Pedaling 45 mph (posted speed limit) is not the problem. Pedaling 45 mph and having traffic merging to your right at 60mph is the problem. Doubters can take East Cahuenga from Burbank to Los Angeles, running alongside the 5 Freeway (Cahuenga Pass), by bicycle - I did that for several months as part of a 15 mile commute (that's 15 miles each way, 30 miles a day.) Face it, you're always going to have normal car traffic going way faster than any other traffic (ie, semi trailers, campers, old people in cadillacs, bicycles) unless there just happens to be a cop there. Then EVERYBODY slows down...
Frankly, bikes can travel faster than NEVs can (NEV's, by DEFINITION have a top speed of 25mph - and are speed governed to ensure that speed...) A more useful speed would have been 40mph - that way an NEV could keep up with most traffic in the slowest lane. Unfortunately, I doubt many people want to chance 40mph in a souped up golf cart without doors (yes, I know you can buy doors as an option), and very little in the way of crash-collision engineering.
Ever test drive one of these things? It's incredibly irritating to floor the accelerator and feel like you're on a Disneyland Autotopia car - only slower (although there is noticable absence of motor noise and gasoline exhaust fumes.) The price isn't too shabby if you need a utility cart - $5k. But no, they clearly are not designed to blend in with normal traffic - something that many cyclists (assuming they're obeying traffic laws) can do easily on most city streets.
Here's where it gets really screwy - Monsanto is claiming ownership of a genetic sequence which, when grown in conformance with the natural lifecycle of the plant, WILL SPREAD. I don't mean in a laboratory, or an isolated test field, I mean if you throw the seed into a field, little vectors of genetic contaimination (pollen) will spread. You can't get a pure-bred version of the crop, because the plant evidently is sterile in certain situations, but given that the farmer is being charged with having seeds that are partially bred from Monsanto property, it means that the plants can pass on their genetic material to a certain extent.
So, am I supposed to now make sure your IP doesn't find itself into my materials? How? Am I supposed to test the genetic sequences of ALL the plants that I have? This isn't a case where I'm going out and collecting YOUR IP in order to grow new plants - this is a case where your IP is contaminating my plants as a normal course of operation.
For example, this would be like a company which writes a computer program, that during the normal course of operations, spawns a virus that infects other programs on your hard drive. One of the programs that it infects is your compiler. Can this company now sue to get revenues for the programs you write and distribute that are compiled with this infected compiler? After all, this infected compiler now incorporates their IP...
Actually, the farmer says he never bought Mansanto seeds, the plants were growing in a ditch by the road, and that the plants contaminated the farmer's conventional canola (costing him the years crop.) If I were the farmer, I would have sued Mansanto for crop contamination.
Instead, it seems if some disgruntled seed saleman is pissed that you didn't want to buy their patented seed, he can just plant some on your property, and sue you for the cost after the fact. Now that's insane.
Even large retail chains with an internet sales outlet may split into subsidiaries.
Unlikely - the bill as passed (according to the article) targets businesses with an internet presence selling the same products and using the same name as the related company in California (ie, Barnes and Noble), not to mention any business that owns part of another business that operates in California. So, unless the subsidiary operation is spun off completely, with a different name, it would seem that they'd be covered under this proposed law.
My question is, if corporation X, which sells widgets from Nevada, owns part of corporation Y (perhaps the employee pension fund owns shares of corp Y), which sells doodads from California, does that now mean that corp X now must collect taxes on widgets sold to Californians?
First Californians are barred from buying magazines with capacities above 10 rounds, knives with blades longer than 6 inches, and now we'll be barred from buying goods from out of state because nobody is crazy enough to have to file California taxes when they don't even do business in California! Seriously, if I do business from Nevada, and I invest in a friend's business out of California, I'm going to end up having to collect and remit taxes from Californians from my Nevada business to the California Tax Franchise Board? That's just nuts!
Nothing, if you don't mind getting beat over the head with preachy messages. However, I didn't watch Batman (the Paul Dini WB Batman) for moral content, but for damn good story and character (not to mention bitchin' design and good animation.)
It is a hard line to walk to write a 3-act teleplay which is involving and dramatic (or humorous, depending on genre), with character development, story arc, and good dialogue, within a 22 minute time limit, while trying NOT beat the audience over the head with a required moral theme. Many writers wouldn't even bother with these limitations - and the good ones who do often find their work butchered to fit for time and studio requirements. Ever wondered what the writer was thinking when he/she wrote something? It may not have been the writer's fault - likely some key piece of information was cut, rendering the whole episode totally meaningless.
And where is this educational content you speak of?
FCC regs mandate that each network screen at least 3 hours of "educational" programming per week in order to maintain their broadcast licenses. Regarding Schoolhouse Rock, those programs would have to be at least 30 minutes or more in order to qualify, since the FCC specifically excludes shorter programs, as well as PSAs from their definition of programs that fall under the 3 hour requirement:
From the FCC regs: "We will not credit educational and informational PSAs, interstitials, or other short segments as core programming."
This is insanity, as the Schoolhouse Rock segments were (and continue to be) often more entertaining than the programs there were playing at the time. (Although the FCC recognizes the contribution of shorter programs, they really want to have stations air actual shows that fullfill the "educational imperative".) Even worse, the FCC will not recognize once-time episodes (ie, programming that is not regularly scheduled) such as "ABC Afterschool Specials" (this is directly taken from paragraph 103 from the above FCC link.)
So, given the 3 hour rule, if you don't play animated shows on a daily basis, then a significant portion of your Saturday/Sunday lineup (if you even have one anymore) MUST have, as a significant (if not primary) focus, shows that, on an ongoing basis, be considered "educational."
Here's the clincher - in order to earn money back on an animated series, you need to syndicate. In order to increase the "educational" value of your syndicated programming (so that it can fulfill some affilate station's educational programming requirement), ALL children's programming must at some level, be arguably "educational" - or at least, that's what the executives want to see. Hence, I'll bet that even shows like Kirby's Adventures, the new TNMT, or Ultimate Muscle - IF they air on network TV, probably had to undergo review in order to be deemed (even at the flimsiest level) "educational."
These are some of the constraints I was referring to when I condemned the myriad requirements that writers had to hew to when trying to create entertaining programming. Don't blame the writers (mostly.)
You can't have guns or fighting childrens cartoons anymore.
You can have guns. You just have to call them "blasters", and they can't be used to kill anyone. You can have fighting, but you can't show head blows, blood, or heros doing anything less than the "right thing".
Blame the FCC for mandating "educational content", and blame the studios for having "standards and practices" policies that serve to sanitize and enforce "moral lessons."
Unfortunately, this is all moot as there aren't too many decent shows to write for these days. Either the quality of the animation really has gone down the crapper (mainly bad character design choices, and the pervasive creep of the talking head versus actual staging and action) or the storyline and the characters are so constrained that you really can't do anything daring with them.
Note that the above comments apply mainly to shows on network TV and to a few shows on PBS. Also note that there are a few excellently written and well animated shows on both network TV and PBS. However, much of the really good stuff is on cable, and since I don't get cable...
That's true only if you dispose of it. I personally keep junk mail around for use as kindling during the winters (although the plastic wrap they use now for ads are getting quite annoying.) If you have way too much time on your hands, you can mash up the waste mail and make your own recycled paper!
Good god, now instead of losing a piece of paper or a business card between my desk and the wall (to be reclaimed decades later, when I move), I can now lose multiple GB of files.
I forsee a new market for 3M, making sticky-chips so we can organize our CF cards in the same way we use Post-It Notes (tm) to replace torn envelopes, napkins, etc.
A WSJ article from last month says it all. Basically, the credit card companies aren't interested in prosecuting fraud because they pass the costs directly to the merchant to accepted the card (with extra penalties to boot.) If you (as the merchant, or the customer) try to get the credit card company to follow up on a fraud attempt, they'll just ignore you. As a consequence, identity theft goes unpunished, customers are lulled into a false sense of security (oh, we'll just deactivate your old card and issue you a new one), and merchants get a lossage rate of up to 2% when accepting credit cards for card not present transactions...
Besides, for criminal cases, you need a prosecutor to file a case. Unless the amount is above a certain number, they'll typically just ignore you.
The injunction covers customers of all ISPs, or so according to the news article I read. The Wall Street Journal front column for May 7th has an excellent story on the lengths that Earthlink went to to dissuade this spammer from continuing, before finally resorting to tracking his ass down and suing him.
Disable javascript. Disable Java. Problem solved.
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Prince of Pop-ups
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I OWN MY COMPUTER - its fully 100% a resource of MINE and nobody else. I also PAY for my internet access, by the month.
If he wants to force feed me ads - then he better damn well PAY me. And protect himself while walking around in public.
Given that it is your computer, why are you letting him execute hostile code on your computer? I mean, if you're using Explorer (for example) and your security level is set such that pop-up ads are able to execute, aren't you basically allowing pop-up ads?
Now, rational folks will avoid using Explorer because of that annoying dialog box that informs you that "an active-x control on this page could not be loaded" when you turn scripting off, but the same case holds for Netscape. Pop-ups exploit features that you have turned on. Turn them off, and pop-ups cease to work.
I've browsed for years with javascript turned off, and the only time I'm bombarded with crap (the LA Times is a good example of intrusive advertising) is when I temporarily enable JS to do some banking, and forget to turn it off. In IE, I just set the default to have active scripting off for all sites, and add a few "trusted" sites so scripting is enabled selectively for just those sites.
Think about it. Why do certain sites insist on forcing you to use javascript to browse their sites (ie, latimes.com). To make sure you can experience the full "benefit" of their pop-up/pop-under ads. Solution? Boycott these sites.
The end of the MPAA or the end of the Tivo? There are only 650,000 Tivo subscribers. Cutting off part of their market could easily kill the company (especially if a cable monopoly decides to standardize on the lowest common denominator, and bans Tivos even in states where Tivos are still legal, just because a big chunk of their cable network is in a Tivo-illegal state.) You don't want them to be hogtied until someone overturns the law in court - they might be bankrupt by then. Best thing to do is preemptively fight (for example, the SonicBlue subscribers preemptively sued the studios for the right to use ReplayTV units to timeshift and share shows.)
Don't let the enemy define where and when you fight - you must be the one to control the battlefield.
Given that many commercial PVRs call home, if the MPAA has it's way, they'll get all the subscriber lists and track down each and every unit.
They'll treat PVR owners like criminals (look at law-abiding gun owners for examples of how your basic rights can be abused), and unless you can come up with enough money to buy a law keeping them from sticking it to you, you're going to have to take it. Or else, become a criminal, and hide your PVR in your basement...
I find it ironic that there's a Ad Council spot with a bunch of parishoners holding church services in somebody's basement because they're afraid they'll be arrested, and then afterwards a little blurb about how we should be thankful for freedom of religion. At the rate our rights are getting bought out by the corporations (who although are legal entities, aren't even voting citizens, damnit) freedom of religion is probably all we'll have left - and that's if we're lucky.
I've seen the exact opposite. For the last couple of months, I've seen an increasing number of spams that have forged features that generate negative scores - negatives scores big enough to outweigh the "spamminess" of the rest of the message.
Fortunately, although annoying, this problem is easy to fix. For any forged feature that gives a negative score (ie, PGP signature, PINE as client, etc.), just go to your user prefs and assign a score of 0 to it.
I've already set the majority of the features that generate negative scores (out of the 12 or so that exist), and at this rate, all will be disabled within the next month or so.
Problem solved. The next thing for me to do is to continue to fine tune the minimum score needed to trip the command to report the mail. I'm already down to 4.2 as the defining line, and I'm prepared to take it down to 4. I'll have to start whitelisting senders soon at this rate...
Amazing. An idea from over 10 years ago is finally realized. When I was in high-school, an entrepreneur demoed a new technology (the cd burner) that would allow music stores to create albums on demand, complete with cd, liner notes, cover art, etc. When he left, the class had a discussion, and we all more or less agreed that his idea was going to be dead on arrival.
Why? It took creative control from the record labels and gave it to the music stores. It threatened middlemen and the distributors who moved the physical product. And, it allowed consumers to pick and choose the tracks that they wanted, allowing them to save money by not having to buy filler material.
Fast forward a decade, after the introduction and growth of the internet, the rise of MP3s, the emergence of Napster, and the succeeding waves of P2P filesharing, and the popular outcry for sensible (even compulsory) licensing of music. Only now is that idea of on-demand music CDs coming to life.
If you read the William Shatner books (the ones where Kirk is resurrected by the Borg) you'll find that the explaination for the "evil" mirror universe is that the intrusion of the Borg, and the cultural contamination of the First Contact Cochran & Co. creates a Vulcan/Starfleet that is expansionist in nature.
There's no indication that this is the case with the Archer timeline, but as Berman has clearly demonstrated (assuming that Earth really does get wasted big-time next season) THIS IS NOT THE SAME TIMELINE AS KIRK/TNG. Ergo, the future in Enterprise is NOT the same TNG we all know and love (or in the case of Voyager, hate with a rabid mania.)
I think this is a GOOD thing, as it gives Berman a lot of freedom to play with. The question is whether he's actually making good use of that freedom...
Actually, the last time Spam was on sale at the local supermarket, I went and bought a bunch (low-sodium, fries up well, and tastes great with rice.) Even though I'm rabidly anti-spam (anti-uce), I have a very positive attitude toward Hormel. They're smart enough to understand that Spam, the meat product, is very different from spam, the generic term for junk e-mail/usenet postings. Moreover, they've delineated what is permissible in terms of using "spam" to refer to junk e-mail - no use of the Hormel logo, using spam vs. Spam (tm). I think their courtesy should be repaid with an equal dose of courtesy from the community. Hurrah for Hormel!
Basically, from what I can glean from the news sources, this guy was the perfect example of an immigrant who "made it" and became an exemplary American citizen. He's married to an American (a Christian, according to the WSJ), owns a house, has kids, and is a trusted member of his company (Intel) and is preety much an ideal upscale, upstanding citizen.
Basically, there was a bunch of disgruntled outcasts in the local area who wanted to "go fight the US on behalf of the Taliban", the FBI nabbed them, then nabbed him too because he employed one of these miscreants, and because he traveled to China. Then, it looks like they held him for 6 weeks without charges until they could dig up something to charge him with. Understandably, this whole process has pissed off many of his friends, and scared his family senseless (having an armed squad of guys descending on your house to grab everything after the head of the household has been carted off to jail is not a fun experience.)
Is he innocent? Is he guilty? Well, that remains to be seen. But clearly, he's not another wanna-be Taliban drifter like John Walker Lindh or Richard Reid, or a short-term agent like Mohammed Atta. On the face of it, it smells like another witchunt, like what happened with the Chinese guy (Wen Ho Lee) that worked at Los Alamos until they decided to charge him with treason...
No, no, no. Don't hit their biggest pages repeatedly, that's just rude. Instead, mirror their whole damn site locally, so you can browse their fabulous content at your leisure. Of course, we know you're busy, and your drive space is kind of important, so we'll forgive you if you have to delete the local mirror without ever having to read it.
But I'm sure the spammer will thank you for taking the time to save his information in the event his site is unreachable...:)
Have you been training your filter against a corpus of known "good" messages as well as the bad? I haven't tried bayesian filtering (I keep having to delete the bayesian scores that spamassassin keeps generating, because it keeps training itself on the wrong messages), but I have been keeping every single piece of spam that makes it past my current filters in order to feed them into a bayesian scoring system (as well as a bunch of good mail.)
I'd be curious to know if you had the same problem with false positives after training the bayesian scoring system with a corpus of "good" mail.
That's in Arizona. Here in the People's Republic of Kalifornia, it is illegal to have, transport, manufacture, cause to transport, manufacture, to sell, or even give away any magazine that holds more than 10 rounds. Of course there's an exemption for the entertainment industry, but it means that all magazines fitting that description not already in your personal posession at the time the law took effect are illegal.
Note that this is different from the national law forbidding the importation or manufacture of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds - you can still buy magazines that were here in the US at the time (and there are presumably stacks of them lying in warehouses that were manufactured just prior to the passage of that law.) You just can't bring them into California...
And just try to open carry any kind of firearm in Los Angeles, I dare you.:) Actually, the worst thing about being in LA is that there are no indoor gun ranges within the city limits that I know of, with the exception of the police ranges, and the LAX range, which is getting run down and rather unsavory. No place to shoot means no place to practice.:(
Radio Frequencies and Microwaves are close to the same thing, you can cook a pigeon with both. Tesla was using something more along the lines of magnetic forces
HUH? Now mind you, physics was a LONG time ago, but here's what I remember: Microwaves are a subset of RF energy, which is a broad term describing electromagnetic oscillations which run the gamut from mile-long waves to super-high frequencies... like visible light. A static (and stationary) high magnetic force isn't going to transmit any energy - to send energy you'll need to vary/modulate the field.
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Pedaling 45 mph (posted speed limit) is not the problem. Pedaling 45 mph and having traffic merging to your right at 60mph is the problem. Doubters can take East Cahuenga from Burbank to Los Angeles, running alongside the 5 Freeway (Cahuenga Pass), by bicycle - I did that for several months as part of a 15 mile commute (that's 15 miles each way, 30 miles a day.) Face it, you're always going to have normal car traffic going way faster than any other traffic (ie, semi trailers, campers, old people in cadillacs, bicycles) unless there just happens to be a cop there. Then EVERYBODY slows down...
Frankly, bikes can travel faster than NEVs can (NEV's, by DEFINITION have a top speed of 25mph - and are speed governed to ensure that speed...) A more useful speed would have been 40mph - that way an NEV could keep up with most traffic in the slowest lane. Unfortunately, I doubt many people want to chance 40mph in a souped up golf cart without doors (yes, I know you can buy doors as an option), and very little in the way of crash-collision engineering.
Ever test drive one of these things? It's incredibly irritating to floor the accelerator and feel like you're on a Disneyland Autotopia car - only slower (although there is noticable absence of motor noise and gasoline exhaust fumes.) The price isn't too shabby if you need a utility cart - $5k. But no, they clearly are not designed to blend in with normal traffic - something that many cyclists (assuming they're obeying traffic laws) can do easily on most city streets.
Here's where it gets really screwy - Monsanto is claiming ownership of a genetic sequence which, when grown in conformance with the natural lifecycle of the plant, WILL SPREAD. I don't mean in a laboratory, or an isolated test field, I mean if you throw the seed into a field, little vectors of genetic contaimination (pollen) will spread. You can't get a pure-bred version of the crop, because the plant evidently is sterile in certain situations, but given that the farmer is being charged with having seeds that are partially bred from Monsanto property, it means that the plants can pass on their genetic material to a certain extent.
So, am I supposed to now make sure your IP doesn't find itself into my materials? How? Am I supposed to test the genetic sequences of ALL the plants that I have? This isn't a case where I'm going out and collecting YOUR IP in order to grow new plants - this is a case where your IP is contaminating my plants as a normal course of operation.
For example, this would be like a company which writes a computer program, that during the normal course of operations, spawns a virus that infects other programs on your hard drive. One of the programs that it infects is your compiler. Can this company now sue to get revenues for the programs you write and distribute that are compiled with this infected compiler? After all, this infected compiler now incorporates their IP...
Actually, the farmer says he never bought Mansanto seeds, the plants were growing in a ditch by the road, and that the plants contaminated the farmer's conventional canola (costing him the years crop.) If I were the farmer, I would have sued Mansanto for crop contamination.
Instead, it seems if some disgruntled seed saleman is pissed that you didn't want to buy their patented seed, he can just plant some on your property, and sue you for the cost after the fact. Now that's insane.
Even large retail chains with an internet sales outlet may split into subsidiaries.
Unlikely - the bill as passed (according to the article) targets businesses with an internet presence selling the same products and using the same name as the related company in California (ie, Barnes and Noble), not to mention any business that owns part of another business that operates in California. So, unless the subsidiary operation is spun off completely, with a different name, it would seem that they'd be covered under this proposed law.
My question is, if corporation X, which sells widgets from Nevada, owns part of corporation Y (perhaps the employee pension fund owns shares of corp Y), which sells doodads from California, does that now mean that corp X now must collect taxes on widgets sold to Californians?
First Californians are barred from buying magazines with capacities above 10 rounds, knives with blades longer than 6 inches, and now we'll be barred from buying goods from out of state because nobody is crazy enough to have to file California taxes when they don't even do business in California! Seriously, if I do business from Nevada, and I invest in a friend's business out of California, I'm going to end up having to collect and remit taxes from Californians from my Nevada business to the California Tax Franchise Board? That's just nuts!
And what's wrong with moral lessons?
Nothing, if you don't mind getting beat over the head with preachy messages. However, I didn't watch Batman (the Paul Dini WB Batman) for moral content, but for damn good story and character (not to mention bitchin' design and good animation.)
It is a hard line to walk to write a 3-act teleplay which is involving and dramatic (or humorous, depending on genre), with character development, story arc, and good dialogue, within a 22 minute time limit, while trying NOT beat the audience over the head with a required moral theme. Many writers wouldn't even bother with these limitations - and the good ones who do often find their work butchered to fit for time and studio requirements. Ever wondered what the writer was thinking when he/she wrote something? It may not have been the writer's fault - likely some key piece of information was cut, rendering the whole episode totally meaningless.
And where is this educational content you speak of?
FCC regs mandate that each network screen at least 3 hours of "educational" programming per week in order to maintain their broadcast licenses. Regarding Schoolhouse Rock, those programs would have to be at least 30 minutes or more in order to qualify, since the FCC specifically excludes shorter programs, as well as PSAs from their definition of programs that fall under the 3 hour requirement:
From the FCC regs: "We will not credit educational and informational PSAs, interstitials, or other short segments as core programming."
This is insanity, as the Schoolhouse Rock segments were (and continue to be) often more entertaining than the programs there were playing at the time. (Although the FCC recognizes the contribution of shorter programs, they really want to have stations air actual shows that fullfill the "educational imperative".) Even worse, the FCC will not recognize once-time episodes (ie, programming that is not regularly scheduled) such as "ABC Afterschool Specials" (this is directly taken from paragraph 103 from the above FCC link.)
So, given the 3 hour rule, if you don't play animated shows on a daily basis, then a significant portion of your Saturday/Sunday lineup (if you even have one anymore) MUST have, as a significant (if not primary) focus, shows that, on an ongoing basis, be considered "educational."
Here's the clincher - in order to earn money back on an animated series, you need to syndicate. In order to increase the "educational" value of your syndicated programming (so that it can fulfill some affilate station's educational programming requirement), ALL children's programming must at some level, be arguably "educational" - or at least, that's what the executives want to see. Hence, I'll bet that even shows like Kirby's Adventures, the new TNMT, or Ultimate Muscle - IF they air on network TV, probably had to undergo review in order to be deemed (even at the flimsiest level) "educational."
These are some of the constraints I was referring to when I condemned the myriad requirements that writers had to hew to when trying to create entertaining programming. Don't blame the writers (mostly.)
You can't have guns or fighting childrens cartoons anymore.
You can have guns. You just have to call them "blasters", and they can't be used to kill anyone. You can have fighting, but you can't show head blows, blood, or heros doing anything less than the "right thing".
Blame the FCC for mandating "educational content", and blame the studios for having "standards and practices" policies that serve to sanitize and enforce "moral lessons."
Unfortunately, this is all moot as there aren't too many decent shows to write for these days. Either the quality of the animation really has gone down the crapper (mainly bad character design choices, and the pervasive creep of the talking head versus actual staging and action) or the storyline and the characters are so constrained that you really can't do anything daring with them.
Note that the above comments apply mainly to shows on network TV and to a few shows on PBS. Also note that there are a few excellently written and well animated shows on both network TV and PBS. However, much of the really good stuff is on cable, and since I don't get cable...
That's true only if you dispose of it. I personally keep junk mail around for use as kindling during the winters (although the plastic wrap they use now for ads are getting quite annoying.) If you have way too much time on your hands, you can mash up the waste mail and make your own recycled paper!
Well, maybe not a drop in ram replacement, but how about a solid-state ide/scsi drive? Memory blocks, so to speak...
Good god, now instead of losing a piece of paper or a business card between my desk and the wall (to be reclaimed decades later, when I move), I can now lose multiple GB of files.
I forsee a new market for 3M, making sticky-chips so we can organize our CF cards in the same way we use Post-It Notes (tm) to replace torn envelopes, napkins, etc.
A WSJ article from last month says it all. Basically, the credit card companies aren't interested in prosecuting fraud because they pass the costs directly to the merchant to accepted the card (with extra penalties to boot.) If you (as the merchant, or the customer) try to get the credit card company to follow up on a fraud attempt, they'll just ignore you. As a consequence, identity theft goes unpunished, customers are lulled into a false sense of security (oh, we'll just deactivate your old card and issue you a new one), and merchants get a lossage rate of up to 2% when accepting credit cards for card not present transactions...
Besides, for criminal cases, you need a prosecutor to file a case. Unless the amount is above a certain number, they'll typically just ignore you.
The injunction covers customers of all ISPs, or so according to the news article I read. The Wall Street Journal front column for May 7th has an excellent story on the lengths that Earthlink went to to dissuade this spammer from continuing, before finally resorting to tracking his ass down and suing him.
I OWN MY COMPUTER - its fully 100% a resource of MINE and nobody else. I also PAY for my internet access, by the month.
If he wants to force feed me ads - then he better damn well PAY me. And protect himself while walking around in public.
Given that it is your computer, why are you letting him execute hostile code on your computer? I mean, if you're using Explorer (for example) and your security level is set such that pop-up ads are able to execute, aren't you basically allowing pop-up ads?
Now, rational folks will avoid using Explorer because of that annoying dialog box that informs you that "an active-x control on this page could not be loaded" when you turn scripting off, but the same case holds for Netscape. Pop-ups exploit features that you have turned on. Turn them off, and pop-ups cease to work.
I've browsed for years with javascript turned off, and the only time I'm bombarded with crap (the LA Times is a good example of intrusive advertising) is when I temporarily enable JS to do some banking, and forget to turn it off. In IE, I just set the default to have active scripting off for all sites, and add a few "trusted" sites so scripting is enabled selectively for just those sites.
Think about it. Why do certain sites insist on forcing you to use javascript to browse their sites (ie, latimes.com). To make sure you can experience the full "benefit" of their pop-up/pop-under ads. Solution? Boycott these sites.
That will be the end of them, and good riddance.
The end of the MPAA or the end of the Tivo? There are only 650,000 Tivo subscribers. Cutting off part of their market could easily kill the company (especially if a cable monopoly decides to standardize on the lowest common denominator, and bans Tivos even in states where Tivos are still legal, just because a big chunk of their cable network is in a Tivo-illegal state.) You don't want them to be hogtied until someone overturns the law in court - they might be bankrupt by then. Best thing to do is preemptively fight (for example, the SonicBlue subscribers preemptively sued the studios for the right to use ReplayTV units to timeshift and share shows.)
Don't let the enemy define where and when you fight - you must be the one to control the battlefield.
Given that many commercial PVRs call home, if the MPAA has it's way, they'll get all the subscriber lists and track down each and every unit.
They'll treat PVR owners like criminals (look at law-abiding gun owners for examples of how your basic rights can be abused), and unless you can come up with enough money to buy a law keeping them from sticking it to you, you're going to have to take it. Or else, become a criminal, and hide your PVR in your basement...
I find it ironic that there's a Ad Council spot with a bunch of parishoners holding church services in somebody's basement because they're afraid they'll be arrested, and then afterwards a little blurb about how we should be thankful for freedom of religion. At the rate our rights are getting bought out by the corporations (who although are legal entities, aren't even voting citizens, damnit) freedom of religion is probably all we'll have left - and that's if we're lucky.
I've seen the exact opposite. For the last couple of months, I've seen an increasing number of spams that have forged features that generate negative scores - negatives scores big enough to outweigh the "spamminess" of the rest of the message.
Fortunately, although annoying, this problem is easy to fix. For any forged feature that gives a negative score (ie, PGP signature, PINE as client, etc.), just go to your user prefs and assign a score of 0 to it.
I've already set the majority of the features that generate negative scores (out of the 12 or so that exist), and at this rate, all will be disabled within the next month or so.
Problem solved. The next thing for me to do is to continue to fine tune the minimum score needed to trip the command to report the mail. I'm already down to 4.2 as the defining line, and I'm prepared to take it down to 4. I'll have to start whitelisting senders soon at this rate...
If they try to patent this idea, I'm citing Johnny Mnemonic as prior art!!!
Amazing. An idea from over 10 years ago is finally realized. When I was in high-school, an entrepreneur demoed a new technology (the cd burner) that would allow music stores to create albums on demand, complete with cd, liner notes, cover art, etc. When he left, the class had a discussion, and we all more or less agreed that his idea was going to be dead on arrival.
Why? It took creative control from the record labels and gave it to the music stores. It threatened middlemen and the distributors who moved the physical product. And, it allowed consumers to pick and choose the tracks that they wanted, allowing them to save money by not having to buy filler material.
Fast forward a decade, after the introduction and growth of the internet, the rise of MP3s, the emergence of Napster, and the succeeding waves of P2P filesharing, and the popular outcry for sensible (even compulsory) licensing of music. Only now is that idea of on-demand music CDs coming to life.
I wonder where that original entrepreneur is now?
If you read the William Shatner books (the ones where Kirk is resurrected by the Borg) you'll find that the explaination for the "evil" mirror universe is that the intrusion of the Borg, and the cultural contamination of the First Contact Cochran & Co. creates a Vulcan/Starfleet that is expansionist in nature.
There's no indication that this is the case with the Archer timeline, but as Berman has clearly demonstrated (assuming that Earth really does get wasted big-time next season) THIS IS NOT THE SAME TIMELINE AS KIRK/TNG. Ergo, the future in Enterprise is NOT the same TNG we all know and love (or in the case of Voyager, hate with a rabid mania.)
I think this is a GOOD thing, as it gives Berman a lot of freedom to play with. The question is whether he's actually making good use of that freedom...
Actually, the last time Spam was on sale at the local supermarket, I went and bought a bunch (low-sodium, fries up well, and tastes great with rice.) Even though I'm rabidly anti-spam (anti-uce), I have a very positive attitude toward Hormel. They're smart enough to understand that Spam, the meat product, is very different from spam, the generic term for junk e-mail/usenet postings. Moreover, they've delineated what is permissible in terms of using "spam" to refer to junk e-mail - no use of the Hormel logo, using spam vs. Spam (tm). I think their courtesy should be repaid with an equal dose of courtesy from the community. Hurrah for Hormel!
The hell? It's out already??? OMG, gotta get to the damn bookstore... *sounds of running, then door slamming*
Basically, from what I can glean from the news sources, this guy was the perfect example of an immigrant who "made it" and became an exemplary American citizen. He's married to an American (a Christian, according to the WSJ), owns a house, has kids, and is a trusted member of his company (Intel) and is preety much an ideal upscale, upstanding citizen.
Basically, there was a bunch of disgruntled outcasts in the local area who wanted to "go fight the US on behalf of the Taliban", the FBI nabbed them, then nabbed him too because he employed one of these miscreants, and because he traveled to China. Then, it looks like they held him for 6 weeks without charges until they could dig up something to charge him with. Understandably, this whole process has pissed off many of his friends, and scared his family senseless (having an armed squad of guys descending on your house to grab everything after the head of the household has been carted off to jail is not a fun experience.)
Is he innocent? Is he guilty? Well, that remains to be seen. But clearly, he's not another wanna-be Taliban drifter like John Walker Lindh or Richard Reid, or a short-term agent like Mohammed Atta. On the face of it, it smells like another witchunt, like what happened with the Chinese guy (Wen Ho Lee) that worked at Los Alamos until they decided to charge him with treason...
No, no, no. Don't hit their biggest pages repeatedly, that's just rude. Instead, mirror their whole damn site locally, so you can browse their fabulous content at your leisure. Of course, we know you're busy, and your drive space is kind of important, so we'll forgive you if you have to delete the local mirror without ever having to read it.
:)
But I'm sure the spammer will thank you for taking the time to save his information in the event his site is unreachable...
Have you been training your filter against a corpus of known "good" messages as well as the bad? I haven't tried bayesian filtering (I keep having to delete the bayesian scores that spamassassin keeps generating, because it keeps training itself on the wrong messages), but I have been keeping every single piece of spam that makes it past my current filters in order to feed them into a bayesian scoring system (as well as a bunch of good mail.)
I'd be curious to know if you had the same problem with false positives after training the bayesian scoring system with a corpus of "good" mail.
That's in Arizona. Here in the People's Republic of Kalifornia, it is illegal to have, transport, manufacture, cause to transport, manufacture, to sell, or even give away any magazine that holds more than 10 rounds. Of course there's an exemption for the entertainment industry, but it means that all magazines fitting that description not already in your personal posession at the time the law took effect are illegal.
:) Actually, the worst thing about being in LA is that there are no indoor gun ranges within the city limits that I know of, with the exception of the police ranges, and the LAX range, which is getting run down and rather unsavory. No place to shoot means no place to practice. :(
Note that this is different from the national law forbidding the importation or manufacture of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds - you can still buy magazines that were here in the US at the time (and there are presumably stacks of them lying in warehouses that were manufactured just prior to the passage of that law.) You just can't bring them into California...
And just try to open carry any kind of firearm in Los Angeles, I dare you.
Radio Frequencies and Microwaves are close to the same thing, you can cook a pigeon with both. Tesla was using something more along the lines of magnetic forces
HUH? Now mind you, physics was a LONG time ago, but here's what I remember: Microwaves are a subset of RF energy, which is a broad term describing electromagnetic oscillations which run the gamut from mile-long waves to super-high frequencies... like visible light. A static (and stationary) high magnetic force isn't going to transmit any energy - to send energy you'll need to vary/modulate the field.