> Everything you buy, those store cards, and even the man
interviewing you in the street goes to data organizations.
When I buy things, I can use cash. I do.
When I'm given a "warranty registration card", I can throw it away. I do.
When I walk into a grocery store, I can buy things without using the grocery card. I do.
When the man in the street asks me to take a survey, I can ignore him. I do.
When Doublelick tries to serve me an ad to track what web sites I view - be they pr0n or news, Slashdot or microsoft.com - I can firewall them.
I do, and I will.
The problem with Doubleclick is that the Average Joe knows something about how he's being tracked by all those other forms of demographic data harvesting. He generally does not know that Doublelick wants to file his name against "into sheep pr0n, Natalie Portman and gr1tz."
Doubleclick isn't a threat to be because I have their IP blocks firewalled. (w00h00, all g0atz, all da time, and Doubleclick don't know sheeeeit! Carnivore's another matter;-) But they remain a threat to the privacy of the Average Joe.
> unless you want to pay for the sites you visit, you better realize how good you got it -
getting an improved consumer experience, cheaper products and free journalism.
Advertising does not improve my consumer experience. Nor, in my experience, do links between news sites and advertisers increase the quality of the journalism I read. If anything, there's a negative correlation; in general (both online and on TV), the more reliant the editor is on advertising, the less trustworthy the journalism.
> let me remind you of what my political ideals are, and why that makes me vote
republican, even though I'm a slashdot-reading, FSF-supporting, Kernel-modifying fool:
I'll throw in one more thing to support the guy's argument: Government-imposed moral codes require the threat of force. The force requires human (cops, judges, etc.) backing. Human backing requires money.
It doesn't matter whether the moral code to be imposed is that of the left ("You will show compassion to the idle poor by paying higher taxes to support them") or the right ("You will obey the Laws of the Most High God"), it all comes down to government programmes, and those all require funding.
The current left-wing agenda (Clinton/Gore) is self-reinforcing because it's self-financing. Most of the rhetoric about the "responsibility" that the Haves have towards the Have-Nots centers about how to expand government's financial take, in order to fill some dream of a great utopian wonderland. The take has to expand; the expanding take is a means to an end.
The current right-wing agenda (Bush/umm...Shrub:-) is not self-reinforcing. Cutting taxes and government programmes eventually leaves a government starved for cash. A cash-starved government is inherently less able to bring about social change of any type; it costs money to put the Ten Commandments in every school, or whatever other idiocy comes to mind, damnit. But if the government seriously starts to reduce its take, it will ultimately find itself faced with the choice of funding (some Left-wing "enemy" like the military) or the goofy morality programmes.
But if (as the left suggests) the end goal of the evil corporatist bastidges is to increase social inequiality through cutting government spending, the total take has to drop.
(And speaking as one of them eeeevul corporatist bastidges, I know where I'd cut first... and it ain't the military that's gettin' cut when it comes to that choice;-)
> Fully 50% of the SPAM I used to see originated from the dialpools of the gargantuan ISPs of the world.
UUnet, Earthlink, PSInet etc.
Since Earthlink went to port 25 blocking (actually, dialsprint.net leased to Earthlink customers), that's now 90% UUNET.
I'm positive that the majority of abuse mail
is piped to/dev/null
For UUNET, I'd agree - they're wholly nonresponsive and deserve to be blocked.
But I'll vouch for Dialsprint. It took a few months, but I did get a human response from one of the Dialsprint abuse staff. Of course, it was two days before they implemented port 25 blocking, so it was kind of a moot point, as spam from Dialsprint/Earthlink dropped from 30% of my spamload to "noise level" within a week of it.
MAPS DUL rocks, but I'd like to see uu.net RBL'd.
The main problem with that is that they don't have an "actionable" RBL nom for uu.net. I've got dozens of Telodigm (linkusnow.net and friends) spams and hundreds of UUNET ignorebot tickets. All I have to do is make the phone call. Sigh. Fuck Qwest for hosting Telodigm, and fuck UUNET for... well, being the world's biggest spamhaus.
But the day UUNET blocks port 25 for its resellers (which I fear will require a full RBL of every netblock they own, with associated collateral damage) is the day we win a major battle in the spam wars. They're the only big dialup provider left.
>On the other hand, your entire argument is nullified since the client in no way shape or form needs to
support the deprecated presentational aspects of HTML.
Sorry - to be more precise, the end user doesn't see <EM> as denoting "Emphasis", they perceive it as "a way to get Italics". And since 99% of the userbase is used to seeing three items in a toolbar marked "BI[underline]" to get the presentational elements, it wonn't matter whether they're Bold or Italic, or Strong and Emphasis.
The end user uses markup elements as presentational elements because they don't appreciate the difference. The level of clue you're asking for isn't realistic; as a tech writer, I've seen the most "OO"-clued developers and technically-clued testers produce Word and FrameMaker documents that are marked entirely with "hardcoded font changes", even when given a template/style-sheet chock full of everything they want.
They still "<Font=Courier Size=10>" when they mean "<functioncall>" because they don't grok that a desktop publishing system is not a typewriter. Now imagine trying to get Joe AOLer to do the right thing for a random email. He won't, for the same reason - because he can't comprehend the difference. "Yo, what's the difference as long as it looks bold when I click the bold button?"
>And water and
electricity... what is it exactly that they are going to *do* with all this information?
Use too much water and electricity, and the cops will assume you're running a hydroponics lab.
As for your VIN - someone joked that they might not want their insurance company knowing they'd just purchased some bondo and paint. I agree - 'cuz I just read the [H]ardOCP article on case-modding, and have a free weekend coming up...;-)
A better example - would you want your insurance company or a potential employer knowing you were purchasing over-the-counter "supplements" (
never mind the issue of the questionable efficacy of herbals) that people often use to treat medical conditions?
What happens when a data miner notices your purchase of St. John's Wort (that you ran down to the store to get for your bedridden grandmother who believes in the stuff) coinciding with your purchase of a gun ('cuz you happened to take up target shooting last week) and some industrial music (for your skr1pt k1dd13 nephew's Christmas present) and comes to the obvious - yet incorrect - conclusion.
> I really, honestly, WANT TO KNOW what it is
they [could/are going to] do with it that would be so terrible as to warrant the hassle of paying my
bills by hand...
Unless you want to live in a universe in which the data miners know everything about everyone (so that their software can come to the correct conclusion in cases like the one I outlined), the best response is to deny access to the data unless there's a need-to-know. What you see as the most trivial piece of information could be the one your adversary's looking for.
The marketing organizations do not have your best interests at heart. They have demonstrated a voracious appetite for your data. The logical response is to deny them what they want.
If it's the Cold War and you're a CIA agent, and a cute Russian babe walks up to you and asks you "Amerikanski, I theenk my cheep Russian watch is two minutes slow, and I have to get to the train, what time do you have on your fine Amerikan timepiece?", you don't answer.
Maybe it was just a gal who wanted to know if she'd catch her train. Or maybe she wants to know where to wait for after you synchronize watches with your junior agent who's mission involves walking around town and "bumping into" his contact under a bridge at precisely midnight.
> Coult you possibly be more ignorant of what HTML is? You fail to realize that HTML is a
semantic markup language, not some presentational language, which you obviously think it is,
Umm... ask 100 users who prefer HTML mail to text why they use HTML mail.
Betcha 99 of 'em say "Well, it'z cuz u can bold things and italicize things".
The fact that HTML is a semantic markup language has nothing to do with the fact that it's used as a presentational language, thereby effectively nullifying your argument.
> Each new medium developed should be able to repesent information to the richest
extent possible.
Agreed -- but email is not the new medium, the web was.
(To clarify: Would you chastise Leonardo DaVinci because the Mona Lisa isn't a 3D CGI rendering? Even if HTML:Plaintext as CGI:Paint, it does not follow that all email should parse HTML, just as it does not parse that all oil paintings should be "updated" to look like ray-tracings. Email, WWW, paint, and ray-tracing are media. Plain text, HTML, the Mona Lisa, and Quake models are instances of media.)
>Is it fully skinable yet? More importantly, does it have the ability to play MP3's?
"Well, if it supports HTML mail, it's a web browser, so I guess it's gonna have to if it wants to beat Mozilla! You can wait three years for v1.0 of your mail client as long as it's got skinz, can't you?" *rimshot*;-)
>So why the fuck are you ranting about the superiority of 7bit ascii? There isnt a single advantage to
using 7-bit ascii over MIME or (preferbly) Unicode.
Umm... because 7-bit ASCII is what's in the RFC that specifies what SMTP is?
Because MIME-encoded binaries are 7-bit ASCII, just encoded in base64?
In English, I'd still rather see a "'" or """ instead of the =[hexdigit] that MIME uses -- but I'd rather see =[hexdigit] than the 8-bit "thing" that M$ includes.
Just like I'd much rather see a 7-bit ASCII representation of a base64-encoded JPG than have a mailer just "cat natalieportman.jpg |/bin/mail poorbastard@127.0.0.1"
Non-US character sets will likely wind up in some sort of representation that comes down to 7-bit ASCII too. SMTP is an 8-bit-unclean protocol - and if you use SMTP, you have to figure out how to decode quoted-printable or base64 data.
If you're going UTF-8 (or UTF-16), and the transport is not 8-bit-clean (i.e. if you use SMTP), then you need to do it in 7 bits and do MIME support. RFC2376, IIRC.
Email is about communication across platforms. To the extent possible, it should be independent of the mail client of the sender and the reader.
That's what the RFCs are for.
(Disclaimer: If you're doing groupware - strictly for stuff in the LAN and you control all the clients and all the recipients - you can design an 8-bit-clean transport protocol, and you can blithely send all the 8-bit data you want. Just don't assume that anyone outside your LAN will be able to read it. That is where Lotus Bloats and MSexchange both went wrong, and that's the thing I'd like to see an open-source Outlook-killer not do.)
(Of course, I do agree that that the issue of 8-bit-unclean transport is a wholly separate issue from my stance on HTML mail, since you can do HTML mail in 7-bit, but I'll still bounce it in procmail. It's just that I'll bounce it for a different reason;-)
> Believe it or not, there are reasons for using
X other than getting 12 terminal windows on the same screen.
Bah! A mouse is just a device you use to figure out which of those terminal windows you wanna type in;-):-):-)
Re:Some useful techniques for fighting spamsters
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Spammer Gets Spammed
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· Score: 2
>Most of my spam mail originates from a uu.net address. Which is kind of ironic, cause I own 400 shares of Worldcom, who own UU.NET in the first place. If something
isn't done soon, I'm filing a shareholder's proposal at the next Annual Meeting...
How long have you held your WCOM stock? If it's long enough to be able to make a shareholder's proposal, please consider doing so.
There are probably some folks at MAPS who would very much like to talk to you.
>Funny how you complain about HTML mail, specifically of people using it to put things in
boldface, then later on down, put "by default" in boldface...
I'm one of those who believes HTML in email is an abomination.
The answer to why I use HTML markup on Slashdot is because Slashdot is accessed through the web. HTML is what web pages are made of; it's therefore appropriate to use HTML.
Email is not the Web. Email is a method for sending text (7-bit text, none of this 8-bit M$ASCII crap even!) between users on two systems.
Since even web browser authors can't render the same pice of HTML identically, and there are only two mainstream browsers, how on earth do you propose to make every email client (from mutt to Elm to Pine to Eudora to Outbreak to Nutscrape to...) render HTML correctly?
Email is not the web. If you want to mark up your email, *emphasize* things or _underline_ them or SCREAM, but do it in 7-bit ASCII, and do it in text.
The PROPER way to handle HTML postings is to cancel the article, then hire a
hitman to kill the poster, his wife and kids, and fuck his dog and smash his
computer into little bits. Anything more is just extremism.
- Paul Tomblin in alt.sysadmin.recovery, regarding HTML in USENET.
I happen to agree with the sentiment when it comes to HTML in email too.
>Why in the heck would I want my text below the part I'm replying to? So the person can
read through 14 consecutive replies before they get to the good stuff?
So that at least one of the 13 previous people who were also "top-replying" would be encouraged to get some clue and trim out the irrelevant crud;-)
Why the heck did you, a proponent of "top-posting" - when you posted your reply to Slashdot, which does not (last time I looked) automatically quote text to which you're replying - put your reply at the bottom of your reply to the original poster?
Answer: The same reason peoples' replies belong below the quoted text in email, namely "Here's what Foo said. Here's what Bar said in response. And here's why I agree with Foo and not Bar.", or more bluntly, because people in western cultures read left-to-right and top-to-bottom.
Re:light stopped? Or destroyed and re-emitted...
on
Stop, Light.
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· Score: 1
>One of the tenants of probability theory is that, given enough time, an event will occur. Thus, given an infinite period of time, _all_ events that are possible will eventually
occur. In other words, if you wait an infinitely long time, you'll eventually teleport to the inner ring of Neptune.
And in a decidedly Douglas Adams twist ("There is a theory that this has already happened") - there's (Hawking's?) thesis that the universe is merely a universe-sized quantum fluctuation.
Wait long enough, and eventually a Big Bang followed by 20-30 billion years of physics suitable for the evolution of sentient life will happen, simply by accident.
>As Isaac Asimov once said: hardcovers and paperbacks reach different people, or target as the marketing
people likes to say.
Yeah - hardcovers go to people who have lots of shelf space;-)
I speak as a former hardcover buyer who just plain ran out of shelf space two years ago and who has paperbacks two layers deep on his shelves.
OTOH, I also speak as someone who thinks e-books are a long way away. We're a *long* way from "6 hours on batteries so you can read a good book in a single sitting", especially if you add "...at 1200 DPI with really good contrast between white and black in all lighting conditions" to the design specs.
Books - the dead tree things - are still pretty cool.
(And on the third hand, while I'm at work sipping coffee, I think I'm gonna enjoy "Underground" a chapter or two at a time... Props to the authors, not just for the publication, but also for a great job of text conversion. It looks great in a "book-shaped" 80x80 xterm on my 21" monitor.)
>A while back, I wanted to roll my own TiVo, but got stuck on realtime
compression. I looked into a couple of mpeg cards, but nothin in my price range went beyond
quarter-frame mpeg-1.
Check out the ATI All-In-Wonder 128. The 32M version (as opposed to the 16M version) does real-time video capture in MPEG-1 and MPEG-2.
I can vouch for that on a Celeron 366 overclocked to 550 with 128M on a Win98 box. And it's got a built-in TV tuner. Also has MPEG-2 with IDCT in hardware. The DVD playback is great. Card was about $200.
Only problem is I don't think any Linux video capture drivers have ever been released for it. I got those results using the bundled software for Windoze.
Note that I didn't look into it that much, but I suspect it's the guts of a TiVo. (A TiVo sounds an awful lot like my PC with all the stuff embedded onto the motherboard, frankly.)
It's also been a year or so since the card was released, so there should be even better hardware available now.
Y'know, the interesting part of your post is that it doesn't really matter if the end user shuts down his or her PC. At least not during winter.
What happens to the 100W that goes into a monitor? It gets turned into heat and dumped into the room. Why do you have a heat sink on your 40W-consuming CPU and 70W Peltier? To dump heat into the PC's case. Why the fans? To dump heat in the case into the room.
If you're a colo, heat sucks. You've got so many boxen that you need a big AC to cool the room.
If you're at home in winter, leaving your computer on 24/7 just means you don't need to heat your room as much from external sources.
And if your home heating is electrical (baseboard heaters, etc.), there's no measurable difference in your power consumption either way. Power off your computer and spend more on your heater, or leave it on and note that the duty cycle of your heater drops a few percent.
So for those of you in CA with electrical heat in winter, feel free to overclock and leave your monitors on 24/7. USE the heat your boxen generate!
(My bedroom's about 2-3F warmer when I leave my PC and monitor on all night. And yes, I did spend a couple of weeks, one night with heat, one night without, comparing delta-T of room versus outdoors, to prove it. As always, YMMV. But for me, my 'puter makes pretty good space heater.)
>The only other partial reason for it is the strict polution limits set. They can't operate without
exceeding their quotas so they are shutting down for that reason as well. This is more of a
tough problem than the pricecaps, because they can't just open it up to "pollute all you want,
guys"
And why the hell NOT?
Seriously. Does a red light force your vehicle to come to a complete stop with your front bumper behind the white line?
The state is responsible for the laws that mandate the pollution quotas. The state is responsible for enforcing those laws.
If Gov. Davis can talk about using the power of eminent domain to seize generating assets, he's just as capable of invoking emergency powers to rescind the quotas and fire up the plants.
The gas-based ones probably won't be able to produce power at a profit, based on the price of natural gas. But the coal-based ones should be just fine.
What I still don't know (and haven't been able to find out), is (a) how many plants are offlined due to "quota" reasons, and (b) of those, how many can produce power at reasonable cost. The only "polluting" technology that I know of that fits this bill is coal. (Nuclear, hydroelectric, and geothermal are zero-emission.)
>A storm (granted, a nifty big nasty one) actually managed to take down a nuclear power plant?
Disclaimer: What follows is pure speculation because I didn't follow the news very closely.
My hunch is that some kelp got torn loose from the seabed and the waves clogged a warm-water release pipe, or a cold-water intake pipe, limiting the ability of the plant to condense the steam and return it to circulation.
If my supposition is correct, then any gas- or coal-fired generator would have been shut down for the same reason.
>I really hope that natural gas fed fuel cell generators for residential use pan out. I'd love to be
'off grid' and heat my hot water at the same time.
I agree - but you've still got a pricing issue.
What may posters are failing to recognize is that most of the new generating capacity nationwide is based on natural gas.
Gas futures have gone from $2.00 per contract to $9.00 per contract this winter alone, and I remember only 1-2 years ago when gas trading at $2.00 was record-setting.
Hell, remember $10/barrel oil? Try $25-30 today.
Crude up by 300%. Gas up 500%. That is why non-CA generators are charging "outrageous" prices to CA distributors.
It's not a cartel, it's a market.
And Gov. Davis' "solution" of "protecting" consumers from rate hikes by using the State's credit to keep PGC and EIX afloat is a non-solution; all it does is take the money for the rate hikes out of taxpayers' pockets in the California budget. Today's spending represents tomorrow's taxes.
I'm not dissing the Governor personally for this - it's damn shrewd politicking, as the net cost to the consumer is likely the same, but Davis can proclaim himself the Defender of the People's Interest against Evil Capitalist Swine.
If I were the Governor, I'd probably do something just as expedient.
How many are real clickthroughs and how many are people frantically clicking for anything near the ad that resembles a "stop" button to get the fsckin' thing to shut up so they can continue to listen to the MP3 they had as background music?
(If I want your web site to make noise, I'll rub my moistened finger on the screen.)
> Oh, and everyone is going to put up their websites at their own cost, as a labor of love? > > Oh, I dunno, in some ways the web was a lot better when this was still true.
I was about to just agree blindly with you (I remember that time), and then it hit me. I'm surprised nobody's thought of this before.
Suppose you put up a site as a labor of love. It grows, ad-free, by word of mouth, because your content r00lz - "content is king!" - until it starts to cost serious cash to pay for the bandwidth. It's basically a Slashdot effect with dollars, and bits-per-month, not hits-per-second.
What happens when a site is Slashdotted? It gets mirrored.
What's the analogy to Laybor Olove mirroring his site? Getting his friend Mirr Roar to mirror it for him.
Now you've got two identical sites paying half of what Laybor was gonna hafta pay. If that's beneath their ISPs' "$10/month flat rate", the site remains free.
More people like the site? More people replicate its content. More people mirror it.
Freenet.
I think I've found the "killer app" for Freenet beyond pr0n, DeCSS and mp3z.
It'll take a while for bandwidth to catch up and Freenet to scale to this level, but I think there's something at least semi-useful in the idea of end users independently replicating preferred content.
My bad. Those whose views you espouse. (It's just that the only people who've phrased it the way you did have been direct marketers;)
>social patterns and behaviour are
irrevoricably changed by new technologies
Interestingly enough, I agree with you here - but come to the exact opposite conclusion, namely...
> I know more than a few marketers who's attitudes towards consumers are almost direct reactions against consumers' attitudes towards marketers.
...that it's precisely because of new technologies (i.e., the 'net) that the consumer has realized what those old-line marketers think of him, and he's pissed. The age when an ad exec can say "we can know everything about the consumer and when we target his ass, he's powerless against us, and will have to buy your product" may be coming to an end.
>The point is, I'm no coperation-lover,
Don't mistake my loathing of certain marketing techniques with a loathing for corporations in general. I like corporations. I work for one and invest in several others, tech and non-tech alike. Profits are great. (Though I'm speaking for myself here - there are just as many slashdotters who loathe 'em)
> You sound like my
counter-culture friends who would rather spend a good night out culture-busting than figure out an alternative
for the corperations (who are too lazy and focused on their core business to pursue such alternatives); that is, a
cheaper, better, more cost effective, easier way of advertising that doesn't piss everyone off.
In honesty, I think you and I are aiming for the same thing (less-intrusive and obnoxious advertising) here; we just have different strategies of getting there, because part of my goal also includes a privacy factor; it's none of your business what I read/watch/listen to, which is why I try to deny you that data.
When I enter bogus demographic data, my intent is to devalue that data pool. If I'm successful over the long term, companies will realize that direct marketing campaigns - ranging from telemarketing to junk mail to spam - generate poor returns on investment. And they will have to find better ways of generating sales. (Which is, ultimately, what I think you're after too, except that you place less value on privacy than I do, because you see privacy as a commodity to be traded away in exchange for less-intrusive ads, whereas I see it as an inalienable right, for which ad agencies have yet to offer me anything remotely near what I'd "charge" for it.)
[I'm going to continue to assume that] You're in the ad business - you know as well as I do that the cheapest and most effective method of advertising is word of mouth. Not slapping the word "viral" onto a glorified chain letter, but real people spreading the word that someone concentrated on their core business and developed a superior product than that of their competitors.
To pick an example of what I mean by "real" word-of-mouth vs. "let's generate some buzz" campaigns, six months from now, we'll have all forgotten about "Ginger". But we'll still be having the P4-vs-Athlon "bang-for-buck" debates because AMD, two years ago, bought some smart engineers and came to market with a product that provided lots of bang for very little buck.
AMD got where they are today without a penny spent on guys in bunny suits or blue face paint.
If you wanna make an even more direct comparison - Coke vs. Pepsi. No "AMD is better because of technical reasons" here - but if you look at revenue growth, it's all about profit margins at the soda fountain, not the can in the store. KO can show as many CGI-rendered bears and happy teenagers sitting around campfires or howling at trains as it wants, but over the past few years, PEP's been getting the higher-margin and better market share by concentrating on the fountains in the theatres and restaurants.
Which is to say that word of mouth doesn't have to be at the consumer level, nor does it have to be based on technical superiority - it can be at the small business level, based on sound pricing strategies too.
Slashdot Mirror
When I buy things, I can use cash. I do.
When I'm given a "warranty registration card", I can throw it away. I do.
When I walk into a grocery store, I can buy things without using the grocery card. I do.
When the man in the street asks me to take a survey, I can ignore him. I do.
When Doublelick tries to serve me an ad to track what web sites I view - be they pr0n or news, Slashdot or microsoft.com - I can firewall them.
I do, and I will.
The problem with Doubleclick is that the Average Joe knows something about how he's being tracked by all those other forms of demographic data harvesting. He generally does not know that Doublelick wants to file his name against "into sheep pr0n, Natalie Portman and gr1tz."
Doubleclick isn't a threat to be because I have their IP blocks firewalled. (w00h00, all g0atz, all da time, and Doubleclick don't know sheeeeit! Carnivore's another matter ;-) But they remain a threat to the privacy of the Average Joe.
> unless you want to pay for the sites you visit, you better realize how good you got it - getting an improved consumer experience, cheaper products and free journalism.
Advertising does not improve my consumer experience. Nor, in my experience, do links between news sites and advertisers increase the quality of the journalism I read. If anything, there's a negative correlation; in general (both online and on TV), the more reliant the editor is on advertising, the less trustworthy the journalism.
I'll throw in one more thing to support the guy's argument: Government-imposed moral codes require the threat of force. The force requires human (cops, judges, etc.) backing. Human backing requires money.
It doesn't matter whether the moral code to be imposed is that of the left ("You will show compassion to the idle poor by paying higher taxes to support them") or the right ("You will obey the Laws of the Most High God"), it all comes down to government programmes, and those all require funding.
The current left-wing agenda (Clinton/Gore) is self-reinforcing because it's self-financing. Most of the rhetoric about the "responsibility" that the Haves have towards the Have-Nots centers about how to expand government's financial take, in order to fill some dream of a great utopian wonderland. The take has to expand; the expanding take is a means to an end.
The current right-wing agenda (Bush/umm...Shrub :-) is not self-reinforcing. Cutting taxes and government programmes eventually leaves a government starved for cash. A cash-starved government is inherently less able to bring about social change of any type; it costs money to put the Ten Commandments in every school, or whatever other idiocy comes to mind, damnit. But if the government seriously starts to reduce its take, it will ultimately find itself faced with the choice of funding (some Left-wing "enemy" like the military) or the goofy morality programmes.
But if (as the left suggests) the end goal of the evil corporatist bastidges is to increase social inequiality through cutting government spending, the total take has to drop. (And speaking as one of them eeeevul corporatist bastidges, I know where I'd cut first... and it ain't the military that's gettin' cut when it comes to that choice ;-)
Since Earthlink went to port 25 blocking (actually, dialsprint.net leased to Earthlink customers), that's now 90% UUNET.
I'm positive that the majority of abuse mail is piped to /dev/null
For UUNET, I'd agree - they're wholly nonresponsive and deserve to be blocked.
But I'll vouch for Dialsprint. It took a few months, but I did get a human response from one of the Dialsprint abuse staff. Of course, it was two days before they implemented port 25 blocking, so it was kind of a moot point, as spam from Dialsprint/Earthlink dropped from 30% of my spamload to "noise level" within a week of it.
MAPS DUL rocks, but I'd like to see uu.net RBL'd.
The main problem with that is that they don't have an "actionable" RBL nom for uu.net. I've got dozens of Telodigm (linkusnow.net and friends) spams and hundreds of UUNET ignorebot tickets. All I have to do is make the phone call. Sigh. Fuck Qwest for hosting Telodigm, and fuck UUNET for... well, being the world's biggest spamhaus.
But the day UUNET blocks port 25 for its resellers (which I fear will require a full RBL of every netblock they own, with associated collateral damage) is the day we win a major battle in the spam wars. They're the only big dialup provider left.
Sorry - to be more precise, the end user doesn't see <EM> as denoting "Emphasis", they perceive it as "a way to get Italics". And since 99% of the userbase is used to seeing three items in a toolbar marked "B I[underline]" to get the presentational elements, it wonn't matter whether they're Bold or Italic, or Strong and Emphasis.
The end user uses markup elements as presentational elements because they don't appreciate the difference. The level of clue you're asking for isn't realistic; as a tech writer, I've seen the most "OO"-clued developers and technically-clued testers produce Word and FrameMaker documents that are marked entirely with "hardcoded font changes", even when given a template/style-sheet chock full of everything they want.
They still "<Font=Courier Size=10>" when they mean "<functioncall>" because they don't grok that a desktop publishing system is not a typewriter. Now imagine trying to get Joe AOLer to do the right thing for a random email. He won't, for the same reason - because he can't comprehend the difference. "Yo, what's the difference as long as it looks bold when I click the bold button?"
Use too much water and electricity, and the cops will assume you're running a hydroponics lab.
As for your VIN - someone joked that they might not want their insurance company knowing they'd just purchased some bondo and paint. I agree - 'cuz I just read the [H]ardOCP article on case-modding, and have a free weekend coming up... ;-)
A better example - would you want your insurance company or a potential employer knowing you were purchasing over-the-counter "supplements" ( never mind the issue of the questionable efficacy of herbals) that people often use to treat medical conditions?
What happens when a data miner notices your purchase of St. John's Wort (that you ran down to the store to get for your bedridden grandmother who believes in the stuff) coinciding with your purchase of a gun ('cuz you happened to take up target shooting last week) and some industrial music (for your skr1pt k1dd13 nephew's Christmas present) and comes to the obvious - yet incorrect - conclusion.
> I really, honestly, WANT TO KNOW what it is they [could/are going to] do with it that would be so terrible as to warrant the hassle of paying my bills by hand...
Unless you want to live in a universe in which the data miners know everything about everyone (so that their software can come to the correct conclusion in cases like the one I outlined), the best response is to deny access to the data unless there's a need-to-know. What you see as the most trivial piece of information could be the one your adversary's looking for.
The marketing organizations do not have your best interests at heart. They have demonstrated a voracious appetite for your data. The logical response is to deny them what they want.
If it's the Cold War and you're a CIA agent, and a cute Russian babe walks up to you and asks you "Amerikanski, I theenk my cheep Russian watch is two minutes slow, and I have to get to the train, what time do you have on your fine Amerikan timepiece?", you don't answer.
Maybe it was just a gal who wanted to know if she'd catch her train. Or maybe she wants to know where to wait for after you synchronize watches with your junior agent who's mission involves walking around town and "bumping into" his contact under a bridge at precisely midnight.
Your call ;-)
Umm... ask 100 users who prefer HTML mail to text why they use HTML mail.
Betcha 99 of 'em say "Well, it'z cuz u can bold things and italicize things".
The fact that HTML is a semantic markup language has nothing to do with the fact that it's used as a presentational language, thereby effectively nullifying your argument.
Agreed -- but email is not the new medium, the web was.
(To clarify: Would you chastise Leonardo DaVinci because the Mona Lisa isn't a 3D CGI rendering? Even if HTML:Plaintext as CGI:Paint, it does not follow that all email should parse HTML, just as it does not parse that all oil paintings should be "updated" to look like ray-tracings. Email, WWW, paint, and ray-tracing are media. Plain text, HTML, the Mona Lisa, and Quake models are instances of media.)
"Well, if it supports HTML mail, it's a web browser, so I guess it's gonna have to if it wants to beat Mozilla! You can wait three years for v1.0 of your mail client as long as it's got skinz, can't you?" *rimshot* ;-)
Umm... because 7-bit ASCII is what's in the RFC that specifies what SMTP is?
Because MIME-encoded binaries are 7-bit ASCII, just encoded in base64?
In English, I'd still rather see a "'" or """ instead of the =[hexdigit] that MIME uses -- but I'd rather see =[hexdigit] than the 8-bit "thing" that M$ includes.
Just like I'd much rather see a 7-bit ASCII representation of a base64-encoded JPG than have a mailer just "cat natalieportman.jpg | /bin/mail poorbastard@127.0.0.1"
Non-US character sets will likely wind up in some sort of representation that comes down to 7-bit ASCII too. SMTP is an 8-bit-unclean protocol - and if you use SMTP, you have to figure out how to decode quoted-printable or base64 data.
If you're going UTF-8 (or UTF-16), and the transport is not 8-bit-clean (i.e. if you use SMTP), then you need to do it in 7 bits and do MIME support. RFC2376, IIRC.
Email is about communication across platforms. To the extent possible, it should be independent of the mail client of the sender and the reader.
That's what the RFCs are for.
(Disclaimer: If you're doing groupware - strictly for stuff in the LAN and you control all the clients and all the recipients - you can design an 8-bit-clean transport protocol, and you can blithely send all the 8-bit data you want. Just don't assume that anyone outside your LAN will be able to read it. That is where Lotus Bloats and MSexchange both went wrong, and that's the thing I'd like to see an open-source Outlook-killer not do.)
(Of course, I do agree that that the issue of 8-bit-unclean transport is a wholly separate issue from my stance on HTML mail, since you can do HTML mail in 7-bit, but I'll still bounce it in procmail. It's just that I'll bounce it for a different reason ;-)
Bah! A mouse is just a device you use to figure out which of those terminal windows you wanna type in ;-) :-) :-)
How long have you held your WCOM stock? If it's long enough to be able to make a shareholder's proposal, please consider doing so.
There are probably some folks at MAPS who would very much like to talk to you.
I'm one of those who believes HTML in email is an abomination.
The answer to why I use HTML markup on Slashdot is because Slashdot is accessed through the web. HTML is what web pages are made of; it's therefore appropriate to use HTML.
Email is not the Web. Email is a method for sending text (7-bit text, none of this 8-bit M$ASCII crap even!) between users on two systems.
Since even web browser authors can't render the same pice of HTML identically, and there are only two mainstream browsers, how on earth do you propose to make every email client (from mutt to Elm to Pine to Eudora to Outbreak to Nutscrape to...) render HTML correctly?
Email is not the web. If you want to mark up your email, *emphasize* things or _underline_ them or SCREAM, but do it in 7-bit ASCII, and do it in text.
- Paul Tomblin in alt.sysadmin.recovery, regarding HTML in USENET.I happen to agree with the sentiment when it comes to HTML in email too.
So that at least one of the 13 previous people who were also "top-replying" would be encouraged to get some clue and trim out the irrelevant crud ;-)
Why the heck did you, a proponent of "top-posting" - when you posted your reply to Slashdot, which does not (last time I looked) automatically quote text to which you're replying - put your reply at the bottom of your reply to the original poster?
Answer: The same reason peoples' replies belong below the quoted text in email, namely "Here's what Foo said. Here's what Bar said in response. And here's why I agree with Foo and not Bar.", or more bluntly, because people in western cultures read left-to-right and top-to-bottom.
And in a decidedly Douglas Adams twist ("There is a theory that this has already happened") - there's (Hawking's?) thesis that the universe is merely a universe-sized quantum fluctuation.
Wait long enough, and eventually a Big Bang followed by 20-30 billion years of physics suitable for the evolution of sentient life will happen, simply by accident.
Yeah - hardcovers go to people who have lots of shelf space ;-)
I speak as a former hardcover buyer who just plain ran out of shelf space two years ago and who has paperbacks two layers deep on his shelves.
OTOH, I also speak as someone who thinks e-books are a long way away. We're a *long* way from "6 hours on batteries so you can read a good book in a single sitting", especially if you add "...at 1200 DPI with really good contrast between white and black in all lighting conditions" to the design specs.
Books - the dead tree things - are still pretty cool.
(And on the third hand, while I'm at work sipping coffee, I think I'm gonna enjoy "Underground" a chapter or two at a time... Props to the authors, not just for the publication, but also for a great job of text conversion. It looks great in a "book-shaped" 80x80 xterm on my 21" monitor.)
I believe the correct response is "Payback's a bitch, ain't it?" ;-)
Check out the ATI All-In-Wonder 128. The 32M version (as opposed to the 16M version) does real-time video capture in MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. I can vouch for that on a Celeron 366 overclocked to 550 with 128M on a Win98 box. And it's got a built-in TV tuner. Also has MPEG-2 with IDCT in hardware. The DVD playback is great. Card was about $200.
Only problem is I don't think any Linux video capture drivers have ever been released for it. I got those results using the bundled software for Windoze.
More info at this guy's site.
Note that I didn't look into it that much, but I suspect it's the guts of a TiVo. (A TiVo sounds an awful lot like my PC with all the stuff embedded onto the motherboard, frankly.)
It's also been a year or so since the card was released, so there should be even better hardware available now.
Y'know, the interesting part of your post is that it doesn't really matter if the end user shuts down his or her PC. At least not during winter.
What happens to the 100W that goes into a monitor? It gets turned into heat and dumped into the room. Why do you have a heat sink on your 40W-consuming CPU and 70W Peltier? To dump heat into the PC's case. Why the fans? To dump heat in the case into the room.
If you're a colo, heat sucks. You've got so many boxen that you need a big AC to cool the room.
If you're at home in winter, leaving your computer on 24/7 just means you don't need to heat your room as much from external sources.
And if your home heating is electrical (baseboard heaters, etc.), there's no measurable difference in your power consumption either way. Power off your computer and spend more on your heater, or leave it on and note that the duty cycle of your heater drops a few percent.
So for those of you in CA with electrical heat in winter, feel free to overclock and leave your monitors on 24/7. USE the heat your boxen generate!
(My bedroom's about 2-3F warmer when I leave my PC and monitor on all night. And yes, I did spend a couple of weeks, one night with heat, one night without, comparing delta-T of room versus outdoors, to prove it. As always, YMMV. But for me, my 'puter makes pretty good space heater.)
And why the hell NOT?
Seriously. Does a red light force your vehicle to come to a complete stop with your front bumper behind the white line?
The state is responsible for the laws that mandate the pollution quotas. The state is responsible for enforcing those laws.
If Gov. Davis can talk about using the power of eminent domain to seize generating assets, he's just as capable of invoking emergency powers to rescind the quotas and fire up the plants.
The gas-based ones probably won't be able to produce power at a profit, based on the price of natural gas. But the coal-based ones should be just fine.
What I still don't know (and haven't been able to find out), is (a) how many plants are offlined due to "quota" reasons, and (b) of those, how many can produce power at reasonable cost. The only "polluting" technology that I know of that fits this bill is coal. (Nuclear, hydroelectric, and geothermal are zero-emission.)
Disclaimer: What follows is pure speculation because I didn't follow the news very closely.
My hunch is that some kelp got torn loose from the seabed and the waves clogged a warm-water release pipe, or a cold-water intake pipe, limiting the ability of the plant to condense the steam and return it to circulation.
If my supposition is correct, then any gas- or coal-fired generator would have been shut down for the same reason.
I agree - but you've still got a pricing issue.
What may posters are failing to recognize is that most of the new generating capacity nationwide is based on natural gas.
Gas futures have gone from $2.00 per contract to $9.00 per contract this winter alone, and I remember only 1-2 years ago when gas trading at $2.00 was record-setting.
Hell, remember $10/barrel oil? Try $25-30 today.
Crude up by 300%. Gas up 500%. That is why non-CA generators are charging "outrageous" prices to CA distributors.
It's not a cartel, it's a market.
And Gov. Davis' "solution" of "protecting" consumers from rate hikes by using the State's credit to keep PGC and EIX afloat is a non-solution; all it does is take the money for the rate hikes out of taxpayers' pockets in the California budget. Today's spending represents tomorrow's taxes.
I'm not dissing the Governor personally for this - it's damn shrewd politicking, as the net cost to the consumer is likely the same, but Davis can proclaim himself the Defender of the People's Interest against Evil Capitalist Swine. If I were the Governor, I'd probably do something just as expedient.
But as a solution, it blows chunks.
How many are real clickthroughs and how many are people frantically clicking for anything near the ad that resembles a "stop" button to get the fsckin' thing to shut up so they can continue to listen to the MP3 they had as background music?
(If I want your web site to make noise, I'll rub my moistened finger on the screen.)
>
> Oh, I dunno, in some ways the web was a lot better when this was still true.
I was about to just agree blindly with you (I remember that time), and then it hit me. I'm surprised nobody's thought of this before.
Suppose you put up a site as a labor of love. It grows, ad-free, by word of mouth, because your content r00lz - "content is king!" - until it starts to cost serious cash to pay for the bandwidth. It's basically a Slashdot effect with dollars, and bits-per-month, not hits-per-second.
What happens when a site is Slashdotted? It gets mirrored.
What's the analogy to Laybor Olove mirroring his site? Getting his friend Mirr Roar to mirror it for him.
Now you've got two identical sites paying half of what Laybor was gonna hafta pay. If that's beneath their ISPs' "$10/month flat rate", the site remains free.
More people like the site? More people replicate its content. More people mirror it.
Freenet.
I think I've found the "killer app" for Freenet beyond pr0n, DeCSS and mp3z.
It'll take a while for bandwidth to catch up and Freenet to scale to this level, but I think there's something at least semi-useful in the idea of end users independently replicating preferred content.
And yep, that's exactly what I was thinking about when I first attempted to explain the x-ray novae.
Like I said - the coolest thing about /. is that when you get something wrong, you get called on it and you learn something new.
My bad. Those whose views you espouse. (It's just that the only people who've phrased it the way you did have been direct marketers ;)
>social patterns and behaviour are irrevoricably changed by new technologies
Interestingly enough, I agree with you here - but come to the exact opposite conclusion, namely...
> I know more than a few marketers who's attitudes towards consumers are almost direct reactions against consumers' attitudes towards marketers.
>The point is, I'm no coperation-lover,
Don't mistake my loathing of certain marketing techniques with a loathing for corporations in general. I like corporations. I work for one and invest in several others, tech and non-tech alike. Profits are great. (Though I'm speaking for myself here - there are just as many slashdotters who loathe 'em)
> You sound like my counter-culture friends who would rather spend a good night out culture-busting than figure out an alternative for the corperations (who are too lazy and focused on their core business to pursue such alternatives); that is, a cheaper, better, more cost effective, easier way of advertising that doesn't piss everyone off.
In honesty, I think you and I are aiming for the same thing (less-intrusive and obnoxious advertising) here; we just have different strategies of getting there, because part of my goal also includes a privacy factor; it's none of your business what I read/watch/listen to, which is why I try to deny you that data.
When I enter bogus demographic data, my intent is to devalue that data pool. If I'm successful over the long term, companies will realize that direct marketing campaigns - ranging from telemarketing to junk mail to spam - generate poor returns on investment. And they will have to find better ways of generating sales. (Which is, ultimately, what I think you're after too, except that you place less value on privacy than I do, because you see privacy as a commodity to be traded away in exchange for less-intrusive ads, whereas I see it as an inalienable right, for which ad agencies have yet to offer me anything remotely near what I'd "charge" for it.)
[I'm going to continue to assume that] You're in the ad business - you know as well as I do that the cheapest and most effective method of advertising is word of mouth. Not slapping the word "viral" onto a glorified chain letter, but real people spreading the word that someone concentrated on their core business and developed a superior product than that of their competitors.
To pick an example of what I mean by "real" word-of-mouth vs. "let's generate some buzz" campaigns, six months from now, we'll have all forgotten about "Ginger". But we'll still be having the P4-vs-Athlon "bang-for-buck" debates because AMD, two years ago, bought some smart engineers and came to market with a product that provided lots of bang for very little buck. AMD got where they are today without a penny spent on guys in bunny suits or blue face paint.
If you wanna make an even more direct comparison - Coke vs. Pepsi. No "AMD is better because of technical reasons" here - but if you look at revenue growth, it's all about profit margins at the soda fountain, not the can in the store. KO can show as many CGI-rendered bears and happy teenagers sitting around campfires or howling at trains as it wants, but over the past few years, PEP's been getting the higher-margin and better market share by concentrating on the fountains in the theatres and restaurants.
Which is to say that word of mouth doesn't have to be at the consumer level, nor does it have to be based on technical superiority - it can be at the small business level, based on sound pricing strategies too.