There are lots of people who simply buy generic gifts for family like socks or shit like that. Isn't this book a lot better than a gift like that?
No. There are a lot of people who like to say "it's the thought that counts", but what poor gifts show is a lack of real consideration. Think about it. Do I really show I'm thoughtful if I get someone a shitty MP3 player because I heard they like music? Or rather do I show that I simply can't grok their specialized needs, and instead of admitting that their devotion to music is so far beyond my grasp that I have no better choice but to give them cash (or some generic gift that everyone needs)? Personally, I prefer to be surrounded by friends with abilities I can't touch in fields of expertise I barely know. None of that "I know you're a nurse, so I got you some cotton balls because that's the limit of my ability to understand nursing" bullshit. Nobody should pretend to know what the other needs in their specialty. That's the thought that really counts.
Christmas is just an opportunity to get together with loved ones and exchange gifts as a token of affection. It doesn't have to be the "perfect gift"; as long as it's somewhere in the ballpark you should feel happy that your family is at least aware of your interests.
Honestly, I've never felt that giving gifts of any kind showed real interest. I've always been happy with just the "get together" part. I'll often pay for the meal (or whatever), but I'm unlikely to show up with something hastily bought and pointlessly wrapped. And nothing I ever give comes with the assumption of an "exchange". I think it's childish to keep track of personal relationships based on who owes who what "gift".
Your comparison to a thief is interesting. It implies a prior knowledge that it was wrong.
No it doesn't. As the saying goes, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." Even then, it's laughable to suggest that Microsoft legal was completely unaware of monopoly laws. All evidence points to them knowing they were doing wrong; they just thought they could get away with it.
WMP has been a part of Windows since at very least Windows 95. It hasn't been a problem for 10 years.
They haven't been a convicted monopolist for 10 years. All bets are off when a company so abuses the market. These days, it wouldn't be all that far fetched for some competitor with a text editor to come in and say Notepad should not be bundled with the OS, and they wouldn't be entirely wrong. That's why it was stupid for MS to gain and then abuse a monopoly position.
A more appropriate judgement would have been a mandate for future versions of windows.
Wrong. Back to the thief analogy, where the penalty is more than just "don't do that again!" MS should be allowed as much rope as they want to keep hanging themselves, and the penalties should become an increasing hardship until such time they understand they shouldn't abuse their users, or the company ceases to exist. Reform or execution. I'm comfortable either way.
I know exactly what monopoly means. My point is that Microsoft is being forced to degrade the user experience.
If that's your point then, no, you don't know exactly what it means to leverage a monopoly illegally. All MS is being "forced" to do is correct the inequity they themselves have caused.
An option to select whether or not to install it, or an easy way to remove it is a far superior option than selling without the option period.
It sure would have been, but MS decided it would rather force things on users instead, an so the courts rightly slap them with a penalty. I don't shed a tear when a thief goes to jail instead of being given the option of just giving things back, and I'm not going to cry because MS isn't allowed to dictate the terms of their surrender.
Once again, people are too dumb to know much better anyway, lets not screw others because we have some fanatical hate of MS.
You must only be speaking for yourself, because I am not part of your "we". You again show your inability to grasp what a monopoly is by saying that dumb users are negatively affected by the removal, when the reality (and reason monopoly laws exist in the first place) is that users are most negatively affected by the inclusion. If you don't get it, and you clearly don't, you should not attempt to speak on the subject.
And its not like Microsoft abused their monopoly to take over the media player market.
You're right, it's not "like" that, it's exactly that. Just because they haven't been successful yet doesn't mean they're not abusing their monopoly.
This would be like asking auto manufacturers to leave interiors out of their cars because they need to be open to competition from custom shops. Its absurd.
What's absurd is that you use the word monopoly without really understanding what it means. The fact that you can even use "auto manufacturers" plural means you just don't get the monopoly position that MS has in the computer market. If any single auto manufacturer had a 90+% marketshare then, yes, they absolutely should be forced to make leather upholstery optional, up to and including not being able to put in an interior at all.
The reality is that email addresses are free to be used once discovered. If I discover your email address, there is an expectation that I can use it.
Maybe you (and spammers, or possibly you as a spammer) would like that expectation, but that is not the reality any longer; spammers ruined it long ago. They judge may not understand that just yet, but you as a participant on Slashdot should. An email these days is to be treated like a "web of trust". Just because I give my friend an email doesn't mean they get to share it with their friends. Just because I mistakenly get sent a CC instead of a BCC with 922 business contacts (as has happened to me personally) doesn't mean I can treat those addresses as my own personal urinal to piss on.
If I "leak" the email address, you might be able to sue me, but you cannot sue the third party I leak it to for simply emailing you.
I most certainly can sue you both. The only interesting question is whether or not I would win. I think a jury can be convinced that friendship is not transitive. I think I could easily explain to 12 people who aren't even as smart as you that if they gave me their phone number and asked me to call, that doesn't mean I'm allowed to pass it on to my (creepy) cousin (who I think is really a great guy), and that his calling could indeed be seen by them as harassment. It's such an easily argument I don't understand why you can't see it.
An email address that I give to AOL (or Slashdot or whoever) implies that the party so "gifted" is who I expect to send me email at that address. I'm sure many here go as far as actually creating email addresses keyed to a site (e.g., foobar+slashdot@example.com), but all email addresses should be considered non-transferable, even without those special measures. If I get an email to an address given to Slashdot that doesn't come from Slashdot, I have been deceived.
How about, instead of an arbitrary number, we invent a system where the hours are related to a physical phenomena?
Isn't that essentially the case? Isn't a year supposed to be the time it physically takes for the Earth to go around the Sun? Isn't a day supposed to be the time it takes for the Earth to physically to go around its axis? It's all the month/hour/minute divisions that are arbitrary, and there is really no physical subdivision we can make with respect to the Earth that is anything other than convention.
I propose we look at shadows cast by the nearest star.
I've been trying to think of a better date/time system myself over the past few years (since we started making these major explorations on Mars). I think you're on the right track, but what has struck my fancy is something a little more . . . universal. It is basically a take on the idea that time and space are connected and that the idea of where you are can tell when you are.
Simply consider the related angles of a lesser body to that of it's next major gravitational influence. Conventional "noon" is not really about the shadow, but the fact that the Me/Earth/Sun angle is 0. So why not formalize that 2pi (or 360 degrees) as what denotes a day, completely independent of how many seconds it happens to take? And what is a year but the time it take for the Earth/Sun/Milky Way angle to come full circle? No leap years or leap seconds or any other nonsense that tries to unify a duration (seconds) with pure geometry. Factor in the distances for what gravitational bodies are involved and you've also got polar coordinates for charting out where you are in addition to when you are.
What's nice is that it gives you a real "star date" you can use as you move from planet to planet or system to system. It also gives you a nice way to represent time on a moon. In reality, that is what "local" time is for us now; we can all be considered to be orbiting the Earth. So time zones would essentially vanish because you'd no longer be arbitrarily telling time locally but via that locality. It's a nifty little relativity paradox, because everyone still has a personal "noon" that they can share with everyone around them, but that doesn't matter to anyone dealing with time at the planetary level.
Any mathematician will tell you base 12 is far superior for doing integer calculations than base 10.
Any mathematician who got stuck trying to get past integers should put a bullet in their "far superior" head.
What's 1/2 an hour?
It's half of an hour. The face of a clock doesn't have to change one lick because you represent the "whole pie" as 100 instead of 60. What's 1/12 of an hour? It's bloody.0833333... of an hour regardless of what the relationship is between an hour and the next unit down! And, likewise, base 10 isn't somehow more magical because it represents 1/10th of an hour more compactly. If you have a "far superior" mind, you should care more about the length/significance of the divisions, and not how some base represents them.
If you had 100 minutes in an hour you'd start doing a lot of rounding or using a lot of decimal places.
Oh, no! All that pain from going from base 12 to base 10? Just think of the horror you'd face trying to drop down to base 2! For that reason, the "far superior" mind would never use a computer when dealing with date or time issues. Hell, any mathematician will tell you computers shouldn't be used for any kind of math at all!
Well, I have. At one point my spam bucket just became too big to check in any case (~200/day), so I thought "what the heck; let's see what happens".
This is where your little experiment went wrong. You used an address that was already on all the spammers' lists. You saw a drop when they shifted from one temporary domain to another (brand new domain == brand new unsubscribe necessary, according to spammer logic), but you never left their master lists and you were never added to any new ones. I suggest trying again with a fresh address that has only just begun to receive spam.
I unsubscribed everything that worked for two days straight. Spam went down 50% over the next few days. Then started to slowly rise again, and after a couple of months was back on the curve that previous history would have predicted.
And that is the point (or pointlessness) of the issue with unsubscribe links. Whether or not you see a big jump after using one isn't really significant. What matters is that you never stop getting spam. Its volumes is always increasing; and there is no solution worth trying unless it permanently reduces the spew.
I know the popular opinion here is typically pro-Apple/iTMS/iPod but honestly I just don't see why we can be pro-reverse engineering on everything else and not this.
Oh, I'm pro-RE. I'm guessing the bulk of Slashdot's readership is, too. The problem is that this "news" is essentially Real admitting they didn't do their job well enough. I mean, it's not like the update broke any songs iTMS sold, or any other non-DRM music on the iPod. Does anyone have evidence of Apple specifically engineering the update to break Real's hackery? I don't see any, despite the sensationalist headline of a fight and a lockout; all I see is that Real came up short of a full solution. Time for them to do a better RE job, or else refund the money they got out of people with their "we support the iPod" claim.
Interesting point, while I firmly believe most MMORPG players are not in it to make money, and would prefer people not buy their way into the system, and really hate the people with bots just so they can sell off good items.
Why would you hate that? If someone can "game the game" (as it were) with a bot, doesn't that just point to the fact that that aspect of the game isn't worth your individual human effort to play? Wouldn't items so farmed actually be correspondingly cheaper than items that had to be gained by human efforts? And don't people buy their way into things all the time, with all manner of currency, both in games and in reality? The very foundation of WoW and other MMORPGs is that you have to subscribe! The only way to play is to buy their way into the system, so what's the big deal if they buy their way in with $15/month for 6 months or simply pay $200 to get a jump start? If anything, people in game should want a lesser player to come in hemorrhaging great wealth because that means you have a fool who has parted with their money once in reality and has set themselves up to part with it again in the game. Once you win their property fair and square in the game, maybe they'll give you the $200 to get it back so that they can start all over again.
You do have a point that there probably is a large amount of people who do sell off their old junk, thus making the game more affordable to more users who are being suplimented by people with money to burn.
Absolutely. Any long running game like EQ has a totally unbalanced economy because resources just spawn out of nowhere and end up getting saved more than spent. I have friends who have reported just giving newbies millions in treasure because there wasn't much else to do with it. They need a real economy, where wealth can be destroyed, to bring things back in check; I think being able to pay the monthly fee (or part of it) in game currency is one way to take wealth back out of the system.
It will be interesting to see how getting rid of such actions will influence the older players, and if older player simply leave the system once the game becomes less challenging and they don't have the opertunity to make money from it.
The games get stale because they don't have a proper ecosystem. Characters just level up until there is nothing left in the food chain that is interesting to fight. Or, at the low end, they just endlessly kill rats or goblins or whatever monster is in illogically infinite supply. Nothing ever seems to be hunted to extinction. The bottom never seems to fall out of any markets. In short, eventually it becomes clear that nothing interesting will ever happen, so players abandon the game. I think that's where the misguided concern over selling things is: the subscribers who leave and hope to get something back by selling to subscribers who are just joining. Blizzard is not really concerned about people who spawn camp making a bit of dough. Instead they're trying to control the loss of one subscriber, never realizing that selling game items makes the experience more interesting to many new subscribers.
If you want to trde, use the in-game trading system, which lets you trade virtual-items and virtual-money for other virtual-items and virtual-money.
So how much virtual-money does it take to play the virtual-game for a month? Division by zero error, you say? Until you can use in-game money to pay to remain playing, pretending you can trade within the game economy is a joke.
Blizzard can afford kick the players that are only there to make money off the system, so they will do it.
No, they really can't afford to kick the people who continue to play their game. Just because I have gained two +6 swords (or whatever) and I can get rid of one for $15, allowing me to essentially play a month for free, doesn't mean I'm only playing to make money.
The other MMORGS would do this too, but they are probably scared of turning away subsribers, when in reality, banning this activity could ulimatly bring in new subscribers.
Funny, because the reverse is so obviously the case. People spend real time and money creating a virtual world for Blizzard, and Blizzard thinks they can turn around and say it was all a complete waste, and somehow such a sinkhole is going to attract new subscribers? If they, or any other MMORPG, really wanted to attract subscribers they would create an actual economy within the game first, and even then they have to allow people to transfer resources back and forth between the real world and the game world.
The simple reality is that even in virtual worlds it takes real money to create resources. If it takes a customer two months of play to get an item, they've created something that is worth at least $30. They can dance around the issue all they want and attempt to enforce their haphazard internal economy as much as they like, but it all still comes down to dollars and cents in the real world. Until they change their payment options to support game currency, they don't have an isolated economy. The paradox, of course, is that in accepting the internal currency they have to acknowledge that value in the game still translates to value out of game. Their current stance is so mentally confused I can't give them my money any more than I'd give money to the crazy person with the sign at the exit ramp.
What's bad about this basically stems from what it means to be a "game" and not an extension of the real life economic market, and how the uncontrolled influence of real-world money into the picture destroys this separation.
There is no such distinct economy, regardless of how much you and Blizzard wish there to be one. The simple fact is that it already costs real-world money to play their little game. They were the ones that put a $15/month price tag on the experience, and it is foolish for them to say "Hey, we require you to to spend time in an alternate reality gathering resources so that you can spend time in our reality, but you're not allowed to apply time spent in our reality gathering resources to that alternate reality." If they had any clue at all, they would create an isolated economy, but they haven't and it's wrong for them to punish their customers for a split economy that Blizzard itself (and seemingly every other MMORPG) has created.
Would wget -N http://www.foobar.baz/rss.xml still grab the whole file or would it honor the 304?
Since it's just a plain request with no state information, it would get the whole file. In theory you could add the necessary parts with --header arguments, but you would still have to maintain state (for every URL) somewhere. Odds are that once a day isn't a big burden on whatever servers you're hitting anyway. It's people polling servers multiple times in an hour than need to act more friendly.
You can read the display if you want, but since it speaks to you (literally) you can do without the screen.
For an idea of how this could be accomplished on a lightweight portable player, let me point out that Mac OS X comes with speech synthesis, including a command line tool you can use to save the audio. So
say -o Sting.aiff Sting
gives me a 25KB file (easily converted to a 5KB MP3) that I can download to the player like any other audio file. They probably wouldn't even use 1% of the space on it to provide voice menus like that. Apple can make iTunes take care of it all for you. The small storage size makes not having a scroll wheel not such a problem. As long as I can jump through the spoken menus without having to wait for them to say the whole thing, it would be pretty painless to use.
So... I should, like, try to buy Ken as my computer encyclopedia?
If you can beat the offer MS made him, sure! More to the point, you should buy whatever Ken himself bought, not what he is hawking. At least when kids were told to "Be Like Mike", they were supposed to actually buy the kind of shoes that Jordan wore. Same thing for the Subway ads with that Jared guy. This thing Ken's doing just looks bad, even if it does add a few hundred grand to the millions he fully earned. It's like those hot bods in ads for workout machines or supplements, who never used the product at all to achieve their results. Par for the course with MS, I suppose; hate to see Ken's reputation tarnished that way, though.
Jennings will embark on a nationwide media tour called 'Quiz the Whiz' that challenges news desks to stump the human encyclopedia with questions from Microsoft's Encarta Reference Library Premium 2005.
So the media campaign is to draw attention to what, exactly? If you stump Jennings, he is knocked down a peg and you demonstrate that he was more lucky than anything in getting asked question on Jeopardy he just happened to know. Why bother with any specific education/product if success comes only from a coin flip? If you don't stump him, Encarta is knocked down a peg because he shows that he has more knowledge than what they're trying to sell and that you should probably buy another product if you want a more comprehensive reference. There is no win-win here; someone at MS should be fired for thinking up this gimmick.
Probably, since I never really heard of anyone else using it. As your link points out, it is just a natural extension of the idea of throw-away email addresses (which actually identify not just a person, but a relationship between two people). I started using those (e.g., me.you@example.com) a while ago. When I switched to a hosting provider that allowed subdomains, I switched over to the format of you@me.example.com so as to give each user their own domain to control. Both solutions still required we accept and filter anything coming to the given domain. Around that time, though, I was starting to get spam into the hundreds per day (now it'd probably be in the thousands if I accepted it all) and I realized that it was the common "me" part that most allowed mishandling of the address by spammers. So I decided to switch to me@you.example.com, and that immediately made more sense because when a "you" goes bad, I can just drop it off the face of the Internet and take whatever further action is appropriate for the contact in question. No blocking, no filtering, no bouncing, no blackholes. Just a server that leaves because someone decided to abuse it. Seems like the most appropriate way to handle an abusive relationship.:-)
FYI, any time (which is every time) I get a challenge for an email I didn't send, I immediately block the server because that kind of "solution" is nothing short of dropping their spam problem in my lap. Fair warning to anyone who thinks FairUCE is in any way a "Smart" answer to spam.
The only effective spam solution I've currently found is to have expiring email addresses. One easy way to set that up is to use subdomains that don't even resolve after a certain point. So you might have me@2004.example.com good for only three more weeks, or me@amazon.example.com good for as long as Amazon (or your "healthy" girlfriend) doesn't sell you out. You can get tricky, of course, and use subdomains that are not so easily subject to a dictionary attack or guessing.
It used to be all the rage... yes, starting with AfterDark decades ago, and finally culminating in WebShots a few years ago. But does anyone really do this nowadays? Seriously?
As someone who has put out a few screen savers for Mac OS X, including ones with a global "confirmed saves" counter, I can easily say that, yes, people are downloading and running screen savers quite a bit. There isn't really a practical reason for it; it's more of a personalization thing. You should think about it the way people think about desktop wallpapers. I personally have enough windows open to obscure 95% of my desktop, but I'm well aware that there are people who don't and so they like changing the "view" often.
A screen saver still provides a common, easy privacy guard, especially when combined with a password lock. It can also display information in the big that indicates from across the room if you should sit down (e.g., new email count). Or allow you to brand/advertise if a computer happens to be publicly visible. I mean, if you have a row of computer sitting idle at CompUSA, why wouldn't you run a screen saver on them that listed sale items? If it's just sitting in the back office, sure, use energy saver to sleep it. But if you were thinking of dropping $150 on a Ambient Orb, you might try simply running a screen saver first.
User-generated content sounds good at first, but how would it work?
The short answer is that you have to create an economy. Most online games do a piss-poor job of that (items/creatures spawn out of nowhere), and many actually go after users who create an out-of-world economy (e.g., selling EQ items on eBay). User created content is as simple as me wanting something in the game and the game providing multiple routes to that goal, including trading with another player who already has it. And that creates the economy, because if that player wants something you don't have, they've potentially set up a pseduo-quest for you to get item A for them in exchange for item B.
Unfortunately, I think it all boils down to the question: Why does anybody want anything in the game? That is, a totally closed virtual economy is a dead end. A game must have a way of creating value to its players outside the game, and the company cannot constantly being trying to crush it. I don't even mean they have to allow selling on eBay. It could simply be a mechanism whereby a user who creates "sufficiently interesting" play doesn't have to pay for a month. As it stands, too many games take the approach that their virtual world isn't touched by the real world, and so they try to cut off the game economy completely from the fact that people are participating in an external economy simply to play the game.
Too bad there isn't something as devilishly clever as unbirth...
Wow, way to miss the linguistic shift. The commentary was directed towards the move from contracting "foo not bar" (e.g., "would not hit") as "foon't bar" (wouldn't hit) to "foo unbar" (would unhit) instead. While I'm sure many will say it is doubleplus ungood English, I do unhave a problem with it. It gets rid of the pesky apostrophe and, honestly, does unscrew up the language anymore than it's already screwed up. Now if we could just take care of this "it is" contraction vs. possession mess . . .
Why not spend that $100,000,000 on reducing the cost of their MP3 players and let them sell themselves?
Because the market for the feature "cheap" is pretty dry when it comes to MP3 players. Anyone who thinks they can compete with an iPod on cost alone is as confused as someone who thinks they can compete with the iPod on marketing alone. There is no one feature you can match and proclaim you'll use it to battle Apple; the iPod just brings together too many good ideas, and you have to cut bait if you can't at least put out a package that matches it. Only then would you get bonus points for being a little cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
There are lots of people who simply buy generic gifts for family like socks or shit like that. Isn't this book a lot better than a gift like that?
No. There are a lot of people who like to say "it's the thought that counts", but what poor gifts show is a lack of real consideration. Think about it. Do I really show I'm thoughtful if I get someone a shitty MP3 player because I heard they like music? Or rather do I show that I simply can't grok their specialized needs, and instead of admitting that their devotion to music is so far beyond my grasp that I have no better choice but to give them cash (or some generic gift that everyone needs)? Personally, I prefer to be surrounded by friends with abilities I can't touch in fields of expertise I barely know. None of that "I know you're a nurse, so I got you some cotton balls because that's the limit of my ability to understand nursing" bullshit. Nobody should pretend to know what the other needs in their specialty. That's the thought that really counts.
Christmas is just an opportunity to get together with loved ones and exchange gifts as a token of affection. It doesn't have to be the "perfect gift"; as long as it's somewhere in the ballpark you should feel happy that your family is at least aware of your interests.
Honestly, I've never felt that giving gifts of any kind showed real interest. I've always been happy with just the "get together" part. I'll often pay for the meal (or whatever), but I'm unlikely to show up with something hastily bought and pointlessly wrapped. And nothing I ever give comes with the assumption of an "exchange". I think it's childish to keep track of personal relationships based on who owes who what "gift".
Your comparison to a thief is interesting. It implies a prior knowledge that it was wrong.
No it doesn't. As the saying goes, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." Even then, it's laughable to suggest that Microsoft legal was completely unaware of monopoly laws. All evidence points to them knowing they were doing wrong; they just thought they could get away with it.
WMP has been a part of Windows since at very least Windows 95. It hasn't been a problem for 10 years.
They haven't been a convicted monopolist for 10 years. All bets are off when a company so abuses the market. These days, it wouldn't be all that far fetched for some competitor with a text editor to come in and say Notepad should not be bundled with the OS, and they wouldn't be entirely wrong. That's why it was stupid for MS to gain and then abuse a monopoly position.
A more appropriate judgement would have been a mandate for future versions of windows.
Wrong. Back to the thief analogy, where the penalty is more than just "don't do that again!" MS should be allowed as much rope as they want to keep hanging themselves, and the penalties should become an increasing hardship until such time they understand they shouldn't abuse their users, or the company ceases to exist. Reform or execution. I'm comfortable either way.
I know exactly what monopoly means. My point is that Microsoft is being forced to degrade the user experience.
If that's your point then, no, you don't know exactly what it means to leverage a monopoly illegally. All MS is being "forced" to do is correct the inequity they themselves have caused.
An option to select whether or not to install it, or an easy way to remove it is a far superior option than selling without the option period.
It sure would have been, but MS decided it would rather force things on users instead, an so the courts rightly slap them with a penalty. I don't shed a tear when a thief goes to jail instead of being given the option of just giving things back, and I'm not going to cry because MS isn't allowed to dictate the terms of their surrender.
Once again, people are too dumb to know much better anyway, lets not screw others because we have some fanatical hate of MS.
You must only be speaking for yourself, because I am not part of your "we". You again show your inability to grasp what a monopoly is by saying that dumb users are negatively affected by the removal, when the reality (and reason monopoly laws exist in the first place) is that users are most negatively affected by the inclusion. If you don't get it, and you clearly don't, you should not attempt to speak on the subject.
And its not like Microsoft abused their monopoly to take over the media player market.
You're right, it's not "like" that, it's exactly that. Just because they haven't been successful yet doesn't mean they're not abusing their monopoly.
This would be like asking auto manufacturers to leave interiors out of their cars because they need to be open to competition from custom shops. Its absurd.
What's absurd is that you use the word monopoly without really understanding what it means. The fact that you can even use "auto manufacturers" plural means you just don't get the monopoly position that MS has in the computer market. If any single auto manufacturer had a 90+% marketshare then, yes, they absolutely should be forced to make leather upholstery optional, up to and including not being able to put in an interior at all.
The reality is that email addresses are free to be used once discovered. If I discover your email address, there is an expectation that I can use it.
Maybe you (and spammers, or possibly you as a spammer) would like that expectation, but that is not the reality any longer; spammers ruined it long ago. They judge may not understand that just yet, but you as a participant on Slashdot should. An email these days is to be treated like a "web of trust". Just because I give my friend an email doesn't mean they get to share it with their friends. Just because I mistakenly get sent a CC instead of a BCC with 922 business contacts (as has happened to me personally) doesn't mean I can treat those addresses as my own personal urinal to piss on.
If I "leak" the email address, you might be able to sue me, but you cannot sue the third party I leak it to for simply emailing you.
I most certainly can sue you both. The only interesting question is whether or not I would win. I think a jury can be convinced that friendship is not transitive. I think I could easily explain to 12 people who aren't even as smart as you that if they gave me their phone number and asked me to call, that doesn't mean I'm allowed to pass it on to my (creepy) cousin (who I think is really a great guy), and that his calling could indeed be seen by them as harassment. It's such an easily argument I don't understand why you can't see it.
An email address that I give to AOL (or Slashdot or whoever) implies that the party so "gifted" is who I expect to send me email at that address. I'm sure many here go as far as actually creating email addresses keyed to a site (e.g., foobar+slashdot@example.com), but all email addresses should be considered non-transferable, even without those special measures. If I get an email to an address given to Slashdot that doesn't come from Slashdot, I have been deceived.
How about, instead of an arbitrary number, we invent a system where the hours are related to a physical phenomena?
Isn't that essentially the case? Isn't a year supposed to be the time it physically takes for the Earth to go around the Sun? Isn't a day supposed to be the time it takes for the Earth to physically to go around its axis? It's all the month/hour/minute divisions that are arbitrary, and there is really no physical subdivision we can make with respect to the Earth that is anything other than convention.
I propose we look at shadows cast by the nearest star.
I've been trying to think of a better date/time system myself over the past few years (since we started making these major explorations on Mars). I think you're on the right track, but what has struck my fancy is something a little more . . . universal. It is basically a take on the idea that time and space are connected and that the idea of where you are can tell when you are.
Simply consider the related angles of a lesser body to that of it's next major gravitational influence. Conventional "noon" is not really about the shadow, but the fact that the Me/Earth/Sun angle is 0. So why not formalize that 2pi (or 360 degrees) as what denotes a day, completely independent of how many seconds it happens to take? And what is a year but the time it take for the Earth/Sun/Milky Way angle to come full circle? No leap years or leap seconds or any other nonsense that tries to unify a duration (seconds) with pure geometry. Factor in the distances for what gravitational bodies are involved and you've also got polar coordinates for charting out where you are in addition to when you are.
What's nice is that it gives you a real "star date" you can use as you move from planet to planet or system to system. It also gives you a nice way to represent time on a moon. In reality, that is what "local" time is for us now; we can all be considered to be orbiting the Earth. So time zones would essentially vanish because you'd no longer be arbitrarily telling time locally but via that locality. It's a nifty little relativity paradox, because everyone still has a personal "noon" that they can share with everyone around them, but that doesn't matter to anyone dealing with time at the planetary level.
Any mathematician will tell you base 12 is far superior for doing integer calculations than base 10.
Any mathematician who got stuck trying to get past integers should put a bullet in their "far superior" head.
What's 1/2 an hour?
It's half of an hour. The face of a clock doesn't have to change one lick because you represent the "whole pie" as 100 instead of 60. What's 1/12 of an hour? It's bloody .0833333... of an hour regardless of what the relationship is between an hour and the next unit down! And, likewise, base 10 isn't somehow more magical because it represents 1/10th of an hour more compactly. If you have a "far superior" mind, you should care more about the length/significance of the divisions, and not how some base represents them.
If you had 100 minutes in an hour you'd start doing a lot of rounding or using a lot of decimal places.
Oh, no! All that pain from going from base 12 to base 10? Just think of the horror you'd face trying to drop down to base 2! For that reason, the "far superior" mind would never use a computer when dealing with date or time issues. Hell, any mathematician will tell you computers shouldn't be used for any kind of math at all!
Well, I have. At one point my spam bucket just became too big to check in any case (~200/day), so I thought "what the heck; let's see what happens".
This is where your little experiment went wrong. You used an address that was already on all the spammers' lists. You saw a drop when they shifted from one temporary domain to another (brand new domain == brand new unsubscribe necessary, according to spammer logic), but you never left their master lists and you were never added to any new ones. I suggest trying again with a fresh address that has only just begun to receive spam.
I unsubscribed everything that worked for two days straight. Spam went down 50% over the next few days. Then started to slowly rise again, and after a couple of months was back on the curve that previous history would have predicted.
And that is the point (or pointlessness) of the issue with unsubscribe links. Whether or not you see a big jump after using one isn't really significant. What matters is that you never stop getting spam. Its volumes is always increasing; and there is no solution worth trying unless it permanently reduces the spew.
I know the popular opinion here is typically pro-Apple/iTMS/iPod but honestly I just don't see why we can be pro-reverse engineering on everything else and not this.
Oh, I'm pro-RE. I'm guessing the bulk of Slashdot's readership is, too. The problem is that this "news" is essentially Real admitting they didn't do their job well enough. I mean, it's not like the update broke any songs iTMS sold, or any other non-DRM music on the iPod. Does anyone have evidence of Apple specifically engineering the update to break Real's hackery? I don't see any, despite the sensationalist headline of a fight and a lockout; all I see is that Real came up short of a full solution. Time for them to do a better RE job, or else refund the money they got out of people with their "we support the iPod" claim.
Interesting point, while I firmly believe most MMORPG players are not in it to make money, and would prefer people not buy their way into the system, and really hate the people with bots just so they can sell off good items.
Why would you hate that? If someone can "game the game" (as it were) with a bot, doesn't that just point to the fact that that aspect of the game isn't worth your individual human effort to play? Wouldn't items so farmed actually be correspondingly cheaper than items that had to be gained by human efforts? And don't people buy their way into things all the time, with all manner of currency, both in games and in reality? The very foundation of WoW and other MMORPGs is that you have to subscribe! The only way to play is to buy their way into the system, so what's the big deal if they buy their way in with $15/month for 6 months or simply pay $200 to get a jump start? If anything, people in game should want a lesser player to come in hemorrhaging great wealth because that means you have a fool who has parted with their money once in reality and has set themselves up to part with it again in the game. Once you win their property fair and square in the game, maybe they'll give you the $200 to get it back so that they can start all over again.
You do have a point that there probably is a large amount of people who do sell off their old junk, thus making the game more affordable to more users who are being suplimented by people with money to burn.
Absolutely. Any long running game like EQ has a totally unbalanced economy because resources just spawn out of nowhere and end up getting saved more than spent. I have friends who have reported just giving newbies millions in treasure because there wasn't much else to do with it. They need a real economy, where wealth can be destroyed, to bring things back in check; I think being able to pay the monthly fee (or part of it) in game currency is one way to take wealth back out of the system.
It will be interesting to see how getting rid of such actions will influence the older players, and if older player simply leave the system once the game becomes less challenging and they don't have the opertunity to make money from it.
The games get stale because they don't have a proper ecosystem. Characters just level up until there is nothing left in the food chain that is interesting to fight. Or, at the low end, they just endlessly kill rats or goblins or whatever monster is in illogically infinite supply. Nothing ever seems to be hunted to extinction. The bottom never seems to fall out of any markets. In short, eventually it becomes clear that nothing interesting will ever happen, so players abandon the game. I think that's where the misguided concern over selling things is: the subscribers who leave and hope to get something back by selling to subscribers who are just joining. Blizzard is not really concerned about people who spawn camp making a bit of dough. Instead they're trying to control the loss of one subscriber, never realizing that selling game items makes the experience more interesting to many new subscribers.
If you want to trde, use the in-game trading system, which lets you trade virtual-items and virtual-money for other virtual-items and virtual-money.
So how much virtual-money does it take to play the virtual-game for a month? Division by zero error, you say? Until you can use in-game money to pay to remain playing, pretending you can trade within the game economy is a joke.
Blizzard can afford kick the players that are only there to make money off the system, so they will do it.
No, they really can't afford to kick the people who continue to play their game. Just because I have gained two +6 swords (or whatever) and I can get rid of one for $15, allowing me to essentially play a month for free, doesn't mean I'm only playing to make money.
The other MMORGS would do this too, but they are probably scared of turning away subsribers, when in reality, banning this activity could ulimatly bring in new subscribers.
Funny, because the reverse is so obviously the case. People spend real time and money creating a virtual world for Blizzard, and Blizzard thinks they can turn around and say it was all a complete waste, and somehow such a sinkhole is going to attract new subscribers? If they, or any other MMORPG, really wanted to attract subscribers they would create an actual economy within the game first, and even then they have to allow people to transfer resources back and forth between the real world and the game world.
The simple reality is that even in virtual worlds it takes real money to create resources. If it takes a customer two months of play to get an item, they've created something that is worth at least $30. They can dance around the issue all they want and attempt to enforce their haphazard internal economy as much as they like, but it all still comes down to dollars and cents in the real world. Until they change their payment options to support game currency, they don't have an isolated economy. The paradox, of course, is that in accepting the internal currency they have to acknowledge that value in the game still translates to value out of game. Their current stance is so mentally confused I can't give them my money any more than I'd give money to the crazy person with the sign at the exit ramp.
What's bad about this basically stems from what it means to be a "game" and not an extension of the real life economic market, and how the uncontrolled influence of real-world money into the picture destroys this separation.
There is no such distinct economy, regardless of how much you and Blizzard wish there to be one. The simple fact is that it already costs real-world money to play their little game. They were the ones that put a $15/month price tag on the experience, and it is foolish for them to say "Hey, we require you to to spend time in an alternate reality gathering resources so that you can spend time in our reality, but you're not allowed to apply time spent in our reality gathering resources to that alternate reality." If they had any clue at all, they would create an isolated economy, but they haven't and it's wrong for them to punish their customers for a split economy that Blizzard itself (and seemingly every other MMORPG) has created.
Would wget -N http://www.foobar.baz/rss.xml still grab the whole file or would it honor the 304?
Since it's just a plain request with no state information, it would get the whole file. In theory you could add the necessary parts with --header arguments, but you would still have to maintain state (for every URL) somewhere. Odds are that once a day isn't a big burden on whatever servers you're hitting anyway. It's people polling servers multiple times in an hour than need to act more friendly.
You can read the display if you want, but since it speaks to you (literally) you can do without the screen.
For an idea of how this could be accomplished on a lightweight portable player, let me point out that Mac OS X comes with speech synthesis, including a command line tool you can use to save the audio. So
gives me a 25KB file (easily converted to a 5KB MP3) that I can download to the player like any other audio file. They probably wouldn't even use 1% of the space on it to provide voice menus like that. Apple can make iTunes take care of it all for you. The small storage size makes not having a scroll wheel not such a problem. As long as I can jump through the spoken menus without having to wait for them to say the whole thing, it would be pretty painless to use.So... I should, like, try to buy Ken as my computer encyclopedia?
If you can beat the offer MS made him, sure! More to the point, you should buy whatever Ken himself bought, not what he is hawking. At least when kids were told to "Be Like Mike", they were supposed to actually buy the kind of shoes that Jordan wore. Same thing for the Subway ads with that Jared guy. This thing Ken's doing just looks bad, even if it does add a few hundred grand to the millions he fully earned. It's like those hot bods in ads for workout machines or supplements, who never used the product at all to achieve their results. Par for the course with MS, I suppose; hate to see Ken's reputation tarnished that way, though.
Jennings will embark on a nationwide media tour called 'Quiz the Whiz' that challenges news desks to stump the human encyclopedia with questions from Microsoft's Encarta Reference Library Premium 2005.
So the media campaign is to draw attention to what, exactly? If you stump Jennings, he is knocked down a peg and you demonstrate that he was more lucky than anything in getting asked question on Jeopardy he just happened to know. Why bother with any specific education/product if success comes only from a coin flip? If you don't stump him, Encarta is knocked down a peg because he shows that he has more knowledge than what they're trying to sell and that you should probably buy another product if you want a more comprehensive reference. There is no win-win here; someone at MS should be fired for thinking up this gimmick.
Q. What to you get when you combine Apple and IBM?
Based on what has already happened in past mergers, I think those in the know would say:
A. NeXT
Did we come up with it independently?
Probably, since I never really heard of anyone else using it. As your link points out, it is just a natural extension of the idea of throw-away email addresses (which actually identify not just a person, but a relationship between two people). I started using those (e.g., me.you@example.com) a while ago. When I switched to a hosting provider that allowed subdomains, I switched over to the format of you@me.example.com so as to give each user their own domain to control. Both solutions still required we accept and filter anything coming to the given domain. Around that time, though, I was starting to get spam into the hundreds per day (now it'd probably be in the thousands if I accepted it all) and I realized that it was the common "me" part that most allowed mishandling of the address by spammers. So I decided to switch to me@you.example.com, and that immediately made more sense because when a "you" goes bad, I can just drop it off the face of the Internet and take whatever further action is appropriate for the contact in question. No blocking, no filtering, no bouncing, no blackholes. Just a server that leaves because someone decided to abuse it. Seems like the most appropriate way to handle an abusive relationship. :-)
FYI, any time (which is every time) I get a challenge for an email I didn't send, I immediately block the server because that kind of "solution" is nothing short of dropping their spam problem in my lap. Fair warning to anyone who thinks FairUCE is in any way a "Smart" answer to spam.
The only effective spam solution I've currently found is to have expiring email addresses. One easy way to set that up is to use subdomains that don't even resolve after a certain point. So you might have me@2004.example.com good for only three more weeks, or me@amazon.example.com good for as long as Amazon (or your "healthy" girlfriend) doesn't sell you out. You can get tricky, of course, and use subdomains that are not so easily subject to a dictionary attack or guessing.
It used to be all the rage... yes, starting with AfterDark decades ago, and finally culminating in WebShots a few years ago. But does anyone really do this nowadays? Seriously?
As someone who has put out a few screen savers for Mac OS X, including ones with a global "confirmed saves" counter, I can easily say that, yes, people are downloading and running screen savers quite a bit. There isn't really a practical reason for it; it's more of a personalization thing. You should think about it the way people think about desktop wallpapers. I personally have enough windows open to obscure 95% of my desktop, but I'm well aware that there are people who don't and so they like changing the "view" often.
A screen saver still provides a common, easy privacy guard, especially when combined with a password lock. It can also display information in the big that indicates from across the room if you should sit down (e.g., new email count). Or allow you to brand/advertise if a computer happens to be publicly visible. I mean, if you have a row of computer sitting idle at CompUSA, why wouldn't you run a screen saver on them that listed sale items? If it's just sitting in the back office, sure, use energy saver to sleep it. But if you were thinking of dropping $150 on a Ambient Orb, you might try simply running a screen saver first.
"Liars have alot to remember."
My preferred quote on the subject:
"Truth often represents the only way to keep a complex story straight."
Stephen Jay Gould
User-generated content sounds good at first, but how would it work?
The short answer is that you have to create an economy. Most online games do a piss-poor job of that (items/creatures spawn out of nowhere), and many actually go after users who create an out-of-world economy (e.g., selling EQ items on eBay). User created content is as simple as me wanting something in the game and the game providing multiple routes to that goal, including trading with another player who already has it. And that creates the economy, because if that player wants something you don't have, they've potentially set up a pseduo-quest for you to get item A for them in exchange for item B.
Unfortunately, I think it all boils down to the question: Why does anybody want anything in the game? That is, a totally closed virtual economy is a dead end. A game must have a way of creating value to its players outside the game, and the company cannot constantly being trying to crush it. I don't even mean they have to allow selling on eBay. It could simply be a mechanism whereby a user who creates "sufficiently interesting" play doesn't have to pay for a month. As it stands, too many games take the approach that their virtual world isn't touched by the real world, and so they try to cut off the game economy completely from the fact that people are participating in an external economy simply to play the game.
Too bad there isn't something as devilishly clever as unbirth...
Wow, way to miss the linguistic shift. The commentary was directed towards the move from contracting "foo not bar" (e.g., "would not hit") as "foon't bar" (wouldn't hit) to "foo unbar" (would unhit) instead. While I'm sure many will say it is doubleplus ungood English, I do unhave a problem with it. It gets rid of the pesky apostrophe and, honestly, does unscrew up the language anymore than it's already screwed up. Now if we could just take care of this "it is" contraction vs. possession mess . . .
Why not spend that $100,000,000 on reducing the cost of their MP3 players and let them sell themselves?
Because the market for the feature "cheap" is pretty dry when it comes to MP3 players. Anyone who thinks they can compete with an iPod on cost alone is as confused as someone who thinks they can compete with the iPod on marketing alone. There is no one feature you can match and proclaim you'll use it to battle Apple; the iPod just brings together too many good ideas, and you have to cut bait if you can't at least put out a package that matches it. Only then would you get bonus points for being a little cheaper.