Look...I have a Samsung wireless phone. The first three units I got all semi-worked but had some defect. Made In Indonesia is stamped on the back. What should be there? Made In Indonesia By Children As Young As 5 Years Old Living 30 To A Room Smaller Than My Bedroom Making A Combined Daily Salary Less Than The Cost Of A Combo Meal... You expected quality? Cost to manufacture? $.93 Cost to consumer in US? $100 Yeah, I know why there are there too. Cost more to ship the damn thing than it cost to make.
Your (insert item here) is a piece of crap? Look at the POM. If it's junk, odds are it comes from one of the three above. But in the age of global parts...That can be misleading. If the components inside are made in Indonesia, or China... Odds are they will fail quickly.
This is what you get when you mix poor wages, illiteracy, bad working conditions, and sweat shops.
Welcome to the global marketplace. Corporations will chase cheap labor to make cheap products while exporting the jobs of those who used to make them somewhere else. It's a nice race to the bottom. Forget quality. Forget quality of life. Japan is just doing the same thing we did. Chase cheaper labor and export jobs to where they can get it. Their economy is in the crapper now? Gee, I wonder why!
You see it very dramatically in the guitar market. As soon as a country acquires the skill to finally make a decent product, they move the operation to where people will work for a dollar less. They haven't even hit the bottom of the pool yet. There are still places with cheaper labor, less environmental laws, and lower education...
Enter corporate solution
Make you buy it twice.
How we going to pay for that new plant? Got to drive demand somehow. Making it fail is a good way to do that.
This isn't to say that corporations don't love to sell you the same stuff twice. General Electric (one of the most crooked US companies in history) does it all the time with light bulbs. Goddess help those who fly on planes with their engines. They can't even make a good cordless phone or a toaster that wont burn your house down. Of course, even avionics parts are being made in China now. Fasteners that fail and kill several hundred people. Yep. Made in China. Thanks for dying on United....And thank you General Electric. I'm sure I'll hear from their lawyers soon.
Just start that mantra...
Business knows best. Free markets. Deregulation. Business knows best. Free markets. Deregulation.
Of course, even General Electric isn't as bad as Hewlett Packard. When HP switched from being technology focused to being "consumer focused" that's when we got things like print heads and ink carts that are programmed to fail at a certain date. Still half full of ink? No matter. Still plenty of geeks here who work with embedded applications. Go look into it. Call it what you will..I call it corporate crime.
It wouldn't suprise me at all to see automobile manufactures start to incorporate this into their cars computers. Encyrpted of course --.
Seriously, you really should watch this short film. [foxsearchlight.com] I'll leave it at that. Ignore the fact that it's titled "Farm Sluts"; or rather don't ignore it, watch it at home and not at work.
The real problem with home users is that 0.04% of them (read morons) actually buy the stuff being solicited. Talk about a minority rule. The best anti-spam algorithm is thus: "Don't buy their shit".
As much as I wish that were true, I know it isn't. Here is why: People still buy get rich quick schemes. This is how the spam mailing list and tools sellers pitch their scheme. "Just think about how you'll feel living in your new luxorious house, being your own boss, never having to worry about money, working the hours that you want to work...How it will feel to have more time with your family... The Amazing Spam-Money-Making System includes 100 million email addresses...."
So, even IF no one was buying from spammers it wouldn't stop new entrants into the spammer business. They just can't seem to pass up that amazing money making oppurtunity available only for a limited time.;-)
"The PC is more scary monster than household pet. It is rarely loved, sometimes feared," said Mr Crabtree. Next to it is a picture of cute puppies and kittens.
Perhaps our UK counterparts have learned a thing or two (bad) from the American news reporting system. People like puppies..Must include puppies in story. What in the world is happening that could possibly be more important than puppies? Actual world events? End rant. (sigh)
Much like the picture of the puppies, this story is fluff. Of course people use a service where they are not billed by the minute more than a service where they are. Thanks to quicker downloads and page loads (and of course, not watching the clock for billing) - they probably have longer periods of inactivity as well.
The worst is when you go to do someone a favor. When you are leaving everything works, system actually now boots. Yet at the next family function, she goes around telling everyone how you *broke* her e-mail. Sorry for the rant, but when one's family is as fux0r3d as mine, you gotta vent it somewhere.
I should of learned that lesson long ago with a girlfriend who had a minor problem on her car. So I fixed it, no big deal, just replace rotors and pads. She was happy - life was okay. A few months later her exhaust system had problems and it was *my* fault. Then transmission had problems...Also *my* fault. That level of complexity was enough to screw her sense of reason beyond accepting that these are unrelated systems. Thankfully I was spared from every solving any computer problems for her.
The problem is, if you are working on something that people truly don't understand, even pro-bono, this lack of understanding can lead to all kinds of accusations and misunderstandings.
Opera is a great browser to use for that reason. Disable plugins with F12 plus a click. However, if I want to automate it I prefer to use Webwasher along with it. If you get the Windows version, get the beta, it's got the flash killing features in it. What I like about Webwasher is I can exclude sites which the flash animation is actually useful. They make a Mac and Linux version as well.
We had a special team set up, whose only function was to ward off intrusion attempts, and DoS attacks. For a couple of week stretch once, we were getting 10's of thousands of spurious emails per day. I believe someone got busted behind that too.
Did they have titles like: Enlarge your penis 811%? Horny College Sluts Waiting For You? Lowest Mortgage Rates Ever!
I want that guy busted too.
Re:Why should we care?
on
Root Zone Changed
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I wonder if this has anything to do with the recent denial of service attacks against the root servers?
Just speculating that maybe the attackers used a worm/trojan that was preset to attack them at the previous IP on certain dates? Similar to some things we have seen in the past...
Ridiculous. The police aren't elected either, do you think they have no incentive to protect your rights? Let's ask Rodney King. He survived police brutality...Many of the other victims didn't. How about asking any of the protestors preemptively arrested a few weeks ago in Washington D.C.? The police *are* the enemy too. Not to leave out the National Guard didn't have those machine gun weilding choppers pointed at foreign terrorist, they were pointed at Americans. As well as the snipers on the roofs at WEF.
Do you treat the army as an enemy because Generals don't obtain their posts democratically? The Army is the enemy as well, and has been used as such against the American Public by the Federal Government. The most memorable example was during Lincolns reign, but it is far from the only example. Currently the Army has been conducting operations in concert with FEMA to simulate taking over entire American cities and forcing people into concentration camps. Hmmm.. Are they the enemy? They just *might* be.
Try to tell a court judge you won't accept his judgment because you didn't vote for him. In my state at least we can vote "Yes/No" on judges. If he commits a serious error we stand a chance of getting a different venue to air our grievences by the appeals process, there is also a totally ineffective judicial review process that usually results in your attorney getting disbarred if he tries to use it. Not always the enemy.
I am not an American, but I have met and worked with many fine people employed by the National Security Agency and I believe they are a great credit to your country. They are actively protecting you from real threats, and they have no secret agenda to destroy your freedoms. I am an American, and the NSA spent a ton of time, money, and resources chasing down & spying on foreign auto companies, foreign airplane builders, and foreign airplane customers...and passed the information onto US military, auto, and aviation interest here. Maybe if they didn't spend so much of their time spying on behest of big corporate interest I would take them as more sincere. --- In fairness, they also occasionally look for terrorist threats as well.
In that light, the question posed here is entirely appropriate. There is a compromise between freedom and security, and the NSA is exactly right to ask the government to decide where the compromise should end up. And rest assured, it will end up where the American people say it should end up. That I agree with. It's just the last couple times we gave them and their counterparts at the Office Of Naval Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, & the FBI free reign -- they launched attacks and smear campaigns to root out communist, attack environmental groups, break into tap and spy on politicial parties, generate false evidence, MURDER, and disrupt genuinely lawful political activity in the US. The kinds of interest that would want this service now are even more entrenched in government than they were then.
Hell, we have defense contractors (and one with numerous felony convictions at that) owning major television networks in the US. Just an example of how entrenched some of those interest are.
If you let them start building huge databases on people, the information will be abused. Witchhunts will be started. People will be dragged off on trumped up charges. Political/religious enemies will be set up. What isn't illegal today may well be tomorrow. We have some very valid reasons not to want these intelligence organizations to spy on Americans. I'm less worried about them getting FISA warrants and spying on people who contact foreign powers, or people who are foreign nationals inside of the US. If they really suspect someone...They can get a FISA warrant. They've had that power for a long time. It could easily have accomodated even the two *Americans* involved in the 9-11 hijackings as they had signifigant contact with foreign powers known to be hostile to the US. We can do this without the USA PATRIOT ACT. In fact, we can do all of this with the laws we had on the books prior to 9-11.
That being said...The NSA does need more foreign language people, it probably needs more communications & IT people as well. The volume of traffic makes it impossible to monitor everything. I'm not averse to their existence, but I'm well aware of their potential to be a tool for whoever is in power to crush dissent.
A digital divide is a symptom of a set of much more deep-rooted problems, not a cause. I think diplomats like to pay lip service to the "digital divide" so they can look like they're concerned about the issues at hand when they're really not. After all, having an enormous underclass to put to cheap labor is good for big business.
Perhaps some of the reason for this rhetoric is to get subsidies for technology companies who have seen their sales slack off a bit because their target markets have become saturated?
#1 Get Governemnts To Pony Up Money To Buy Our Products #2 Look Good Doing It...Helping Poor People By Offering Slight But Still Comfortably Profitible Discount #3 Pump Share Price #4 Profit
Almost universally I've been against big company mergers that decrease competition. This wasn't one of them.
I'm extremely disappointed with the FCC's decision in this matter, one that I feel was probably influenced by back door dealing at the behest of the current cable conglomerates.
This was a deal that made sense for consumers, and made good business sense for the companies involved. It's also unfortunate that consumers are being denied Canadian competition in this market as well. (Maybe...but I doubt it, a NAFTA challenge will correct that last item.)
I had a friend that a few years ago bought a house on the edge of what in 10 years will be suburbia, but it isn't yet. They are still getting things like water treatment, gas service, and the like wired up. Every year for 10 years the cable company here has promised to connect this community. Every year for 5 years the phone company has said "we're going to roll out DSL in your area soon". Every year the federal government gives them a ton of money in subsidies to 'wire up rural areas'. Nothing happens.
Echostar has done more for rural communities in terms of offering service than cable ever has. At least they provide a choice. This deal would of allowed them to combine resources, have the bandwidth to offer additional services (and local channels) to just about every area of the US. It would of lowered the cost bar for the service as well. This is a slap in the face to every American living in rural communities and in communities that cable will never be available in.
An observation: most people who claim that suits are "uncomfortable" formed their opinion at a time when they could only afford cheap suits. A good suit is far more comfortable even than very casual clothes, it's made of high quality material and it can easily be modified to fit you exactly, rather than a generic "Size X" that casual clothes come on. People look good in suits; tailors have literally centuries of experience starting with military uniforms at making clothes that people look good in. Suits have plenty of pockets for stuff. Suits are versatile, you can go fully formal or in shirt sleeves.
Another possible reason is that humans are very status-oriented. If you've been to grad school and earn $$$, do you really want to dress like a mail room clerk? It sounds terribly snobbish, but I think it's a good explanation.
Another possible is...Chicks dig guys in suits. Eventually even uber-geeks figure this out and use it to their advantage. ];-)
- When asking the "man in the street" for opinions, they carefully select the interviewees to coincide with the stereotype they wish to perpetuate. People selected for interviews typically are:
We really have to get you a video tape of COPS, or Worlds Wildest Police Chases, or the 6PM News from America.
Just look at the wave of "patriotism" after September 11th. It became more like, "If you question anything the President says, you're considered a terrorist too...".
"I'm not fully convinced about this whole WMD in Iraq...I didn't see any smoking gun."
When did you start to hate America?
"I thought we were supposed to be going after Bin Laden...?"
How long have you been a terrorist?
"Boy the economy is sure in the crapper and corporate fraud is rampant. When are they going to clean this mess up?"
Get me TIPS on the line, I've got some suspicious activities to report. Why do you hate America?
"I'm not comfortable with the USA Patriot Act, the new airport security measures, and the huge databases they are building..This kind of thing may end up abused."
Why do you hate America you pinko commie liberal scum, love it or leave it.
"Our president wasn't even elected by a majority of the voters..."
If the US can't stop drugs coming into the country -- what makes you think they can stop guns?
We live in a world of global markets. Billions of those big "rail/truck" cars come in on boats every year. Less than 1% of them can be checked. The check rate at land crossings is around 3% for semis, many trucking companies have "trusted pass" privledges. Add in private cars, boats, planes...and it's pretty much impossible to stop contraband of relative small size of any kind from coming in the US.
So they build a database - get imported guns, or imported gun parts. Wala- not in database.
Of course, any database is meaningless for a gun that's been fired a thousand or so times, and even more meaningless for any gun that has it's barrel and firing pin changed out. Even simple tools (wire brush) can alter the signature enough to make them unusable. Add in that gun parts can often be interchanged, and that guns frequently get 'rebuilt' for completely legit reasons.
Add in thefts and proxy buyers (who presumably would have to stage a theft under the proposed system) and you have another layer.
What's to stop people from switching to shotguns for their work instead? Other than a firing pin impression (easily changed) you aren't going to get any valuable data.
Not all guns leave casings either (IE: revolvers, many shotguns, many long guns).
As sensational as the sniper case is, the reality is you are no more likely to be killed in Washing ton D.C. or Maryland, or NoVA this week than you were a month ago.
A libertarian public-interest think tank and law firm in Washington, D.C., the Institute for Justice has put itself in the forefront of the battle against racial preferences, desegregation orders, and affirmative action.
The Institute for Justice received substantial funding from the Bradley Foundation.> Which is also a backer of other far to the right organizations like the Heritage Foundation & the CATO Institute think tank.
It is also financed by the oil and gas fortunes of Fred G. Koch, a founder of the John Birch Society. David, a Libertarian, provides a significant amount of funding for the Cato Institute's $4 million annual budget. Koch Industries is now the second largest family-owned business in the U.S., with annual sales of over $20 billion. Forbes ranks David and Charles Koch among the 50 richest people in the country. Koch Industries has frequently been indicted for Environmental Crimes.
They also received substantial funding from the John M Olin Foundation . Ammunitions Manufacturer Olin gave considerable money to the Heritage Foundation and other far right causes.
The main activities of the Institute for Justice seem to be around school vouchers, the rights of companies to bust up unions, ending affirmative action, repeal of any laws regarding union contractors or minority contractors, fighting environmental legislation, and taking on eminent domain statues through the courts.
The collective agendas of those affiliated with them and their published works show their goal to be the complete privatization of all current government services.
Who's Who in the Institute
William H. Mellor President and General Counsel. Mellor served as Deputy General Counsel for Legislation and Regulations in the Department of Energy during the Reagan Administration, a period that saw the steady erosion of government restrictions on Big Energy. From 1986 to 1991, he was President of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, a right-wing think tank located in San Francisco that challenges environmental regulations, and was former Governor Pete Wilson's favored source of information regarding privatization and water rights. [From 1989 through 1998, the PRI received 8 grants totaling $337,500 from the Bradley Foundation.]
Clint Bolick
Vice President and Director of Litigation. Clint Bolick worked as an assistant at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was EEOC chairman. While working for the Landmark Legal Foundation, Bolick led the defense for the first Wisconsin school voucher program. [Between 1988 and 1992, the Kansas City, MO-based Landmark Legal Foundation received 10 grants from the Bradley Foundation totaling $592,700.]
When Wisconsin expanded its voucher program to include religious schools - the first state in the country to do so - Bolick defended the plan in court. While the State of Wisconsin officially defended the program, it was the Bradley Foundation that provided funding for the attorneys, who besides Bolick included the "independent" counsel Kenneth Starr. Starr, who made his living defending big auto and tobacco companies from consumer litigation, had also previously done work for Bradley.
Until Bolick began presenting himself as a defender of low-income African American schoolchildren, he had been most closely associated with attacks on affirmative action. He is the author of "The Affirmative Action Fraud: Can We Restore the American Civil Rights Vision?" published by the Cato Institute. It was Bolick who drafted a bill that would end all affirmative action programs on the federal level. And he had high praise for the landmark Hopwood vs. Texas decision, calling it "clearly another nail in the coffin of racial preferences."
------------- It's always important to know who you get in bed with before you cut them a check. I'm not fully happy with any of these organizations. The ACLU fails to aggressively support a lot of things it claims to champion (such as ending the War On Drugs, or defending the rights of Gun Owners)and has taken some things too far to the left my taste. Even with the money coming in from Olin, Institute for Justice doesn't seem to be interested in those either.
The real problem with AOL is price. $23.90 for a dialup account. Even if you just wanted access to their content, BYOA is $14.95 a month. Even yearly accounts don't save you much: $239.40.
Most ISP's yearly plans are under $150. A few ISP's are $9.95 a month for dialup. You might give up the ability to travel with it and always have an access # handy, but it's hard to justify paying 2 1/2 times as much for their content which mainly consist of abusive chatrooms with l3m3rs, being spammed and marketed to constantly, and polls asking about your pets.
On the positive side: You can travel just about anywhere and still get access. Their falling customer base did finally solve that problem of users getting disconnected repeatedly.;)
Maybe a bit ironic...But I find I get better news coverage of what is happening in the US by watching BBC than I do from watching the 4 major networks in the US. The information filter is a bit different. All media has some bias, there bias just seems to be more relavent for the kinds of stories I'm interested in.
I did come across some sites that were non-working on 9/11 and 9/12. Most of them were independant media outlets that just got overwhelmed. CNN was extremely slow but reachable.
Since a lot of traffic gets routed through NY -- I wonder how much of that was a direct effect of sat power outage? Lines being cut? Microwave towers on the center itself going bye bye? The cellular network in NY was barely functional during that period - so it's something to ponder about.
One nice thing with Opera (6.0) is just type "A" then your query in the box where you would enter urls and it auto feeds your query to All The Web. Supersearch feature in Opera is also handy. I hope when they release 7.0 they add more engines to that very handy feature.
When I'm on the Windows machine I sometimes break out FirstStop they have a free version which is decent for meta searching a few engines from the desktop.
Searchlores is another interesting place to look for way too much information about search engines, and very strangely organized at that.
Google is still my default search engine, but sometimes you can't find what you want there easily. Files can be particularly hard to come across. I use Atomic File Finder when that becomes bothersome. FTP-AFFD
"Over in High Point, North Carolina, lawyer Marshall Hurley is trying to make a judge see things similarly, but may have a tougher go of it in what appears to be the most ethically-compromised system in the nation. High Point contracts with Electronic Data Systems, which subcontracts with PEEK Traffic. A big, happy family, the three entities have formed SafeLight. If a High Point citizen wants to appeal a photo ticket, he first has to pay a $50 "bond" (presumption of innocence be damned). But when a motorist heads into traffic adjudication, he meets not a judge or even a lawyer, but rather a college professor, hired to appear disinterested in the outcome. The professors are paid from the funds generated by red-light camera tickets, and the hearings are held not in court, but at SafeLight's offices, a fact that even a disinterested professor might find interesting. "
Of course, the system is always weighted against the common citizen. I once decided to fight a ticket and I'm in Missouri so all matters that could cost me more than $20 allow me to have a jury present (in the state constitution). So the judge ask me if I want to waive my right to jury? I ask him "Who pays your salary?" he says "The state". "Who pays the prosecutors salary?" "The state". "Who pays the police officers salary?" "The state". "What does my case read?" "The state V....." Well, that's 3 on 1..No thanks, I'll take a jury.
No doubt about that... I had the experience of needing to speak with the county executive. So I figured I could just call his office and make an appointment to see him. So after a few second conversation with his secretary in which she asked my name and business she said the folling words "...And how much will you be donating to the Westfall committee?"
Needless to say I've not actually gotten in to see him.
I don't know how much of Cipro was public sector, but Bayer did a lot of shady things with it including paying off generic makers in the US so as to maximize profits.
From the Director, Larry Bresler UHCAN-Ohio Anthrax Drug Maker
Keeps Lower Cost Drugs from Consumers At the same time that UHCAN Ohio is working for passage of the Prescrip- tion Drug Fair Pricing Act passed here in Ohio, we are joining with groups nation- ally to make prescription drugs more affordable to consumers. We are doing this by confronting and taking legal action against pharmaceutical companies that maintain excessively high drug prices through unfair and illegal prac- tices.
A good example of this involves the drug Cipro. Cipro has received a lot of publicity in recent weeks because it is the primary antibiotic drug to treat anthrax. However, even before the anthrax scare, Cipro was the best selling antibiotic drug in the world.
Bayer Corporation, the maker of Cipro, has been selling Cipro in the United States for about $4.67 a pill. After the Anthrax outbreak, Bayer agreed to drop the price to the U.S. government to $.95 a pill, suggesting a real sacrifice for the country. However, the estimated cost to make Cipro by Bayer is only $.20 a pill.
Three generic companies had intended to make a generic version of Cipro available to the public in 1995. The cost for this generic Cipro was expected to be about $.40 a pill to consumers. Bayer was able to get the generic companies to abandon its plans to bring cheaper generic brands to the market by paying the companies $200 million not to manufacture the generic Cipro.
Through the Prescription Access Litiga- tion (PAL) project, UHCAN Ohio and 13 other groups have filed a lawsuit to stop the agreement between Bayer and the three generic drug companies to allow the cheaper generic versions of Cipro to be produced and marketed in the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what those three words are?
.. You expected quality? Cost to manufacture? $.93 Cost to consumer in US? $100 Yeah, I know why there are there too. Cost more to ship the damn thing than it cost to make.
...That can be misleading. If the components inside are made in Indonesia, or China... Odds are they will fail quickly.
...
...And thank you General Electric. I'm sure I'll hear from their lawyers soon.
Made In China
Made In Indonesia
Made In Malaysia
Look...I have a Samsung wireless phone. The first three units I got all semi-worked but had some defect. Made In Indonesia is stamped on the back. What should be there? Made In Indonesia By Children As Young As 5 Years Old Living 30 To A Room Smaller Than My Bedroom Making A Combined Daily Salary Less Than The Cost Of A Combo Meal.
Your (insert item here) is a piece of crap? Look at the POM. If it's junk, odds are it comes from one of the three above. But in the age of global parts
This is what you get when you mix poor wages, illiteracy, bad working conditions, and sweat shops.
Welcome to the global marketplace. Corporations will chase cheap labor to make cheap products while exporting the jobs of those who used to make them somewhere else. It's a nice race to the bottom. Forget quality. Forget quality of life. Japan is just doing the same thing we did. Chase cheaper labor and export jobs to where they can get it. Their economy is in the crapper now? Gee, I wonder why!
You see it very dramatically in the guitar market. As soon as a country acquires the skill to finally make a decent product, they move the operation to where people will work for a dollar less. They haven't even hit the bottom of the pool yet. There are still places with cheaper labor, less environmental laws, and lower education
Enter corporate solution
Make you buy it twice.
How we going to pay for that new plant? Got to drive demand somehow. Making it fail is a good way to do that.
This isn't to say that corporations don't love to sell you the same stuff twice. General Electric (one of the most crooked US companies in history) does it all the time with light bulbs. Goddess help those who fly on planes with their engines. They can't even make a good cordless phone or a toaster that wont burn your house down. Of course, even avionics parts are being made in China now. Fasteners that fail and kill several hundred people. Yep. Made in China. Thanks for dying on United.
Just start that mantra...
Business knows best.
Free markets.
Deregulation.
Business knows best.
Free markets.
Deregulation.
Of course, even General Electric isn't as bad as Hewlett Packard. When HP switched from being technology focused to being "consumer focused" that's when we got things like print heads and ink carts that are programmed to fail at a certain date. Still half full of ink? No matter.
Still plenty of geeks here who work with embedded applications. Go look into it. Call it what you will..I call it corporate crime.
It wouldn't suprise me at all to see automobile manufactures start to incorporate this into their cars computers. Encyrpted of course --.
Business Knows Best.
Free Markets.
Deregulation.
Seriously, you really should watch this short film. [foxsearchlight.com] I'll leave it at that. Ignore the fact that it's titled "Farm Sluts"; or rather don't ignore it, watch it at home and not at work.
That's a truly hilarious short film. (sigh)
The real problem with home users is that 0.04% of them (read morons) actually buy the stuff being solicited. Talk about a minority rule. The best anti-spam algorithm is thus: "Don't buy their shit".
;-)
As much as I wish that were true, I know it isn't. Here is why: People still buy get rich quick schemes. This is how the spam mailing list and tools sellers pitch their scheme. "Just think about how you'll feel living in your new luxorious house, being your own boss, never having to worry about money, working the hours that you want to work...How it will feel to have more time with your family... The Amazing Spam-Money-Making System includes 100 million email addresses...."
So, even IF no one was buying from spammers it wouldn't stop new entrants into the spammer business. They just can't seem to pass up that amazing money making oppurtunity available only for a limited time.
Yeah, and Slashdot ranked above:
Ebay
That's a suprise to me.
"The PC is more scary monster than household pet. It is rarely loved, sometimes feared," said Mr Crabtree. Next to it is a picture of cute puppies and kittens.
Perhaps our UK counterparts have learned a thing or two (bad) from the American news reporting system. People like puppies..Must include puppies in story. What in the world is happening that could possibly be more important than puppies? Actual world events? End rant.
(sigh)
Much like the picture of the puppies, this story is fluff. Of course people use a service where they are not billed by the minute more than a service where they are. Thanks to quicker downloads and page loads (and of course, not watching the clock for billing) - they probably have longer periods of inactivity as well.
The worst is when you go to do someone a favor. When you are leaving everything works, system actually now boots. Yet at the next family function, she goes around telling everyone how you *broke* her e-mail. Sorry for the rant, but when one's family is as fux0r3d as mine, you gotta vent it somewhere.
...Also *my* fault. That level of complexity was enough to screw her sense of reason beyond accepting that these are unrelated systems. Thankfully I was spared from every solving any computer problems for her.
I should of learned that lesson long ago with a girlfriend who had a minor problem on her car. So I fixed it, no big deal, just replace rotors and pads. She was happy - life was okay. A few months later her exhaust system had problems and it was *my* fault. Then transmission had problems
The problem is, if you are working on something that people truly don't understand, even pro-bono, this lack of understanding can lead to all kinds of accusations and misunderstandings.
Opera is a great browser to use for that reason. Disable plugins with F12 plus a click. However, if I want to automate it I prefer to use Webwasher along with it. If you get the Windows version, get the beta, it's got the flash killing features in it. What I like about Webwasher is I can exclude sites which the flash animation is actually useful. They make a Mac and Linux version as well.
Sometimes the best tool isn't always open source.
We had a special team set up, whose only function was to ward off intrusion attempts, and DoS attacks. For a couple of week stretch once, we were getting 10's of thousands of spurious emails per day. I believe someone got busted behind that too.
Did they have titles like: Enlarge your penis 811%? Horny College Sluts Waiting For You? Lowest Mortgage Rates Ever!
I want that guy busted too.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the recent denial of service attacks against the root servers?
Just speculating that maybe the attackers used a worm/trojan that was preset to attack them at the previous IP on certain dates? Similar to some things we have seen in the past...
Ridiculous. The police aren't elected either, do you think they have no incentive to protect your rights? Let's ask Rodney King. He survived police brutality ...Many of the other victims didn't. How about asking any of the protestors preemptively arrested a few weeks ago in Washington D.C.? The police *are* the enemy too. Not to leave out the National Guard didn't have those machine gun weilding choppers pointed at foreign terrorist, they were pointed at Americans. As well as the snipers on the roofs at WEF.
...and passed the information onto US military, auto, and aviation interest here. Maybe if they didn't spend so much of their time spying on behest of big corporate interest I would take them as more sincere. --- In fairness, they also occasionally look for terrorist threats as well.
...They can get a FISA warrant. They've had that power for a long time. It could easily have accomodated even the two *Americans* involved in the 9-11 hijackings as they had signifigant contact with foreign powers known to be hostile to the US. We can do this without the USA PATRIOT ACT. In fact, we can do all of this with the laws we had on the books prior to 9-11.
Do you treat the army as an enemy because Generals don't obtain their posts democratically? The Army is the enemy as well, and has been used as such against the American Public by the Federal Government. The most memorable example was during Lincolns reign, but it is far from the only example. Currently the Army has been conducting operations in concert with FEMA to simulate taking over entire American cities and forcing people into concentration camps. Hmmm.. Are they the enemy? They just *might* be.
Try to tell a court judge you won't accept his judgment because you didn't vote for him. In my state at least we can vote "Yes/No" on judges. If he commits a serious error we stand a chance of getting a different venue to air our grievences by the appeals process, there is also a totally ineffective judicial review process that usually results in your attorney getting disbarred if he tries to use it. Not always the enemy.
I am not an American, but I have met and worked with many fine people employed by the National Security Agency and I believe they are a great credit to your country. They are actively protecting you from real threats, and they have no secret agenda to destroy your freedoms. I am an American, and the NSA spent a ton of time, money, and resources chasing down & spying on foreign auto companies, foreign airplane builders, and foreign airplane customers
In that light, the question posed here is entirely appropriate. There is a compromise between freedom and security, and the NSA is exactly right to ask the government to decide where the compromise should end up. And rest assured, it will end up where the American people say it should end up. That I agree with. It's just the last couple times we gave them and their counterparts at the Office Of Naval Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, & the FBI free reign -- they launched attacks and smear campaigns to root out communist, attack environmental groups, break into tap and spy on politicial parties, generate false evidence, MURDER, and disrupt genuinely lawful political activity in the US. The kinds of interest that would want this service now are even more entrenched in government than they were then.
Hell, we have defense contractors (and one with numerous felony convictions at that) owning major television networks in the US. Just an example of how entrenched some of those interest are.
If you let them start building huge databases on people, the information will be abused. Witchhunts will be started. People will be dragged off on trumped up charges. Political/religious enemies will be set up. What isn't illegal today may well be tomorrow. We have some very valid reasons not to want these intelligence organizations to spy on Americans. I'm less worried about them getting FISA warrants and spying on people who contact foreign powers, or people who are foreign nationals inside of the US. If they really suspect someone
That being said...The NSA does need more foreign language people, it probably needs more communications & IT people as well. The volume of traffic makes it impossible to monitor everything. I'm not averse to their existence, but I'm well aware of their potential to be a tool for whoever is in power to crush dissent.
The chip business must be thriving in Columbia -- they are the largest importer of potassium permanganate in the world.
;-)
Oh wait..It's used to make cocaine too.
A digital divide is a symptom of a set of much more deep-rooted problems, not a cause. I think diplomats like to pay lip service to the "digital divide" so they can look like they're concerned about the issues at hand when they're really not. After all, having an enormous underclass to put to cheap labor is good for big business.
...Helping Poor People By Offering Slight But Still Comfortably Profitible Discount
Perhaps some of the reason for this rhetoric is to get subsidies for technology companies who have seen their sales slack off a bit because their target markets have become saturated?
#1 Get Governemnts To Pony Up Money To Buy Our Products
#2 Look Good Doing It
#3 Pump Share Price
#4 Profit
Almost universally I've been against big company mergers that decrease competition. This wasn't one of them.
I'm extremely disappointed with the FCC's decision in this matter, one that I feel was probably influenced by back door dealing at the behest of the current cable conglomerates.
This was a deal that made sense for consumers, and made good business sense for the companies involved. It's also unfortunate that consumers are being denied Canadian competition in this market as well. (Maybe...but I doubt it, a NAFTA challenge will correct that last item.)
I had a friend that a few years ago bought a house on the edge of what in 10 years will be suburbia, but it isn't yet. They are still getting things like water treatment, gas service, and the like wired up. Every year for 10 years the cable company here has promised to connect this community. Every year for 5 years the phone company has said "we're going to roll out DSL in your area soon". Every year the federal government gives them a ton of money in subsidies to 'wire up rural areas'. Nothing happens.
Echostar has done more for rural communities in terms of offering service than cable ever has. At least they provide a choice. This deal would of allowed them to combine resources, have the bandwidth to offer additional services (and local channels) to just about every area of the US. It would of lowered the cost bar for the service as well. This is a slap in the face to every American living in rural communities and in communities that cable will never be available in.
An observation: most people who claim that suits are "uncomfortable" formed their opinion at a time when they could only afford cheap suits. A good suit is far more comfortable even than very casual clothes, it's made of high quality material and it can easily be modified to fit you exactly, rather than a generic "Size X" that casual clothes come on. People look good in suits; tailors have literally centuries of experience starting with military uniforms at making clothes that people look good in. Suits have plenty of pockets for stuff. Suits are versatile, you can go fully formal or in shirt sleeves.
Another possible reason is that humans are very status-oriented. If you've been to grad school and earn $$$, do you really want to dress like a mail room clerk? It sounds terribly snobbish, but I think it's a good explanation.
Another possible is...Chicks dig guys in suits. Eventually even uber-geeks figure this out and use it to their advantage. ];-)
- When asking the "man in the street" for opinions, they carefully select the interviewees to coincide with the stereotype they wish to perpetuate. People selected for interviews typically are:
We really have to get you a video tape of COPS, or Worlds Wildest Police Chases, or the 6PM News from America.
Just look at the wave of "patriotism" after September 11th. It became more like, "If you question anything the President says, you're considered a terrorist too...".
"I'm not fully convinced about this whole WMD in Iraq...I didn't see any smoking gun."
When did you start to hate America?
"I thought we were supposed to be going after Bin Laden...?"
How long have you been a terrorist?
"Boy the economy is sure in the crapper and corporate fraud is rampant. When are they going to clean this mess up?"
Get me TIPS on the line, I've got some suspicious activities to report. Why do you hate America?
"I'm not comfortable with the USA Patriot Act, the new airport security measures, and the huge databases they are building..This kind of thing may end up abused."
Why do you hate America you pinko commie liberal scum, love it or leave it.
"Our president wasn't even elected by a majority of the voters..."
Why do you hate America?
If the US can't stop drugs coming into the country -- what makes you think they can stop guns?
...and it's pretty much impossible to stop contraband of relative small size of any kind from coming in the US.
We live in a world of global markets. Billions of those big "rail/truck" cars come in on boats every year. Less than 1% of them can be checked. The check rate at land crossings is around 3% for semis, many trucking companies have "trusted pass" privledges. Add in private cars, boats, planes
So they build a database - get imported guns, or imported gun parts. Wala- not in database.
Of course, any database is meaningless for a gun that's been fired a thousand or so times, and even more meaningless for any gun that has it's barrel and firing pin changed out. Even simple tools (wire brush) can alter the signature enough to make them unusable. Add in that gun parts can often be interchanged, and that guns frequently get 'rebuilt' for completely legit reasons.
Add in thefts and proxy buyers (who presumably would have to stage a theft under the proposed system) and you have another layer.
What's to stop people from switching to shotguns for their work instead? Other than a firing pin impression (easily changed) you aren't going to get any valuable data.
Not all guns leave casings either (IE: revolvers, many shotguns, many long guns).
As sensational as the sniper case is, the reality is you are no more likely to be killed in Washing ton D.C. or Maryland, or NoVA this week than you were a month ago.
A libertarian public-interest think tank and law firm in Washington, D.C., the Institute for Justice has put itself in the forefront of the battle against racial preferences, desegregation orders, and affirmative action.
The Institute for Justice received substantial funding from
the Bradley Foundation.>
Which is also a backer of other far to the right organizations like the Heritage Foundation & the CATO Institute think tank.
It is also financed by the oil and gas fortunes of Fred G. Koch, a founder of the John Birch Society. David, a Libertarian, provides a significant amount of funding for the Cato Institute's $4 million annual budget. Koch Industries is now the second largest family-owned business in the U.S., with annual sales of over $20 billion. Forbes ranks David and Charles Koch among the 50 richest people in the country. Koch Industries has frequently been indicted for Environmental Crimes.
They also received substantial funding from the John M Olin Foundation . Ammunitions Manufacturer Olin gave considerable money to the Heritage Foundation and other far right causes.
The main activities of the Institute for Justice seem to be around school vouchers, the rights of companies to bust up unions, ending affirmative action, repeal of any laws regarding union contractors or minority contractors, fighting environmental legislation, and taking on eminent domain statues through the courts.
The collective agendas of those affiliated with them and their published works show their goal to be the complete privatization of all current government services.
Who's Who in the Institute
William H. Mellor
President and General Counsel. Mellor served as Deputy General Counsel for Legislation and Regulations in the Department of Energy during the Reagan Administration, a period that saw the steady erosion of government restrictions on Big Energy. From 1986 to 1991, he was President of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, a right-wing think tank located in San Francisco that challenges environmental regulations, and was former Governor Pete Wilson's favored source of information regarding privatization and water rights. [From 1989 through 1998, the PRI received 8 grants totaling $337,500 from the Bradley Foundation.]
Clint Bolick
Vice President and Director of Litigation. Clint Bolick worked as an assistant at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was EEOC chairman. While working for the Landmark Legal Foundation, Bolick led the defense for the first Wisconsin school voucher program. [Between 1988 and 1992, the Kansas City, MO-based Landmark Legal Foundation received 10 grants from the Bradley Foundation totaling $592,700.]
When Wisconsin expanded its voucher program to include religious schools - the first state in the country to do so - Bolick defended the plan in court. While the State of Wisconsin officially defended the program, it was the Bradley Foundation that provided funding for the attorneys, who besides Bolick included the "independent" counsel Kenneth Starr. Starr, who made his living defending big auto and tobacco companies from consumer litigation, had also previously done work for Bradley.
Until Bolick began presenting himself as a defender of low-income African American schoolchildren, he had been most closely associated with attacks on affirmative action. He is the author of "The Affirmative Action Fraud: Can We Restore the American Civil Rights Vision?" published by the Cato Institute. It was Bolick who drafted a bill that would end all affirmative action programs on the federal level. And he had high praise for the landmark Hopwood vs. Texas decision, calling it "clearly another nail in the coffin of racial preferences."
-------------
It's always important to know who you get in bed with before you cut them a check. I'm not fully happy with any of these organizations. The ACLU fails to aggressively support a lot of things it claims to champion (such as ending the War On Drugs, or defending the rights of Gun Owners)and has taken some things too far to the left my taste. Even with the money coming in from Olin, Institute for Justice doesn't seem to be interested in those either.
The real problem with AOL is price. $23.90 for a dialup account. Even if you just wanted access to their content, BYOA is $14.95 a month. Even yearly accounts don't save you much: $239.40.
;)
Most ISP's yearly plans are under $150. A few ISP's are $9.95 a month for dialup. You might give up the ability to travel with it and always have an access # handy, but it's hard to justify paying 2 1/2 times as much for their content which mainly consist of abusive chatrooms with l3m3rs, being spammed and marketed to constantly, and polls asking about your pets.
On the positive side: You can travel just about anywhere and still get access. Their falling customer base did finally solve that problem of users getting disconnected repeatedly.
With enough body piercings an tattoos added I don't see why not. :)
Maybe a bit ironic...But I find I get better news coverage of what is happening in the US by watching BBC than I do from watching the 4 major networks in the US. The information filter is a bit different.
All media has some bias, there bias just seems to be more relavent for the kinds of stories I'm interested in.
I did come across some sites that were non-working on 9/11 and 9/12. Most of them were independant media outlets that just got overwhelmed. CNN was extremely slow but reachable.
Since a lot of traffic gets routed through NY -- I wonder how much of that was a direct effect of sat power outage? Lines being cut? Microwave towers on the center itself going bye bye? The cellular network in NY was barely functional during that period - so it's something to ponder about.
One nice thing with Opera (6.0) is just type "A" then your query in the box where you would enter urls and it auto feeds your query to All The Web. Supersearch feature in Opera is also handy. I hope when they release 7.0 they add more engines to that very handy feature. When I'm on the Windows machine I sometimes break out FirstStop they have a free version which is decent for meta searching a few engines from the desktop. Searchlores is another interesting place to look for way too much information about search engines, and very strangely organized at that. Google is still my default search engine, but sometimes you can't find what you want there easily. Files can be particularly hard to come across. I use Atomic File Finder when that becomes bothersome. FTP-AFFD
"Over in High Point, North Carolina, lawyer Marshall Hurley is trying to make a judge see things similarly, but may have a tougher go of it in what appears to be the most ethically-compromised system in the nation. High Point contracts with Electronic Data Systems, which subcontracts with PEEK Traffic. A big, happy family, the three entities have formed SafeLight. If a High Point citizen wants to appeal a photo ticket, he first has to pay a $50 "bond" (presumption of innocence be damned). But when a motorist heads into traffic adjudication, he meets not a judge or even a lawyer, but rather a college professor, hired to appear disinterested in the outcome. The professors are paid from the funds generated by red-light camera tickets, and the hearings are held not in court, but at SafeLight's offices, a fact that even a disinterested professor might find interesting. "
....." Well, that's 3 on 1 ..No thanks, I'll take a jury.
Of course, the system is always weighted against the common citizen. I once decided to fight a ticket and I'm in Missouri so all matters that could cost me more than $20 allow me to have a jury present (in the state constitution). So the judge ask me if I want to waive my right to jury? I ask him "Who pays your salary?" he says "The state". "Who pays the prosecutors salary?" "The state". "Who pays the police officers salary?" "The state". "What does my case read?" "The state V
No doubt about that ... I had the experience of needing to speak with the county executive. So I figured I could just call his office and make an appointment to see him. So after a few second conversation with his secretary in which she asked my name and business she said the folling words "...And how much will you be donating to the Westfall committee?"
Needless to say I've not actually gotten in to see him.
I don't know how much of Cipro was public sector, but Bayer did a lot of shady things with it including paying off generic makers in the US so as to maximize profits.
From the Director,
Larry Bresler
UHCAN-Ohio
Anthrax Drug Maker
Keeps Lower Cost Drugs
from Consumers
At the same time that UHCAN Ohio is
working for passage of the Prescrip-
tion Drug Fair Pricing Act passed here in
Ohio, we are joining with groups nation-
ally to make prescription drugs more
affordable to consumers. We are doing
this by confronting and taking legal
action against pharmaceutical companies
that maintain excessively high drug
prices through unfair and illegal prac-
tices.
A good example of this involves the drug
Cipro. Cipro has received a lot of publicity
in recent weeks because it is the primary
antibiotic drug to treat anthrax. However,
even before the anthrax scare, Cipro was
the best selling antibiotic drug in the
world.
Bayer Corporation, the maker of Cipro,
has been selling Cipro in the United
States for about $4.67 a pill. After the
Anthrax outbreak, Bayer agreed to drop
the price to the U.S. government to $.95 a
pill, suggesting a real sacrifice for the
country. However, the estimated cost to
make Cipro by Bayer is only $.20 a pill.
Three generic companies had intended to
make a generic version of Cipro available
to the public in 1995. The cost for this
generic Cipro was expected to be about
$.40 a pill to consumers. Bayer was able
to get the generic companies to abandon
its plans to bring cheaper generic brands
to the market by paying the companies
$200 million not to manufacture the
generic Cipro.
Through the Prescription Access Litiga-
tion (PAL) project, UHCAN Ohio and 13
other groups have filed a lawsuit to stop
the agreement between Bayer and the
three generic drug companies to allow
the cheaper generic versions of Cipro to
be produced and marketed in the United States.