We have found a disturbing trend among car owners, when they no longer want a car they are not just storing it on a shelf to collect dust.
Used car dealers are actively working to divert customers shopping for new cars into their used car lots by prominently placing used car ads on websites and newspapers.
This is affecting the quality and diversity of new cars available to car dealers.
We believe it is in our members' best interests to de-link their websites from dealers who sell used cars. There's no good reason for car makers to be complicit in undermining their own sales. It just takes a minute, and it's the right thing to do.
I found a link for a form letter http://www.digitalconsumer.org/fax.html
As a constituent and an ardent consumer of digital media, I write today to urge you to support a Consumer Technology Bill of Rights, and to express my concerns about the recent trend toward allowing one-sided copyright laws to eliminate my Fair Use rights.
Historically, our country has enjoyed a balance between the rights of copyright holders and the rights of citizens who legally acquire copyrighted works. Generally speaking, rights holders have the exclusive right to distribute and profit from artistic works. Consumers like me who legally acquire these works are free to use them in most noncommercial ways. Unfortunately, this balance has shifted dramatically in recent years, much to the detriment of consumers.
To prevent further erosion of my rights, I would like to add my voice to DigitalConsumer.org in calling for a "consumer technology bill of rights". It is simply an attempt to assert positively the public's personal use rights. These rights are not new; they are historic rights granted in previous legislation and court rulings that have over the last four years been whittled away.
Under the guise of "preventing illegal copying" I believe Hollywood is vilifying their customers - people like me - and using the legislative process to create new lines of business at my expense. Their goal is to create a legal system that takes away my long-cherished personal use rights and then to charge me an additional fee to regain those rights!
Copy protection, especially to prevent overseas piracy for illicit sale, is an important issue. But before Congress considers yet another change in the law at the behest of the copyright holders, I urge you in the strongest possible terms to protect my Fair Use rights.
Thank you very much for your attention to this important matter.
I've been through the one at Norfolk, we spent a day offloading sensitive electronic gear. Mostly the 4 or 5 PCs on board, weapons and sonar screens. Most of the electricial equipment on Navy ships are of an old design and wouldn't be affected by this. The Navy believes if it is less than 20 years old it must be some new-fangled stuff and not tested enough for their liking.
Why most scanners still need constant definition updates and can not do good heuristic scanning is beyond me.
Oh wait...that's right most companies charge for yearly updates.
Why make a better product that wouldn't require constant updates when you can make an inferior product and charge yearly for the ability to perform updates?
I guess AV companies also follow the Microsoft model.
I run Scanmail on my Exchange server. The virus definitions get updated daily. I thought this was good enough, then "I Love You" hit us. I had gotten my updates that morning before the vendor had issued a fix for it.
Blocking the attachments by extension and not blocking.doc and.xls was a conscious decision on my part. It gives me piece of mind that I'll block most of the viruses before a definition is issued. No one even notices the attachment types that I block, and they seem to be the easiest ones to exploit.
This virus wasted about 5 minutes of my time. I read an article about what it did, then the next day I deleted about 150 copies of this that got quarantined on our company's Exchange server.
I use a virus scanner on the Exchange server capable of blocking attachments based on extension (Scanmail by TrendMicro works nicely for me). I always block:
ade,adp,asx,bas,bat,chm,cmd,com,cpl,crt,exe,hlp, ht a,inf,ins,isp,js,jse,lnk,mdb,mde,msc,msi,msp,mst,p cd,pif,reg,scr,sct,shs,url,vb,vbe,vbs,wsc,wsf,wsh
Bingo - no e-mail virus problems:)
I figure if my users really need them and the person sending the message is smart enough (and meant to send it) then they can zip it. If the sender wasn't smart enough to zip it, then I can always pull it out of the quarantine folder.
I think it is just because it is the only way to view the latest Star Wars and LOTR trailer. Personally that's the only reason I downloaded QT software.
The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss with a foreword by Stephen Hawking. This book has been out since 1996. It looks at some of the made up science of Star Trek and then explains how some of these things could possibly happen in the future. The physics seemed pretty solid and it was pretty readable as I recall.
A video store called Clean Flicks near Salt Lake City Utah has been doing this with tapes for a while now. Salon wrote up an article here back in January.
Wait until the Hollywood lawyers get ahold of this
The legal issues on this from Salon:
Hollywood studios are looking into the legality of such editing, but have not yet taken any legal action, perhaps because the phenomenon is confined to Utah, and because any extra publicity might encourage others to follow Lines in his unique crusade.
Clean Flicks says in their FAQ:
Is this legal?
Yes, as long as you own the video tape, you can do whatever you want to with that particular tape. We do not copy movies onto blank tapes. We only edit movies that you own or give us permission to buy for you.
USNEWS has a good article here:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/011112/biztec h/ 12energy.htm on this subject.
One of the things the article says is that Wind power is becoming more efficient, the only problem is storing the power created at night when power demand is low. It goes on to say that at night the windmills could go into hydrogen creating mode.
They think fuel cells are about a decade away from being cheap enough to replace internal combustion and Shell is already looking into establishing an infrastructure for hydrogen.
The thing I found best to handle the mess of cables is the twisty ties used for loaves of bread.
If you buy a box of trash bags you get about 30 of 'em. Works alot better than tie wraps because you don't have to cut them and risk nicking the wires. The velcro things are way too expensive.
And at the risk of getting modded down as a redundant...
Terry Brooks has to be at the top of my list. The whole Shannara series is a great read.
Orson Scott Card I loved the entire Ender and Ender's shadow series(except for Xenocide)
Harry TurtleDove "Guns of the South"
I'm waiting to see how Microsoft spins this news into a positive:
This month, the company quietly downgraded the Xbox hard disk from the expected 10GB part to a smaller 8GB unit, apparently to save costs.
I've heard a lot of talk about this move, but my favorite line comes from a Gartner analyst, who said, "Maybe Fry's had a sale [on 8GBdrives]." Nice.
We looked into it for our company, turns out the head of our sales group sent a copy of the commision $$$ amounts to everyone in our sales group by mistake and we wanted to prevent that in the future. But that's another story.
Anyway they wanted about $175 a copy, I think for what we needed. Then I found the PGP Freeware link on their site. I thought, hey why pay for it when they give it away for free?
No wonder its going away. Could you imagine going to the Ford dealer and the dealer saying "here's the new Ford for $20,000". And you ask, "what about the Mercury over there exactly like it" and the dealer says "Oh those, they're free, take as many as you like" Where is the choice here?
The world is an unsafe place, that was true even before the attacks. If someone wants to kill someone people bad enough he's going to get me no matter what I do. Yes, we should take precautions but let's not get carried away here.
McNealy says ``I'm tired of the outrage. If you get on a plane, I want to know who you are. If you rent a crop duster, I want to know who you are,''
He's going for the knee jerk reaction here. Maybe he should also propose that the card have an American flag on them.
I wouldn't worry about air travel nowadays, if I had a reason to travel I wouldn't hesitate in the least. If I had the money I would take my family to Disney World now. The news footage I saw with no lines looks a lot better than the last time I was there.
The unthinkable was done, it shocked everyone, but now the element of surprise is gone. Terrorists aren't going to use a commercial plane anymore than the Japenese were going to come back to Pearl Harbor a month later.
I crop duster, why worry about that, a crackpot a few years ago only needed a rental truck. He could have just as easily stolen a truck one night and carried the attack out the next morning. There's no limit to the evil things some people are capable of if they are determined. I'm sure they'll come up with something just as evil and unexpected.
How about confidentiality of the card information? I'm sure you wouldn't have to physically present you card for every transaction you want to do. Are they going to tie all of my accounts into one card? Oh, that would be great, now if I call an order into one unscrupulous place, I'm locked out of all my accounts until the banks straighten it out.
I mean I'm all for all of these companies proposing these things, the more companies involved touting their own standard the longer it will take for someone to agree on a standard. As long as each individual company can buy enough poliiticians I mean.
I constantly get forwarded "Urgent alerts". Anyone with some basic critical thinking skills would immediately know to double check these stories. People are just so willing to believe anything they read.
I think more people need to exposed to some rules on critical thinking.
Here is a baloney detection kit that I found.
A google search turns up "Bert is Evil" pages
across all of these domains:
.AT,.BE,.CA,.CH,.CL,.CZ,.DE,.DK,.FI,.IE,.IS,.JP,.KR,.NL,.NU,.RU,.SE,.TO,.UK,.ZA
Plus the usual.COM,.NET,.TV,.ORG Domains
Bert must have look-a-likes everyway to protect himself, kinda like Saddam did in Desert storm
Mr. Hooper's death should be reinvestigated
on
Bert Is Evil
·
· Score: 1
Obviously then it is true about the Mr. Hooper death here and here [fractalcow.com], it was
probably a training mission.
I have an M$ natural keyboard pro, it has all sorts of shortcut buttons along the top. One of these is the Media button. The default action when I press the media button is to bring up a menu of "deluxe CD player, Realplayer, Winamp, Quicktime, and Windows Media Player". The M$ application that set up my keyboard actually searched my system and found all of the different media programs on the system and gives me a choice of these. I don't think M$ is doing this for a devious purpose.
They share alot of the blame. The patch has been heavily advertised and available for a while.
I say at least a set of Chinese finger traps for admins who STILL haven't yet patched their systems
Slashdot Mirror
We have found a disturbing trend among car owners, when they no longer want a car they are not just storing it on a shelf to collect dust.
Used car dealers are actively working to divert customers shopping for new cars into their used car lots by prominently placing used car ads on websites and newspapers.
This is affecting the quality and diversity of new cars available to car dealers.
We believe it is in our members' best interests to de-link their websites from dealers who sell used cars. There's no good reason for car makers to be complicit in undermining their own sales. It just takes a minute, and it's the right thing to do.
I found a link for a form letter http://www.digitalconsumer.org/fax.html
As a constituent and an ardent consumer of digital media, I write today to urge you to support a Consumer Technology Bill of Rights, and to express my concerns about the recent trend toward allowing one-sided copyright laws to eliminate my Fair Use rights.
Historically, our country has enjoyed a balance between the rights of copyright holders and the rights of citizens who legally acquire copyrighted works. Generally speaking, rights holders have the exclusive right to distribute and profit from artistic works. Consumers like me who legally acquire these works are free to use them in most noncommercial ways. Unfortunately, this balance has shifted dramatically in recent years, much to the detriment of consumers.
To prevent further erosion of my rights, I would like to add my voice to DigitalConsumer.org in calling for a "consumer technology bill of rights". It is simply an attempt to assert positively the public's personal use rights. These rights are not new; they are historic rights granted in previous legislation and court rulings that have over the last four years been whittled away.
Under the guise of "preventing illegal copying" I believe Hollywood is vilifying their customers - people like me - and using the legislative process to create new lines of business at my expense. Their goal is to create a legal system that takes away my long-cherished personal use rights and then to charge me an additional fee to regain those rights!
Copy protection, especially to prevent overseas piracy for illicit sale, is an important issue. But before Congress considers yet another change in the law at the behest of the copyright holders, I urge you in the strongest possible terms to protect my Fair Use rights.
Thank you very much for your attention to this important matter.
Here's a link to look up your elected officialsq /officials
http://www.congress.org/congressorg/db
Now someone with better skills in legalese needs to come up with a template for a letter to write our senators.
I've been through the one at Norfolk, we spent a day offloading sensitive electronic gear. Mostly the 4 or 5 PCs on board, weapons and sonar screens. Most of the electricial equipment on Navy ships are of an old design and wouldn't be affected by this. The Navy believes if it is less than 20 years old it must be some new-fangled stuff and not tested enough for their liking.
With all that extra bandwidth do you think they'll remove the "Thou shalt not VPN" provisions from their terms of service?
Why most scanners still need constant definition updates and can not do good heuristic scanning is beyond me.
Oh wait...that's right most companies charge for yearly updates.
Why make a better product that wouldn't require constant updates when you can make an inferior product and charge yearly for the ability to perform updates?
I guess AV companies also follow the Microsoft model.
OK I guess I could amend what I said.
.doc and .xls was a conscious decision on my part. It gives me piece of mind that I'll block most of the viruses before a definition is issued. No one even notices the attachment types that I block, and they seem to be the easiest ones to exploit.
I run Scanmail on my Exchange server. The virus definitions get updated daily. I thought this was good enough, then "I Love You" hit us. I had gotten my updates that morning before the vendor had issued a fix for it.
Blocking the attachments by extension and not blocking
This virus wasted about 5 minutes of my time. I read an article about what it did, then the next day I deleted about 150 copies of this that got quarantined on our company's Exchange server.
, ht a,inf,ins,isp,js,jse,lnk,mdb,mde,msc,msi,msp,mst,p cd,pif,reg,scr,sct,shs,url,vb,vbe,vbs,wsc,wsf,wsh
:)
I use a virus scanner on the Exchange server capable of blocking attachments based on extension (Scanmail by TrendMicro works nicely for me). I always block:
ade,adp,asx,bas,bat,chm,cmd,com,cpl,crt,exe,hlp
Bingo - no e-mail virus problems
I figure if my users really need them and the person sending the message is smart enough (and meant to send it) then they can zip it. If the sender wasn't smart enough to zip it, then I can always pull it out of the quarantine folder.
Apple is claiming soaring rates of QT adoption.
I think it is just because it is the only way to view the latest Star Wars and LOTR trailer. Personally that's the only reason I downloaded QT software.
The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss with a foreword by Stephen Hawking. This book has been out since 1996. It looks at some of the made up science of Star Trek and then explains how some of these things could possibly happen in the future. The physics seemed pretty solid and it was pretty readable as I recall.
A video store called Clean Flicks near Salt Lake City Utah has been doing this with tapes for a while now. Salon wrote up an article here back in January.
Wait until the Hollywood lawyers get ahold of this
The legal issues on this from Salon:
Hollywood studios are looking into the legality of such editing, but have not yet taken any legal action, perhaps because the phenomenon is confined to Utah, and because any extra publicity might encourage others to follow Lines in his unique crusade.
Clean Flicks says in their FAQ:
Is this legal?
Yes, as long as you own the video tape, you can do whatever you want to with that particular tape. We do not copy movies onto blank tapes. We only edit movies that you own or give us permission to buy for you.
USNEWS has a good article here:c h/ 12energy.htm on this subject.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/011112/bizte
One of the things the article says is that Wind power is becoming more efficient, the only problem is storing the power created at night when power demand is low. It goes on to say that at night the windmills could go into hydrogen creating mode.
They think fuel cells are about a decade away from being cheap enough to replace internal combustion and Shell is already looking into establishing an infrastructure for hydrogen.
The thing I found best to handle the mess of cables is the twisty ties used for loaves of bread.
If you buy a box of trash bags you get about 30 of 'em. Works alot better than tie wraps because you don't have to cut them and risk nicking the wires. The velcro things are way too expensive.
And at the risk of getting modded down as a redundant...
Terry Brooks has to be at the top of my list. The whole Shannara series is a great read.
Orson Scott Card I loved the entire Ender and Ender's shadow series(except for Xenocide)
Harry TurtleDove "Guns of the South"
I got this from WinInfo:
I'm waiting to see how Microsoft spins this news into a positive:
This month, the company quietly downgraded the Xbox hard disk from the expected 10GB part to a smaller 8GB unit, apparently to save costs.
I've heard a lot of talk about this move, but my favorite line comes from a Gartner analyst, who said, "Maybe Fry's had a sale [on 8GBdrives]." Nice.
We looked into it for our company, turns out the head of our sales group sent a copy of the commision $$$ amounts to everyone in our sales group by mistake and we wanted to prevent that in the future. But that's another story.
Anyway they wanted about $175 a copy, I think for what we needed. Then I found the PGP Freeware link on their site. I thought, hey why pay for it when they give it away for free?
No wonder its going away. Could you imagine going to the Ford dealer and the dealer saying "here's the new Ford for $20,000". And you ask, "what about the Mercury over there exactly like it" and the dealer says "Oh those, they're free, take as many as you like" Where is the choice here?
The world is an unsafe place, that was true even before the attacks. If someone wants to kill someone people bad enough he's going to get me no matter what I do. Yes, we should take precautions but let's not get carried away here.
McNealy says ``I'm tired of the outrage. If you get on a plane, I want to know who you are. If you rent a crop duster, I want to know who you are,''
He's going for the knee jerk reaction here. Maybe he should also propose that the card have an American flag on them.
I wouldn't worry about air travel nowadays, if I had a reason to travel I wouldn't hesitate in the least. If I had the money I would take my family to Disney World now. The news footage I saw with no lines looks a lot better than the last time I was there.
The unthinkable was done, it shocked everyone, but now the element of surprise is gone. Terrorists aren't going to use a commercial plane anymore than the Japenese were going to come back to Pearl Harbor a month later.
I crop duster, why worry about that, a crackpot a few years ago only needed a rental truck. He could have just as easily stolen a truck one night and carried the attack out the next morning. There's no limit to the evil things some people are capable of if they are determined. I'm sure they'll come up with something just as evil and unexpected.
How about confidentiality of the card information? I'm sure you wouldn't have to physically present you card for every transaction you want to do. Are they going to tie all of my accounts into one card? Oh, that would be great, now if I call an order into one unscrupulous place, I'm locked out of all my accounts until the banks straighten it out.
I mean I'm all for all of these companies proposing these things, the more companies involved touting their own standard the longer it will take for someone to agree on a standard. As long as each individual company can buy enough poliiticians I mean.
I constantly get forwarded "Urgent alerts". Anyone with some basic critical thinking skills would immediately know to double check these stories. People are just so willing to believe anything they read.
I think more people need to exposed to some rules on critical thinking.
Here is a baloney detection kit that I found.
A google search turns up "Bert is Evil" pages .BE, .CA, .CH, .CL, .CZ, .DE, .DK, .FI, .IE, .IS, .JP, .KR, .NL, .NU, .RU, .SE, .TO, .UK, .ZA
.COM, .NET, .TV, .ORG Domains
across all of these domains:
.AT,
Plus the usual
Bert must have look-a-likes everyway to protect himself, kinda like Saddam did in Desert storm
Obviously then it is true about the Mr. Hooper death here and here [fractalcow.com], it was
probably a training mission.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"
I have an M$ natural keyboard pro, it has all sorts of shortcut buttons along the top. One of these is the Media button. The default action when I press the media button is to bring up a menu of "deluxe CD player, Realplayer, Winamp, Quicktime, and Windows Media Player". The M$ application that set up my keyboard actually searched my system and found all of the different media programs on the system and gives me a choice of these. I don't think M$ is doing this for a devious purpose.
Part of the first movie was spent figuring out what The Matrix really was. That will be missing, kinda like watching the Sixth Sense the second time.
All the ones we got went bad. We begged Dell Premier access not to ship us another IBM replacement.
Instead of Deskstars we call them Deathstars
They share alot of the blame. The patch has been heavily advertised and available for a while.
I say at least a set of Chinese finger traps for admins who STILL haven't yet patched their systems