> Apparently, the editors are going to try and make April Fool's DAY into April Fool's MONTH.
Too late. That Iraqi Disinformation Minister talking head beat 'em to it. (Pencil bombs? US troops nowhere near the airport or Baghdad, they're all on a big soundstage? WTF d00d, is he trying to get a job writing for The Onion after the war's over?:-)
> > > If our objective is to maximize economic growth, are we striking the right balance... > > > > I thought our objective was to maximize joy and minimize suffering.
I happen to believe on the basis of my observations that the two tend to go together pretty consistently, but I grok your point that my observation isn't universally accepted.
That said, you should understand that by definition, as Chair of the Federal Reserve, his objective is to maximize economic growth.
(And yes, it is an awesome responsibility. One word, misspoken, out of the guy's mouth, can spur traders to move billions of dollars. That's why he's extremely careful when and how he speaks. To us, this essay may read like a mild rehash of Slashdottisms, but for the Chair of the Federal Reserve, this essay is unusually forceful writing.)
> > Alan Greenspan is the one asking the questions. In finacial markets, this is likely akin to The Voice Of God coming down and asking you questions. > I think it would be more accurate to describe him as "the most powerful man in the world, period". Oh, you though that was the President? Silly you!
No, he said the most powerful force in the universe, period, was God. (But yeah... still... silly him:)
Greenspan is aware that patents provide an incentive to innovate - cure AIDS, get a 13-year monopoly to recoup your $10B investment, but by the time your kids are teenagers, you've gotta have made your money back and be investing the profits something new (like a vaccine for SARS!), because AIDS should be well and cured by then.
He's also aware that copyright - more and more - provides a disincentive to innovate. Draw a fucking cartoon mouse, get a lifetime monopoly to recoup your week-and-a-half investment, and by the time your kids are dead of old age, maybe they'll be able to show your great-grandchildren "Steamboat Willie" without paying money to the reanimated corpse of Disney.
Kudos to Greenspan for not just realizing there's a terrible imbalance in our IP system, but in realizing that it's a threat to our economy, and further kudos for coming out and saying so.
> Why must everyone adopt linux? I quite frankly don't want to have to deal with the 200 morons and 10 clued people I work with all adopting linux and then having to answer all their questions. I'd be quite happy if they'd simply switch from IE to Mozilla so I don't have to keep removing virii from their desktop.
Why must everyone adopt BeOS? I quite frankly don't want to have to deal with the 200 morons and 10 clued people I work with all adopting BeOS and then having to...
Oh, wait. So few people adopted BeOS that... hey, I need a new $TOOL for my BeBox today. Don't have time to write one from scratch. Anyone building one? Hello? Anyone here? Bueller?
/me looks at BeBox sitting in closet, shakes head sadly.
> Mplayer and Xine work just fine when you actually have a system with the correct dependancies to run them.
Not to nitpick but...
...if I put up a piece of software that I claim "plays videos", then isn't it my responsibility to ensure that anyone who downloads that gets either:
1) Software downloaded and b00bies jiggling, or
2) An error message, for each dependency not met, along the lines of "I need $DEPENDENCY. You don't have $DEPENDENCY. Download $FILE, do $THIS, and run me again." (or "I need $THIS hardware. You have $THAT hardware. This software will probably / might / might not / probably won't work.")
If my software isn't a video player, but is, say, a compiler, fair enough - I can safely make somewhat more generous assumptions about my users.
But for stuff like web browsers, mail clients, and media players, how on earth can developers assume that most of their users understand dependency trees, video chipsets, or even something as simple as video card manufacturers?
> 1) A 1984-ish state is less likely to have the economic ability to provide the high-quality equipment and training. See North Korea. > 2) A well-trained, well-armed, professional army is a major threat to the powers that be. Remember why Stalin was so ill-prepared for WWII; he purged the military of everyone he could find that was competent. > 3) Soldiers in a democracy's army are voters, and are related to voters. Equipping them badly would have bad results at election time. This is also why an all-volunteer army makes a war more acceptable to the people than a drafted army.
Agreed on all points. Like I said earlier, I don't believe 1984 will happen. Even if I take for granted the assumption that the "ruling elite" are evil (as opposed to merely walking down a road to hell that happens to be paved with good intentions), I still come to the conclusion that a 1984-style security state is not in the best interests of the ruling elite.
If your goal is absolute power, permanently entrenched, a dysfunctional economy is still a fundamentally bad thing. It therefore stands to reason that the "ruling elite" will not build such a state, and that if they find themselves building it "by accident", they'll quickly dismantle it, because it's in their best interests to do so.
> Yeah, until it benefits some "elite" member's cause.
Think: being a soldier in Vietnam or Iraq2
war.
Vietnam: around 50,000 over the course of the war, comparable to the number of Americans killed in auto accidents every year.
Gulf War II: To date, under 100 KIA, out of about 250,000 coalition troops.
I don't mean to minimize the sacrifices made by US troops in either conflict, but since I'm wearing my Evil Hat (tm) today, it looks the odds for the average prole living in an Empire of 200-300M people are pretty good.
I'll take my Evil Hat (tm) off for the rest of this post and get serious for a bit: the reason Vietnam had such an impact on the "prole" wasn't because of the war itself, it was because of the draft.
Again, I intend no disrespect intended towards those who served in Vietnam, but there's a damn good reason why we don't have a draft today, and it's not political consequences. One of the most important (and frequently ignored) lessons of Vietnam was that troops in all-volunteer forces tend to be of better quality than conscripts.
The upshot of that is that you can accomplish the same military objectives with fewer troops, and because you have fewer troops to equip, you can equip them better. For $1M, you can equip 100 men with $10000 worth of gear (rifle, night vision, body armor, GPS, and "their" fraction of your expenditures on air support and spy satellites), and those 100 men will trounce a competing army that spent $1M conscriptiong 2000 men at $500 apiece (basically enough for a uniform and a rifle).
Further of this has been left as an exercise for CNN or FNC, whichever form of media bias floats your boat:)
> And why the hell is USA trying to give democracy and liberty to other nations? USA doesn't have enough of that for themselves.
I'll bet you think burning a copy of your favorite CD to MP3z to listen to in the car is stealing, too. Go RIAA!:)
Freedom is not like atoms. Freedom is like bits. If I give you my bits, I still have my bits. I'm free. You being free doesn't make me less free.
> They should concentrate on cherishing the little democracy and liberties they have, for it may well be gone in a few years. Enjoy it while you can.
Freedom is like bits in another way. The more of it there is, the harder it is to take away.
If I'm the only guy with a copy of some special bits and someone erases them, I'm screwed. But if I gave you a copy of those bits, I can always get them back from you. (And thanks for being my offsite backup solution, dude!:-)
And if everybody has the bits, nothing can take them away from anybody. (The information in DeCSS mirrors, xenu.net mirrors, etc.)
> And that is what this is all about: the creation of a new lower class of un-privileged citizens, who have no rights and no voice. Later generations will look back, and think of us as living in a dark age filled with wars, diseases, and ever-eroding civil rights.
If they have neither rights nor voices, then who cares what they think?
Future generations will look back, and think of us as living in a dark age filled with wars and diseases - that finally ended once the enemies among us were identified and dealt with. *evil grin*
But to go Orwellian on you for a moment - precisely because they had no rights and no voice, the proles were more free than the Party members.
So even if Orwell's dystopian nightmare comes true (which I highly doubt - but I'm taking it as a given to prove a point here), everyone still gets to make their a faster/better/cheaper choice.
"Freedom, security, luxury. Choose any two."
Winston: Live a double life among the elite, and worry about Room 101.
O'Brien: Live according to Party principles among the elite, but worry about having to maintain ideological purity.
Proles: Do whatever you like, secure in the knowledge that you're not important enough to be targeted, but live in the slums.
> you have to stay away from the roommates. >Reason #1. Hot girls generally have hot friends. And lots! >Reason #2. You do something with her...she gets pissed at you later...then who is going to cook and clean?!!?
Her hot roomates, obviously, which is why you shouldn't stay away from 'em. *rimshot*
> Now that it has made some progress, it is more difficult for a closed-source company to compete with it. It exists, and will be difficult to eliminate... There is no company to go out of business to cause Mozilla to disappear.
It'll also be harder for closed-source to compete on a feature-by-feature basis.
I used 3.01 (!) for years because it was vastly easier (but still required a dropdown) to toggle image loading and Javashit; the options required a dropdown and single-tab menu. Inconvenient, but not too bad.
When I saw those options buried under a hierarchical menu in 4.x (presumably as an attempt to dissuade folks from turning 'em off - more ad revenue, more popups, and who cares if the browser crashes every time some malformed Javashit decides to blow it to smithereens), I regarded 4.x as a downgrade, not an upgrade.
It wasn't until I saw the XUL-Planet "preferences toolbar" with Mozilla 1.x that I had the kind of user control that - for all intents and purposes - should have been available in 1996.
On one hand, I'm still ch33z3d that it took seven years to fix a usability "bug" first introduced in 4.01.
On the other hand, looking at the trend towards adware and bannerware in closed-source software, I'm pretty sure that were it not for Mozilla, there'd have been no fix for that UI misfeature - ever.
> There are hundreds of abuses of wiretap privileges by the FBI per year. Are they to catch crooks? No, FBI agents use them to spy on their spouses, or even worse, to spy on companies for insider trading purposes (just last year I recall two FBI agents getting arrested for that). It is a classic case of "who watches the watchers"...
Well, at elast the SEC's watching the watchers:)
I've traditionally opposed the traditional government model of setting up multiple bureaucracies with overlapping areas of responsibility on the grounds that it's a redundant waste of taxpayer dollars, and in cases where time is of the essence, a recipe for a public safety clusterfuck.
The model does, however, have one good point - if you're a dirtball, it becomes increasingly hard to get away with anything indefinitely, because there are too many people in unrelated bureaucracies hunting you down.
From the dirtball's perspective, an immediate superior or subordinate can usually be bought off (or brought in) with kickbacks, but an investigator headquartered 500 miles and two Federal Departments away is vastly harder to compromise (or even identify as someone to compromise), because on the org chart, he might as well be on a different planet.
> Today a Volkswagen Bug, approximately the size of a meteorite, [... ]
The aluminum tubes from Germany were just a ruse for Saddam's clandestine WMD programme! The sudden rain of meteor-sized Volkswagens is conclusive proof that Germany has been clandestinely aiding Saddam's development and deployment mass drivers using Volkswagen Bugs as ammo!
> I work for a shitty ISP whose main userbase is the scum of the earth from every backwoods trailer park in the US that other ISPs won't touch.
I'm probably not seeing the full picture, because I preemptively block inbound SMTP from netspace that doesn't terminate spammers. The biggest chunks are 4.0.0.0/8 (open DSL proxies from Genuity/Verizon/LVLT depending on who's bankrupt this week), 12.0.0.0/8 (ditto in AT&T space), and 24.0.0.0/8 (ditto, but with cablemodems) and 200.0.0.0/6 (all of LACNIC and a decent chunk of Asia.)
> The world needs less market grabbers like
Microsoft and more sharing and careing.</hippy>
<capitalist>And the world needs more market - so there's more pie from which everyone can try to grab a slice.</capitalist>
I work for a commercial software developer. We build tools. Someday, those FSF hippies might build Free tools that do the job better.
Y'know what? I can live with that. Someone writes a Free tool that beats our tools? Cool! More tools means more productive software developers. More productive software developers means more software gets written. More software being written and more people writing software, means more people we can build new tools for, and sell those tools instead. Selling tools happens to be profitable for us. It gives us money to pay our folks to build better tools. Building tools is fun. FSF rocks. And yes, we donate.
Near as I can tell from the PR fluff, it speeds "web browsing", not actual throughput, through use of compression, better image caching, and preloading of images.
Meaning that your bandwidth remains at the same pokey 53K it always was.
Meaning that you don't wait for banner ads - they get downloaded in the background while the modem's idle.
Meaning it's nothing more than glorified adware/spyware.
Meaning it's the same crap you get spammed for every day.
On one hand, you've got the snake oil advertized by spams saying "ACCELER8 YOUR DOWNLOADS UP TO 5X FASTER 2DAY WITH ASSWARE!!!!11!1! qdicxrk", by trailer trash hoping make $9.99 once by selling spyware/adware/affiliate crapware to the clueless.
This is the same snake oil, except it's advertised by press release instead of spam, the trailer trash now wears a nice suit, and he's hoping to... make an extra $9.99 per month.
Margins on DSL are crap - at $30-50/month, they're losing money, but margins on dialup aren't much better.
Heavy dialup users realize that with DSL/cable at $30/month, and dialup at $20/month, they're better off with broadband. Infrequent dialup users are realizing that with competing dialup at $10/month, they're better off with $10/month dialup than the $22/month offering.
Consequently, the fat-margin $20+/month 2-hour-a-week dialup AOLusers and Earthsinkers (on which the "dialup ISP" business plan depends) are becoming a dying breed, leaving the suits desperate to try anything to boost margins among the decreasing dialup-n00b market segments, as long as they can, and by any means necessary.
With apologies to the President:
"Investors, I call upon you to see this for what it is. Do not sacrifice your hard-earned capital for the last gasps of a dying business plan."
> No.. we do not use a closed loop confirmation at the moment [but trust me.. I have been fighting for it for about 2 years now.]
Thanks for the clarification. My biggest concern wasn't necessarily what you were doing, but that you didn't know the difference. (Amazing how often that happens in F500 companies, innit?:)
> Sorry for the confusion.. when this program first started a contracter told the marketing department that we would default opt-out people.. with the definition of opt-out meaning that they are not e-mailed. [long story]
Yeah. Frankly, I hate saying "opt-in with closed-loop confirmation".
That used to be just "opt-in", and the closed-loop confirmation was assumed.
Then spammers said "opt-in" meant "I opted you in!"
So we called it "confirmed opt-in" with confirmation, whereupon spammers said "confirmed opt-in means we opted you in and you confirmed you wanted to stay on the list by not replying/clicking to unsubscribe".
Thus, "opt-in with closed-loop confirmation", for the next year or two until the spammers and the DMA redefine that as spam, too. *sigh*
> These are people who can not install a mouse on their machines without issues. So after awhile it just got easier to 'translate' their definitions.
I sympathize. You guys sound like you're doing 99% of the things right, and getting jumped on for it, because guys who aren't doing it right keep changing the definitions in mid-stream.
> to 'win back' a customer who lost faith in our brand could cost thousands and thousands of dollers in 'conventional' advertising campaigns.
> > At the bottom line, not only is SPAM offensive, but it just doesn't make financial sense.
So true. The sad thing is that none of that had to happen. But the spammers poisoned the well in 1996, and everyone suffers for it.
> In short: I have read the entire PATRIOT Act, and see nothing at all 'evil' in it. A few oddities - technically, it makes it a crime to derail a ferry...
...which is a cryin' shame, becuase I'd pay good money to see that;)
But other than that, I concur with your assessment, and I'm traditionally a skeptic when it comes to the government's ability to solve anything.
> The EFF's page is finally loaded, and... well, I'm glad I haven't donated to them!
Yeah, I used to donate to the EFF. That money now goes to FSF. (When I donate in the name of writing code that protects my rights, I want it to be source code:)
> I work for a fortune 500. We send e-mail. We ONLY send email to folks who have opted into our mailing lists (by default, we are, across the board, and opt-out company - meaning we will assume you wanted to opt-out before we send you a lick of e-mail.)
*blink*
Your marketing department needs a dictionary:-) The term "opt-out" typically means "We add anything with an @ sign in it to the mailing list, and we spam the bejeezus it until it begs to be removed, and we might continue to spam it later." As such, saying you're opt-out-by-default raises a lot of hackles, even if it's not what you mean.
What - precisely - do you mean when you say "we will assume you wanted to opt-out before we send you a lick of e-mail"? Taking that assumption at face value, I wonder WTF you plan to do with these email addresses, since you're never gonna send mail to 'em?:-)
If you mean that you get an email address from, say, a web form, and verify that the submitter of that email address does indeed want the mailing, you're doing closed-loop confirmed opt-in (that is, if you're doing this, and that's great.
If you mean anything less than opt-in with closed-loop confirmation, (say, something along the lines of "$FORD is cool! This is a one-time mailing to people who like cars! Honest! If you don't wanna hear from us again, you don't have to unsubscribe, we've already opted you out, you'll never get another mailing for $FORD from us again, at least until next week when $DAIMLERCHRYSLER pays us to run their ad!"), then, well... FOAD.
In a perfect world, I'd be able to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're doing the right thing. Sadly, it is an imperfect world. What you wrote was sufficiently ambiguous that while I'm willing to believe you might be doing the right thing, I'm just as willing to believe you're spamming, and using some sort of weasel wording to assuage your conscience, deceive your customers (the people on whose behalf you send the mail), or both.
> Your first window was twm until you figured out how to configure X... admit it!
mouse, n. The funny shaped thing on my desk that I move around when I wanna type in a different xterm!
(Actually, no joke - CDE sux0rz, but my Slowaris box has all four ugly-ass desktops covered with xterms and browser windows, so I don't notice how hard it sux0rz:)
> *I* never gave Experian/etc ANY right to my financial information. Why should they have it?
RTFFP. Read the Fuc^H^Hine Fine Print.
Everything you sign at a bank, whether it be to open a checking account, apply for a loan, or apply for a credit card, has fine print.
Usually that fine print will say "We may also share customer information to credit bureaus and similar organizations" somewhere in it. In order for you to get the loan, they need to know your creditworthiness. As a condition of getting your card, or your bank account, you allow them to send that information back to the credit bureaus.
Don't like it? Don't apply for the card, loan, or account.
Of course, every bank does this, so if you really don't like it... you won't get any credit cards, loans, or bank accounts.
But there's nothing in the law that requires banks from demanding the right to shar^H^H^Hell your customer information -- but balancing that, there's nothing in the law requiring that you do business with banks.
I choose to do business with banks because it's more convenient. I'm paying for a pretty high level of convenience with a relatively moderate cost to my privacy. I happen to loathe my bank and the way it hawks my data, and likewise, I loathe the way I have to, every frickin' year, tell them "no, I don't want 5 inserts for vaccuum cleaners with my credit card statement, you fux0ring d0rx!". Of course, I loathe all other banks equally.
If a bank were to show up that actually respected its customers' privacy, I'd gladly do my business with that bank. Of course, some morons must buy their vaccuum cleaners through credit card bills, otherwise the ads wouldn't show up, so someone must be making money by doing this. I therefore suspect that my mythical "PrivacyBancorp" would be less profitable for its shareholders, and would soon be bought out by a more profitable bank, rendering the point moot. But I dunno - privacy geeks tend to be into computers, and thus have good jobs - maybe they're a good market segment, so maybe there's a buck to be made in keeping customer data as private as the law allows.
At the moment, I lack the $500M or thereabouts required to start my own frickin' bank and find out for myself. Anyone wanna set up a PayPal fund?:)
Slashdot Mirror
>
> WTFDTM?
YKYBR/.TLW... Y already KWTFTMt :)
*rimshot*
> Apparently, the editors are going to try and make April Fool's DAY into April Fool's MONTH. Too late. That Iraqi Disinformation Minister talking head beat 'em to it. (Pencil bombs? US troops nowhere near the airport or Baghdad, they're all on a big soundstage? WTF d00d, is he trying to get a job writing for The Onion after the war's over? :-)
> >
> > I thought our objective was to maximize joy and minimize suffering.
I happen to believe on the basis of my observations that the two tend to go together pretty consistently, but I grok your point that my observation isn't universally accepted.
That said, you should understand that by definition, as Chair of the Federal Reserve, his objective is to maximize economic growth.
(And yes, it is an awesome responsibility. One word, misspoken, out of the guy's mouth, can spur traders to move billions of dollars. That's why he's extremely careful when and how he speaks. To us, this essay may read like a mild rehash of Slashdottisms, but for the Chair of the Federal Reserve, this essay is unusually forceful writing.)
> I think it would be more accurate to describe him as "the most powerful man in the world, period". Oh, you though that was the President? Silly you!
No, he said the most powerful force in the universe, period, was God. (But yeah... still... silly him :)
Greenspan is aware that patents provide an incentive to innovate - cure AIDS, get a 13-year monopoly to recoup your $10B investment, but by the time your kids are teenagers, you've gotta have made your money back and be investing the profits something new (like a vaccine for SARS!), because AIDS should be well and cured by then.
He's also aware that copyright - more and more - provides a disincentive to innovate. Draw a fucking cartoon mouse, get a lifetime monopoly to recoup your week-and-a-half investment, and by the time your kids are dead of old age, maybe they'll be able to show your great-grandchildren "Steamboat Willie" without paying money to the reanimated corpse of Disney.
Kudos to Greenspan for not just realizing there's a terrible imbalance in our IP system, but in realizing that it's a threat to our economy, and further kudos for coming out and saying so.
Why must everyone adopt BeOS? I quite frankly don't want to have to deal with the 200 morons and 10 clued people I work with all adopting BeOS and then having to...
Oh, wait. So few people adopted BeOS that... hey, I need a new $TOOL for my BeBox today. Don't have time to write one from scratch. Anyone building one? Hello? Anyone here? Bueller?
Not to nitpick but...
1) Software downloaded and b00bies jiggling, or
2) An error message, for each dependency not met, along the lines of "I need $DEPENDENCY. You don't have $DEPENDENCY. Download $FILE, do $THIS, and run me again." (or "I need $THIS hardware. You have $THAT hardware. This software will probably / might / might not / probably won't work.")
If my software isn't a video player, but is, say, a compiler, fair enough - I can safely make somewhat more generous assumptions about my users.
But for stuff like web browsers, mail clients, and media players, how on earth can developers assume that most of their users understand dependency trees, video chipsets, or even something as simple as video card manufacturers?
Yeah, but would you still buy RIAA music even if it came with a free car? I wouldn't :)
> 2) A well-trained, well-armed, professional army is a major threat to the powers that be. Remember why Stalin was so ill-prepared for WWII; he purged the military of everyone he could find that was competent.
> 3) Soldiers in a democracy's army are voters, and are related to voters. Equipping them badly would have bad results at election time. This is also why an all-volunteer army makes a war more acceptable to the people than a drafted army.
Agreed on all points. Like I said earlier, I don't believe 1984 will happen. Even if I take for granted the assumption that the "ruling elite" are evil (as opposed to merely walking down a road to hell that happens to be paved with good intentions), I still come to the conclusion that a 1984-style security state is not in the best interests of the ruling elite.
If your goal is absolute power, permanently entrenched, a dysfunctional economy is still a fundamentally bad thing. It therefore stands to reason that the "ruling elite" will not build such a state, and that if they find themselves building it "by accident", they'll quickly dismantle it, because it's in their best interests to do so.
Vietnam: around 50,000 over the course of the war, comparable to the number of Americans killed in auto accidents every year.
Gulf War II: To date, under 100 KIA, out of about 250,000 coalition troops.
I don't mean to minimize the sacrifices made by US troops in either conflict, but since I'm wearing my Evil Hat (tm) today, it looks the odds for the average prole living in an Empire of 200-300M people are pretty good.
I'll take my Evil Hat (tm) off for the rest of this post and get serious for a bit: the reason Vietnam had such an impact on the "prole" wasn't because of the war itself, it was because of the draft.
Again, I intend no disrespect intended towards those who served in Vietnam, but there's a damn good reason why we don't have a draft today, and it's not political consequences. One of the most important (and frequently ignored) lessons of Vietnam was that troops in all-volunteer forces tend to be of better quality than conscripts.
The upshot of that is that you can accomplish the same military objectives with fewer troops, and because you have fewer troops to equip, you can equip them better. For $1M, you can equip 100 men with $10000 worth of gear (rifle, night vision, body armor, GPS, and "their" fraction of your expenditures on air support and spy satellites), and those 100 men will trounce a competing army that spent $1M conscriptiong 2000 men at $500 apiece (basically enough for a uniform and a rifle).
Further of this has been left as an exercise for CNN or FNC, whichever form of media bias floats your boat :)
I'll bet you think burning a copy of your favorite CD to MP3z to listen to in the car is stealing, too. Go RIAA! :)
Freedom is not like atoms. Freedom is like bits. If I give you my bits, I still have my bits. I'm free. You being free doesn't make me less free.
> They should concentrate on cherishing the little democracy and liberties they have, for it may well be gone in a few years. Enjoy it while you can.
Freedom is like bits in another way. The more of it there is, the harder it is to take away.
If I'm the only guy with a copy of some special bits and someone erases them, I'm screwed. But if I gave you a copy of those bits, I can always get them back from you. (And thanks for being my offsite backup solution, dude! :-)
And if everybody has the bits, nothing can take them away from anybody. (The information in DeCSS mirrors, xenu.net mirrors, etc.)
If they have neither rights nor voices, then who cares what they think? Future generations will look back, and think of us as living in a dark age filled with wars and diseases - that finally ended once the enemies among us were identified and dealt with. *evil grin*
But to go Orwellian on you for a moment - precisely because they had no rights and no voice, the proles were more free than the Party members.
So even if Orwell's dystopian nightmare comes true (which I highly doubt - but I'm taking it as a given to prove a point here), everyone still gets to make their a faster/better/cheaper choice.
"Freedom, security, luxury. Choose any two."
Winston: Live a double life among the elite, and worry about Room 101.
O'Brien: Live according to Party principles among the elite, but worry about having to maintain ideological purity.
Proles: Do whatever you like, secure in the knowledge that you're not important enough to be targeted, but live in the slums.
>Reason #1. Hot girls generally have hot friends. And lots!
>Reason #2. You do something with her...she gets pissed at you later...then who is going to cook and clean?!!?
Her hot roomates, obviously, which is why you shouldn't stay away from 'em. *rimshot*
It'll also be harder for closed-source to compete on a feature-by-feature basis.
I used 3.01 (!) for years because it was vastly easier (but still required a dropdown) to toggle image loading and Javashit; the options required a dropdown and single-tab menu. Inconvenient, but not too bad.
When I saw those options buried under a hierarchical menu in 4.x (presumably as an attempt to dissuade folks from turning 'em off - more ad revenue, more popups, and who cares if the browser crashes every time some malformed Javashit decides to blow it to smithereens), I regarded 4.x as a downgrade, not an upgrade.
It wasn't until I saw the XUL-Planet "preferences toolbar" with Mozilla 1.x that I had the kind of user control that - for all intents and purposes - should have been available in 1996.
On one hand, I'm still ch33z3d that it took seven years to fix a usability "bug" first introduced in 4.01.
On the other hand, looking at the trend towards adware and bannerware in closed-source software, I'm pretty sure that were it not for Mozilla, there'd have been no fix for that UI misfeature - ever.
Well, at elast the SEC's watching the watchers :)
I've traditionally opposed the traditional government model of setting up multiple bureaucracies with overlapping areas of responsibility on the grounds that it's a redundant waste of taxpayer dollars, and in cases where time is of the essence, a recipe for a public safety clusterfuck.
The model does, however, have one good point - if you're a dirtball, it becomes increasingly hard to get away with anything indefinitely, because there are too many people in unrelated bureaucracies hunting you down.
From the dirtball's perspective, an immediate superior or subordinate can usually be bought off (or brought in) with kickbacks, but an investigator headquartered 500 miles and two Federal Departments away is vastly harder to compromise (or even identify as someone to compromise), because on the org chart, he might as well be on a different planet.
The aluminum tubes from Germany were just a ruse for Saddam's clandestine WMD programme! The sudden rain of meteor-sized Volkswagens is conclusive proof that Germany has been clandestinely aiding Saddam's development and deployment mass drivers using Volkswagen Bugs as ammo!
Paging Hans Blix!
I'm probably not seeing the full picture, because I preemptively block inbound SMTP from netspace that doesn't terminate spammers. The biggest chunks are 4.0.0.0/8 (open DSL proxies from Genuity/Verizon/LVLT depending on who's bankrupt this week), 12.0.0.0/8 (ditto in AT&T space), and 24.0.0.0/8 (ditto, but with cablemodems) and 200.0.0.0/6 (all of LACNIC and a decent chunk of Asia.)
That in mind...
"So what's it like at Rackspace?" :-)
<capitalist>And the world needs more market - so there's more pie from which everyone can try to grab a slice.</capitalist>
I work for a commercial software developer. We build tools. Someday, those FSF hippies might build Free tools that do the job better.
Y'know what? I can live with that. Someone writes a Free tool that beats our tools? Cool! More tools means more productive software developers. More productive software developers means more software gets written. More software being written and more people writing software, means more people we can build new tools for, and sell those tools instead. Selling tools happens to be profitable for us. It gives us money to pay our folks to build better tools. Building tools is fun. FSF rocks. And yes, we donate.
RESOLUTION: Bug closed. Software works as designed.
*rimshot*
(On a more serious note, if you haven't heard of Galactic Civilizations, check it out. Good stuff.)
Meaning that your bandwidth remains at the same pokey 53K it always was.
Meaning that you don't wait for banner ads - they get downloaded in the background while the modem's idle.
Meaning it's nothing more than glorified adware/spyware.
Meaning it's the same crap you get spammed for every day.
On one hand, you've got the snake oil advertized by spams saying "ACCELER8 YOUR DOWNLOADS UP TO 5X FASTER 2DAY WITH ASSWARE!!!!11!1! qdicxrk", by trailer trash hoping make $9.99 once by selling spyware/adware/affiliate crapware to the clueless.
This is the same snake oil, except it's advertised by press release instead of spam, the trailer trash now wears a nice suit, and he's hoping to... make an extra $9.99 per month.
Margins on DSL are crap - at $30-50/month, they're losing money, but margins on dialup aren't much better.
Heavy dialup users realize that with DSL/cable at $30/month, and dialup at $20/month, they're better off with broadband. Infrequent dialup users are realizing that with competing dialup at $10/month, they're better off with $10/month dialup than the $22/month offering.
Consequently, the fat-margin $20+/month 2-hour-a-week dialup AOLusers and Earthsinkers (on which the "dialup ISP" business plan depends) are becoming a dying breed, leaving the suits desperate to try anything to boost margins among the decreasing dialup-n00b market segments, as long as they can, and by any means necessary.
With apologies to the President:
"Investors, I call upon you to see this for what it is. Do not sacrifice your hard-earned capital for the last gasps of a dying business plan."
Thanks for the clarification. My biggest concern wasn't necessarily what you were doing, but that you didn't know the difference. (Amazing how often that happens in F500 companies, innit? :)
> Sorry for the confusion .. when this program first started a contracter told the marketing department that we would default opt-out people .. with the definition of opt-out meaning that they are not e-mailed. [long story]
Yeah. Frankly, I hate saying "opt-in with closed-loop confirmation".
That used to be just "opt-in", and the closed-loop confirmation was assumed.
Then spammers said "opt-in" meant "I opted you in!"
So we called it "confirmed opt-in" with confirmation, whereupon spammers said "confirmed opt-in means we opted you in and you confirmed you wanted to stay on the list by not replying/clicking to unsubscribe".
Thus, "opt-in with closed-loop confirmation", for the next year or two until the spammers and the DMA redefine that as spam, too. *sigh*
> These are people who can not install a mouse on their machines without issues. So after awhile it just got easier to 'translate' their definitions.
I sympathize. You guys sound like you're doing 99% of the things right, and getting jumped on for it, because guys who aren't doing it right keep changing the definitions in mid-stream.
> to 'win back' a customer who lost faith in our brand could cost thousands and thousands of dollers in 'conventional' advertising campaigns.
>
> At the bottom line, not only is SPAM offensive, but it just doesn't make financial sense.
So true. The sad thing is that none of that had to happen. But the spammers poisoned the well in 1996, and everyone suffers for it.
But other than that, I concur with your assessment, and I'm traditionally a skeptic when it comes to the government's ability to solve anything.
> The EFF's page is finally loaded, and... well, I'm glad I haven't donated to them!
Yeah, I used to donate to the EFF. That money now goes to FSF. (When I donate in the name of writing code that protects my rights, I want it to be source code :)
*blink*
Your marketing department needs a dictionary :-) The term "opt-out" typically means "We add anything with an @ sign in it to the mailing list, and we spam the bejeezus it until it begs to be removed, and we might continue to spam it later." As such, saying you're opt-out-by-default raises a lot of hackles, even if it's not what you mean.
What - precisely - do you mean when you say "we will assume you wanted to opt-out before we send you a lick of e-mail"? Taking that assumption at face value, I wonder WTF you plan to do with these email addresses, since you're never gonna send mail to 'em? :-)
If you mean that you get an email address from, say, a web form, and verify that the submitter of that email address does indeed want the mailing, you're doing closed-loop confirmed opt-in (that is, if you're doing this, and that's great.
If you mean anything less than opt-in with closed-loop confirmation, (say, something along the lines of "$FORD is cool! This is a one-time mailing to people who like cars! Honest! If you don't wanna hear from us again, you don't have to unsubscribe, we've already opted you out, you'll never get another mailing for $FORD from us again, at least until next week when $DAIMLERCHRYSLER pays us to run their ad!"), then, well... FOAD.
In a perfect world, I'd be able to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're doing the right thing. Sadly, it is an imperfect world. What you wrote was sufficiently ambiguous that while I'm willing to believe you might be doing the right thing, I'm just as willing to believe you're spamming, and using some sort of weasel wording to assuage your conscience, deceive your customers (the people on whose behalf you send the mail), or both.
mouse, n. The funny shaped thing on my desk that I move around when I wanna type in a different xterm!
(Actually, no joke - CDE sux0rz, but my Slowaris box has all four ugly-ass desktops covered with xterms and browser windows, so I don't notice how hard it sux0rz :)
RTFFP. Read the Fuc^H^Hine Fine Print.
Everything you sign at a bank, whether it be to open a checking account, apply for a loan, or apply for a credit card, has fine print.
Usually that fine print will say "We may also share customer information to credit bureaus and similar organizations" somewhere in it. In order for you to get the loan, they need to know your creditworthiness. As a condition of getting your card, or your bank account, you allow them to send that information back to the credit bureaus.
Don't like it? Don't apply for the card, loan, or account.
Of course, every bank does this, so if you really don't like it... you won't get any credit cards, loans, or bank accounts.
But there's nothing in the law that requires banks from demanding the right to shar^H^H^Hell your customer information -- but balancing that, there's nothing in the law requiring that you do business with banks.
I choose to do business with banks because it's more convenient. I'm paying for a pretty high level of convenience with a relatively moderate cost to my privacy. I happen to loathe my bank and the way it hawks my data, and likewise, I loathe the way I have to, every frickin' year, tell them "no, I don't want 5 inserts for vaccuum cleaners with my credit card statement, you fux0ring d0rx!". Of course, I loathe all other banks equally.
If a bank were to show up that actually respected its customers' privacy, I'd gladly do my business with that bank. Of course, some morons must buy their vaccuum cleaners through credit card bills, otherwise the ads wouldn't show up, so someone must be making money by doing this. I therefore suspect that my mythical "PrivacyBancorp" would be less profitable for its shareholders, and would soon be bought out by a more profitable bank, rendering the point moot. But I dunno - privacy geeks tend to be into computers, and thus have good jobs - maybe they're a good market segment, so maybe there's a buck to be made in keeping customer data as private as the law allows.
At the moment, I lack the $500M or thereabouts required to start my own frickin' bank and find out for myself. Anyone wanna set up a PayPal fund? :)
Wrong direction. Wrong orifice. *rimshot*