. Does anyone know if the worm caused any delays in getting through to the 911 system that caused serious injury or death? Considering the total penetration of WebTV, not likely.
It was reported in the article that 21 people recived the email, of which 10 of them executed the code and had a visit from the police. 10 911 calls spaced throught a day, across all of America hardly constitutes a "threat to national security or emergency services".
100,000 CDs at (say) $15.00 each retail. That's $1,500,000 going into that part of the economym which is a good thing regardless. The retail employees make money, the shippers make money, the local jurisdiction gets some tax revenue - all are stimulated by the transaction....Say they only get $1.00. That's more money ($100,000) than most people make in a year, and doesn't take into account the revenue they also make from tie-in licensing, touring, t-shirt sales, and all the rest. The CD-sales-only part, if a very modestly successful artist sells only that many CDs, is a decent living.
That's rather unrealistic math if you are on a major label, those type of returns are possible on an Indie label you or maybe your best buddy owns with a very favorable(rare) distribution deal through a major label.
You see, the fees that the record companies take out for everything come out of the artist "share" of those proceeds, on a good day they make.75, some bands that sold more than 300,000 copies of their first record like (ahem) Nirvana, actually ended up owing money to the record label their first couple years ever after 300K+ in sales. If they were smart they hung on to royalty for use rights & publishing rights, but most musicians don't realize they are worth that much and sign those away as well.
Even at your math and assuing they by some marvel of being on an Indie actually got $1.00 per CD when it was said and done, the $100,000 would be before tax and split between however many members are in the band, assuming the artist didn't hire out (ala Michael Jackson) 100% for session players at $51.50 an hour.
T-shirt sales are usually tied in to the record company, and even more distateful, most clubs are now demanding (even the major venues) a percentage (usually 40-50%) of merchandise sales at clubs. Most clubs even set up beer back stage that is charges by the bottles you drink just like the mini-bars in hotel rooms, they just do the accounting at the end of the night. The food is never free either. Nor is the soundman, the lightman, and some places the band and not the club is responsible to pay for the doormen and security (understandable if you are a gansta rapper, not as understandable if you are adult contemp).
It's not an easy gig being a professional musician if your goal is mass sales. It's a better gig if you find a small secure niche and stay in it.
My brothers band made 2-3x as much selling 1/3 as many records on their Indie label as they did on Geffen with #1 and #3 and #4 hits in several world markets during the Geffen period to boot. Not only did they make more money, but no $175,000 videos that never get rotation coming out of their salary, no mega expensive thousand dollar a day tour busses, no catered at $300 a plate shrimp either. Not that Geffen did much other than waste their money promotional wise. Yeah, they could give away a few thousand more copies of your music and if you are Michael Jackson blackmail your way onto MTV, but that 2nd one doesn't happen unless you are Michael Jackson. You pay for the promo copies. The only real advantage the majors have is their "company" stations that they can legally buy playola on. You sell a few more records, but you have to sell 5-10X as many to make up for the costs incurred to break even.
They typically played 500-3000 seat holes before Geffen, mostly 700-4000 size holes on Geffen, and when they dropped Geffen a few years later they are still playing 500-3000 seat holes...right where they started without the major label, major headache, and major expense.
Giving away MP3's/OGG files doesn't have to cost you sales, it can be a very effective promotional tool if it's done right. For bands that are on the cusp between radio play and not getting radio play, those MP3's may be the only way they can tap into new markets and draw new fans both to shows & to buy albums. It worked well for Wilco, albeit they had a good following
So basically, if someone turns out a drug which say, causes liver cirrhosis, then it doesn't matter whether it's a drug against cancer or a drug against acne?
That's a weird position. It's not 'government overhead'. It's a protection system which is there for a very good reason. I guess you never heard of Thalidomide?
Thalidomide is currently being used as a very effect agent against 3 different types of cancer, and is in trials for some types of neuropathic pain, as well as a host of other uses. Just because a drug is bad for pregnant women doesn't mean it's a bad drug. Generally speaking, any drug useful in chemo is going to be an "X" for pregnancy. Look at Methotrexate. Also generally speaking, most of the chemo drugs are useful in rheumatic conditions like Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Crohn's disease.
I know you are trying to bring images of deformed babies into the arguement, but you can do that with about 1/5-1/4 of the FDA approved drugs for other indications, and most of them haven't even been tested in that circumstance, hell most of them haven't even been tested on teenagers, much less children, todlers, newborns, the unborn...etc A fair portion of the drugs approved by the FDA have never been subject to any testing or formal approval process at all, they were simply grandfathered in. Even drugs that are approved are rarely tested in human trials beyond 6-10 weeks.
Dragging Vioxx into this is also kind of poor. There is another NSAID which has risks far higher, it's called Toradol, and while it's fairly effective at blunting pain and reducing inflammation, it's the most likely of all of them to cause people to bleed out. Did they pull it off the market? No. It took a bit of time to reeducate doctors & get people to follow the reccomendation to only give it for a few days duration, but it's still a widely used and useful drug in hospitals. Vioxx is still a useful drug, and if not for them pulling it, would still be widely used even with those risks. It offered some benefits (not a sulfa drug for instance), less chance of bleeding out due to GI problems, useful post surgical because it doesn't interfere with clotting, and yes, it doubled the risks of heart attacks and strokes. That last thing is relative though to what the risks actually are for any given person at that point in their life though. For an 18 year old, otherwise healthy - that's a pretty low risk. For a few days post surgical it's not much of a risk.
The difference between a good drug and a bad drug is often in the eye of the beholder & in the way they are prescibed.
In the case of Intel processors (especially duals) memory bandwidth is severly lacking
They do have 800 FSB with 64 bit support in the Xeon's now, which makes them quite attractive dual processor machines provided you have the budget, and DDR2 support as well... The days of the 400/533 FSB for the Xeons while everything else goes passing by are over. Of course, they don't yet have the 1066 of some of the extreme editions.
That isn't what gives me pause though. I've been considering a dual xeon purchase using either a Tyan or an Iwill MB. I would like to see how these dual cores compare to two physical processors and if the Xeon line is going to get a major upgrade along with it, thus ending my purchases future proofing.
On the other hand, if they do come out with a dual core Xeon, and it needs a new chipset... I'll be able to buy the system I want to buy now for bargain basement prices as people upgrade, and even without an upgrade path it may still be a fastastic machine. I just hate having to wait though, I already waited for 800FSB and dual PCI-E (though only the tyan is truly 16x/16x the Iwill is really an 8x/8x config).
There's a simpler term for this. It's called a "Tax". It will never be used to pay for recycling. Instead it will be used to pay for pork projects and other forms of government waste. The moment anybody points this out they will be accused of attempting to "starve children and keep old people from getting their medicine".
Exactly. I highly doubt any of this is going to increase recycling, but it is going to inflict $20-40 cost on every new computer system sold. It will be just like the environmental tax on tires in my state. Add $3 when they are sold, and add another $1 per item when you dispose of it. But the garage still has to pay someone to haul it away as the fee goes to the state and is spent on other things.
It's simply resulted in massive amounts of tires being thrown away in alleys rather than disposed of properly.
I highly doubt ant front end fee at the federal level is going to generate even a single recycling center on the ground. It may generate a ton of new rules for your garbage man, that he might have to sort it and pay someone else to haul it away, but this will just be tacked on to your garbage bill, the $10-40 you paid up front wont go to that at all. That is the way these things work out in the real world.
Look, on a practical level, you don't want to get arrested in a foreign country. This isn't Mexico of the 1980's where you could slip the guy a $50 and the problem disappears. (Though I hear Russia is like that now.)
Being an American wont protect you from the laws abroad. What may be a small fine over there for them, may be a long stay in jail and a forced deportation through a slow administrative process for you - we are starting to do the same thing here over minor law violations to guest workers. You need to become familiar with the punishments they dole out, and do your best to get along & go along.
Actually, if you have registered your copy with them and put in factual information (or remember the information you used anyway!), you can call microsoft up on the phone and give them the info and they will read you your key. I've had to do this in the past, and there was no charge for this.
Now if you didn't register your copy, or can't remember the information you used for that purpose, SOL.
I really feel that Usenet is one of those things that people have to be shown it to realize it exist and has potential to be useful. I'm amazed as many AOLers found it to be honest, though the reader they gave them was rather self limiting as far as what they could do with it, but did allow some very basic message filtering.
Usenet is becomming more and more obscure as web message boards dedicated to single topics spring up. I would hate for every group to lie behind registration, but without a new influx of people into usenet that is what will eventually happen.
The main barriers now seems to be simply entering the NNTP settings for people and people figuring out how to subscribe to various groups, and then how to actually use their message filters to make it a tolerable experience. But there is another barrier to this which is growing, many ISP's are no longer offering access to newsgroups, or are doing it behind an awful web based interface. While the web based interface bypasses the entering of NNTP settings, they usually don't allow filtering, or to be able to take full advantage of the things it can do (such as transfer multipart files).
Pretty much if we want it to be around, the more geekier set need to talk to reasonably good peopele and ask if they use it, and if not show them how to use it & how to actually get the most out of it beyond the basics. Otherwise it's likely to disappear, and then we all lose.
In my view it's as simple as introducing people to it every now and then that you know to be decent.
I see it as "education" to accept any form of totalitarianism starting with the most vulnerable - kids, prison inmates, those in the military, shortly to be followed by the mentally ill and everyone else. Yet another sad day, but they will be trained through things like this to accept it...
Nicotine is a poison all on its own, so I would think it has its own limiting factor built in.
You can make a really nice insecticide for household plants by steeping some tobacco in water. Just thinking about that makes me not want to breathe cigarette smoke ever again.
You can kill yourself by drinking 5 gallons of (or less) of water as well. The dose makes the poison, tylenol is at least as deadly as pure uranium when eaten. (#1 medical cause of liver failure as well) Nicotine is about as "dangerous" as caffeine is, the problems stem from the delivery device.
Quality smokeless tobacco products do not have the high risks that smoking cigarettes do. Of course, the safety NAZI's don't want you to know that. They also don't want you to know that they pull a number out of the air nearly at random to assess second hand smoke impact - or that a glass of whisky sitting on the table at room temperature is releasing more toxins into the air than a person chain smoking...
I'm perfectly willing to say cigarettes are dangerous to the end user, if everyone who smokes switched to smokeless tobacco like copenhagen or ariva we would see deaths from tobacco use drop to less than 9K a year (and probably lower than that). A nicotine inhaler would be a great delivery device, a transmucal sucker would be another great delivery device... The problem is with the regulation, they don't wamt people to have safer alternatives or to know the truth. The people in charge of health policy are largely zealots like Coop. He actually went on record as saying smokeless tobacco was *more dangerous* than smoking. What can I say? Americans are in love with prohibition... They've tried it with booze, opioids, cocaine, MDMA, LSD... We've all seen what a wonderful success releasing fraud as truth about drugs has done for usage. The war on drugs is clearly winning with those tactics by anyones sane measure...>sarcasm off
So now you aren't allowed at a Bush event unless you support him? I guess it is all about the image of having support. It must be pretty easy to have a chanting mob of supporters if you pre-screen the crowd. It sounds kind of like a tent revival for an evangelical con-man.
This guys advance team has a thing for hokey props. When they came to St Louis & set up shop at JS Logistics, they covered up all of the warehouse items that were made in other countries (china mostly) with "Made In USA" stickers and brought in a great big box of Made In USA labeled boxes. This is a transportation company, they don't make anything. How about the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the Navy ship complete with fighter jet entrance?... Or the having two entire tractor trailers painted up with a hokey message for a photo-op in Florida during the hurricane. (That one bothered me.)
I really dislike the phony props, staging, PR, and all of the other BS that goes on.
I'm sure the Kerry campaign has used many similar tactics but I haven't seen them other than the "pit" around the DNC which was just as bad as the preemptive arrest the RNC had. More & more this is just not my country and I'm not sure how to get it back.
One nitpicky thing I would take issue with is your characterization of ketamine - while it is occasionally used for pediatric anesthesia, the side effects of hallucination and nightmares essentially preclude its use in adults.
It's a newer technique that the anaesthesiologist have started using more often here. They give it only once in the drip to prep the person for surgery usually in combo with fentanyl or whatever agent they choose to put the person under, and it's just part of that proceedure. It's not the primary agent to put them under, the dose is much less than that. The patient is out for the worst part of where those kind of side effects would be noticed. There really isn't value in continuing it for days on end. There is quite a bit of interesting research on NMDA antagonist going on in particular for central pain states where they seem to have the greatest benefit. It's also been shown to reduce post surgical pain substantially when given before the operation.
There are gentler ways of using them as well in chronic pain. Part of the action of Methadone is as an NMDA antagonist, which is probably work it works better on Neuropathy pain. Dextromethorphan is also a weak NMDA antagonist - and I've used that (75mg split into 3 doses)as well as the Methdone & Duragesic in combo to be able to drop my total pain killer doses by about 1/3. It's a strange combo, but it worked for me. It's not impairing, but it's not easy to adjust. I couldn't keep taking Oxycodone and Neurontin and remain employed, it was just way too much mental clouding. I did try a trial of very low dose Ketamine after a shot of IM ketamine lowered my pain for 7 days. I couldn't handle them, but I didn't get nightmares or really hallucinations, it worked on most of my pain, but I couldn't drive on it period. That was when they were still trying nerve blocks to figure out what my options were. It's not a first line option, but it's an option to consider when you are running out of options and don't want to keep upping the opioids because they are intolerable.
I was very desperate for help till I found an Anaesthesiologist to manage my pain. GP's and Rheumatologist are okay doctors, but a lot of them are really lacking in knowledge & experience when it comes to managing serious chronic pain for long periods. I see him every 4 months or so to get reevaluated, I see the rheumatologist every 3 months, my dentist every 4 months (Sjogren's too, Raynauds, and a few other complicating vasuclitis issues), eye doctor every 6 months and see my GP every month. The other doctors simply pass on their reccommendations to my GP, and that way we have one doctor that sees everything just in case. Though it takes a little longer to change things, I like that arrangement as we don't run into one doctor doesn't know what the other doctors are doing. I bring them a nice typed list of everything I'm on and the pill bottles just in case and we do liver and kidney test frequently.
I don't like the chemo and biologic drugs, and I really don't like the needles, but they've gotten me off of steroids. I went from having to be in the wheelchair, to up and about, to back at work in about 5 months doing what we are doing. I'm going to have to get some replacement parts as I've got a lot of damage, but we are avoiding it for as long as we can as they don't last. I'm not a big fan of NSAIDS eiher, I've been through the ulcer thing - but I still have to use them, or take steroids. Given the choice of the two, I'll take the NSAIDS. The arthritis is under well enough control right now that it isn't the major source of my pain, the existing damage, the neuropathy, and the myofascial pain are probably more feeders for it. I still get the frankenstein feeling when the RA flares up and a short while every morning, but it's not like it was 8 months ago where my hands were swollen to the point where I couldn't tie my own shoes and I had to wear sandals all of the time.
It's a nasty disease, went from feeling great working 6
I have a degenerative rheumatoid arthritis which has decided to rest in my spine, hips, and hands mostly but affects every joint in my body from time to time, chronic myofascial pain, neuropathy and a neurological condition which causes hypersensitivity in the nervous system to everything (not just pain, bright lights, sounds, temperature). I didn't ask for these things, but that's just the way the cookie crumbles. Having these and still trying to have a life and make it to work is difficult, the pain is off the charts, and depressingly I know it's going to get worse as I get older and end up with a lot more joint and bone damage. There is no cure for any of it, just treatments to slow down the progression and mask the symptoms a bit. This is not how I expected to feel at age 32.
Having this, I'm very up on the research into pain management. If something out there has been tried, the odds are I've heard of it and I've read the trial. This isn't the first attempt to block euphoria from opioids or make drugs "unabusable". It is the first I've heard of a vaccine (well, more like a phage in this case) against it.
There are not a whole lot of formulations out there that are suitable for long term use for those in severe chronic pain. There are extended release versions of Oxycodone (Oxycontin), a few extended release versions of Morphine (Kadian, MScontin, Avinza), a transdermal patch called Duragesic which delivers Fentanyl and can provide relief for up to 72 hours (but some people need to change them every 48) if you can get it to stick, Methadone (which despite it's long half life doesn't provide relief as long as it provides relief from withdrawal symptoms. It is, however, a very good pain killer once the dosage gets adjusted correctly.), and a few non-compounded instant release versions of Oxycodone & Morphine out there.
There are tons of choices for moderate to severe acute pain, but most of those are combined with Tylenol or Aspirin, Caffeine, & Ibuprofen which greatly limits their dosage ceiling because they cause liver & kidney failure in high doses over prolonged periods of time. (You know them as, Tylenol-2-3-4, Vicodin, Norco, Vicoprofen, Tylox, Percocet...etc) Other great choices for acute pain include Demerol, which tends to cause a buildup of metabolites that can cause seizures with chronic use -- but it's a great drug for acute pain.
It's much safer to be on the "long" drugs than the "short" drugs if you are going to need them for years on end. Misguided pressure from the federal government has made doctors leery of scrutiny if they write the long drugs. It's also had the effect of making doctors less likely to manage pain period. More than 60 million Americans suffer with some kind of chronic pain, and the odds are just about all of us will at some point in our life as we age.
Various different drugs have been tried & mixed in with opioids. Purdue Pharma recently tried to make a version of Oxycontin with Naloxone in it. The problem is, by blocking these receptors which also produce euphoria, they also block pain control. Their conclusion was, it couldn't be done with the technology they had to work with and still deliver a product which had the full range of pain fighting abilities Oxycontin does. Another procuct on the market (Talwin) has formulations that use similar technology, but has a very low ceiling on it's benefit for that reason.
Something like this vaccine being mandatory terrifies me. I'm having a hard enough time finding relief as it is, and I take drugs many times more powerful than morphine to be able to function on a daily basis. Those in pain have a natural protection mechanism against the euphoria and sedation these drugs produce. Extreme pain blocks those signals in the body as well as ones for respitory depression. If someone without extreme pain & opioid tolerence were to try to take the same doses of the medicines I use - they would end up in the hospital or
Some of the clients are just too big. My family uses Yahoo on their PCs. I have a 12" PowerBook and the Yahoo Messenger client for OS X takes up a good 10+% of the screen.
This is part of the reason I run dual monitors on my desktops, and wouldn't mind having a third monitor in front of me either! By the time you have open even 4-5 programs there isn't enough screen real estate to watch them all. Much less the 5-6 I usually have open. This situation is bad enough on a desktop, much less a laptop with a 12" screen.
Want to lower insurance rates? It's easy: Make fragile painted bumpers illegal.
It's not just bumpers that need to be fixed, a lot of cars now have an external spare tire on the rear that is positioned so that if you get into an accident with them with a vehicle taller than say a Geo Metro - you are not only going to impact the bumper but the spare tire - which in turn will impact the rear glass, 3rd light, frame for rear glass. Since that piece is usually one section, you end up not only having to replace the bumper, but the entire rear door assembly + glass + electronics (like wipers).
The accident that was $500 or less is now closer to $3,000-3,500 on a car like that.
Makes me wonder how the Internet community would treat banner ads today if they were targetted then the way Google does AdSense now. Maybe there would have never been a Punch the Monkey campaign, or banners disguised like Windows dialog boxes, seizure-inducing flashes, or irritating popups. More likely, my morning tea has not yet kicked in.
Advertising companies would threaten to chop the heads off of cute adorable kittens threatening "if you don't buy, the kitten dies" if they thought they could get away with it. I think you severely underestimate their evilness.
Online advertising companies are responsibile for such wonderful things as:
Spam
Spyware
Drive By Installed Spware
Browser Hijackers
Drive By Installed Adware
Bundled Malware/Adware/Spyware In Precompiled Executable Applications
Epileptic Seizure Inducing Flash Ads
Epileptic Seizure Inducing Banner Ads
Datamining Intermediary Websites For Tracking
Contest With No Winner In Violation Of Federal & State Laws For The Express Purpose Of Collecting & Selling Marketing Information
Advertising To Mimic Windows Dialog Boxes
WinPopUp/Messenger Spam
SPIM (Instant Messanger Bots & Spam)
IRC Spam & Marketing Bots
IRC & Spam Marketing Trojans
Threatening To Kill Your Kitty Fluffy If You Don't Buy Now
When I had my own place =I think= I was paying only $20.00 or $30.00 for SBC dsl - was I wrong?
The line item for SBC's cheapest plan may be $26.90 per month with a qualifying bundle, but that doesn't mean you really pay $26.90. It's closer to $35 a month by the time their made up taxes and service charges get applied. If you signed up before they applies the latest round of made up charges it's roughly $31.95 a month. Which still isn't bad for what you get, but I find their adverting of $26.90 to be not only misleading but fraud.
Honestly, this is probably just a PR-Hit from the Business Software Alliance written word for word by them and put in the paper by a lazy NY Times hack.
Half of the "news" is PR hits. PR firms write the story, even include a trivially opposing view (for balance) then distribute it to reporters at all of the major news services hoping that natural laziness will kick in and they will run the premade story.
A lot of the TV news is the same way. They call it a "Video News Release" they basically film the story with the PR firms own "reporter" - they send the smaller stations the polished footage and most of them just run it, the major networks get raw footage so they can edit in their own newsperson (I hesitate to call them reporters) asking those probing questions...
Radio..same thing...
It's very easy for the big PR firms to get hits. Once you get it into a major news services it gets picked up and repeated by hundreds of papers, almost none of them tell you that the story was written by XX's PR firm.
Government does the same thing. Remember the Medicare Testimonials PR release?
Just for kicks I decided to launch Opera 7.23 and open 107 browser tabs on a wimpy 500mhz 256MB machine. Now I have no idea what the memory footprint would be to leave this like this overnight (probably very ugly). But I am surprised that it hasn't crashed yet. Using a little over 111MB of memory for Opera alone.
Perhaps if you routinely operate with 107 browser tabs open you might find Opera more to your liking.
I updated my systems with the latest critical fixes for W2K server... My 2000 server install boots off of an IDE drive, but I have a 7 SCSI disk as network storage on the server. They have no swap, no system files, nothing but data. Every single one of those drives lit up, one by one as they were individually scanned -- and then an outgoing tranmission made to M$. If I had had ethereal going I might have a chance to tell you what was outgoing, but it was probably SSL anyway. This irked me a great deal in that I didn't know what was going on with it. There is no absolutely no reason for those drives to be involved in any of those security updates. It can only be M$ scanning my storage to see what I have installed and sending either a summary or possibly even the contents of my files to them.
This situation is not tolerable to me. The open source solution might not do everything I want, but the behavior of their update system just flat out pissed me off. I don't trust them anymore, why should I? So I'm looking at finally going fully Microsoft free here. I've been a huge Windows 2000 supporter. It's done everything I wanted, has a huge software base, but I can't trust it anymore. It's like I don't own my own computers, and that just flat out isn't acceptable.
If you find something at TigerDirect and you can get it out the door at a bargain price by all means go for it, but it it requires a rebate be warned, you may have trouble.
That has been my experience as well. No problems dealing with them on the web/phone or otherwise, but I've had occasional problems actually getting the rebates, especially if there are two of them.
So how long before companies/gov't are taken "hostage" by rented DOS machines?
That kind of thing already happens. A friend of mine does administration for a couple small and medium size ecommerce sites. The calling card is typically a 30 minute DDoS attack followed by an email and/or phone call saying "we can make this problem go away if you pay us".
If you don't pay them they DDoS you a few more times. If you pay them, they DDoS you a few more times and demand more money. Only option is to go to the Feds with it and hope they use attacks your upstream provider can help filter.
Slashdot Mirror
. Does anyone know if the worm caused any delays in getting through to the 911 system that caused serious injury or death? Considering the total penetration of WebTV, not likely.
It was reported in the article that 21 people recived the email, of which 10 of them executed the code and had a visit from the police. 10 911 calls spaced throught a day, across all of America hardly constitutes a "threat to national security or emergency services".
100,000 CDs at (say) $15.00 each retail. That's $1,500,000 going into that part of the economym which is a good thing regardless. The retail employees make money, the shippers make money, the local jurisdiction gets some tax revenue - all are stimulated by the transaction. ...Say they only get $1.00. That's more money ($100,000) than most people make in a year, and doesn't take into account the revenue they also make from tie-in licensing, touring, t-shirt sales, and all the rest. The CD-sales-only part, if a very modestly successful artist sells only that many CDs, is a decent living.
.75, some bands that sold more than 300,000 copies of their first record like (ahem) Nirvana, actually ended up owing money to the record label their first couple years ever after 300K+ in sales. If they were smart they hung on to royalty for use rights & publishing rights, but most musicians don't realize they are worth that much and sign those away as well.
...right where they started without the major label, major headache, and major expense.
That's rather unrealistic math if you are on a major label, those type of returns are possible on an Indie label you or maybe your best buddy owns with a very favorable(rare) distribution deal through a major label.
You see, the fees that the record companies take out for everything come out of the artist "share" of those proceeds, on a good day they make
Even at your math and assuing they by some marvel of being on an Indie actually got $1.00 per CD when it was said and done, the $100,000 would be before tax and split between however many members are in the band, assuming the artist didn't hire out (ala Michael Jackson) 100% for session players at $51.50 an hour.
T-shirt sales are usually tied in to the record company, and even more distateful, most clubs are now demanding (even the major venues) a percentage (usually 40-50%) of merchandise sales at clubs. Most clubs even set up beer back stage that is charges by the bottles you drink just like the mini-bars in hotel rooms, they just do the accounting at the end of the night. The food is never free either. Nor is the soundman, the lightman, and some places the band and not the club is responsible to pay for the doormen and security (understandable if you are a gansta rapper, not as understandable if you are adult contemp).
It's not an easy gig being a professional musician if your goal is mass sales. It's a better gig if you find a small secure niche and stay in it.
My brothers band made 2-3x as much selling 1/3 as many records on their Indie label as they did on Geffen with #1 and #3 and #4 hits in several world markets during the Geffen period to boot. Not only did they make more money, but no $175,000 videos that never get rotation coming out of their salary, no mega expensive thousand dollar a day tour busses, no catered at $300 a plate shrimp either. Not that Geffen did much other than waste their money promotional wise. Yeah, they could give away a few thousand more copies of your music and if you are Michael Jackson blackmail your way onto MTV, but that 2nd one doesn't happen unless you are Michael Jackson. You pay for the promo copies. The only real advantage the majors have is their "company" stations that they can legally buy playola on. You sell a few more records, but you have to sell 5-10X as many to make up for the costs incurred to break even.
They typically played 500-3000 seat holes before Geffen, mostly 700-4000 size holes on Geffen, and when they dropped Geffen a few years later they are still playing 500-3000 seat holes
Giving away MP3's/OGG files doesn't have to cost you sales, it can be a very effective promotional tool if it's done right. For bands that are on the cusp between radio play and not getting radio play, those MP3's may be the only way they can tap into new markets and draw new fans both to shows & to buy albums. It worked well for Wilco, albeit they had a good following
So basically, if someone turns out a drug which say, causes liver cirrhosis, then it doesn't matter whether it's a drug against cancer or a drug against acne?
That's a weird position. It's not 'government overhead'. It's a protection system which is there for a very good reason. I guess you never heard of Thalidomide?
Thalidomide is currently being used as a very effect agent against 3 different types of cancer, and is in trials for some types of neuropathic pain, as well as a host of other uses. Just because a drug is bad for pregnant women doesn't mean it's a bad drug. Generally speaking, any drug useful in chemo is going to be an "X" for pregnancy. Look at Methotrexate. Also generally speaking, most of the chemo drugs are useful in rheumatic conditions like Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Crohn's disease.
I know you are trying to bring images of deformed babies into the arguement, but you can do that with about 1/5-1/4 of the FDA approved drugs for other indications, and most of them haven't even been tested in that circumstance, hell most of them haven't even been tested on teenagers, much less children, todlers, newborns, the unborn...etc A fair portion of the drugs approved by the FDA have never been subject to any testing or formal approval process at all, they were simply grandfathered in. Even drugs that are approved are rarely tested in human trials beyond 6-10 weeks.
Dragging Vioxx into this is also kind of poor. There is another NSAID which has risks far higher, it's called Toradol, and while it's fairly effective at blunting pain and reducing inflammation, it's the most likely of all of them to cause people to bleed out. Did they pull it off the market? No. It took a bit of time to reeducate doctors & get people to follow the reccomendation to only give it for a few days duration, but it's still a widely used and useful drug in hospitals. Vioxx is still a useful drug, and if not for them pulling it, would still be widely used even with those risks. It offered some benefits (not a sulfa drug for instance), less chance of bleeding out due to GI problems, useful post surgical because it doesn't interfere with clotting, and yes, it doubled the risks of heart attacks and strokes. That last thing is relative though to what the risks actually are for any given person at that point in their life though. For an 18 year old, otherwise healthy - that's a pretty low risk. For a few days post surgical it's not much of a risk.
The difference between a good drug and a bad drug is often in the eye of the beholder & in the way they are prescibed.
I'm still waiting for the box that says:
;-)
"Click No to install XXX toolbar"
In the case of Intel processors (especially duals) memory bandwidth is severly lacking
They do have 800 FSB with 64 bit support in the Xeon's now, which makes them quite attractive dual processor machines provided you have the budget, and DDR2 support as well...
The days of the 400/533 FSB for the Xeons while everything else goes passing by are over. Of course, they don't yet have the 1066 of some of the extreme editions.
That isn't what gives me pause though. I've been considering a dual xeon purchase using either a Tyan or an Iwill MB. I would like to see how these dual cores compare to two physical processors and if the Xeon line is going to get a major upgrade along with it, thus ending my purchases future proofing.
On the other hand, if they do come out with a dual core Xeon, and it needs a new chipset... I'll be able to buy the system I want to buy now for bargain basement prices as people upgrade, and even without an upgrade path it may still be a fastastic machine. I just hate having to wait though, I already waited for 800FSB and dual PCI-E (though only the tyan is truly 16x/16x the Iwill is really an 8x/8x config).
I need a better magic 8 ball.
There's a simpler term for this. It's called a "Tax". It will never be used to pay for recycling. Instead it will be used to pay for pork projects and other forms of government waste. The moment anybody points this out they will be accused of attempting to "starve children and keep old people from getting their medicine".
Exactly. I highly doubt any of this is going to increase recycling, but it is going to inflict $20-40 cost on every new computer system sold. It will be just like the environmental tax on tires in my state. Add $3 when they are sold, and add another $1 per item when you dispose of it. But the garage still has to pay someone to haul it away as the fee goes to the state and is spent on other things.
It's simply resulted in massive amounts of tires being thrown away in alleys rather than disposed of properly.
I highly doubt ant front end fee at the federal level is going to generate even a single recycling center on the ground. It may generate a ton of new rules for your garbage man, that he might have to sort it and pay someone else to haul it away, but this will just be tacked on to your garbage bill, the $10-40 you paid up front wont go to that at all. That is the way these things work out in the real world.
This is a ripoff.
Look, on a practical level, you don't want to get arrested in a foreign country. This isn't Mexico of the 1980's where you could slip the guy a $50 and the problem disappears. (Though I hear Russia is like that now.)
Being an American wont protect you from the laws abroad. What may be a small fine over there for them, may be a long stay in jail and a forced deportation through a slow administrative process for you - we are starting to do the same thing here over minor law violations to guest workers. You need to become familiar with the punishments they dole out, and do your best to get along & go along.
Actually, if you have registered your copy with them and put in factual information (or remember the information you used anyway!), you can call microsoft up on the phone and give them the info and they will read you your key. I've had to do this in the past, and there was no charge for this.
Now if you didn't register your copy, or can't remember the information you used for that purpose, SOL.
But without new blood Usenet ages and dies.
I really feel that Usenet is one of those things that people have to be shown it to realize it exist and has potential to be useful. I'm amazed as many AOLers found it to be honest, though the reader they gave them was rather self limiting as far as what they could do with it, but did allow some very basic message filtering.
Usenet is becomming more and more obscure as web message boards dedicated to single topics spring up. I would hate for every group to lie behind registration, but without a new influx of people into usenet that is what will eventually happen.
The main barriers now seems to be simply entering the NNTP settings for people and people figuring out how to subscribe to various groups, and then how to actually use their message filters to make it a tolerable experience. But there is another barrier to this which is growing, many ISP's are no longer offering access to newsgroups, or are doing it behind an awful web based interface. While the web based interface bypasses the entering of NNTP settings, they usually don't allow filtering, or to be able to take full advantage of the things it can do (such as transfer multipart files).
Pretty much if we want it to be around, the more geekier set need to talk to reasonably good peopele and ask if they use it, and if not show them how to use it & how to actually get the most out of it beyond the basics. Otherwise it's likely to disappear, and then we all lose.
In my view it's as simple as introducing people to it every now and then that you know to be decent.
I see it as "education" to accept any form of totalitarianism starting with the most vulnerable - kids, prison inmates, those in the military, shortly to be followed by the mentally ill and everyone else. Yet another sad day, but they will be trained through things like this to accept it...
Nicotine is a poison all on its own, so I would think it has its own limiting factor built in.
...
You can make a really nice insecticide for household plants by steeping some tobacco in water. Just thinking about that makes me not want to breathe cigarette smoke ever again.
You can kill yourself by drinking 5 gallons of (or less) of water as well. The dose makes the poison, tylenol is at least as deadly as pure uranium when eaten. (#1 medical cause of liver failure as well) Nicotine is about as "dangerous" as caffeine is, the problems stem from the delivery device.
Quality smokeless tobacco products do not have the high risks that smoking cigarettes do. Of course, the safety NAZI's don't want you to know that. They also don't want you to know that they pull a number out of the air nearly at random to assess second hand smoke impact - or that a glass of whisky sitting on the table at room temperature is releasing more toxins into the air than a person chain smoking
I'm perfectly willing to say cigarettes are dangerous to the end user, if everyone who smokes switched to smokeless tobacco like copenhagen or ariva we would see deaths from tobacco use drop to less than 9K a year (and probably lower than that). A nicotine inhaler would be a great delivery device, a transmucal sucker would be another great delivery device... The problem is with the regulation, they don't wamt people to have safer alternatives or to know the truth. The people in charge of health policy are largely zealots like Coop. He actually went on record as saying smokeless tobacco was *more dangerous* than smoking. What can I say? Americans are in love with prohibition... They've tried it with booze, opioids, cocaine, MDMA, LSD... We've all seen what a wonderful success releasing fraud as truth about drugs has done for usage. The war on drugs is clearly winning with those tactics by anyones sane measure...>sarcasm off
So now you aren't allowed at a Bush event unless you support him? I guess it is all about the image of having support. It must be pretty easy to have a chanting mob of supporters if you pre-screen the crowd. It sounds kind of like a tent revival for an evangelical con-man.
...
This guys advance team has a thing for hokey props. When they came to St Louis & set up shop at JS Logistics, they covered up all of the warehouse items that were made in other countries (china mostly) with "Made In USA" stickers and brought in a great big box of Made In USA labeled boxes. This is a transportation company, they don't make anything.
How about the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the Navy ship complete with fighter jet entrance?
Or the having two entire tractor trailers painted up with a hokey message for a photo-op in Florida during the hurricane. (That one bothered me.)
I really dislike the phony props, staging, PR, and all of the other BS that goes on.
I'm sure the Kerry campaign has used many similar tactics but I haven't seen them other than the "pit" around the DNC which was just as bad as the preemptive arrest the RNC had. More & more this is just not my country and I'm not sure how to get it back.
One nitpicky thing I would take issue with is your characterization of ketamine - while it is occasionally used for pediatric anesthesia, the side effects of hallucination and nightmares essentially preclude its use in adults.
It's a newer technique that the anaesthesiologist have started using more often here. They give it only once in the drip to prep the person for surgery usually in combo with fentanyl or whatever agent they choose to put the person under, and it's just part of that proceedure. It's not the primary agent to put them under, the dose is much less than that. The patient is out for the worst part of where those kind of side effects would be noticed. There really isn't value in continuing it for days on end. There is quite a bit of interesting research on NMDA antagonist going on in particular for central pain states where they seem to have the greatest benefit. It's also been shown to reduce post surgical pain substantially when given before the operation.
There are gentler ways of using them as well in chronic pain. Part of the action of Methadone is as an NMDA antagonist, which is probably work it works better on Neuropathy pain. Dextromethorphan is also a weak NMDA antagonist - and I've used that (75mg split into 3 doses)as well as the Methdone & Duragesic in combo to be able to drop my total pain killer doses by about 1/3. It's a strange combo, but it worked for me. It's not impairing, but it's not easy to adjust. I couldn't keep taking Oxycodone and Neurontin and remain employed, it was just way too much mental clouding. I did try a trial of very low dose Ketamine after a shot of IM ketamine lowered my pain for 7 days. I couldn't handle them, but I didn't get nightmares or really hallucinations, it worked on most of my pain, but I couldn't drive on it period. That was when they were still trying nerve blocks to figure out what my options were. It's not a first line option, but it's an option to consider when you are running out of options and don't want to keep upping the opioids because they are intolerable.
I was very desperate for help till I found an Anaesthesiologist to manage my pain. GP's and Rheumatologist are okay doctors, but a lot of them are really lacking in knowledge & experience when it comes to managing serious chronic pain for long periods. I see him every 4 months or so to get reevaluated, I see the rheumatologist every 3 months, my dentist every 4 months (Sjogren's too, Raynauds, and a few other complicating vasuclitis issues), eye doctor every 6 months and see my GP every month. The other doctors simply pass on their reccommendations to my GP, and that way we have one doctor that sees everything just in case. Though it takes a little longer to change things, I like that arrangement as we don't run into one doctor doesn't know what the other doctors are doing. I bring them a nice typed list of everything I'm on and the pill bottles just in case and we do liver and kidney test frequently.
I don't like the chemo and biologic drugs, and I really don't like the needles, but they've gotten me off of steroids. I went from having to be in the wheelchair, to up and about, to back at work in about 5 months doing what we are doing. I'm going to have to get some replacement parts as I've got a lot of damage, but we are avoiding it for as long as we can as they don't last. I'm not a big fan of NSAIDS eiher, I've been through the ulcer thing - but I still have to use them, or take steroids. Given the choice of the two, I'll take the NSAIDS. The arthritis is under well enough control right now that it isn't the major source of my pain, the existing damage, the neuropathy, and the myofascial pain are probably more feeders for it. I still get the frankenstein feeling when the RA flares up and a short while every morning, but it's not like it was 8 months ago where my hands were swollen to the point where I couldn't tie my own shoes and I had to wear sandals all of the time.
It's a nasty disease, went from feeling great working 6
I am a chronic pain patient
I have a degenerative rheumatoid arthritis which has decided to rest in my spine, hips, and hands mostly but affects every joint in my body from time to time, chronic myofascial pain, neuropathy and a neurological condition which causes hypersensitivity in the nervous system to everything (not just pain, bright lights, sounds, temperature). I didn't ask for these things, but that's just the way the cookie crumbles. Having these and still trying to have a life and make it to work is difficult, the pain is off the charts, and depressingly I know it's going to get worse as I get older and end up with a lot more joint and bone damage. There is no cure for any of it, just treatments to slow down the progression and mask the symptoms a bit. This is not how I expected to feel at age 32.
Having this, I'm very up on the research into pain management. If something out there has been tried, the odds are I've heard of it and I've read the trial. This isn't the first attempt to block euphoria from opioids or make drugs "unabusable". It is the first I've heard of a vaccine (well, more like a phage in this case) against it.
There are not a whole lot of formulations out there that are suitable for long term use for those in severe chronic pain. There are extended release versions of Oxycodone (Oxycontin), a few extended release versions of Morphine (Kadian, MScontin, Avinza), a transdermal patch called Duragesic which delivers Fentanyl and can provide relief for up to 72 hours (but some people need to change them every 48) if you can get it to stick, Methadone (which despite it's long half life doesn't provide relief as long as it provides relief from withdrawal symptoms. It is, however, a very good pain killer once the dosage gets adjusted correctly.), and a few non-compounded instant release versions of Oxycodone & Morphine out there.
There are tons of choices for moderate to severe acute pain, but most of those are combined with Tylenol or Aspirin, Caffeine, & Ibuprofen which greatly limits their dosage ceiling because they cause liver & kidney failure in high doses over prolonged periods of time. (You know them as, Tylenol-2-3-4, Vicodin, Norco, Vicoprofen, Tylox, Percocet...etc) Other great choices for acute pain include Demerol, which tends to cause a buildup of metabolites that can cause seizures with chronic use -- but it's a great drug for acute pain.
It's much safer to be on the "long" drugs than the "short" drugs if you are going to need them for years on end. Misguided pressure from the federal government has made doctors leery of scrutiny if they write the long drugs. It's also had the effect of making doctors less likely to manage pain period. More than 60 million Americans suffer with some kind of chronic pain, and the odds are just about all of us will at some point in our life as we age.
Various different drugs have been tried & mixed in with opioids. Purdue Pharma recently tried to make a version of Oxycontin with Naloxone in it. The problem is, by blocking these receptors which also produce euphoria, they also block pain control. Their conclusion was, it couldn't be done with the technology they had to work with and still deliver a product which had the full range of pain fighting abilities Oxycontin does. Another procuct on the market (Talwin) has formulations that use similar technology, but has a very low ceiling on it's benefit for that reason.
Something like this vaccine being mandatory terrifies me. I'm having a hard enough time finding relief as it is, and I take drugs many times more powerful than morphine to be able to function on a daily basis. Those in pain have a natural protection mechanism against the euphoria and sedation these drugs produce. Extreme pain blocks those signals in the body as well as ones for respitory depression. If someone without extreme pain & opioid tolerence were to try to take the same doses of the medicines I use - they would end up in the hospital or
Some of the clients are just too big. My family uses Yahoo on their PCs. I have a 12" PowerBook and the Yahoo Messenger client for OS X takes up a good 10+% of the screen.
This is part of the reason I run dual monitors on my desktops, and wouldn't mind having a third monitor in front of me either!
By the time you have open even 4-5 programs there isn't enough screen real estate to watch them all. Much less the 5-6 I usually have open.
This situation is bad enough on a desktop, much less a laptop with a 12" screen.
But you'll still be able to get bad outsourced tech support from India & Convergsys.
Want to lower insurance rates? It's easy: Make fragile painted bumpers illegal.
It's not just bumpers that need to be fixed, a lot of cars now have an external spare tire on the rear that is positioned so that if you get into an accident with them with a vehicle taller than say a Geo Metro - you are not only going to impact the bumper but the spare tire - which in turn will impact the rear glass, 3rd light, frame for rear glass. Since that piece is usually one section, you end up not only having to replace the bumper, but the entire rear door assembly + glass + electronics (like wipers).
The accident that was $500 or less is now closer to $3,000-3,500 on a car like that.
Advertising companies would threaten to chop the heads off of cute adorable kittens threatening "if you don't buy, the kitten dies" if they thought they could get away with it. I think you severely underestimate their evilness.
Online advertising companies are responsibile for such wonderful things as:
Spam
Spyware
Drive By Installed Spware
Browser Hijackers
Drive By Installed Adware
Bundled Malware/Adware/Spyware In Precompiled Executable Applications
Epileptic Seizure Inducing Flash Ads
Epileptic Seizure Inducing Banner Ads
Datamining Intermediary Websites For Tracking
Contest With No Winner In Violation Of Federal & State Laws For The Express Purpose Of Collecting & Selling Marketing Information
Advertising To Mimic Windows Dialog Boxes
WinPopUp/Messenger Spam
SPIM (Instant Messanger Bots & Spam)
IRC Spam & Marketing Bots
IRC & Spam Marketing Trojans
Threatening To Kill Your Kitty Fluffy If You Don't Buy Now
Could
Happen Like This: Farm Sluts
When I had my own place =I think= I was paying only $20.00 or
$30.00 for SBC dsl - was I wrong?
The line item for SBC's cheapest plan may be $26.90 per month with a qualifying bundle, but that doesn't mean you really pay $26.90. It's closer to $35 a month by the time their made up taxes and service charges get applied. If you signed up before they applies the latest round of made up charges it's roughly $31.95 a month. Which still isn't bad for what you get, but I find their adverting of $26.90 to be not only misleading but fraud.
Honestly, this is probably just a PR-Hit from the Business Software Alliance written word for word by them and put in the paper by a lazy NY Times hack.
Half of the "news" is PR hits. PR firms write the story, even include a trivially opposing view (for balance) then distribute it to reporters at all of the major news services hoping that natural laziness will kick in and they will run the premade story.
A lot of the TV news is the same way. They call it a "Video News Release" they basically film the story with the PR firms own "reporter" - they send the smaller stations the polished footage and most of them just run it, the major networks get raw footage so they can edit in their own newsperson (I hesitate to call them reporters) asking those probing questions...
Radio..same thing...
It's very easy for the big PR firms to get hits. Once you get it into a major news services it gets picked up and repeated by hundreds of papers, almost none of them tell you that the story was written by XX's PR firm.
Government does the same thing. Remember the Medicare Testimonials PR release?
Just for kicks I decided to launch Opera 7.23 and open 107 browser tabs on a wimpy 500mhz 256MB machine. Now I have no idea what the memory footprint would be to leave this like this overnight (probably very ugly). But I am surprised that it hasn't crashed yet. Using a little over 111MB of memory for Opera alone.
Perhaps if you routinely operate with 107 browser tabs open you might find Opera more to your liking.
I updated my systems with the latest critical fixes for W2K server... My 2000 server install boots off of an IDE drive, but I have a 7 SCSI disk as network storage on the server. They have no swap, no system files, nothing but data. Every single one of those drives lit up, one by one as they were individually scanned -- and then an outgoing tranmission made to M$. If I had had ethereal going I might have a chance to tell you what was outgoing, but it was probably SSL anyway. This irked me a great deal in that I didn't know what was going on with it. There is no absolutely no reason for those drives to be involved in any of those security updates. It can only be M$ scanning my storage to see what I have installed and sending either a summary or possibly even the contents of my files to them.
This situation is not tolerable to me. The open source solution might not do everything I want, but the behavior of their update system just flat out pissed me off. I don't trust them anymore, why should I? So I'm looking at finally going fully Microsoft free here. I've been a huge Windows 2000 supporter. It's done everything I wanted, has a huge software base, but I can't trust it anymore. It's like I don't own my own computers, and that just flat out isn't acceptable.
If you find something at TigerDirect and you can get it out the door at a bargain price by all means go for it, but it it requires a rebate be warned, you may have trouble.
That has been my experience as well. No problems dealing with them on the web/phone or otherwise, but I've had occasional problems actually getting the rebates, especially if there are two of them.
So how long before companies/gov't are taken "hostage" by rented DOS machines?
That kind of thing already happens. A friend of mine does administration for a couple small and medium size ecommerce sites. The calling card is typically a 30 minute DDoS attack followed by an email and/or phone call saying "we can make this problem go away if you pay us".
If you don't pay them they DDoS you a few more times. If you pay them, they DDoS you a few more times and demand more money. Only option is to go to the Feds with it and hope they use attacks your upstream provider can help filter.