One more observation: "Operating through the eyes of video game killers trains kids to stalk victims, take aim and kill, Yee said."
If Yee wishes to make sure nobody in California learns how to "stalk, aim, and kill", he'll have to ban (or otherwise segregate) hunting publications as well, for obvious reasons, along with any fictional or reference book, video, which depicts, or otherwise provides information on hunting. The next step is to restrict what you can see on the internet and other game-related print publications, since preventing kids from looking at the box won't stop them from reading gaming magazines, or visiting official or fan websites.
Can everyone see where this is going? And I'm paying how much a year in taxes to pay the salary for this bozo to propose crap like this, which will inevitably cost millions of dollars in court time, and weeks, if not months of a judge (or even a jury's) time, if passed? What about the costs of enforcements? More tax money out of my pocket!
"Operating through the eyes of video game killers trains kids to stalk victims, take aim and kill, Yee said Taking that a step further: Joining the United States Army trains our kids to stalk enemies, take aim and kill.
I'm assuming Mr. Yee will next propose a bill forcing armed services recruiters to be cordoned off in an isolated area during career fairs at Junior, Middle, and High Schools throughout California, to prevent our impressionable youth from being exposed to glorified depictions of violence. Then, he'll ask to ban contact sports in high school like football and hockey...
Seriously though, I wouldn't be surprised if he did - they've already more or less banned shooting sports in the state, recruits from California (either for law enforcement or military) probably have never even been taught basic firearms safety, much less the basic points of shooting. God forbid anyone should propose something unpatriotic these days, but throw out a chorus of "please think of the children!" and we've got another brainless law in the making.
Did anyone stop to think that maybe the children need a little less protection from themselves, and more protection from stupid lawmakers like this? Of course, he is from San Francisco (aka Feinstein-land...)
Another thought - this law would affect purchases of first person shooters. What about America's Army, which is downloadable for free? Wouldn't that create an uneven playing field, and jeopardize the jobs of thousands of programmers, animators, artists, and modelers, many of whom live and work in California and pay taxes here? I guess they could all go to work for the US Army...
When I ran cat5 as a student, the rule told to me was, at least 6" between parallel runs of electrical and network cable, and if you need to cross electrical conduits, do it at right angles to minimize inductive interference.
Also, never bend network cable at sharp angles (give it a radius so the wires don't kink), and make sure you leave slack, so when the house flexes (ie, during an earthquake) your wires flex instead of breaking. If you're running wires in your attic, make sure they're supported (ie, on hangers) and out of the way, so you don't step on them when you're up there.
Power conversion should be done at a central location in the building
The main problem with this is the voltage drop in the line. If the conversion point is too far from the usage point, you're wasting a lot of electricity in heat, pushing extra current to your device, unless you use oversize wires.
The other problem is that you need to size a transformer big enough to handle maximum load. As you well know, even when there's nothing on the other end (ie, your cell phone), the wall wart and associated transformer are still putting out heat, due to the inefficiencies in pushing electrons around an iron core. Your big-enough transformer would be putting out heat continuously, whether you were using it or not - not very efficient.
Ideally, if you want to consolidate power usage, get a bigger psu and chain devices off of it. Runs of no longer than 30 feet are recommended. Either that, or buy peripherials that don't use wall warts.
If you put in a Tivo, or ReplayTV (or anything else with a hard drive) then a UPS is a must. Otherwise, you're just waiting for the drive to crash due to random power fluctuations...
Don't forget to put electrical, networking, and cable in cabinets (you'd be surprised how handy that can be - I wish I had done it),
By this I mean, if you build storage cabinets, put outlets and network jacks in them, in case you want to put in a microserver, or a ReplayTV/Tivo. Extra speaker wires are also nice, in case you want to hook speakers to a central MP3 player, connected to that power and network in your cabinet. Power outlets in cabinets are also handy for keeping battery rechargers out of sight.
Last bit of advice, locate power outlets/network jacks at least 1.5 feet above desk height if you want to use them with a desk or bookshelf, so that you can still access power/network even with a full set of books on the shelf.
If this is new constructions, also consider running separate waste lines for toilet vs. washbasin/bath. Certain areas are experimenting with using grey water(ie washbasin water) to flush the toilet in order to conserve drinking water. It wouldn't hurt to have separate lines to have the option of converting in the future if need be.
If I had to build a house now, I would definitely recommend going overboard with the electricity, gas, aerial and cat 6 cabling.
It's good advice. I regret not doing extra drops (cat 5e at the time) when remodeling. I have a minimum of 3 ports per room, and I find that I'm always running short. Coax for the television is even worse - the electrician who did that drop only did one drop per room. This is very inconvenient if you want to put the tv on the side of the room opposite the coax outlet.
The most important thing if you're doing new construction is when doing the blueprints, design the house so that all of your water, cable, and electricity runs are accessible, and centralized. Residential contractors build so that you won't want to do maintainance - they staple wires in place, embed pipes in concrete, and do other things to discourage you from "upgrading" your house. Don't forget to put electrical, networking, and cable in cabinets (you'd be surprised how handy that can be - I wish I had done it), and give your garage/attic/basement a double-helping of everything, plus a main feeder big enough to supply another sub-panel/subnet worth of power/bandwidth. In this case, I told the idiot architect to give me a 80amp run to the attic (don't ask me why, just run it), but he ended up omitting it and not telling me.
By coordinating all of your runs via a central location, and making sure that you can access it, you can leave room for future expansion. Better yet, locate all your networking equipment there also, and soundproof the sucker. I sort of have this arrangement now (centralized location), but all the runs are embedded in drywall:(
Remember, if you hire a contractor, YOU MUST CHECK THE WORK. If you hire an architect/general contractor to implement things, YOU MUST CHECK THE WORK. This is year 3 of living in this house, and I'm still fixing electrical problems, correcting defects in cabinetry, patching walls and stucco, and replacing worn out plumbing. No, I didn't hire these guys, if I had, I would have kept a closer eye on em.
Get a cabinet and put your clothes in there. Then take all your electrical appliances and stick them in your closet. If you're worried about sparking, line the closet with tin first.
A large ABC rated fire extinguisher might also be a good idea...
It's called the technique of the "Big Lie". You tell a lie so enormous and outrageous, people believe you actually have credibility, because no reasonable, right-thinking person would make such an incredible claim without some kind of truth to back them up.
This is what allows con men to get away with what they do - they act as though they're 100% in the right, and in the absence of any cohesive resistance, people are swayed because, hey, who wants to be wrong? (ie, who wants to be embarassed.)
The current situation has troubled me because SCO has dominated the market share of the press via press releases (just as the lawmakers have dominated the press with the passage of their "anti-spam" bill.) It doesn't matter that 99.99% of what they say is utter bullshit that will eventually land them in court for libel, fraud, and stock manipulation. In the absence of somebody releasing a big fat claim to the contrary, people are inclined to belive what the mainstream press tell them, and the mainstream press isn't exactly doing investigative reporting of SCO (that I know of.)
Hmm, after reading the Diebold response, it looks like someone with half a brain and a clue got through to the idiot execs. It is essentially a total surrender, abandoning claims of irrepairable harm, a recognition that the materials are too widespread to control, and a conditional promise not to sue under copyright.
I was wrong - this is a win (sort of)! Too bad we had to file suit to generate this response though...
It's not a win unless the EFF wins the actual case. Although the main intent behind the suits was to stop Diebold from issuing any more takedown letters citing copyright, a successful injunction against Diebold would have sent a very strong message against any future abuses of copyright in ways contrary to the public good (ie, interference with 1st amendment protections.)
If the judge allows dismissal, the EFF misses a slam dunk chance to nibble away at corporate abuse (ie, the DMCA stands, Diebold gets away with saying "Oops, we really didn't mean to stifle free speech. We promise not to do it again *crossing fingers*" While OGP will probably be relieved that they won't have to go to the time and expense of trial, we're just postponing the inevitable courtroom clash between individual freedom and corporate manipulation of federal law.
It probably has to do with cable providers REALLY overselling bandwidth, and running into problems when someone starts up a file repository which (if not capped) can eat up all the upstream bandwidth for a neighborhood (the whole shared header thing.) It probably also has to do with the lack of tech-savvy people to do support for cable broadband, AND the desire to charge business-class prices for the privilege of a static IP.
I have to say though, my DSL provider (Speakeasy) has been remarkably cool about everything. In fact, they ENCOURAGE you to run servers on your connection, AND there's a reseller program where you can resell Speakeasy bandwidth with their blessings (in fact, they'll bill your "customers" and give you part of the cut in exchange for you being the neighborhood tech guy.)
Yes, it pissed me off very much, especially since I surf with JS off, and could see the crap that they were packing their gateway page with in order to game the ranking. I actually reported one linkspammer that had claim-jumped several unrelated domain names, packed them with the typical scraped text (to score high and give false returns) and multiple linkages to other pages that linked back to other pages in the fake site, but were redirecting them all to an A-to-Z everything but the kitchen sink Amazon site. Amazon just said "We're not responsible for the content of 3rd party sites."
The worst thing about these "associate sites" is they're always advertising stuff that IS NOT IN STOCK. This obviously drowns out returns from people who do have it in stock, poisoning the search results. Bastards.
Even worse, these linkspammers (that's what they do, they spam up the search results with a tangled morass of javascript redirects, pages with text scraped directly from google and/or ebay, and links to pages that link back to themselves), have also taken advantage of pre-existing linkages to boost their results.
How?
By borrowing a porn technique, and taking over expired domains that still have other sites pointing at them. Instead of just getting hits from those links, they exploit this interconnectedness to dupe the google ranking algorithm to give them top hits. This wouldn't be bad if they actually sold something that corresponded to the search term. However, you get stuff like "Home Loans Now" when doing a search for "Comic Book Covers", when the text excerpt that the linkspammer has put into the page has "Recommendations on Mylar vs. Polyproplene comic book covers."
Google searches for me had been going downhill for the last two months (I was actually going back and using altavista and metacrawler to get decent results.) Hopefully they lower the boom on these bastards, and ban them permanently.
Whoops. Sorry, that should have read "unsolicited commercial e-mails", aka, spam. Basically, I have objections to people e-mailing me, wanting to buy stuff. People wanting to sell stuff to me should stick to sending me flyers and catalogs.
The worst offenders are the bozos who "merge" e-mails with demographic info, and other data. They THINK they're doing targeted e-mails when in fact they're annoying the hell out of me by spamming my customer support addresses. Some organizations that send garbage to me are people I would have done business with... had they not made the very offensive decision to buy one of these "targeted" lists, that have my personal info, and the assumption that an e-mail address is just like a postal address.
Like I've said before, if this bill is signed into law, I'm turning on whitelisting. NOBODY will be able to reach me, unless they go through a challenge/response system (or via a web feedback form, for as long as that stays unmolested.) Yes, I'll take a hit on business, but letting all these vermin steal my time would do even more damage.
Just in case anyone is interested, the House vote was 392 in favor, 5 against, and 37 no votes. Take a look and see if your congresscritter sold out (mine did, not a surprise.)
Pro-business my ass. Rising standards of living are due to increase productivity and worker efficiency. What you're proposing is a DECREASE in productivity and worker efficiency. Any other economy which eliminates this inefficiency will be poised to reap increased benefits from technology, while we wallow in the stone age, with people having to hire gatekeepers to keep their e-mail boxes clean.
What you have here is a powerful entrenched lobby representing a very specific special interest group (marketers) - ironically one that took it on the chin with the do-no-call list (although they managed to stall that too in the courts.) This special interest group does NOT speak for the business community.
Any challenger with an ounce of sense is going to run ads saying "incumbent X legalized spam, get rid of the bastard and vote me, candidate Y, as congressman/woman"
Strike first. Set the tone. Make it a campaign issue. You think that voting for an "anti-spam" bill is going to work, when it becomes public knowledge that the bill made it 100% legal for scum-marketers to fill up your mailbox?
As a business owner, voting for a business-friendly candidate means not only lower taxes, but a permanent ban on ALL types of unsolicited e-mails. Anything else is tantamount to a congress-approved tax on my time and money - time to keep my spam filters in good repair, money for my bandwidth and additional equipment requirements, as well as in terms of potential lost business due to the effects of spam.
Vote the bastards out of the House. Vote the bastards out of the Senate. They listened to the wrong special interest this time.
I use the hard plastic tubs from contco, you can usually find them on sale for about $6 at the local Home Depot. Another tip is instead of just shelves, try building full-length floor to ceiling cabinets. This allows you to put storage in common areas without making them look like cellar/garage space, and cuts down on the dust that collects.
I keep my tools collected in several toolboxes - one for woodworking/general, one for cable/networking, one for electrical, and another for building/repairing computers. There's also a toolbox for plumbing that needs to be re-organized.
Big items (such as complete computers, or cases) go in the garage, under plastic sheeting, or if they're small enough, in the cabinets. Misc. parts that don't merit storage in a contco box go in plain old cardboard boxes, but are sorted by part type (ie, isa cards, power supplies, floppy drives, etc.)
From the samples I've heard, Apple TTS has only made incremental improvements. We're still talking mostly about stringing pre-recorded phonemes together, guided by a semi-intelligent system for decoding written text into the audio equivalent for the speech engine.
What I'd like to see is physical modeling of the speech apparatus - lungs, vocal cords, mouth, tongue, teeth, lips, where you can vary parameters such as articulation, etc. We have the computational power to drive such a simulation, witness the brain-dazzling graphics $200 3d cards can pump out. Couple that on-demand speech engine with a decent text to speech translator, and say goodbye to poor phoneme transitions and inappropriate articulations.
Of course, this technology would probably find it's first applications in interactive 3d porn... Grant applications anybody?
Re:There are more artists than performance artists
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· Score: 3, Interesting
What about sign painters? There are still 2d animators around, they just migrated media from paper->cel to paper->digital. Of course, those that are still working (no thanks to brainless execs who think 3d is the panacea for bad, overworked and overbudget stories...)
The Man in the High Castle also would make a great movie. Hollywood needs to focus on his novels. His short stories just barely scratched the surface of what he was trying to reveal. Perhaps that is why they have been used mostly to date, because they are more skeletal and can be mutated into a product easily.
This is true of not only PKD, but of all novels in general. It's much easier to take a short story and pad it out to a feature length movie, than to take an existing novel-length story, cut out everything that won't work visually (remember, movies are about showing, not telling), and then try and bandage what's left into a cohesive plot. Also consider that much of the richness of the novel will be lost, as we don't have the available screen time to follow everybody's POV, or to track multiple storylines and/or subplots. Pretty much as a rule, writers try and find a central theme in a novel, pick out a few characters and main events, keep the time and setting (sometimes - sometimes not in the event of The 13th Floor), and write everything else from scratch.
Novella-sized stories, written in a cinematic style are easiest to translate to screen time, but even then, film being the collaborative medium it is, you got a lot of cooks, and a potentially spoiled broth...
I'm a programmer with a business and consulting background. I interact with customers, managers, etc., and I do a pretty damn good job of it. However, when I'm writing code and solving problems, the last thing I want to do is to break up my work time with idle chitchat, listen to some adjoining worker's cell phone conversation, or have to deal with someone's ruffled feathers. When I sit down and code, I do NOT want to expend the mental resources having to deal with other people - I just want to get work done!!!
Think of it this way. If it takes someone 40 minutes to get their brain back into gear to remember and manipulate a 4000 line piece of code, do you really want to interrupt their concentration? A couple of days of not being able to get any work done because of interruptions can turn the most friendly, interesting person into a raving psycho.
Anyone have any details on how to do this? I've got some systems that I'd like to cloak as classic MacOS machines to discourage script kiddies from poking at them. They're already locked down, but I figure the more indirection I can throw out, the more likely that they'll go off and bother some other poor sod.
SpamCop publishes a list, but whether it is used for scoring or blocking is completely up to the person receiving the list. For example, you state that you like SpamAssassin - one of the filters that is used by SA to score spam is the SpamCop blacklist. Also keep in mind that publishing this list is only one of the benefits that SpamCop provides. I use the reporting service to report spam (and incidentally, it's these reports that go into the creation of the blacklist.)
Funnily enough, SpamCop recently incorporated SpamAssassin for the pop/webmail service that they provide.
As for getting on and off, there is a deputy you can e-mail (a live human being), in addition to the standard set of webforms etc. SpamCop these days is a very benign service (for the most part). The fact that SpamCop is under almost constant attack by spammers trying to DDOS them, trying to overload their systems with fake accounts, etc. tells me that spammers consider SpamCop to be a major threat.
All you would need to have a public debate about the annual budget would be to draft a law making tax withholding illegal. Thus, on April 15th, millions of taxpayers would suddenly realize that the government wants them to fork over tens of thousands of dollars, and that half of the time they spend at work is going to fund whatever pork-barrel special interest is delivering the votes to the politicos.
At that point, we'd have a very sudden turnover in our elected officials, and some reasonable policies concerning what we spend our money on, and how much we take out of each taxpayer's pocket to do so. Come on, do we really need MORE subsidies to grow corn, just so we can turn it into mash and make ethanol out of it? What about subsides to build a $20 billion dollar giant natural gas pipeline from Alaska... to Illinois? Even MORE money for the already giant auto conglomerates so they can do more "research" on hydrogen fueled cars (just as they did "research" on electric cars in the 80's).
Make withholding illegal, and that will be the sparking point for the next American revolution. And it's about time - I'm tired of special interests picking my pockets with Uncle Sam's blessings.
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One more observation: "Operating through the eyes of video game killers trains kids to stalk victims, take aim and kill, Yee said."
If Yee wishes to make sure nobody in California learns how to "stalk, aim, and kill", he'll have to ban (or otherwise segregate) hunting publications as well, for obvious reasons, along with any fictional or reference book, video, which depicts, or otherwise provides information on hunting. The next step is to restrict what you can see on the internet and other game-related print publications, since preventing kids from looking at the box won't stop them from reading gaming magazines, or visiting official or fan websites.
Can everyone see where this is going? And I'm paying how much a year in taxes to pay the salary for this bozo to propose crap like this, which will inevitably cost millions of dollars in court time, and weeks, if not months of a judge (or even a jury's) time, if passed? What about the costs of enforcements? More tax money out of my pocket!
"Operating through the eyes of video game killers trains kids to stalk victims, take aim and kill, Yee said
Taking that a step further: Joining the United States Army trains our kids to stalk enemies, take aim and kill.
I'm assuming Mr. Yee will next propose a bill forcing armed services recruiters to be cordoned off in an isolated area during career fairs at Junior, Middle, and High Schools throughout California, to prevent our impressionable youth from being exposed to glorified depictions of violence. Then, he'll ask to ban contact sports in high school like football and hockey...
Seriously though, I wouldn't be surprised if he did - they've already more or less banned shooting sports in the state, recruits from California (either for law enforcement or military) probably have never even been taught basic firearms safety, much less the basic points of shooting. God forbid anyone should propose something unpatriotic these days, but throw out a chorus of "please think of the children!" and we've got another brainless law in the making.
Did anyone stop to think that maybe the children need a little less protection from themselves, and more protection from stupid lawmakers like this? Of course, he is from San Francisco (aka Feinstein-land...)
Another thought - this law would affect purchases of first person shooters. What about America's Army, which is downloadable for free? Wouldn't that create an uneven playing field, and jeopardize the jobs of thousands of programmers, animators, artists, and modelers, many of whom live and work in California and pay taxes here? I guess they could all go to work for the US Army...
When I ran cat5 as a student, the rule told to me was, at least 6" between parallel runs of electrical and network cable, and if you need to cross electrical conduits, do it at right angles to minimize inductive interference.
Also, never bend network cable at sharp angles (give it a radius so the wires don't kink), and make sure you leave slack, so when the house flexes (ie, during an earthquake) your wires flex instead of breaking. If you're running wires in your attic, make sure they're supported (ie, on hangers) and out of the way, so you don't step on them when you're up there.
Power conversion should be done at a central location in the building
The main problem with this is the voltage drop in the line. If the conversion point is too far from the usage point, you're wasting a lot of electricity in heat, pushing extra current to your device, unless you use oversize wires.
The other problem is that you need to size a transformer big enough to handle maximum load. As you well know, even when there's nothing on the other end (ie, your cell phone), the wall wart and associated transformer are still putting out heat, due to the inefficiencies in pushing electrons around an iron core. Your big-enough transformer would be putting out heat continuously, whether you were using it or not - not very efficient.
Ideally, if you want to consolidate power usage, get a bigger psu and chain devices off of it. Runs of no longer than 30 feet are recommended. Either that, or buy peripherials that don't use wall warts.
If you put in a Tivo, or ReplayTV (or anything else with a hard drive) then a UPS is a must. Otherwise, you're just waiting for the drive to crash due to random power fluctuations...
Don't forget to put electrical, networking, and cable in cabinets (you'd be surprised how handy that can be - I wish I had done it),
By this I mean, if you build storage cabinets, put outlets and network jacks in them, in case you want to put in a microserver, or a ReplayTV/Tivo. Extra speaker wires are also nice, in case you want to hook speakers to a central MP3 player, connected to that power and network in your cabinet. Power outlets in cabinets are also handy for keeping battery rechargers out of sight.
Last bit of advice, locate power outlets/network jacks at least 1.5 feet above desk height if you want to use them with a desk or bookshelf, so that you can still access power/network even with a full set of books on the shelf.
If this is new constructions, also consider running separate waste lines for toilet vs. washbasin/bath. Certain areas are experimenting with using grey water(ie washbasin water) to flush the toilet in order to conserve drinking water. It wouldn't hurt to have separate lines to have the option of converting in the future if need be.
If I had to build a house now, I would definitely recommend going overboard with the electricity, gas, aerial and cat 6 cabling.
:(
It's good advice. I regret not doing extra drops (cat 5e at the time) when remodeling. I have a minimum of 3 ports per room, and I find that I'm always running short. Coax for the television is even worse - the electrician who did that drop only did one drop per room. This is very inconvenient if you want to put the tv on the side of the room opposite the coax outlet.
The most important thing if you're doing new construction is when doing the blueprints, design the house so that all of your water, cable, and electricity runs are accessible, and centralized. Residential contractors build so that you won't want to do maintainance - they staple wires in place, embed pipes in concrete, and do other things to discourage you from "upgrading" your house. Don't forget to put electrical, networking, and cable in cabinets (you'd be surprised how handy that can be - I wish I had done it), and give your garage/attic/basement a double-helping of everything, plus a main feeder big enough to supply another sub-panel/subnet worth of power/bandwidth. In this case, I told the idiot architect to give me a 80amp run to the attic (don't ask me why, just run it), but he ended up omitting it and not telling me.
By coordinating all of your runs via a central location, and making sure that you can access it, you can leave room for future expansion. Better yet, locate all your networking equipment there also, and soundproof the sucker. I sort of have this arrangement now (centralized location), but all the runs are embedded in drywall
Remember, if you hire a contractor, YOU MUST CHECK THE WORK. If you hire an architect/general contractor to implement things, YOU MUST CHECK THE WORK. This is year 3 of living in this house, and I'm still fixing electrical problems, correcting defects in cabinetry, patching walls and stucco, and replacing worn out plumbing. No, I didn't hire these guys, if I had, I would have kept a closer eye on em.
Get a cabinet and put your clothes in there. Then take all your electrical appliances and stick them in your closet. If you're worried about sparking, line the closet with tin first.
A large ABC rated fire extinguisher might also be a good idea...
It's called the technique of the "Big Lie". You tell a lie so enormous and outrageous, people believe you actually have credibility, because no reasonable, right-thinking person would make such an incredible claim without some kind of truth to back them up.
This is what allows con men to get away with what they do - they act as though they're 100% in the right, and in the absence of any cohesive resistance, people are swayed because, hey, who wants to be wrong? (ie, who wants to be embarassed.)
The current situation has troubled me because SCO has dominated the market share of the press via press releases (just as the lawmakers have dominated the press with the passage of their "anti-spam" bill.) It doesn't matter that 99.99% of what they say is utter bullshit that will eventually land them in court for libel, fraud, and stock manipulation. In the absence of somebody releasing a big fat claim to the contrary, people are inclined to belive what the mainstream press tell them, and the mainstream press isn't exactly doing investigative reporting of SCO (that I know of.)
Hmm, after reading the Diebold response, it looks like someone with half a brain and a clue got through to the idiot execs. It is essentially a total surrender, abandoning claims of irrepairable harm, a recognition that the materials are too widespread to control, and a conditional promise not to sue under copyright.
I was wrong - this is a win (sort of)! Too bad we had to file suit to generate this response though...
It's not a win unless the EFF wins the actual case. Although the main intent behind the suits was to stop Diebold from issuing any more takedown letters citing copyright, a successful injunction against Diebold would have sent a very strong message against any future abuses of copyright in ways contrary to the public good (ie, interference with 1st amendment protections.)
If the judge allows dismissal, the EFF misses a slam dunk chance to nibble away at corporate abuse (ie, the DMCA stands, Diebold gets away with saying "Oops, we really didn't mean to stifle free speech. We promise not to do it again *crossing fingers*" While OGP will probably be relieved that they won't have to go to the time and expense of trial, we're just postponing the inevitable courtroom clash between individual freedom and corporate manipulation of federal law.
It probably has to do with cable providers REALLY overselling bandwidth, and running into problems when someone starts up a file repository which (if not capped) can eat up all the upstream bandwidth for a neighborhood (the whole shared header thing.) It probably also has to do with the lack of tech-savvy people to do support for cable broadband, AND the desire to charge business-class prices for the privilege of a static IP.
I have to say though, my DSL provider (Speakeasy) has been remarkably cool about everything. In fact, they ENCOURAGE you to run servers on your connection, AND there's a reseller program where you can resell Speakeasy bandwidth with their blessings (in fact, they'll bill your "customers" and give you part of the cut in exchange for you being the neighborhood tech guy.)
Yes, it pissed me off very much, especially since I surf with JS off, and could see the crap that they were packing their gateway page with in order to game the ranking. I actually reported one linkspammer that had claim-jumped several unrelated domain names, packed them with the typical scraped text (to score high and give false returns) and multiple linkages to other pages that linked back to other pages in the fake site, but were redirecting them all to an A-to-Z everything but the kitchen sink Amazon site. Amazon just said "We're not responsible for the content of 3rd party sites."
The worst thing about these "associate sites" is they're always advertising stuff that IS NOT IN STOCK. This obviously drowns out returns from people who do have it in stock, poisoning the search results. Bastards.
Even worse, these linkspammers (that's what they do, they spam up the search results with a tangled morass of javascript redirects, pages with text scraped directly from google and/or ebay, and links to pages that link back to themselves), have also taken advantage of pre-existing linkages to boost their results.
How?
By borrowing a porn technique, and taking over expired domains that still have other sites pointing at them. Instead of just getting hits from those links, they exploit this interconnectedness to dupe the google ranking algorithm to give them top hits. This wouldn't be bad if they actually sold something that corresponded to the search term. However, you get stuff like "Home Loans Now" when doing a search for "Comic Book Covers", when the text excerpt that the linkspammer has put into the page has "Recommendations on Mylar vs. Polyproplene comic book covers."
Google searches for me had been going downhill for the last two months (I was actually going back and using altavista and metacrawler to get decent results.) Hopefully they lower the boom on these bastards, and ban them permanently.
Whoops. Sorry, that should have read "unsolicited commercial e-mails", aka, spam. Basically, I have objections to people e-mailing me, wanting to buy stuff. People wanting to sell stuff to me should stick to sending me flyers and catalogs.
The worst offenders are the bozos who "merge" e-mails with demographic info, and other data. They THINK they're doing targeted e-mails when in fact they're annoying the hell out of me by spamming my customer support addresses. Some organizations that send garbage to me are people I would have done business with... had they not made the very offensive decision to buy one of these "targeted" lists, that have my personal info, and the assumption that an e-mail address is just like a postal address.
Like I've said before, if this bill is signed into law, I'm turning on whitelisting. NOBODY will be able to reach me, unless they go through a challenge/response system (or via a web feedback form, for as long as that stays unmolested.) Yes, I'll take a hit on business, but letting all these vermin steal my time would do even more damage.
Just in case anyone is interested, the House vote was 392 in favor, 5 against, and 37 no votes. Take a look and see if your congresscritter sold out (mine did, not a surprise.)
Pro-business my ass. Rising standards of living are due to increase productivity and worker efficiency. What you're proposing is a DECREASE in productivity and worker efficiency. Any other economy which eliminates this inefficiency will be poised to reap increased benefits from technology, while we wallow in the stone age, with people having to hire gatekeepers to keep their e-mail boxes clean.
What you have here is a powerful entrenched lobby representing a very specific special interest group (marketers) - ironically one that took it on the chin with the do-no-call list (although they managed to stall that too in the courts.) This special interest group does NOT speak for the business community.
Any challenger with an ounce of sense is going to run ads saying "incumbent X legalized spam, get rid of the bastard and vote me, candidate Y, as congressman/woman"
Strike first. Set the tone. Make it a campaign issue. You think that voting for an "anti-spam" bill is going to work, when it becomes public knowledge that the bill made it 100% legal for scum-marketers to fill up your mailbox?
As a business owner, voting for a business-friendly candidate means not only lower taxes, but a permanent ban on ALL types of unsolicited e-mails. Anything else is tantamount to a congress-approved tax on my time and money - time to keep my spam filters in good repair, money for my bandwidth and additional equipment requirements, as well as in terms of potential lost business due to the effects of spam.
Vote the bastards out of the House. Vote the bastards out of the Senate. They listened to the wrong special interest this time.
I use the hard plastic tubs from contco, you can usually find them on sale for about $6 at the local Home Depot. Another tip is instead of just shelves, try building full-length floor to ceiling cabinets. This allows you to put storage in common areas without making them look like cellar/garage space, and cuts down on the dust that collects.
I keep my tools collected in several toolboxes - one for woodworking/general, one for cable/networking, one for electrical, and another for building/repairing computers. There's also a toolbox for plumbing that needs to be re-organized.
Big items (such as complete computers, or cases) go in the garage, under plastic sheeting, or if they're small enough, in the cabinets. Misc. parts that don't merit storage in a contco box go in plain old cardboard boxes, but are sorted by part type (ie, isa cards, power supplies, floppy drives, etc.)
From the samples I've heard, Apple TTS has only made incremental improvements. We're still talking mostly about stringing pre-recorded phonemes together, guided by a semi-intelligent system for decoding written text into the audio equivalent for the speech engine.
What I'd like to see is physical modeling of the speech apparatus - lungs, vocal cords, mouth, tongue, teeth, lips, where you can vary parameters such as articulation, etc. We have the computational power to drive such a simulation, witness the brain-dazzling graphics $200 3d cards can pump out. Couple that on-demand speech engine with a decent text to speech translator, and say goodbye to poor phoneme transitions and inappropriate articulations.
Of course, this technology would probably find it's first applications in interactive 3d porn... Grant applications anybody?
What about sign painters? There are still 2d animators around, they just migrated media from paper->cel to paper->digital. Of course, those that are still working (no thanks to brainless execs who think 3d is the panacea for bad, overworked and overbudget stories...)
The Man in the High Castle also would make a great movie. Hollywood needs to focus on his novels. His short stories just barely scratched the surface of what he was trying to reveal. Perhaps that is why they have been used mostly to date, because they are more skeletal and can be mutated into a product easily.
This is true of not only PKD, but of all novels in general. It's much easier to take a short story and pad it out to a feature length movie, than to take an existing novel-length story, cut out everything that won't work visually (remember, movies are about showing, not telling), and then try and bandage what's left into a cohesive plot. Also consider that much of the richness of the novel will be lost, as we don't have the available screen time to follow everybody's POV, or to track multiple storylines and/or subplots. Pretty much as a rule, writers try and find a central theme in a novel, pick out a few characters and main events, keep the time and setting (sometimes - sometimes not in the event of The 13th Floor), and write everything else from scratch.
Novella-sized stories, written in a cinematic style are easiest to translate to screen time, but even then, film being the collaborative medium it is, you got a lot of cooks, and a potentially spoiled broth...
I'm a programmer with a business and consulting background. I interact with customers, managers, etc., and I do a pretty damn good job of it. However, when I'm writing code and solving problems, the last thing I want to do is to break up my work time with idle chitchat, listen to some adjoining worker's cell phone conversation, or have to deal with someone's ruffled feathers. When I sit down and code, I do NOT want to expend the mental resources having to deal with other people - I just want to get work done!!!
Think of it this way. If it takes someone 40 minutes to get their brain back into gear to remember and manipulate a 4000 line piece of code, do you really want to interrupt their concentration? A couple of days of not being able to get any work done because of interruptions can turn the most friendly, interesting person into a raving psycho.
Anyone have any details on how to do this? I've got some systems that I'd like to cloak as classic MacOS machines to discourage script kiddies from poking at them. They're already locked down, but I figure the more indirection I can throw out, the more likely that they'll go off and bother some other poor sod.
SpamCop publishes a list, but whether it is used for scoring or blocking is completely up to the person receiving the list. For example, you state that you like SpamAssassin - one of the filters that is used by SA to score spam is the SpamCop blacklist. Also keep in mind that publishing this list is only one of the benefits that SpamCop provides. I use the reporting service to report spam (and incidentally, it's these reports that go into the creation of the blacklist.)
Funnily enough, SpamCop recently incorporated SpamAssassin for the pop/webmail service that they provide.
As for getting on and off, there is a deputy you can e-mail (a live human being), in addition to the standard set of webforms etc. SpamCop these days is a very benign service (for the most part). The fact that SpamCop is under almost constant attack by spammers trying to DDOS them, trying to overload their systems with fake accounts, etc. tells me that spammers consider SpamCop to be a major threat.
All you would need to have a public debate about the annual budget would be to draft a law making tax withholding illegal. Thus, on April 15th, millions of taxpayers would suddenly realize that the government wants them to fork over tens of thousands of dollars, and that half of the time they spend at work is going to fund whatever pork-barrel special interest is delivering the votes to the politicos.
At that point, we'd have a very sudden turnover in our elected officials, and some reasonable policies concerning what we spend our money on, and how much we take out of each taxpayer's pocket to do so. Come on, do we really need MORE subsidies to grow corn, just so we can turn it into mash and make ethanol out of it? What about subsides to build a $20 billion dollar giant natural gas pipeline from Alaska... to Illinois? Even MORE money for the already giant auto conglomerates so they can do more "research" on hydrogen fueled cars (just as they did "research" on electric cars in the 80's).
Make withholding illegal, and that will be the sparking point for the next American revolution. And it's about time - I'm tired of special interests picking my pockets with Uncle Sam's blessings.