I've seen a few people posting solutions along the lines of "buy new printer instead of replacement cartridges". While the argument is compelling, is anyone considering that most retail-box low-end bargain printers (ink and laser) ship with "starter" cartridges that are only 1/3 to 1/2 full? This does throw the numbers off because you're only starting with half the ink you'd have from brand-spanking-new cartridges.
BTW, I've concluded that inkjets are stupid and evil. They're slow, expensive, problematic and they don't like Citrix. However, before I got my current 10 year old second-hand HPLJ4 (r0ck!) I used to use ink refill kits with my old Lexmark 3200. In my experience, the refills work fine. You do have to replace the carts with new every 3-4 refills or they gum up a bit, but that's still better than every 1 refills. (It also helps if you refill early, while the cart still has ink in it so the important bits in the bottom never dry out.)
At my office, we use a laser refiller service for toner carts. They pick up used carts, refill them and sell them back to us full. (kinda like the deposit system they used to have for glass soda bottles.) The refilled carts *DO* have a higher failure rate than new carts -- I'm some of them come to us on their 6th or 8th refill! -- but as long as you plan for it by ensuring the refiller warranty replaces anything that fails abnormally and you keep an extra cart or two around just in case, they've been fine, too.
For those of you who never got more than a semester's worth of Quantum Mechanics, you get used to the whole wave-particle duality thing after a while and it stops being weird. Then you start wondering why people seem to get caught up in it.
Here's how you want to think about it:
1) Physically, we don't really understand the fundamental nature of photons (light). That is, we have no idea what they really are...
* BUT *
2) When you do an experiment that measures the wave properties of light, light acts like a wave.
AND
3) When you do an experiment that measures the particle properties of light, it acts like a particle.
EITHER WAY,
4) You cannot simultaneously measure the wave and particle properties of light. Measuring one destroys all information about the other.
OH, AND BY THE WAY...
5) The wave-particle duality of 1 - 4 goes for ALL matter, including 1972 Chevy Vegas.
You can calculate the wavelength of a 1972 Chevy Vega (automobile) using DeBroglie's hypothesis. The problem is that shooting cars at a wall with enough momentum to generate a diffraction pattern would require *immensely* unpractical amounts of energy (especially when you factor in the effect of relativity on the mass of the car.) Still, the principle has born out in experiment, as other larger traditional subatomic particles (neutrons, for example) have been shown to generate diffraction patterns when accelerated to high enough energies through appropriately sized diffraction gratings.
The reason we don't notice this kind of duality in real life is because Planck's contstant (a fundamental constant of nature that acts like a scaling factor for quantum phenomena) is very small in size compared to the scale of our normal macroscopic world. Like most of the bizarre stuff covered in modern physics, it's always there but the effect is muted on the scale you and I are able to normally perceive. You have to get to small sizes or large energies to have enough probability of observing quantum effects to make it worth your while.
P.S. Never play D&D with Physics majors - our DM never gave us wish spells because he knew we'd do stuff like changing fundamental constants of nature - i.e. resetting Planck's constant to 1 - high enough so we could quantum-tunnel through walls and stuff.
I actually respect commercials as a form of visual art - whether or not I will actually buy anything based on advertising is an entirely different issue.
Commercials are truly the cultural 'Haiku' of our generation.
I liked the part where I he didn't really answer my question... It seems you are correct in thinking Capitol Hill is hell bent on passing legislation. I don't think ANY legislation is a good thing, but I feel that they [capitol hill] see us [letter-writing geeks] as meddlers who refuse to offer a solution. Who says there needs to be a solution? Has anyone had any other luck with their representatives?
Of course. If they aren't busy passing laws, just what ARE they doing for their constituents?! [TUNE IN - SPECIAL EXPOSE REPORT AT 11!]
The real enemy here is, of course, budgets with built-in automatic annual funding increases (it's been a while, but I think it's called baseline budgeting... anyone confirm y/n?). Since they don't have to waste valuable time arguing about re-allocating the same money every year, they have more time to devote to bullstuff like this.
Frankly, I think we'd all be better off if we just paid them $10 million a year to go play golf -- maybe start a league or something.
Absolutely. Why leave the technical specifications of standards to a group of people who largely do not have a clue to the technology involved? I never understood why the government gets involved in these technical matters at all.
Because they are clueless, they must rely on 'experts' to advise them; ergo, they can me manipulated into using their legislative power to set the rules to favor one party or the other.
...or at least that's what the folks who hire lobbyists are hoping for.
BTW, in my opinion, this really sounds cynical, even though I don't think that is necessarily the case. U.S. law is adversarial by design. The forefathers valued both public debate and political pressure (and you though all politics was EEEE-VIL) to make sure neither side got away with too much. What bothers me is not political lobbying, but governmental business being conducted behind closed doors, free of scrutiny.
Truth and Fact are two very different things, which lie along two very different paths.
The goal of science is description, not understanding. It covers the 'what', 'when', 'where', 'who' and 'how' very well. It has nothing, whatsoever, to say about 'why'. ('Why' requires alternative possibilities, and as far as nature is concerned, it always plays by the same rules, and it always plays fair. Why is the grass green? Answer: Chlorophyll, but that's a 'what' and a 'how', not a 'why'.)
I may get flames from both sides for this, but I've always thought that people who get in arguments about whether the world is 5 thousand of 5 billion years old have completely missed the point of the science *AND* the religion.
Not the "bread van that turns into a killer robot" again. I hate those toy tie-ins.
I swear when I read this I thought it said "...WEB van that turns into a killer robot" and it got me thinking - what if they came out with a FAILED DOT COM line of Xformers? All your favorites would be there: WebVan, Pets.com and (the most terrifying) BOO.com!
Better yet, create them as a line of piggy banks that explode as soon as you stop stuffing money into them!;)
Anymore, TS is too much of a crap shoot (quality depending entirely on who happens to answer the phone) to be a useful way to solve problems.
I remember the early 90's when you would call TS and an actual *engineer* (as in product designer) would answer the phone. They were cool, they knew the answers, they got my jokes. I want an ID card I can swipe on my telephone that forwards my call straight through those people again because if I'm desperate enough to call someone else for help it's a pretty frickin' real problem.
That said, I really can't blame the industry for the way things are. Enough people are now using computers that have no real troubleshooting skill I think it has to be this way. I imagine support techs drink a LOT of tear-addled beer after work.
Thank God for the www. It's really the only tech support that consistently works anymore.
OTOH, it seems to me that the big selling points of the XBox as a development platform were:
1) It's based on standard PC hardware technology that's easy to interface and extend.
2) It's based on standard PC software technology that you already know how to code.
3) It's based on standard PC technology that's much more advanced and powerful than the other consoles.
The fact that it's really a special-purpose PC in a box (making developing EASY!) will have gone completely to waste if they can't get anyone to dev games for it and it tanks in two years. (Although, I don't think it will - see the Pocket PC for details...)
If, in a year or two from now, new game development has evaporated and nobody's buying the thing, What have they really got to lose by just posting dev kits for download? I'm sure several people are already installing Linux on an XBox as we speak, and some hardy souls out there are still coding new games for the Atari 2600.
Maybe MS hosts an XBOXNet so small developers can post and trade games they've written via broadband. That might be kinda cool.
First SPAM, then PENGUINS on the Tellie, and now we all have to SILLY-WALK to throw off the robot-cameras! Technology is morphing Real-Life into Monty Python! Sony's next AIBO will probably be a dead parrot!
Ironically, in a quick survey of several apps on my hard drive, Microsoft is the only one that consistently provides version of the EULA I can peruse after the installation brain-cloud clears. I have no idea if this is the same one I OK'd during install, nor whether it's the one MS considers to be 'current'. (I assume most publishers put a clause in their EULA/shrink-wrap license that lets them change the terms of the agreement -- I don't know, I never read the damn things...) In fact for MS, the EULA is a text file which can easily and untraceably be modified to suit rapidly changing 'market conditions'. For example, my C:\WINDOWS\EULA.TXT is like, two lines:
Microsoft Windows 98 EULA - Win98 is freeware now, so make lots of copies and give it away to whoever the hell you want, we don't care because we're too busy drinking coffee and listening to grunge rock. Sincerely, Bill.
[Heh, heh, heh - good ollll' notepad!]
The point is, that as long as EULAs are click-through vapordocs that cease to exist after the installer finishes, and as long as the companies in question continue to change them as the mood strikes, why the heck should I be burdened with essentially memorizing them to be sure I am in compliance? Do they keep their EULAs on file to prove my example above is bogus?
Anyone remember a case where EULAs have been tested in court?
Since I started using it as my main browser, I can't remember finding a page where back wouldn't work properly.
Amen.
It occurred to me rather quickly when I started using Opera over a year ago that one of the reasons it IS so much faster than IE is that when you hit the 'back' button - it does not reload the page from the server, but merely shows you what it had onscreen before! Stupid behavioralisms like that shoved IE to the periphery of my "Internet Experience". What's the point in *having* a cache if you're just going to redownload everything every time you show a page anyway?!?!
It has been my experience that a great percentage of AOL users simply do not know that they can use any browser other than 'AOL'. They do not think of it as a browser, but an application called 'AOL'. ('How can you run AOL in Internet Explorer?' 'Can it run in Word, too?')
I'm up for some good old-fashioned AOL-bashing, so let's *really* pile on, eh?
The AOL cluelessness is so rampant...
...[how rampant is it?]
It's so rampant that in my neck of the woods, AOL's renaming their products to accomodate. Apparantly, a large section of the AOL community is confused enough by "Internet Service Provider" that Time-Warner is now running radio ads billing their RoadRunner Cable-Modem service as (((DEEP shudder))) "The RoadRunner High-Speed Online". [gack!]
I hadn't considered that Google's already crawling you anyway (point taken - oops - someone mod me down!), but again, this defeats spambot traps. Further, some of the more useful tech-support-web-forum postings would be somewhat filtered out if webadmins restricted Google crawls by using robot.txt. (I think the bot trap article had some better policy-oriented ideas about how to accomplish this.)
Regarding the PERL scripting, ten years ago, I actually joked with my friends about sending emails to people with batch/script/program attachments that deleted files with a message that sez "run this c00l program d00dez!" but it didn't occur to me that anyone would actually fall for it and that's what the human-engineering-virus "revolution" (Melissa, ILOVEYOU, et. al.) was all about.
(I've also decided on rereading my comments and yours that I should have gone with my first instinct and posted this under the spambot traps article -- in retrospect, it would have been far more appropriate there. Oh, well I had a 50-50 shot and lost - thanks for keeping me honest!)
This morning on/. we have an article about Google releasing their SOAP 1.1 API followed immediately by an article from a guy that set up a spambot trap on his web site, and in the margin a poll about giving spammers what they deserve. Putting 2 and 2 and 2 together, I got 4, popped open a google box and started playing.
All I did was ask google to search for "mailto" and "@msn.com" and lo and behold, she spit back 111,000 hits - hits that contain what look like legit email addresses IN THE THREE LINE SUMMARIES.
The point is, now that google can be automated, what's to stop spammers from SOAPing their way into Google to do their harvesting? Would there be any point over what they're doing now? It might be cheaper, because you only have to run over the google results not the whole sites and since Google caches pages, you can even grab addresses from the past, somewhat.
IT ALSO DEFEATS SPAMBOT TRAPS.
Doesn't this give spammers whole new avenues to exploit?
Worse, are webmasters going to have to put a halt to Google crawls?
But. you know, even *that* wouldn't be so bad if you could simply delete your account when you've decided you've had enough. That's the real screw job here; the worst effect of which is that I am now -- officially -- PARANOID!
Has anyone here ever tried to delete an account from E-bay or Microsft? Some (Yahoo?) will let you do it, but there are usually limits and procedures that imply they're selling your info on the way to the trashcan. Gah!!!!! I usually make up fake marketing info for those bogus logins (NYTimes, etc.), but I'm starting to think I should start doing that for legitimate sites as well.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to find my tin-foil beanie.
Better solutions would be based on an extension to the normal DNS system- essentially, you want each human to have a resolvable domain name associated with her. With that in place, InstantMessaging is an easy problem.
Yup - The evidence is overwhelming that Hart doesn't pay attention. I believe he thinks there's a way to write a story that *doesn't* include these mythological elements. I don't remember the source, but I remember Lucas describing the writing process at some point (I'm not sure if it was before Ep4 or after) as being very difficult when he was consciously trying to work everything in. Once he gave up and just wrote a story that sounded good, he looked back and everything he wanted was there.
BTW, I went to the SW/Myth exhibit when it hit Toledo last Thanksgiving - IT R0CKED! The coolest part (other than the 8ft. Imperial Destroyer from Ep.IV) were the Campbell plaquards positioned around the exhibit describing the mythological elements of the story.
In our area (SBC Ameritech - NE Ohio), it's called Privacy Manager, and WOW, does it work. We moved into a new house, ordered a private unpublished number, and within a week, were getting 2-3 calls a day. Then we ordered CID + PM and we haven't gotten a single marketing call since. I just wish I could get the marketers to pay for it (around $12/month for CID + PM).
I've been rolling the idea of creating a consumer-reports style 'licensetracker' web site around in my head for a little while. I haven't found I thought it would be a useful service to others (home users, developers, CIOs) to make a list of licenses (not just GPL-like, but other commercial licenses, too)with comparison charts and pros/cons. I'd also like a catalog that lists which apps use which licenses with bulleted 'product label' recap of main terms and recent changes. You know, simple FAQ stuff sales-people mysteriously don't seem to be able to answer like, do you know if the Lotus SmartSuite Millenium Edition license allows you to install a copy on your home AND office PC's? How many Excel licenses do you need to buy if you run it on Citrix servers capable of serving 20 users, but have 50 users on you network? 5 of which are hard-core users and 15 others of which need it twice a year. That kind of stuff would be extrordinarily useful.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen a few people posting solutions along the lines of "buy new printer instead of replacement cartridges". While the argument is compelling, is anyone considering that most retail-box low-end bargain printers (ink and laser) ship with "starter" cartridges that are only 1/3 to 1/2 full? This does throw the numbers off because you're only starting with half the ink you'd have from brand-spanking-new cartridges.
BTW, I've concluded that inkjets are stupid and evil. They're slow, expensive, problematic and they don't like Citrix. However, before I got my current 10 year old second-hand HPLJ4 (r0ck!) I used to use ink refill kits with my old Lexmark 3200. In my experience, the refills work fine. You do have to replace the carts with new every 3-4 refills or they gum up a bit, but that's still better than every 1 refills. (It also helps if you refill early, while the cart still has ink in it so the important bits in the bottom never dry out.)
At my office, we use a laser refiller service for toner carts. They pick up used carts, refill them and sell them back to us full. (kinda like the deposit system they used to have for glass soda bottles.) The refilled carts *DO* have a higher failure rate than new carts -- I'm some of them come to us on their 6th or 8th refill! -- but as long as you plan for it by ensuring the refiller warranty replaces anything that fails abnormally and you keep an extra cart or two around just in case, they've been fine, too.
So, um, screw the printer industry, I guess?
For those of you who never got more than a semester's worth of Quantum Mechanics, you get used to the whole wave-particle duality thing after a while and it stops being weird. Then you start wondering why people seem to get caught up in it.
Here's how you want to think about it:
1) Physically, we don't really understand the fundamental nature of photons (light). That is, we have no idea what they really are...
* BUT *
2) When you do an experiment that measures the wave properties of light, light acts like a wave.
AND
3) When you do an experiment that measures the particle properties of light, it acts like a particle.
EITHER WAY,
4) You cannot simultaneously measure the wave and particle properties of light. Measuring one destroys all information about the other.
OH, AND BY THE WAY...
5) The wave-particle duality of 1 - 4 goes for ALL matter, including 1972 Chevy Vegas.
You can calculate the wavelength of a 1972 Chevy Vega (automobile) using DeBroglie's hypothesis. The problem is that shooting cars at a wall with enough momentum to generate a diffraction pattern would require *immensely* unpractical amounts of energy (especially when you factor in the effect of relativity on the mass of the car.) Still, the principle has born out in experiment, as other larger traditional subatomic particles (neutrons, for example) have been shown to generate diffraction patterns when accelerated to high enough energies through appropriately sized diffraction gratings.
The reason we don't notice this kind of duality in real life is because Planck's contstant (a fundamental constant of nature that acts like a scaling factor for quantum phenomena) is very small in size compared to the scale of our normal macroscopic world. Like most of the bizarre stuff covered in modern physics, it's always there but the effect is muted on the scale you and I are able to normally perceive. You have to get to small sizes or large energies to have enough probability of observing quantum effects to make it worth your while.
P.S. Never play D&D with Physics majors - our DM never gave us wish spells because he knew we'd do stuff like changing fundamental constants of nature - i.e. resetting Planck's constant to 1 - high enough so we could quantum-tunnel through walls and stuff.
I actually respect commercials as a form of visual art - whether or not I will actually buy anything based on advertising is an entirely different issue.
Commercials are truly the cultural 'Haiku' of our generation.
I liked the part where I he didn't really answer my question... It seems you are correct in thinking Capitol Hill is hell bent on passing legislation. I don't think ANY legislation is a good thing, but I feel that they [capitol hill] see us [letter-writing geeks] as meddlers who refuse to offer a solution. Who says there needs to be a solution? Has anyone had any other luck with their representatives?
Of course. If they aren't busy passing laws, just what ARE they doing for their constituents?! [TUNE IN - SPECIAL EXPOSE REPORT AT 11!]
The real enemy here is, of course, budgets with built-in automatic annual funding increases (it's been a while, but I think it's called baseline budgeting... anyone confirm y/n?). Since they don't have to waste valuable time arguing about re-allocating the same money every year, they have more time to devote to bullstuff like this.
Frankly, I think we'd all be better off if we just paid them $10 million a year to go play golf -- maybe start a league or something.
Absolutely. Why leave the technical specifications of standards to a group of people who largely do not have a clue to the technology involved? I never understood why the government gets involved in these technical matters at all.
Because they are clueless, they must rely on 'experts' to advise them; ergo, they can me manipulated into using their legislative power to
set the rules to favor one party or the other.
...or at least that's what the folks who hire lobbyists are hoping for.
BTW, in my opinion, this really sounds cynical, even though I don't think that is necessarily the case. U.S. law is adversarial by design. The forefathers valued both public debate and political pressure (and you though all politics was EEEE-VIL ) to make sure neither side got away with too much. What bothers me is not political lobbying, but governmental business being conducted behind closed doors, free of scrutiny.
Ditto.
Truth and Fact are two very different things, which lie along two very different paths.
The goal of science is description, not understanding. It covers the 'what', 'when', 'where', 'who' and 'how' very well. It has nothing, whatsoever, to say about 'why'. ('Why' requires alternative possibilities, and as far as nature is concerned, it always plays by the same rules, and it always plays fair. Why is the grass green? Answer: Chlorophyll, but that's a 'what' and a 'how', not a 'why'.)
I may get flames from both sides for this, but I've always thought that people who get in arguments about whether the world is 5 thousand of 5 billion years old have completely missed the point of the science *AND* the religion.
I swear when I read this I thought it said "...WEB van that turns into a killer robot" and it got me thinking - what if they came out with a FAILED DOT COM line of Xformers? All your favorites would be there: WebVan, Pets.com and (the most terrifying) BOO.com!
Better yet, create them as a line of piggy banks that explode as soon as you stop stuffing money into them!
Anymore, TS is too much of a crap shoot (quality depending entirely on who happens to answer the phone) to be a useful way to solve problems.
I remember the early 90's when you would call TS and an actual *engineer* (as in product designer) would answer the phone. They were cool, they knew the answers, they got my jokes. I want an ID card I can swipe on my telephone that forwards my call straight through those people again because if I'm desperate enough to call someone else for help it's a pretty frickin' real problem.
That said, I really can't blame the industry for the way things are. Enough people are now using computers that have no real troubleshooting skill I think it has to be this way. I imagine support techs drink a LOT of tear-addled beer after work.
Thank God for the www. It's really the only tech support that consistently works anymore.
OTOH, it seems to me that the big selling points of the XBox as a development platform were:
1) It's based on standard PC hardware technology that's easy to interface and extend.
2) It's based on standard PC software technology that you already know how to code.
3) It's based on standard PC technology that's much more advanced and powerful than the other consoles.
The fact that it's really a special-purpose PC in a box (making developing EASY!) will have gone completely to waste if they can't get anyone to dev games for it and it tanks in two years. (Although, I don't think it will - see the Pocket PC for details...)
If, in a year or two from now, new game development has evaporated and nobody's buying the thing, What have they really got to lose by just posting dev kits for download? I'm sure several people are already installing Linux on an XBox as we speak, and some hardy souls out there are still coding new games for the Atari 2600.
Maybe MS hosts an XBOXNet so small developers can post and trade games they've written via broadband. That might be kinda cool.
What can this do that MS NetMeeting + a good headset can't?
Use your existing POTS phone handsets - even the cordless ones.
Burden of proof beyond a shadow of a doubt, and "presumption of Innocence" only apply to criminal cases.
...otherwise correct, however.
[nitpick mode=ON]
Try burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
[nitpick mode=OFF]
First SPAM, then PENGUINS on the Tellie, and now we all have to SILLY-WALK to throw off the robot-cameras! Technology is morphing Real-Life into Monty Python! Sony's next AIBO will probably be a dead parrot!
Ahhh, a miniature BIG TRAK! See - Japan can't do *anything* original!!! < wink >
[Heh, heh, heh - good ollll' notepad!]
The point is, that as long as EULAs are click-through vapordocs that cease to exist after the installer finishes, and as long as the companies in question continue to change them as the mood strikes, why the heck should I be burdened with essentially memorizing them to be sure I am in compliance? Do they keep their EULAs on file to prove my example above is bogus?
Anyone remember a case where EULAs have been tested in court?
Discuss.....
Since I started using it as my main browser, I can't remember finding a page where back wouldn't work properly.
Amen.
It occurred to me rather quickly when I started using Opera over a year ago that one of the reasons it IS so much faster than IE is that when you hit the 'back' button - it does not reload the page from the server, but merely shows you what it had onscreen before! Stupid behavioralisms like that shoved IE to the periphery of my "Internet Experience". What's the point in *having* a cache if you're just going to redownload everything every time you show a page anyway?!?!
It has been my experience that a great percentage of AOL users simply do not know that they can use any browser other than 'AOL'. They do not think of it as a browser, but an application called 'AOL'. ('How can you run AOL in Internet Explorer?' 'Can it run in Word, too?')
...[how rampant is it?]
I'm up for some good old-fashioned AOL-bashing, so let's *really* pile on, eh?
The AOL cluelessness is so rampant...
It's so rampant that in my neck of the woods, AOL's renaming their products to accomodate. Apparantly, a large section of the AOL community is confused enough by "Internet Service Provider" that Time-Warner is now running radio ads billing their RoadRunner Cable-Modem service as (((DEEP shudder))) "The RoadRunner High-Speed Online". [gack!]
If it had gestures, it would almost be as good as Opera. I never thought I'd say thins, but IE is starting to show its age.
I hadn't considered that Google's already crawling you anyway (point taken - oops - someone mod me down!), but again, this defeats spambot traps. Further, some of the more useful tech-support-web-forum postings would be somewhat filtered out if webadmins restricted Google crawls by using robot.txt. (I think the bot trap article had some better policy-oriented ideas about how to accomplish this.)
Regarding the PERL scripting, ten years ago, I actually joked with my friends about sending emails to people with batch/script/program attachments that deleted files with a message that sez "run this c00l program d00dez!" but it didn't occur to me that anyone would actually fall for it and that's what the human-engineering-virus "revolution" (Melissa, ILOVEYOU, et. al.) was all about.
(I've also decided on rereading my comments and yours that I should have gone with my first instinct and posted this under the spambot traps article -- in retrospect, it would have been far more appropriate there. Oh, well I had a 50-50 shot and lost - thanks for keeping me honest!)
Ummmmm. Ok, check this out.
/. we have an article about Google releasing their SOAP 1.1 API followed immediately by an article from a guy that set up a spambot trap on his web site, and in the margin a poll about giving spammers what they deserve. Putting 2 and 2 and 2 together, I got 4, popped open a google box and started playing.
This morning on
All I did was ask google to search for "mailto" and "@msn.com" and lo and behold, she spit back 111,000 hits - hits that contain what look like legit email addresses IN THE THREE LINE SUMMARIES.
The point is, now that google can be automated, what's to stop spammers from SOAPing their way into Google to do their harvesting? Would there be any point over what they're doing now? It might be cheaper, because you only have to run over the google results not the whole sites and since Google caches pages, you can even grab addresses from the past, somewhat.
IT ALSO DEFEATS SPAMBOT TRAPS.
Doesn't this give spammers whole new avenues to exploit?
Worse, are webmasters going to have to put a halt to Google crawls?
But. you know, even *that* wouldn't be so bad if you could simply delete your account when you've decided you've had enough. That's the real screw job here; the worst effect of which is that I am now -- officially -- PARANOID!
Has anyone here ever tried to delete an account from E-bay or Microsft? Some (Yahoo?) will let you do it, but there are usually limits and procedures that imply they're selling your info on the way to the trashcan. Gah!!!!! I usually make up fake marketing info for those bogus logins (NYTimes, etc.), but I'm starting to think I should start doing that for legitimate sites as well.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to find my tin-foil beanie.
Better solutions would be based on an extension to the normal DNS system- essentially, you want each human to have a resolvable domain name associated with her. With that in place, InstantMessaging is an easy problem.
Isn't that what LDAP is supposed to do?
Yup - The evidence is overwhelming that Hart doesn't pay attention. I believe he thinks there's a way to write a story that *doesn't* include these mythological elements. I don't remember the source, but I remember Lucas describing the writing process at some point (I'm not sure if it was before Ep4 or after) as being very difficult when he was consciously trying to work everything in. Once he gave up and just wrote a story that sounded good, he looked back and everything he wanted was there.
BTW, I went to the SW/Myth exhibit when it hit Toledo last Thanksgiving - IT R0CKED! The coolest part (other than the 8ft. Imperial Destroyer from Ep.IV) were the Campbell plaquards positioned around the exhibit describing the mythological elements of the story.
BONUS: According to the preface from my paperback copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Campbell also influenced Kubrik and Clarke! EAT THAT, HART - YOU WEENIE!!
In our area (SBC Ameritech - NE Ohio), it's called Privacy Manager, and WOW, does it work. We moved into a new house, ordered a private unpublished number, and within a week, were getting 2-3 calls a day. Then we ordered CID + PM and we haven't gotten a single marketing call since. I just wish I could get the marketers to pay for it (around $12/month for CID + PM).
Only from Hasbro(R)!) that make the big $$$ today, especially for high-budget summer blockbusters like LOTR: FOTR.
So the 'summer season' has been extended into November? That's one way to boost sales! [grin]
I've been rolling the idea of creating a consumer-reports style 'licensetracker' web site around in my head for a little while. I haven't found I thought it would be a useful service to others (home users, developers, CIOs) to make a list of licenses (not just GPL-like, but other commercial licenses, too)with comparison charts and pros/cons. I'd also like a catalog that lists which apps use which licenses with bulleted 'product label' recap of main terms and recent changes. You know, simple FAQ stuff sales-people mysteriously don't seem to be able to answer like, do you know if the Lotus SmartSuite Millenium Edition license allows you to install a copy on your home AND office PC's? How many Excel licenses do you need to buy if you run it on Citrix servers capable of serving 20 users, but have 50 users on you network? 5 of which are hard-core users and 15 others of which need it twice a year. That kind of stuff would be extrordinarily useful.