Surely you jest. They're still trying to hijack DNS, using the NetSol domain lookup page a couple of years ago meant the name got hijacked within 48 hours, and AFAIK NetSol is still screwing people on domain transfers to other registrars.
The above weren't isolated instances, but happened often enough to show that's the way NetSol, and by extension VeriSign, do business.
I've been wondering this for a while, and the recent article on Slate - http://slate.msn.com/id/2101297 on the economic logic of executing worm writers - compels me to put pen to electron with the following Modest Proposal:
Allow me to set forth a number of propositions: 1) Spam is now 60% or more of all email in the world, and increasing monthly. 2) The lost productivity costs to industry of dealing with spam is estimated to be from $10 billion to $20 billion yearly. 3) There are about 100 to 200 spammers behind 90% of the world's spam. 4) Thus each spammer can be estimated to cost industry globally around $100 million dollars. 5) The EPA and DOT value a human life at between $3 million and $7 million dollars. 6) Many people in the United States are underinsured medically. Some of them need expensive medical care they cannot afford, and therefore die as a result. Call the affordability threshold $100,000 to $1,000,000. If major ISPs and corporations could be ironbound to honour their word, admittedly no small task, then one could posit a regime where: a) The leading 1000 connectivity consumers place half their antispam spending in escrow b) Guido the Fish and Two Finger Tony get hired to smoke the top 100 spam offenders, reducing the need for antispam spending worldwide, and freeing the cash for: c) The escrowed funds then get used to save a large number of lives who would otherwise be lost due to pricy medical care.
At this point, one must ask: What is a spammer's life worth? The economics of the situation means more people get saved than spammers blown away, therefore the sum total is that a greater good is served by the above scheme as more people survive with a higher quality of life than the status quo ante.
Why is everyone comparing the bandwidth of XDR with DDR, which has been around since the dinosaurs? The proper performance face-off is with GDDR3, which at least has the merit of being introduced this millennium. The peak bandwidth difference between XDR and GDDR3 is not so huge - about 20 to 30%, or about the same as RDRAM and DDR, which turned out to be almost nothing when RD's greater latencies were taken into account. I suspect, on no good grounds whatsoever, that XDR is Yet Another high-latency spec from the Rambus brain trust.
Same thing as the Pentium 4: just like a late 60s Detroit muscle car, goes real good in a straight line, slides all over the place when you make a turn.
1) CRTs have significant quantities of lead in the picture tube. Discarded CRTs are the second largest source of lead in waste streams, at 28% vs 65% for lead-acid batteries.
2) CRT power consumption lies between 65 to 100 watts, vs 25 to 45 watts for an LCD. Assuming a delta of 50 watts, and 100 million monitors in the USA, you're talking 5 Gigawatts difference if all CRTs are replaced with LCDs. In other words, you save 5 nuclear plants by running LCDs exclusively, not to mention saving that again in reduced air conditioning costs during the summer.
As my monicker implies, I've been doing audio for a while, and some of the people on the aforementioned site are pretty impressive. Some are less so (a problem I suspect exists for most pro-am activities), but the self-selected mean is decent.
And it's not a stretch to see dailykos.com as doing the same thing for politics, minus the six-figure consulting fees (ie, the ever-losing Bob Shrum).
I once worked for a fellow (calling him a manager would be a stretch, the guy (Hi Matthew!) had No Clue about leading people) who would bitch if I worked any less than 60 hrs/wk, and once committed to a deadline which meant I hammered in two consecutive 100 hour weeks. Then the silly sonofabitch dared tell me a few months later I "let him down" because I was two weeks late after taking two months to clean up code his crony had left in complete disarray. Holy Christ, I almost punched him. As it turns out, the place later went belly up in no small part because of silly-assed management like the above. Me, I found a better-paying gig and a whole ton of schadenfreude when Sony crushed them like a steamroller running over a box of baby chicks.
I've been in other similar situations, and Death Marches, without exception, occur because of poor planning. >60 hour weeks for more than ten days at a time is God's Way of telling you to start looking for another job because the current place will hit the crapper. Maybe not now, but soon, and after all your hard work you'll be flushed away by manglement scrambling to protect their asses and options.
Is everyone absolutely sure this letter is indeed from Perkins Coie? SG didn't show any headers, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find it came from somewhere else; real lawyers send warnings of this sort via certified mail or FedEx.
It reads like a cart00ney to me (cart00neys are the term of art in the anti-spam community for the squeaky-voiced legal threats ill advised spammers occasionally send out), so I'd be surprised a tech-savvy firm like PC emailed this hunk-o-junk with no paper support.
You might wanna be careful about that. Cats need taurine, which tuna does not provide them. Taurine deficiency causes nasty diseases and eventually death.
And of course the weasels from the Direct Marketing Association don't want this to happen. They're the same sacks of sh*t who fought long & hard against the Do-Not-Call list. Imagine that, they don't want spammers turned in either.
Savvis, isn't that the new pronunciation of "Agis"?
(Agis hosted Sanford Wallace for about a year while loudly proclaiming they weren't doing anything wrong. LOTS of people found out how to block IP ranges. Agis later repented, booted Wallace et al, but it was too late. Nobody who cared about their online reputation would choose them as a host, and Agis went belly-up not too long thereafter.)
Real Erdos numbers apply to mathematical collaborators producing papers dealing with what some might say are imaginary worlds, so Real Life contact with Erdos must therefore be quantified with an imaginary number. Obvious, really. She has an Erdos number of i.
Re:Whatever happened to the Smith Bill...
on
CAN-SPAM Is A Bust
·
· Score: 1
Well, as it turns out the House is already busy watering down the junk fax law (cf. HR 4600), changing the mechanism from opt-in to opt-out and prolonging the time a business you contacted can junkfax you to seven years.
The bill's sponsor (Fred Upton [R-MI]) claims unsolicited junk faxes are still prohibited, but since spammers of any stripe are invariably lying sacks of shit they'll just fake correspondance allegedly from you to them. Voila! "Prior business relationship", and your fax machine is drooling paper every morning.
Fred Upton, by the way, is bought & paid for by the real estate lobby, just as Billy Tauzin (R-LA) was the legislative arm of the Direct Marketing Association. If you expect these hyenas to do anything better for email, well, I'd like to smoke what you have - it's good shit.
ObPoliticalRant: I'm not saying the Democrats are enourmously better (see Fritz Hollings, for example) but Republicans really are working overtime to make sure we're all bent over cheeks spread wide open goatse-style for the next "valuable marketing message" to be inserted.
That's know as "painting the tape", when buyers drive up the price at the end of a crappy session to make the closing price look decent (or less horrible than otherwise). SCO stock activity over the past year shows this pattern over & over again - one could wonder who might have a vested interest in propping up the price despite the truly hideous fundamentals.
More power to Buzz, too. The video shows the guy was right in his face, wouldn't give ground, and had pretty well backed him up against the wall. Then, when Aldrin, who was *twice* his age, pasted him one, Sibrel went away whining like a little bitch.
By the way, the Tennessee authorities didn't bust Buzz at all. Probably wanted to give him a medal.
People who used Verisign's Web-based domain name search got their domains hijacked more often than not. It happened to my stepbrother, along with a number of other people I know. The sleazeballs didn't even *try* to make it look legitimate: from lookup to hijack took around a dozen hours.
As my friend in the Army said: "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action".
Heard that. HP once understood human factors, but that also seems to be pre-Fiorina. If they *had* to V out the keyboard, they might have actually LOOKED at a hand and noted the middle finger is the longest rather than the shortest,
and bent the V the other way.
Seriously, slapping in audio delay is not a Bhig Dheal: I have to throw in an 8 second delay for $dayjob, and the silicon count is derisory.
More to the point, having a constant video delay is really useful if you want to do trick audio processing like room or speaker EQ using finite impulse response filters (FIRs), which tend to have long delays of their own in these applications.
...but only in the long term. Short to medium term, anything can (and does) happen. Case in point: Rambus. They tried extorting money from every DRAM maker on the planet on the strength of bogus patents (they retconned the impending DRAM standard into their pending patent application), and their stock price quadrupled over a month when the Japanese capitulated. Infineon told'em to Get Fucked, and RMBS dropped like a stone.
Another case: Aureal. In early 2000, they were languishing at $3 when they announced they were writing a Linux driver for their sound cards, whereupon the stock hit $9 within a week. A few months later, their financials revealed that sales went up by $18 million, but so did losses. The stock dropped by 57% that day, to be worth pennies when the company shut down the following week.
When the DNC list first appeared, the Direct Marketing Association shrieked that telemarketing contributed $600 billion to the GNP. That's 6% of the economy. A quick poll of friends showed they didn't buy *anything* from phone spammers, so that number was immediately suspect. Then the American Teleservices Association said it was $200 billion and 4 million jobs, but that wasn't believable either. Their bid is now down to $50 billion and 2 million jobs.
Those numbers mean each telemarketer's contribution to the economy is $25,000, as opposed to the approximately $40K to $50K to the GNP by each working citizen. Now, let us consider the telepests must be selling a product on top of getting paid - minimum wage is about $10K yearly, so with overhead we're talking closer to $15K, which means the products sold must be worth no more than $10K assuming full-time phone droids. This is supposedly a profitable industry, so one assumes the price would at least cover the overhead (in this case phone spammers) and cost of product. In this case we see the overhead is massive which means the end-user does not get value for money even if the phoners are getting minimum wage. Anecdotal evidence elsewhere in the thread indicates pay rates are better than that.
For the customers to be getting a good deal, the yearly rate must decrease considerably - the only way this can be done legally is to hire people part-time or offshore the phone banks. The aforementioned wage rates, coupled with the overhead of annoying hundreds, if not thousands, of people to make a single sale, mean the jobs must be far less than even half-time. In other words, the "2 million" jobs number is actually equivalent to a fraction thereof.
All the above calculations presuppose, of course, that the DMA and ATA are not merely lying sacks of shit. For the $50 billion and 2 million jobs they claim telemarketers "contribute" to the economy, I sure haven't seen any trace of that presence on the Fortune 500 list. For that matter, the demand for goods and services will not disappear just because Joe LoBrow isn't hawking them over the phone when you're eating dinner. The demand will still exist, and conceivably increase once the cost structure decreases when the inefficiencies of scattergun telephone marketing go away.
SCO hasn't told anyone where they got the alleged infringing Linux code, or exactly which modules contain the alleged copyright violations. A suspicious person might even wonder whether SCO grabbed Linux source off a distro and placed their own copyright notices in the source ex post facto before showing it to easily influenced pseudo-researchers from Giga. Of course Darl McBride, being of the highest integrity and not at all prone to barratry, would never dream of doing such a thing. Honest.
Ooops, that's actually 2^23 values between 1023.0 and 1024.0 (IEEE-754 single precision mantissa is actually 23 bits, extended to 24 by considering the leading bit to be 1 when the number is normalised).
The inexactness portion of his argument is quite wrong. His example claims single precision floating point only allows for 8K values between 1023.0 and 1024.0. Consider that under IEEE-754 the numbers would be represented respectively as 1.99904875 * 2^9 and 1.00000000 * 2^10, _with a full 24 bits of precision in the mantissa_, thus ensuring the number of possible values between 1023.0 and 1024.0 actually reaches 2^24.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely you jest. They're still trying to hijack DNS, using the NetSol domain lookup page a couple of years ago meant the name got hijacked within 48 hours, and AFAIK NetSol is still screwing people on domain transfers to other registrars.
The above weren't isolated instances, but happened often enough to show that's the way NetSol, and by extension VeriSign, do business.
I've been wondering this for a while, and the recent article on Slate - http://slate.msn.com/id/2101297 on the economic logic of executing worm writers - compels me to put pen to electron with the following Modest Proposal:
Allow me to set forth a number of propositions:
1) Spam is now 60% or more of all email in the world, and increasing monthly.
2) The lost productivity costs to industry of dealing with spam is estimated to be from $10 billion to $20 billion yearly.
3) There are about 100 to 200 spammers behind 90% of the world's spam.
4) Thus each spammer can be estimated to cost industry globally around $100 million dollars.
5) The EPA and DOT value a human life at between $3 million and $7 million dollars.
6) Many people in the United States are underinsured medically. Some of them need expensive medical care they cannot afford, and therefore die as a result. Call the affordability threshold $100,000 to $1,000,000. If major ISPs and corporations could be ironbound to honour their word, admittedly no small task, then one could posit a regime where:
a) The leading 1000 connectivity consumers place half their antispam spending in escrow
b) Guido the Fish and Two Finger Tony get hired to smoke the top 100 spam offenders, reducing the need for antispam spending worldwide, and freeing the cash for:
c) The escrowed funds then get used to save a large number of lives who would otherwise be lost due to pricy medical care.
At this point, one must ask: What is a spammer's life worth? The economics of the situation means more people get saved than spammers blown away, therefore the sum total is that a greater good is served by the above scheme as more people survive with a higher quality of life than the status quo ante.
Hmmm. Two Anon comments boosting Rambus within ten minutes of each other? I smell Astroturf.
i d= 11479521
On the other hand, for a quick snort of reality:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=137314&c
Why is everyone comparing the bandwidth of XDR with DDR, which has been around since the dinosaurs? The proper performance face-off is with GDDR3, which at least has the merit of being introduced this millennium. The peak bandwidth difference between XDR and GDDR3 is not so huge - about 20 to 30%, or about the same as RDRAM and DDR, which turned out to be almost nothing when RD's greater latencies were taken into account. I suspect, on no good grounds whatsoever, that XDR is Yet Another high-latency spec from the Rambus brain trust.
Same thing as the Pentium 4: just like a late 60s Detroit muscle car, goes real good in a straight line, slides all over the place when you make a turn.
1) CRTs have significant quantities of lead in the picture tube. Discarded CRTs are the second largest source of lead in waste streams, at 28% vs 65% for lead-acid batteries.
2) CRT power consumption lies between 65 to 100 watts, vs 25 to 45 watts for an LCD. Assuming a delta of 50 watts, and 100 million monitors in the USA, you're talking 5 Gigawatts difference if all CRTs are replaced with LCDs. In other words, you save 5 nuclear plants by running LCDs exclusively,
not to mention saving that again in reduced air conditioning costs during the summer.
I'd say there's an environmental effect.
www.diyaudio.com
As my monicker implies, I've been doing audio for a while, and some of the people on the aforementioned site are pretty impressive. Some are less so (a problem I suspect exists for most pro-am activities), but the self-selected mean is decent.
And it's not a stretch to see dailykos.com as doing the same thing for politics, minus the six-figure consulting fees (ie, the ever-losing Bob Shrum).
Cheers,
Francois.
I once worked for a fellow (calling him a manager would be a stretch, the guy (Hi Matthew!) had No Clue about leading people) who would bitch if I worked any less than 60 hrs/wk, and once committed to a deadline which meant I hammered in two consecutive 100 hour weeks. Then the silly sonofabitch dared tell me a few months later I "let him down" because I was two weeks late after taking two months to clean up code his crony had left in complete disarray. Holy Christ, I almost punched him. As it turns out, the place later went belly up in no small part because of silly-assed management like the above. Me, I found a better-paying gig and a whole ton of schadenfreude when Sony crushed them like a steamroller running over a box of baby chicks.
I've been in other similar situations, and Death Marches, without exception, occur because of poor planning. >60 hour weeks for more than ten days at a time is God's Way of telling you to start looking for another job because the current place will hit the crapper. Maybe not now, but soon, and after all your hard work you'll be flushed away by manglement scrambling to protect their asses and options.
Francois.
Is everyone absolutely sure this letter is indeed from Perkins Coie? SG didn't show any headers, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find it came from somewhere else; real lawyers send warnings of this sort via certified mail or FedEx.
It reads like a cart00ney to me (cart00neys are the term of art in the anti-spam community for the squeaky-voiced legal threats ill advised spammers occasionally send out), so I'd be surprised a tech-savvy firm like PC emailed this hunk-o-junk with no paper support.
Francois.
Janet Jackson lets one wayward tit slip out accidentally on CBS: $750000 fine.
F oxOpps.html
Fox puts hard-core porn on the air:
http://homepage.mac.com/mjsmitho/FoxNewsPornSlip/
Nothing. Nada.
Must be nice to be connected.
You might wanna be careful about that. Cats need taurine, which tuna does not provide them. Taurine deficiency causes nasty diseases and eventually death.
And of course the weasels from the Direct Marketing Association don't want this to happen. They're the same sacks of sh*t who fought long & hard against the Do-Not-Call list. Imagine that, they don't want spammers turned in either.
Savvis, isn't that the new pronunciation of "Agis"?
(Agis hosted Sanford Wallace for about a year while loudly proclaiming they weren't doing anything wrong. LOTS of people found out how to block IP ranges. Agis later repented, booted Wallace et al, but it was too late. Nobody who cared about their online reputation would choose them as a host, and Agis went belly-up not too long thereafter.)
Real Erdos numbers apply to mathematical collaborators producing papers dealing with what some might say are imaginary worlds, so Real Life contact with Erdos must therefore be quantified with an imaginary number. Obvious, really. She has an Erdos number of i.
Well, as it turns out the House is already busy watering down the junk fax law (cf. HR 4600), changing the mechanism from opt-in to opt-out and prolonging the time a business you contacted can junkfax you to seven years.
The bill's sponsor (Fred Upton [R-MI]) claims unsolicited junk faxes are still prohibited, but since spammers of any stripe are invariably lying sacks of shit they'll just fake correspondance allegedly from you to them. Voila! "Prior business relationship", and your fax machine is drooling paper every morning.
Fred Upton, by the way, is bought & paid for by the real estate lobby, just as Billy Tauzin (R-LA) was the legislative arm of the Direct Marketing Association. If you expect these hyenas to do anything better for email, well, I'd like to smoke what you have - it's good shit.
ObPoliticalRant: I'm not saying the Democrats are enourmously better (see Fritz Hollings, for example) but Republicans really are working overtime to make sure we're all bent over cheeks spread wide open goatse-style for the next "valuable marketing message" to be inserted.
That's know as "painting the tape", when buyers drive up the price at the end of a crappy session to make the closing price look decent (or less horrible than otherwise). SCO stock activity over the past year shows this pattern over & over again - one could wonder who might have a vested interest in propping up the price despite the truly hideous fundamentals.
More power to Buzz, too. The video shows the guy was right in his face, wouldn't give ground, and had pretty well backed him up against the wall. Then, when Aldrin, who was *twice* his age, pasted him one, Sibrel went away whining like a little bitch.
By the way, the Tennessee authorities didn't bust Buzz at all. Probably wanted to give him a medal.
Francois.
People who used Verisign's Web-based domain name search got their domains hijacked more often than not. It happened to my stepbrother, along with a number of other people I know. The sleazeballs didn't even *try* to make it look legitimate: from lookup to hijack took around a dozen hours.
As my friend in the Army said: "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action".
Veritas delenda est.
Heard that. HP once understood human factors, but that also seems to be pre-Fiorina. If they *had* to V out the keyboard, they might have actually LOOKED at a hand and noted the middle finger is the longest rather than the shortest, and bent the V the other way.
...it's a feature!
Seriously, slapping in audio delay is not a Bhig Dheal: I have to throw in an 8 second delay for $dayjob, and the silicon count is derisory.
More to the point, having a constant video delay is really useful if you want to do trick audio processing like room or speaker EQ using finite impulse response filters (FIRs), which tend to have long delays of their own in these applications.
Francois.
http://public.migrator2000.org/J2Kdemonstrator/ind ex.xalter
As usual, mung the space.
...but only in the long term. Short to medium term, anything can (and does) happen. Case in point: Rambus. They tried extorting money from every DRAM maker on the planet on the strength of bogus patents (they retconned the impending DRAM standard into their pending patent application), and their stock price quadrupled over a month when the Japanese capitulated. Infineon told'em to Get Fucked, and RMBS dropped like a stone.
Another case: Aureal. In early 2000, they were languishing at $3 when they announced they were writing a Linux driver for their sound cards, whereupon the stock hit $9 within a week. A few months later, their financials revealed that sales went up by $18 million, but so did losses. The stock dropped by 57% that day, to be worth pennies when the company shut down the following week.
When the DNC list first appeared, the Direct Marketing Association shrieked that telemarketing contributed $600 billion to the GNP. That's 6% of the economy. A quick poll of friends showed they didn't buy *anything* from phone spammers, so that number was immediately suspect. Then the American Teleservices Association said it was $200 billion and 4 million jobs, but that wasn't believable either. Their bid is now down to $50 billion and 2 million jobs.
Those numbers mean each telemarketer's contribution to the economy is $25,000, as opposed to the approximately $40K to $50K to the GNP by each working citizen. Now, let us consider the telepests must be selling a product on top of getting paid - minimum wage is about $10K yearly, so with overhead we're talking closer to $15K, which means the products sold must be worth no more than $10K assuming full-time phone droids. This is supposedly a profitable industry, so one assumes the price would at least cover the overhead (in this case phone spammers) and cost of product. In this case we see the overhead is massive which means the end-user does not get value for money even if the phoners are getting minimum wage. Anecdotal evidence elsewhere in the thread indicates pay rates are better than that.
For the customers to be getting a good deal, the yearly rate must decrease considerably - the only way this can be done legally is to hire people part-time or offshore the phone banks. The aforementioned wage rates, coupled with the overhead of annoying hundreds, if not thousands, of people to make a single sale, mean the jobs must be far less than even half-time. In other words, the "2 million" jobs number is actually equivalent to a fraction thereof.
All the above calculations presuppose, of course, that the DMA and ATA are not merely lying sacks of shit. For the $50 billion and 2 million jobs they claim telemarketers "contribute" to the economy, I sure haven't seen any trace of that presence on the Fortune 500 list. For that matter, the demand for goods and services will not disappear just because Joe LoBrow isn't hawking them over the phone when you're eating dinner. The demand will still exist, and conceivably increase once the cost structure decreases when the inefficiencies of scattergun telephone marketing go away.
Francois.
SCO hasn't told anyone where they got the alleged infringing Linux code, or exactly which modules contain the alleged copyright violations. A suspicious person might even wonder whether SCO grabbed Linux source off a distro and placed their own copyright notices in the source ex post facto before showing it to easily influenced pseudo-researchers from Giga. Of course Darl McBride, being of the highest integrity and not at all prone to barratry, would never dream of doing such a thing. Honest.
Ooops, that's actually 2^23 values between 1023.0 and 1024.0 (IEEE-754 single precision mantissa is actually 23 bits, extended to 24 by considering the leading bit to be 1 when the number is normalised).
Francois.
The inexactness portion of his argument is quite wrong. His example claims single precision floating point only allows for 8K values between 1023.0 and 1024.0. Consider that under IEEE-754 the numbers would be represented respectively as 1.99904875 * 2^9 and 1.00000000 * 2^10, _with a full 24 bits of precision in the mantissa_, thus ensuring the number of possible values between 1023.0 and 1024.0 actually reaches 2^24.
Francois.