. Somebody could very easily blackmail him that way. Even if a person didn't blackmail him, how much fun would it be if everyone at your company knew that you bought VigRX?:-)
Like I said, he's lucky that I'm ethical.
Re:I-CAN-SPAM Act Flawed By Design
on
CAN-SPAM Is A Bust
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Yeah, what he said.
I work for a large email security company, and before CAN-SPAM was even passed into law, it was obvious that it would be a total balls-up from the standpoint of preventing spam. Our network processes over 100 million messages per day, the great majority of it spam. Almost none of that spam contains a CAN-SPAM compliant notice, and one good reason it doesn't is the few spammers who tried that found our right away that having such a notice makes it very difficult to delivery your spam.
In anti-spam circles, the act has long been known as the YOU-CAN-SPAM act for precisely the reasons that you state: it overturned all existing anti-spam laws (which were far more effective) and gave spammers a free pass to spam you.
They have to stop if you use the unsub link, but let's face it, after years of unsub links that just confirm that you have a working address, no one would ever trust an unsub link in a spam, even one that purported to be CAN-SPAM compliant.
Nor should they. I will tell you exactly what happens if you use the working unsub link. They drop you from the list for that exact pill which will get you 3+ inches in length and at least an inch in girth. Of course, they also have now confirmed that your address is working and being read, so you get on the list for the patch which gives you 1 - 3 inches in length and a substantial increase in girth. Or the simple, effective exercises, because as everyone knows, pumps, pills, patches, and surgery don't work. And of course, then you'll need an online bored housewife dating site with which to use your newly enhanced manh00d.
CAN-SPAM has done absolutely nothing to can spam; indeed, it allows spammers to operate with near-impunity and it's the reason Scott the Snot Richter walked out of court in New York recently with a slap on the wrist (yes, to an enterprise spammer like Richter, a $40,000 fine and no jail time is a slap on the wrist, and was a great disappointment to the DA).
It's really unfair of the people who WTFA to blame law enforcement; CAN-SPAM was bought and paid for by the DMA, who obviously owns the finest politicians money can buy. CAN-SPAM is functioning *exactly* as intended. If you read the details of CAN-SPAM, it is impossible to believe that it's authors were not precisely aware that they were legalizing spamming. Prior to CAN-SPAM, there was no federal law stating whether spam itself was legal or illegal. There were plenty of state laws that said much of it wasn't, and no state law that said it was. Now we have a federal law which explicitly legalizes spamming and destroys all state anti-spam laws Accident? Cluesslessness? Not a chance.
CAN-SPAM has been very good for companies like mine, which provide services to keep spam out of companies' mail systems. Business is better than ever for us, and I'm sure our competitors are seeing similar business conditions. It has been pretty good for spammers, too, since they can carry out business as usual and do so without fear of prosecution or even, in most cases, of civil suit - something they could never do before.
We get Starbucks in our office coffee machine. And I can plug my Thinkpad running Debian into the network and do a good bit of my work on that instead of the company-issue XP box.
It's not a perk, but I became a squatter in an empty office and so far nobody's kicked me out:-) My initial pretext was that I needed to be in there to train some new staff who will be working in one of our field offices (that was actually true; I couldn't be effective in training if I was constantly walking back to my cubicle on the other side of the building). Then I got my phone moved because there was no phone in that office. The new members of my team are taking up their duties in the field next week, so they've now departed for home, but I'm still in the office, with all my books and my phone and everything.
I won't get to keep it forever b/c my whole team is slated to move to another floor of the building and that will mean a return to cubicles for all of us, but in the meantime I have a nice view out of a big window, and when I need quiet to concentrate, I have a door that I can close.
I don't actually care about having an office, but I do care about being able to see outside from my desk and I do care about having a quiet place to concentrate when I need it. If I had a cubicle with a window (yes, to the outside) I'd happily spend most of my time there, and if there were offices (even without windows (and preferably without Windows)) that I could go to and use when I really needed quiet, that would be fine.
To answer the question requires the answers to those questions.
Is typing on a typewriter (on which I learned to type, showing my age) a necessary skill? No, not for most people. It is if you are a legal secretary or (maybe) a paralegal, because law offices do use typewriters for some things even today, but not for most of us. It's been at least a decade since I've even *seen* a typewriter.
Is typing a necessary skill on a computer? Yes, absolutely. Even if you go into a line of work in which computer use if rare enough that you can get by with hunt-and-peck two-finger typing (OK, my dad does that to this day and he's a retired systems programmer, so I suppose that's a counter-argument), you will need to type a lot of things in high school and college. Doing that with two-fingers won't get you a lower grade as long as you finish on time, but it will make the time investment many times greater if you can't type. I don't type terribly well myself, but even my typing is many times faster than my dad's two-finger work.
Like most people on/., both my work and my main hobby involve typing lots of stuff into a computer. If I were unable to type, it would be really difficult to keep up with either. Even if you're not an IT worker, being able to type is a basic skill for just about any office worker today.
I also made an interesting observation at work recently. I'm the tech lead on the email security team at, well, an email security company and recently hired and trained several new team members. The new team members with a primarily *nix background type faster than those with a primarily Win/Mac background. Coincidence? Perhaps. I'm sure there are many counter-examples. However, I do suspect that greater amount of time *nix people spend with their hands on the keyboard rather than the mouse may have something to do with it. The ones who came from a Windows background can't stop using the mouse, even for things that are far faster from the keyboard. They're just conditioned that way.
UPSes and redundant power supplies are great, but as the grandparent metioned, a bad power supply can corrupt your data. That's true even in a redundant-power machine.
A friend of mine once lost all the data on two drives (RAID 1) in a country with extremely reliable power (Japan; even during typhoons I never once had a power outage in 8 years) when the UPS suddenly died one day and dumped the whole battery load into the computer. The white smoke escaped from everything.
If your data is really valuable, offline storage is not a luxury, it's a necessity. Get a DLT drive (or a changer, if you can afford it). Offsite is easy. Keep at least one backup set at your office. If your house burns down, you're covered. If something so bad happens that it destroys both your house and your office, you have bigger problems than the lost data:-)
I got 70% right because I labeled 3 legit ones as frauds, however, I can state for a fact that on the test, they cheated. As a result, I chose to err on the side of caution as well, calling anything doubtful a fraud.
How did they cheat? If you view the source (something we all can do with an actual email to assist in determining its authenticity), you will find that the original links have been removed completely; there is only a Javascript mouseover that shows you the URL of the real site (if you have Javascript enabled; I surf with it off). Thus, they are unfairly stacking the deck against you in a way that the phishers never could.
I will also point out that the three I erroneously called fraud were from sources that I do not use and with which I am unfamiliar. If I were, for example, actually a Hotmail user, that would not get by me. Or if they had not munged the source, it wouldn't have gotten by me, either.
Take my geek points if you want. What kind of points shall we take from them for cheating on the test?
Actually, no, I don't think PDF is a graphic file format. More to the point, I *know* it is not a graphic file format.
PDFs are full-text searchable. Not on Linux, perhaps, but that's an issue of the tools we have available on this platform; PDFs are, however, searchable. When was the last time you came across, say, a BMP of a scanned document that was full-text searchable?
If you really see nothing in a DOS prompt, that's not in any evidence that the PDF is a graphics file; it's just evidence of the limitations of a DOS prompt. Take a look at a PDF on a *machine and you'll see what I mean. The markup information is readable as ASCII; the content is apparently stored as hex. If JAWS can't read PDFs, that's not because PDFs are graphics files; it's just because JAWS can't read PDFs.
As the earlier poster stated, this is something that really should be taken up with Adobe. Certainly, there is no overwhelming technical reason why PDFs cannot be made readable by text to speech software; they are no uglier on the inside than, say, an MS Word file. If those can be read, then PDFs can be made readable as well. There may be patent or licensing issues involved that need to be ironed out for JAWS to be PDF-capable, or Adobe may need to be persuaded that there is some kind of business case (even if it hinges on intangibles) for making Acrobat Reader natively capable of doing PDF - speech rendering. Or maybe the authors of JAWS just need to be convinced that it's worth doing.
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And the driver of the Hemi looked upon the Fords and the Chevies and the GTOs in his rear view mirror (had to add that one, a friend of mine is the second owner of a '69 Ram Air IV Judge) and he saw that it was good.
It will be bad Hollywood movies.
If you don't believe me, try to find a copy of "The Guns of El Chupacabra." "Gigli" seems like an Academy Award winner in comparison.
I could only stand it for about half an hour, and that even though the executive producer is a friend of mine and gave me a numbered promotional copy. Some of the music is actually pretty good, but they should have just recorded the bands and fired everyone else.
Only 1997? Noob ;-)
The version posted here had more of a unixy spin put on it, but the the "Wife 1.0" story predates the IBM PC. I don't know if it originated in the CP/M world, or Apple, or if it goes back even farther than that, but it was already quite old in 1997.
I lived in Japan for eight years, and you're quite right, there's nothing especially unique about this; it's basically just a Tamagotchi for people who are old enough to jerk off.
;-) However, if anyone else does, you saw the prior art here :-)
So, how to make it unique?
Just a little glue. The pieces are already all in Japan.
One of the many things that Japan is (in)famous for, and perhaps wishes it wasnt, is imekura (image clubs) and telephone clubs. An imekura is where you go for koosu-purei (course play) - sexual fantasy vignettes. For everyone salaryman who has ever wanted to be a train groper but had either too much decency or too little nerve, they have an answer: a train car mockup complete with an OL (or a young woman in a high school uniform, if that's your thing). They also have OL fantasies, nurses, the usual suspects. SM at some of them.
Then there are the telephone clubs. The girls are often high school girls, the customers are not high school boys. Go to the telephone club, use the phone, maybe get to make a date to meet up with a girl. If you meet up, money and bodily fluids will be exchanged.
In other words, Japan has no shortage of young women, high school girls (and even some jr. high school girls) willing to put out for money, either in a direct cash transaction or in exchange for expensive designer bags and such.
Enter (no pun intended) the virtual girlfriend.
You play the game. You buy her presents, do and say all the right things, etc. If you've been very good, a real, live meatspace girl (who has been getting her cut from all these virtual presents for the virtual GF) shows up.
She doesn't know your real name. You don't know hers. But she does know your history with the virtual GF and takes over the persona for a little while in meatspace. Maybe she'll go to some function with you. Maybe have dinner or go to a movie, have a meatspace date with the virtual girlfriend. Or maybe you just head straight to the love hotel, which is what she really showed up for: real-life sex with the virtual girlfriend. Whether this would require some additional presents (most likely the foldable kind that go in your wallet) or not would have to be worked out. If, or how much,she needed would probably depend on what kind of cut she was getting from those virtual presents.
Is this a troll or something? Heck no. Anyone who has lived in Japan for a while (and BTW, I love the place; none of this is trash-talking Japan, I'm just describing some things that are there. No, I don't go to those places; I'm married) knows that combining the virtual GF game with a meatspace temporary GF who just shows up for a no-strings-attached turn at a love hotel would be a huge hit. Not with the whole population, and maybe not long term, but for a year or two (maybe more), they'd make a killing.
Steps will have to be taken to ensure that neither the virtual BF (hereafter referred to as "the john") nor the virtual GF (hereafter referred to as "the ho") can find out the other's identity (nothing could stop the john and the ho from sharing this info if they wanted to; the important point is just to prevent the other person from knowing who your are without your consent), but the plan itself is fully workable.
And I won't even try to patent it
When did I stop trusting sponsored research?
This sounds like a "When did you stop beating your wife?' question. I've never trusted sponsored research, where "sponsored" is defined as "paid for by a private company which stands to benefit from the findings of said research" and "research" is not used in the sense of basic research, but the sense of "market research" or "opinion poll." Such "sponsored research" is tainted by the very fact of who sponsors it.
After all, when was the last time you saw "sponsored research" that found the sponsor's product/solution to be a pile of crap compared to a competing one?
Coming up with such a result would be the best way to ensure that:
1) It would be suppressed and buried forever in the sponsor's biggest and most secret safe, or just destroyed outright;
2) You'd never again be used for research by that sponsor, even if your findings were true and accurate. They weren't sponsoring you to find the truth, they were sponsoring you to find that their product or solution was the best, and you were expected to choose/manipulate data and load questions such that the desired conclusion would be "proven."
Sponsored research should more properly be called an extended press release.
Actually, that's not the case. Those rights are built on Judeo-Christian concepts of morals. Many, but not all, of our laws are built on those rights and morals. Greatly different cultures may have substantially different ideas of what is more and immoral, and their laws reflect that. Take a look at Islamic Sharia law for a good example of this.
A poster a few replies down advances the idea that not all of our laws are based on ethics, and cites seatbelt laws as an example, with the justification for them being that it unfairly burdens the emergency response system. The argument seems to be that this is based on pragmatics rather than ethics, but we can also argue that it's based on ethics/morals, because another motivation of the seatbelt law is that it unfairly burdens the taxpayers standing behind the emergency response and emergency medical systems to have to care for someone who drives without a seatbelt and is thereby much more seriously injured than he would otherwise be in an accident. That is, it's immoral/unethical/unfair to put the burden of your carelessness on society as a whole. Another way to address the situation would be for emergency crews to arrive at the scene, find you weren't wearing your seatbelt, then just pack up and drive away. Or to rescue you and take you to the hospital, but to bill you and/or your family for the full cost of the rescue.
Those measures are, of course, quite harsh and society would likely deem them unethical as well, so the compromise is to have mandatory seatbelt use laws and an enforcement mechanism for them (being fined if you are caught).
The same poster does have a good argument for pragmatics in the case of it not being illegal to lie to your mother, even though society generally considers that to be unethical. There is no such law at least in part because it would be utterly unenforceable, and even if it were enforceable, it would so clog the court system as to cause it to break down and be unable to handle serious crimes. Thus, society sometimes pragmatically judges that something which is unetihical or immoral ought not to be illegal because the law would be utterly unenforceable.
Well, having Bill Clinton in office was certainly helpful to Al Qaeda (Clinton was overall a far better president than I expected him to be, and that whole impeachment deal was a crock), but he was pretty soft on terrorism. Lob a missile here, a missile there, do no real damage. What was needed was a decisive reaction to Al Qaeda way back, which should have included an invasion of Afghanistan during Clinton's first term.
The last real war-fighting Democrats we had were FDR and Harry Truman. It's true that Johnson is the one who really ramped up US involvement in Viet Nam, however, he A) Didn't really want to do it, and B) Did it rather poorly. If the military had been given the mission in Viet Nam that they were given in Iraq (invade the country, shatter its army, and invest the capital, followed by the rest of the country), that mission would have been achieved. Since they were given an impossible mission, however, it had a predictable result.
John Kerry would no real war-fighting president. He's the kind of Democrat bin Laden wants in the oval office. You can bet he sure doesn't want Bush re-elected, and that alone is adequate reason to vote for Bush.
Yes, I know Kerry fought in Viet Nam and was decorated there, and Bush was in only in the Air Guard and never had an overseas tour. However, neither of those makes a person a war-fighting president or not. Indeed, I don't much care what Kerry, Bush, or anyone else did during the Viet Nam era, and neither should the rest of the voters. We should care what they are doing and seem capable of doing right now, and that's why I support Bush.
I think it's a shame that neither Colin Powell nor Condoleeza Rice are running for president; I believe them both to be far more qualified than either Kerry or Bush.
And if anyone on the Bush campaign is reading this, you need to jettison Cheney and put Rice on the ticket as VP. Really. Not only would she be a marvelously better VP than Cheney, she would easily beat any other contender to become Bush's successor in four years,
The terrorists are winning? Really? Maybe I've just missed the news, but I've been under the impression that Al Qaeda has not managed to mount on attack in the United States since the WTC attack.
The reason they haven't been able to do so is quite clear: because we are led by a highly capable president who knows how to fight a war and win it, many Al Qaeda members are now in US custody (good) or dead (better) and we have a lot of terrorists who would otherwise be trying to attack us at home or abroad tied up in Iraq, where they are dealing with a professional army and dying. This is a Good Thing.
If you take a look a little further back in history to WW II, you'll find that one of the major reasons we not only won the war but emerged as the dominant superpower when the shooting was done is that we made sure the combat took place on enemy soil. Hawaii (then a territory) was the only part of the United States to see major combat, and that happened only once.
We are quite correct to be following that pattern again. Let the fighting be in the terrorists' backyard, not ours. History books will quite possibly look back on this war and say that it was indeed WW III, as some commentators believe. And they will look back and see that one of the big reasons we decisively won it is because we fought it on our enemies' ground, not ours.
It is for that reason that President Bush will be getting my vote in November, something that I would otherwise not be inclined to give him. Certainly, I differ with him on a wide range of policies, despite the fact that I have been a registered Republican ever since I was old enough to vote. What we need most of all is a tough, war-fighting president who is willing to go it alone if necessary and who is not afraid to take the war to our enemies and kill them where they are. We have such a president. Everything that Kerry has said on this issue has convinced me that if he is capable of doing that at all (which I have doubts about), he is a good bit less capable of doing it than is our current president.
As for the issue of airline no-fly lists, they are certainly screwed up, and seem to go on nothing but a name. The Ted Kennedy on the list was not the Ted Kennedy who sits in the Senate, I've read, but just someone with a pretty similar name.
However, those lists are not the government's doing. The airlines maintain their own lists, and there is no central authority and maybe even no central list. There have been calls for there to be a single list, run by DHS, but that has not yet been done. I think it will clear up a lot of the confusion if they make such a list.
Actually, Port Chicago has been made a national memorial:
http://www.nps.gov/poch/index.htm
A pretty big deal actually was made of the explosion; there was a full board of inquiry and it did result in some procedural changes to the way ammunition was handled, as well as the reduction, still in 1944, of the number of blacks at ammunition depots reduced to 30% of staff. At Port Chicago, all of the loaders were black, only the officers were white.
Shamefully, the handful loaders who survived were court-martialed for mutiny because they refused to load ammunition until safety changes were made. While they were released from prison in 1946, well short of the long sentences they were given, that doesn't change the wrong that was done to them.
More info on Port Chicago is here:
http://www.usmm.org/portchicago.html
I don't know if I would recommend it to others or not, but one of the smartest things I've ever done in an interview situation is essentially the same thing the grandparent did - telling the mostly clueless HR person conducting the interview "To be honest, I don't think we have anything more to discuss" and walking out. I was voluntarily unemployed at the time, too, having resigned from my previous position without another one secured. (No, that wasn't a dumb move; I had my reasons and it turned out right.) What made me walk out was partly the clue level, or lack thereof; partly it was finding that their idea of an interview consisted not of an interview but of sitting down and taking a test (prime sign of a screwed-up corporate culture combined with a clue level low enough that no one can tell whether technical interviewees know what they are doing or not; I have never before encountered such a thing at a non-government job), and partly when she brought up that they were looking to pay about $25K per year (this was for a *nix admin job in LA). I already had my mind halfway out the door even before she mentioned that, and my feet got up and followed at that point.
:-)
Very shortly thereafter, I got a call from the company at which I am now very happily employed. It wasn't from HR. It was from the head of the development department, calling to set up a time for a telephone interview. That was then followed up with an in-person interview, and shortly thereafter, an offer letter. The first time I met, or even spoke with, anyone from HR was my first day on the job. That's how life ought to be.
And do you know what? Even our HR people have clue. I think they're great. Now how often do you hear anyone say that?
Less than a year into this job, I've moved up to be a team leader, and now I make hiring decisions myself. And we still do it the way it was meant to be: we find our own applicants, look at *all* resumes, interview the best out of those, and let HR know which one we want to hire. Then they send out an offer letter and a drug test packet.
I still shake my head when I think of that other place, and I'm so happy I walked out on them. I know that may seem like a rash move, but really, if a job is such a poor fit that you just couldn't stand working there (especially if what makes it a poor fit is clueslessness), unless you are literally staring hunger in the face and have nothing to fall back on, you're better of walking out. Even if you have to move in with you parents for a little while to save money while you job hunt, do it. It beats taking a horrible job at a horrible company. Those kind of jobs just bring you down. They bring your attitude down. They often even bring your skillset down. And they may bring your chances of getting a better job down, too.
Hold out if you can. Move if you have to. Get into a job that is right for you, at a company that is right for you (and for which you are right, too) and you will prosper. You'll love to go to work. Even when the hours are long (this weekend I will have my first full days off in about two months, woohoo!) it won't seem bad.
Being rehabilitated doesn't imply working in IT. In fact, he might do better to get out of it anyway. He's young and can train for anything. He could retrain as a plumbe when he gets out, and if he's any good at it, he'll make more than most people in IT.
He might also want to look into being a mechanic, if he has the talent for it. Mechanics will need to know more and more about dealing with computer systems on vehicles every year.
There are lots of things he can do when he gets out. It doesn't have to be on computers. I'm in the email security field, and I will tell you flatly that there is no way I would consider hiring him. It's not a matter of the fact that he went to prison; it's a matter of the fact that I could not trust him.
If I were running a plumbing company, it wouldn't matter. But of course, I'd never let him near the office computers.
I'll get modded OT for this (or who knows? Maybe some will find it interesting enough to reward me even though it's OT), and you might want to skip this one if you care about topicality.
.com era, much of it by companies with absolutely unsustainable business models, was guaranteed to created this kind of a glut.
Have I tried to get a job lately? Well, if last fall counts as lately, yes. After voluntarily leaving my previous position, I had a new job offer in less than two months, and I only applied for a few positions before receiving that offer. Less than a year into this job, I have been promoted to the leader of my team and have recruited several new members.
I've hired four people in the last two months and will be hiring a fifth in the next month or so. Those four were all new positions. The one open now is to replace someone who was recruited away.
There's your anecdotal proof. For statistical proof, you might want to check on new job creation. It's happening. Not as fast as hoped for, but it's happening. The economy isn't shrinking, it's growing, and new job creation is proof of that. Does that guarantee you'll get a job (if you're unemployed now)? No. Getting a job, even in good times, means being in the right place at the right time with the right skillset. IT isn't the greatest skillset to have right now. Biotech is a much better one. The competition is rough, and if you're out of work I do feel for you, but there really are jobs out there. If you're in LA and need a job, post a link to your resume in reply to this; I'll take a look. No guarantees, but I do have a position open and I will read your resume.
Want more proof? The Fed just tightened rates again. They only do that when the economy is growing.
Yes, things are tough. Yes, there is still an over-supply of workers in the IT job market in many, if not all, parts of the United States. This is partly due to offshoring, and partly due to the fact that there are just simply too many people in the IT job market right now. The hiring craze that went on during the
However, none of that is Bush's fault. He wasn't even president when the things that caused this situation were happening. It was already a done deal on the day he was sworn in.
Likewise, it's not Clinton's fault, either. He wasn't out there holding a gun to people's heads and forcing them to create impossible companies with ridiculous business models. Nor was he acting as a Silicon Valley Robin Hood, stealing from the rich VC firms and giving to the poor dot-com CEOs. They did that all on their own. Was Clinton responsible for stopping it? No. He was not even legally empowered to stop it.
The economy doesn't boom during times of war, although it booms for certain industries. If you have experience in, say, manufacturing artillery shells, you might find this a good time to be looking for work. War is a drag on the economy, although in the short term it can break a recession, as happened when WW II broke out. The boom, however, came *after* WW II, when millions of people got out of the military with money to spend. Pent-up civilian demand (so much was rationed during the war and cars were not manufactured at all in the United States) also contributed to the post-war boom,
Also, so far, the war we are engaged in now (and we will be engaged in this war for decades to come, regardless of who is elected president in November) has not been one that burns a lot of big-ticket items. Losses of tanks and aircraft have been few and far between. We are fighting an enemy with little ability to destroy either of those. We've probably lost more aircraft to accidents than to enemy fire.
WW II made war industries boom. Ships and aircraft were being built and lost at tremendous rates. Huge amounts of new military hardware was needed. So far in this war, there hasn't been such a need for new stuff. It's being fought with equipment the military already has. The only stuff they
Mitnick is a cunt?
Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. Cunt is a crude term for pussy. OK, pussy is a crude term too, but cunt is cruder.
Pussy is something you stick your dick in. Or at least, something I stick mine in.
Now you say Mitnick is a cunt. Are you implying that you want to stick your dick in Mitnick? Well, gee, thanks for sharing, but I think I'll just stick to pussy if it's all the same to you. And yes, I'm fairly certain that Mitnick != pussy.
You don't know much about class action suits, do you? Google a bit, then come back and tell us if you can find evidence of a class action lawsuit where anyone but the lawyers won. I think you know which way I'm betting on that.
I don't post pictures of my kids on any publicly accessible site for exactly that reason. They are either sent by email directly to family and friends, or put on a password-protected site (mostly the former; password-protected doesn't mean uncrackable).
Unless I'm totally missing something, the CAN-SPAM act does not require you to include a notice that states you are CAN-SPAM compliant, so there is no contradiction here.
Some spammers experimented with such a notice, perhaps believing it might fool people into thinking they were legit, but they were quickly disabused of that idea.
DMA members obey the law?! BAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Good thing I didn't have a mouthful of soda when I read that.
If you said "Some DMA members follow the law" I might go along with that, but the DMA is also rife with "enterprise" spammers, boiler room operators, fax blasters, and the like. CAN-SPAM is exactly the kind of law DMA would like, not because they follow or want to follow the law, but because they want the things they do anyway made legal, so that they can claim to be above-board. This is exactly what CAN-SPAM did for them.
CAN-SPAM has been very good for spammers. It hinders their operations not at all, while giving them a tremendous legal shield against state laws that were starting to give them real problems.
CAN-SPAM was supported by DMA and the spammers, and was opposed by the anti-spam side. Looking at it that way pretty much tells you all you need to know.
CAN-SPAM was a boon to spammers and has been a real problem for those who would stop them. It hasn't been bad for those of us who get paid to keep spam out, either, since spammers who might have been prosecuted under existing anti-spam laws are now practically untouchable.
Imagine if an association of serial rapists were able to lobby Congress to pass law that says it isn't rape if, after you break into the victim's apartment, hold her at knife-point and rape her, you give her a card with an address with a notice that says she does not wish to be raped in the future, and will thereafter not be raped by you. That does not, of course, constrain other rapists.
That's exactly what CAN-SPAM does for spammers and mailboxes. It gives the spammer a free shot at you for each mailing list. If you unsubscribe and they are being technically compliant, they will remove you from that list. None of their other ones, of course. You'll be marked as a live one on those.
If that dodge doesn't work, there's another. You send a letter saying you want to be unsubbed. They unsub you. Then they sell or trade a list of all those known good addresses who unsubbed to some other spammer, getting his list in return. Bang! They are in compliance and you are still in spam. A few weeks or months later, they repeat the list-swap hokey-pokey.
What's different now than before? Nothing, except state attorneys general who might have been able to prosecute or at least sue them before are now barred from doing so because CAN-SPAM legalized this behavior and struck down all state anti-spam laws.
Like I said, bought and paid for.
Perhaps that should be amended to read "the majority of people that use software on Win, Mac, and other non-free operating systems." Of them, it is certainly true that most of them don't give a flying fsck about the license, and a good number of them are quiet willing to use warez, from which we can reasonably assume they don't care about compliance with the license either.
Among Linux users (and BSD users as well, although Linux users tend to be more "excitable" on this point), however, there are a great many people who care a great deal about the license. I sometimes used proprietary software if there is no acceptable alternative under a free license, but like a lot of people who use Linux, I will often choose a GPled (or other free-licensed) product over a proprietary one even if the proprietary one is better. The Free one just has to be "good enough" and under active development so that it is improving. Put another way, many of us will accept software that is far rougher and in a developmental stage as long as it is FOSS. If it's proprietary, we're going to demand more. Partly because of licensing and partly because if I'm paying for it, I should be able to reasonably expect that I am not paying to be a beta tester. Some of my gripe with proprietary software is that I have often found that no matter what the marketing spin says, it's so rough that in fact I *have* just paid to be a beta tester. When I want to beta stuff, I will volunteer. I certainly won't pay for the "privilege."
So yes, actually, many people do indeed give a flying fsck about the license on the software they use.
Yes, the fact that they are going to sell a proprietary version is precisely what will make it different for some people (and MySQL would be different for those people, too).
A developer who writes code and releases it under the GPL and only under the GPL and wants it to remain that way would not be likely to assign the copyright to Novell.
If it were me, I would grant *them* a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to use the code under the GPL. Maybe I would even grant them that license to use it in a proprietary program as well, as long as it was in the GPLed one too.
But sign over my copyright and then have *them* give *me* a perpetual royalty-free license to use my own code? Umm, I don't think so. Not unless I work for Novell developing Evolution code, in which case they already own it and don't have to give me any license at all.
Oh, yes. I see evidence of that all the time.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm an analyst at an email security company. We are very successful at filtering phishing scams, ads for enlargement products, pr0n, the usual suspects.
At least once a day, someone reports a phishing scam for eBay or their bank as being a mistakenly filtered legitimate mail. I always wonder if they did that before or after they went to the site and handed over their password and userid?
Several times, I've seen filtered mail from enlargement pill operations that was reported as mistakenly filtered, but which was very obviously not spam. It was real mail, sent from their actual mail servers, no obfuscation, to the person in question. Of course, you're never going to deliver anything selling VigRX through our network. The last time this happened was just a couple weeks ago, and I have to ask "How dumb was this guy?"
I mean, not only did he buy enlargement pills in the first place, but when the follow-up mail was filtered, he reported it as a mistake. Now, he has given total strangers his name, his company name, his work email address, and told them that he thinks he has a small dick and that he was dumb enough to fall for an enlargement pill spam. He's lucky that I'm a very ethical person and just deleted that mail from the queue. Somebody could very easily blackmail him that way. Even if a person didn't blackmail him, how much fun would it be if everyone at your company knew that you bought VigRX? :-)
Like I said, he's lucky that I'm ethical.
Yeah, what he said.
I work for a large email security company, and before CAN-SPAM was even passed into law, it was obvious that it would be a total balls-up from the standpoint of preventing spam. Our network processes over 100 million messages per day, the great majority of it spam. Almost none of that spam contains a CAN-SPAM compliant notice, and one good reason it doesn't is the few spammers who tried that found our right away that having such a notice makes it very difficult to delivery your spam.
In anti-spam circles, the act has long been known as the YOU-CAN-SPAM act for precisely the reasons that you state: it overturned all existing anti-spam laws (which were far more effective) and gave spammers a free pass to spam you.
They have to stop if you use the unsub link, but let's face it, after years of unsub links that just confirm that you have a working address, no one would ever trust an unsub link in a spam, even one that purported to be CAN-SPAM compliant.
Nor should they. I will tell you exactly what happens if you use the working unsub link. They drop you from the list for that exact pill which will get you 3+ inches in length and at least an inch in girth. Of course, they also have now confirmed that your address is working and being read, so you get on the list for the patch which gives you 1 - 3 inches in length and a substantial increase in girth. Or the simple, effective exercises, because as everyone knows, pumps, pills, patches, and surgery don't work. And of course, then you'll need an online bored housewife dating site with which to use your newly enhanced manh00d.
CAN-SPAM has done absolutely nothing to can spam; indeed, it allows spammers to operate with near-impunity and it's the reason Scott the Snot Richter walked out of court in New York recently with a slap on the wrist (yes, to an enterprise spammer like Richter, a $40,000 fine and no jail time is a slap on the wrist, and was a great disappointment to the DA).
It's really unfair of the people who WTFA to blame law enforcement; CAN-SPAM was bought and paid for by the DMA, who obviously owns the finest politicians money can buy. CAN-SPAM is functioning *exactly* as intended. If you read the details of CAN-SPAM, it is impossible to believe that it's authors were not precisely aware that they were legalizing spamming. Prior to CAN-SPAM, there was no federal law stating whether spam itself was legal or illegal. There were plenty of state laws that said much of it wasn't, and no state law that said it was. Now we have a federal law which explicitly legalizes spamming and destroys all state anti-spam laws Accident? Cluesslessness? Not a chance.
CAN-SPAM has been very good for companies like mine, which provide services to keep spam out of companies' mail systems. Business is better than ever for us, and I'm sure our competitors are seeing similar business conditions. It has been pretty good for spammers, too, since they can carry out business as usual and do so without fear of prosecution or even, in most cases, of civil suit - something they could never do before.
We get Starbucks in our office coffee machine. And I can plug my Thinkpad running Debian into the network and do a good bit of my work on that instead of the company-issue XP box.
:-) My initial pretext was that I needed to be in there to train some new staff who will be working in one of our field offices (that was actually true; I couldn't be effective in training if I was constantly walking back to my cubicle on the other side of the building). Then I got my phone moved because there was no phone in that office. The new members of my team are taking up their duties in the field next week, so they've now departed for home, but I'm still in the office, with all my books and my phone and everything.
It's not a perk, but I became a squatter in an empty office and so far nobody's kicked me out
I won't get to keep it forever b/c my whole team is slated to move to another floor of the building and that will mean a return to cubicles for all of us, but in the meantime I have a nice view out of a big window, and when I need quiet to concentrate, I have a door that I can close.
I don't actually care about having an office, but I do care about being able to see outside from my desk and I do care about having a quiet place to concentrate when I need it. If I had a cubicle with a window (yes, to the outside) I'd happily spend most of my time there, and if there were offices (even without windows (and preferably without Windows)) that I could go to and use when I really needed quiet, that would be fine.
To answer the question requires the answers to those questions.
/., both my work and my main hobby involve typing lots of stuff into a computer. If I were unable to type, it would be really difficult to keep up with either. Even if you're not an IT worker, being able to type is a basic skill for just about any office worker today.
Is typing on a typewriter (on which I learned to type, showing my age) a necessary skill? No, not for most people. It is if you are a legal secretary or (maybe) a paralegal, because law offices do use typewriters for some things even today, but not for most of us. It's been at least a decade since I've even *seen* a typewriter.
Is typing a necessary skill on a computer? Yes, absolutely. Even if you go into a line of work in which computer use if rare enough that you can get by with hunt-and-peck two-finger typing (OK, my dad does that to this day and he's a retired systems programmer, so I suppose that's a counter-argument), you will need to type a lot of things in high school and college. Doing that with two-fingers won't get you a lower grade as long as you finish on time, but it will make the time investment many times greater if you can't type. I don't type terribly well myself, but even my typing is many times faster than my dad's two-finger work.
Like most people on
I also made an interesting observation at work recently. I'm the tech lead on the email security team at, well, an email security company and recently hired and trained several new team members. The new team members with a primarily *nix background type faster than those with a primarily Win/Mac background. Coincidence? Perhaps. I'm sure there are many counter-examples. However, I do suspect that greater amount of time *nix people spend with their hands on the keyboard rather than the mouse may have something to do with it. The ones who came from a Windows background can't stop using the mouse, even for things that are far faster from the keyboard. They're just conditioned that way.
UPSes and redundant power supplies are great, but as the grandparent metioned, a bad power supply can corrupt your data. That's true even in a redundant-power machine.
:-)
A friend of mine once lost all the data on two drives (RAID 1) in a country with extremely reliable power (Japan; even during typhoons I never once had a power outage in 8 years) when the UPS suddenly died one day and dumped the whole battery load into the computer. The white smoke escaped from everything.
If your data is really valuable, offline storage is not a luxury, it's a necessity. Get a DLT drive (or a changer, if you can afford it). Offsite is easy. Keep at least one backup set at your office. If your house burns down, you're covered. If something so bad happens that it destroys both your house and your office, you have bigger problems than the lost data
I got 70% right because I labeled 3 legit ones as frauds, however, I can state for a fact that on the test, they cheated. As a result, I chose to err on the side of caution as well, calling anything doubtful a fraud.
How did they cheat? If you view the source (something we all can do with an actual email to assist in determining its authenticity), you will find that the original links have been removed completely; there is only a Javascript mouseover that shows you the URL of the real site (if you have Javascript enabled; I surf with it off). Thus, they are unfairly stacking the deck against you in a way that the phishers never could.
I will also point out that the three I erroneously called fraud were from sources that I do not use and with which I am unfamiliar. If I were, for example, actually a Hotmail user, that would not get by me. Or if they had not munged the source, it wouldn't have gotten by me, either.
Take my geek points if you want. What kind of points shall we take from them for cheating on the test?
Actually, no, I don't think PDF is a graphic file format. More to the point, I *know* it is not a graphic file format.
PDFs are full-text searchable. Not on Linux, perhaps, but that's an issue of the tools we have available on this platform; PDFs are, however, searchable. When was the last time you came across, say, a BMP of a scanned document that was full-text searchable?
If you really see nothing in a DOS prompt, that's not in any evidence that the PDF is a graphics file; it's just evidence of the limitations of a DOS prompt. Take a look at a PDF on a *machine and you'll see what I mean. The markup information is readable as ASCII; the content is apparently stored as hex.
If JAWS can't read PDFs, that's not because PDFs are graphics files; it's just because JAWS can't read PDFs.
As the earlier poster stated, this is something that really should be taken up with Adobe. Certainly, there is no overwhelming technical reason why PDFs cannot be made readable by text to speech software; they are no uglier on the inside than, say, an MS Word file. If those can be read, then PDFs can be made readable as well. There may be patent or licensing issues involved that need to be ironed out for JAWS to be PDF-capable, or Adobe may need to be persuaded that there is some kind of business case (even if it hinges on intangibles) for making Acrobat Reader natively capable of doing PDF - speech rendering. Or maybe the authors of JAWS just need to be convinced that it's worth doing.
Cheers.