Now hang on just a minute. You can't be sure your problems are caused by the keyboard. Remember, "...a keyboard never hurt anyone...". Maybe the keyboard dropped out of the sky and landed on your wrists, causing long term inflammation and pain?;)
</JOKE>
I, too, suffer from RSI symptoms, and was kind of outraged to come home from seeing a doctor about just those symptoms to see that my injury wasn't, in fact, genuine, but just a figment of my imagination. I think the people in the article are drawing too strong conclusions from the information they've gathered. I won't discount the fact that probably a large amount of sufferers of carpal tunnel syndrome were, in fact, just paranoid.
But, even upon proving that, I don't think the conclusions they draw are valid. They seem to believe that EVERY case of "computer related repetitive stress injury" is in fact fake, and I don't buy it. Mostly, because I suffer from problems myself, and have for a few years now. I just don't think they have the evidence to make the sweeping statement that EVERY case isn't valid.
Right.. it probably has no real merit, but as a clever hack, this seems emminently doable. Sound cards are, after all, digital to analog converters (or analog to digital if you consider the line in), so it should be as doable as a modem is. And just as pointless as reinventing a modem.;)
If you're really paranoid about any kind of file io, socket io, dev access, etc, run the installer under strace. It'll output many pages of stuff, but I imagine you can pipe it to a shell or perl script to get at the goodies you want.
No, I think you should check your figures on this. I think the record is much higher, something around 180 or maybe more, but I forget. It's something pretty insane. I believe the original poster, because I've been typing incessantly since 11-12, and am now 18, and can type over 100 on a good day (when my wrists don't ache. *sigh*). The speed increase was high for the first few years, and gradually sloped off, around 100, when I reach the point that others are suprised I'm actually hitting the correct keys instead of just fingermashing;) But I do believe 130.
These days, it seems like kids are being controlled more and more closely by their parents. They don't get to make mistakes, because mommy and daddy are there to tell them what to do and what not to do. I just finished my freshman year of college, and I saw the results of this kind of parenting: even at a prestigious technical college where you'd expect only smart kids to be enrolled, these kids were acting like it was high school with no rules. They did drugs and drank too much, failed classes, etc.
Meanwhile, my friends and I, whose parents allowed us to learn from our occasional mistake, were trying to get our lives started by becoming adults. I think this system is a really great way to babysit our kids' every moves, but I think that doing that, then expecting them to magically become responsible adults when they graduate is a grave mistake.
Not only that, but then the geeks/nerds get to have mom and dad watching how badly they're treated at school, which is a real great way to add insult to injury. I've been there, the last thing I wanted to do was have mom and dad feel sorry for the way I was treated in school.
I think you've already gathered some decent bargaining strength in that you have the entire slashdot community waiting for them to fix your problem. Let them know this. You should be able to get a bit more of a fair deal. Remember, the customer (especially with a lot more customers, prospective, past, or current) is always right.
Is it just me, or are the methods outlined above already used frequently on pornography sites? I hate the onload and open features of javascript, they give too much control over my browser to the content providor. (And I'm not just saying I want to get at pornography without being advertised at;)) I usually turn off javascript when a site gets too annoying and controllish. However, I imagine they could do interstitials with refreshes. This advertising seems to me to be far more invasive than radio/television, it sounds very big-brotherish.
You remind me a lot of myself a year or two ago. I'm in college now studying cs, but I got a headstart because I've been coding for awhile. I found myself in the position you were in awhile back.
The best suggestion I can make is this: You need experience in how one goes about creating and working with a large project. You need to know how one develops something so that it fulfills the multitude of functions that make it a large project, yet does it elegantly and efficiently enough that it's modifiable and understandable to new users. At the time when I wanted to get into larger things than yet another tic-tac-toe clone, I was playing around with MUSH (multi-user shared hallucination, a derivative of MUD). I knew the functionality and use of the system intimately, which is a definite plus. It's important to really understand everything that a system does before you dive in and read its code. From there, you can go on a "this is how they did this part" basis, and learn your way through the code. I suggest keeping notes so you remember what parts do what. The important part here is to read all the code you can get your hands on, modify it if you want so that you can see if you really understand what does what, but most importantly, read read read. It'll make you develop your own opinions and theories on large project management, at which point you should feel ready to get into larger projects.
At this point, however, I'm nowhere near ready to tackle the linux kernel or mozilla;)
And another sidenote: don't learn on MUSH. The codebase has forked so many times and remerged and reforked and I think even spooned a few times. *shudders*
Most of us probably thought immediately, as did I, "Well, the first thing I'll be doing is finding a server, ssh-ing a tunnel to it, and proxying through it."
Then I read the comments. We can't be expected to have to do this, as one person wrote, and what about those that don't? We shouldn't have to be geeks to have privacy.
I read a little on the Predictive Networks site, particularly an article acclaiming this as the best new form of advertisement since sliced bread. Their arguing point is that as the world stands, using newer technologies (the author seemed to be rambling something about voice recognition...whatever), anyone can ignore commercials. This is true. My VCR has something called 'Commercial advance (credits where due, I think this is trademarked)', whereby recorded programs are scanned and marked for commercials, and when you play the tape, commercials are skipped over. Furthermore, we can scan out banner ads using GPL'd filtering proxies.
However, I don't think this is justification for targetted privacy invading advertisement. The two points I think the author, and, in fact, the entire company, is overlooking is that no one wants to be advertised to, and no one has a god given right to advertise.
First things first, as the author of the originally linked article in slashdot mentioned, how about ASKING the `subscribers' what advertising they'd like to view? The answer is, of course, that everyone knows that no one will want any... so they just go around our backs.
But my final point, and what the author of the article on Predictive Networks (the very name runs chills down my spine) seemed to overlook is that no one has any `right' to advertise, and no one enjoys it. The only advertising currently allowed is shotgun-approach advertising: globally broadcast television and radio commercials, and randomly alternating ads. I'm sure no one minds, or even notices, ads like the one that appears on this very site, it's what keeps it running, and everyone knows that. My argument is that this should be all that's allowed. No one can find out what you're watching on television, and when anayone tries to, they're quickly snuffed out by privacy advocates. The same should go for the internet. There's no difference. We pay for cable tv access, but we don't pay to keep the shows running, they're paid by advertisers (or they are advertisers, i.e. informercials). The internet operates the same way: we pay for bandwidth and equipment, the sites pay to send to us, and they sponser how the want. No one wants to be profiled and forcefed advertisement that someone deems we'd like (I can just imagine how this'd be abused), and before now, no one's been allowed to.
Sure it is! Flip a coin. It comes up heads. Is there a better chance for the next flip to be tails? No, the chances for tails are still 50-50. Selecting the first 50 URLs is just as random as selecting the last 50, or 50 arbitrary ones in the middle. It's even conceivable that a purely arbitrary method of selecting 50 URLs could, in fact, select the first 50. In this case, would you suggest resampling so as not to get those certain first 50? In that case, you would in fact be making the sampling less random. You never know. Statistically, though, selecting the first 50 still constitutes a random sampling.
So, if I were a porn site operator, all I'd need to do is disallow access to User-agent: "Mudcrawler" and then kids can surf my site freely. Do you get the feeling that even the programmers know that their software is pretty much useless? My guess would be that if Mudcrawler couldn't access your page, it would be assumed to be smut and blocked.
The more interesting twist to this is that currently, through a filtered connection (bess proxy at my highschool) I can view wordlists.com including that interesting picture on the left. Heh. Score one for filters, I guess.
Actually, it seems I already had my nintendo out to play dr. mario, you know, when you get nostalgic for the old 8bit days;) So, I dug up my gun and gave it a try. I saw that yes, the white squares do flash. I tried fiddling with my controls to no avail, I can't confuse it. I guess my tv set's not fancy enough;) And by the way, you CAN select which game you want with the first-player controller and your gun in the second controller slot. So it's not calibrating. I couldn't fool it with average incandescent lights (and by the way, I was wrong, incandescents are the ones that don't blink, fluorescents do, but I imagine it has to do with the color.) So, I set out to scientifically (?) test the theory that it flashes each target in succession. I figured that if I blinked fast enough, I could catch it when just one was lit and the other wasn't, and that would prove my theory that the target hit is decided by lighting each seperately. If I _COULDN'T_ see only one square, though, that wouldn't mean I was wrong, it would mean I hadn't proven the hypothesis. It took several tries, but I _DID_ manage to have my eyes open at one point just long enough to see only one square. Only once, mind you, but I think that that, coupled with the fact that this is the simplest and "most portable" solution, means I'm probably right. Ideas? How many of you are going to go try this now?;)
No, I don't think that's how it works. Remember, Nintendo has to be able to make their product REALLY SUPER compatible with everything out there; you can't patch a cartridged game. I don't even think it has to do with rastering, because lcd's might be used, and quite definitely, EVERY different brand/make of TV has different synchronization rates (I think? I mean, this sounds quite logical to me.) Furthermore, tv sets can be different. I doubt it has to do with the rendering of pixels and the time it takes to get to a certain one.
That's a good point. Perhaps we should look at hogan's alley, and other shooting games, see if they do the same. One thing though. Shooting away from the screen is how you select the game, and shooting the screen is how you start it. How's it going to tell the difference? Now, my guess has to be that it just gets a brightish color. Someone should try with weird colorization on their TV, see what the game does. Furthermore, think from a design point of view, specifically from the view of "What can the user do to screw this up?" Once it's calibrated, they could easily just change the colors. Especially if it had to be a different color for their favorite TV show, but they decided that reddish brown hills didn't look good for clay pigeon shooting. So, though I had thought briefly of the fact that it could calibrate, I think it doesn't.
BTW, note that the gun itself has a little lens in it. I think it looks at a VERY narrow part of the screen in doing its calculations.
Alright, I was attempting to cover both bases by saying that either it won't work on lights, or it would but it'd be boring. That's interesting that it CAN be fooled like that.
Well, first of all, you can see, if you shoot the gun, that the display flashes white squares where possible targets are. I haven't played for ages, maybe I should break out my nintendo. Now, the problem of detecting a hit is simple, based on the white-square-flash. It's a matter of contrasting colors. But that brings up a good point. I was thinking perhaps that the color of light might be used to detect which out of several possible targets was hit. But you have to think about this, they had to make the nintendo/gun to work on the widest range of technologies possible. I don't think they would have gone with the raster-timing method, for the simple reason of LCD screens. I don't know if lcd screens were OUT then, but they had to be thinking about possible technologies for which this wouldn't work. That brings up another point: You can easily change the colors on your television set. The set can be black/white or color, and especially if it's color, you could make that nice pearly "white" show up as greenish, bluish, or reddish. So it has to be done by contrasting colors. Ah, idea just occurred. You pull the trigger, the game flashes black, whites out _ONE_ location of an object, blacks that, lights the second, blacks that, etc. All the while reading input from the gun. If the gun can detect simple contrasting colors, this'll work. Furthermore, the chances of shooting at a light and hitting it at the right instant (think 60 hz bulbs, or different, people) makes it unlikely to register a hit. And if it does? So what. Easy win. D'oh. Play fair, dorks:)
>They are demanding that a comment with the title >"SmartHost for dummies" >be stripped from the archives of a mailing list.
Not only that, but their little trademark phrase, "...for dummies", is so darn popular, that people use it without realizing it. We're not infringing, because we're not selling it, instead, we're popularizing and accepting their little trademark!
"Get a hobby..." Oh, I wasn't saying that I DON'T have music as a hobby. I do. I like it. I was just saying, how is this little gift of mine going to help me in the profession I'm aiming at?:)
Well, as far as listening to music during coding, I find that when I code, my mind wanders often... music sometimes succeeds to take my mind off what I'm coding. Oops. However, I do like a good rhythmic quiet background to my music, either something whose words i've memorized, or something with no words. They Might Be Giants is usually my choice. Anyway, interesting sidenote: I discovered the other night that, in fact, I have perfect pitch. Sure I like playing an instrument, but what the heck am I going to do with perfect pitch as a CS student?:) It's a real useful skill... I can play back sounds and music in my head. A friend suggested a sort of "ekg" system for system administrating... things beep differently depending on what their status is, and different boxes "talk" different pitches. It's an interesting skill, I'm going to have to look into what I can do with it.
Unfortunately, we have to take such situations with good the good ones in trying to make a free market society. The point here is that yes, it's unfair that your website is blocked and yes, the blocking software is voluntary. In using Cyber Patrol, you are, in essence, asking the company what web sites it thinks you should go to. You're not asking WHY, and you're not even allowed to know their criteria; but you pay good money for it and you run their program.
It's not libel to label a website or domain as bad, it's simply an error that happens. Remember that when you run the program you're trusting your browsing experience to Cyber Patrol.
It's an unfortunate situation you're in, I won't disagree. The problem is, as a customer, there's not much you can do to make your ISP pay attention and tell people, nor can you get Cyber Patrol to remove your block.
The point is, this is a competitive economy. We pay for services, and if we don't _like_ them, we go elsewhere to get the same service at a different quality. Hence if you don't like your ISP's policy, oops, you're SOL, but now you've learned, and now you can post the name of the ISP so we all put them on our do-not-patronize list. You also realize that Cyber Patrol isn't so great at blocking, and again, you probably won't buy it after this.
This economy that we have in America is based on a "take the bad with the good" stance. If you don't like it, take your business elsewhere. There's not much suing you can do, because you didn't do any kind of research before making your purchase. I'll agree it's a bad position you're in and you can't be expected to have thought that your site might be blocked, but the point is that if you want an economy in which we have competitively low prices and relatively good quality services, you have to also take the fact that bad things might happen, and move on. Remember your position as the money-spender, you're the most powerful of all.
Slashdot Mirror
Now hang on just a minute. You can't be sure your problems are caused by the keyboard. Remember, "...a keyboard never hurt anyone...". Maybe the keyboard dropped out of the sky and landed on your wrists, causing long term inflammation and pain?
</JOKE>
I, too, suffer from RSI symptoms, and was kind of outraged to come home from seeing a doctor about just those symptoms to see that my injury wasn't, in fact, genuine, but just a figment of my imagination. I think the people in the article are drawing too strong conclusions from the information they've gathered. I won't discount the fact that probably a large amount of sufferers of carpal tunnel syndrome were, in fact, just paranoid.
But, even upon proving that, I don't think the conclusions they draw are valid. They seem to believe that EVERY case of "computer related repetitive stress injury" is in fact fake, and I don't buy it. Mostly, because I suffer from problems myself, and have for a few years now. I just don't think they have the evidence to make the sweeping statement that EVERY case isn't valid.
Right.. it probably has no real merit, but as a clever hack, this seems emminently doable. Sound cards are, after all, digital to analog converters (or analog to digital if you consider the line in), so it should be as doable as a modem is. And just as pointless as reinventing a modem. ;)
If you're really paranoid about any kind of file io, socket io, dev access, etc, run the installer under strace. It'll output many pages of stuff, but I imagine you can pipe it to a shell or perl script to get at the goodies you want.
No, I think you should check your figures on this. I think the record is much higher, something around 180 or maybe more, but I forget. It's something pretty insane. I believe the original poster, because I've been typing incessantly since 11-12, and am now 18, and can type over 100 on a good day (when my wrists don't ache. *sigh*). The speed increase was high for the first few years, and gradually sloped off, around 100, when I reach the point that others are suprised I'm actually hitting the correct keys instead of just fingermashing ;) But I do believe 130.
These days, it seems like kids are being controlled more and more closely by their parents. They don't get to make mistakes, because mommy and daddy are there to tell them what to do and what not to do. I just finished my freshman year of college, and I saw the results of this kind of parenting: even at a prestigious technical college where you'd expect only smart kids to be enrolled, these kids were acting like it was high school with no rules. They did drugs and drank too much, failed classes, etc.
Meanwhile, my friends and I, whose parents allowed us to learn from our occasional mistake, were trying to get our lives started by becoming adults. I think this system is a really great way to babysit our kids' every moves, but I think that doing that, then expecting them to magically become responsible adults when they graduate is a grave mistake.
Not only that, but then the geeks/nerds get to have mom and dad watching how badly they're treated at school, which is a real great way to add insult to injury. I've been there, the last thing I wanted to do was have mom and dad feel sorry for the way I was treated in school.
I think you've already gathered some decent bargaining strength in that you have the entire slashdot community waiting for them to fix your problem. Let them know this. You should be able to get a bit more of a fair deal. Remember, the customer (especially with a lot more customers, prospective, past, or current) is always right.
Not only was that a stupid parody, but you misquoted it. Good one.
Is it just me, or are the methods outlined above already used frequently on pornography sites? I hate the onload and open features of javascript, they give too much control over my browser to the content providor. (And I'm not just saying I want to get at pornography without being advertised at ;)) I usually turn off javascript when a site gets too annoying and controllish. However, I imagine they could do interstitials with refreshes. This advertising seems to me to be far more invasive than radio/television, it sounds very big-brotherish.
You remind me a lot of myself a year or two ago. I'm in college now studying cs, but I got a headstart because I've been coding for awhile. I found myself in the position you were in awhile back.
;)
The best suggestion I can make is this: You need experience in how one goes about creating and working with a large project. You need to know how one develops something so that it fulfills the multitude of functions that make it a large project, yet does it elegantly and efficiently enough that it's modifiable and understandable to new users. At the time when I wanted to get into larger things than yet another tic-tac-toe clone, I was playing around with MUSH (multi-user shared hallucination, a derivative of MUD). I knew the functionality and use of the system intimately, which is a definite plus. It's important to really understand everything that a system does before you dive in and read its code. From there, you can go on a "this is how they did this part" basis, and learn your way through the code. I suggest keeping notes so you remember what parts do what. The important part here is to read all the code you can get your hands on, modify it if you want so that you can see if you really understand what does what, but most importantly, read read read. It'll make you develop your own opinions and theories on large project management, at which point you should feel ready to get into larger projects.
At this point, however, I'm nowhere near ready to tackle the linux kernel or mozilla
And another sidenote: don't learn on MUSH. The codebase has forked so many times and remerged and reforked and I think even spooned a few times. *shudders*
No matter what language it was developed in, lisp/scheme/derivatives will still be 90% parentheses ;)
Most of us probably thought immediately, as did I, "Well, the first thing I'll be doing is finding a server, ssh-ing a tunnel to it, and proxying through it."
Then I read the comments. We can't be expected to have to do this, as one person wrote, and what about those that don't? We shouldn't have to be geeks to have privacy.
I read a little on the Predictive Networks site, particularly an article acclaiming this as the best new form of advertisement since sliced bread. Their arguing point is that as the world stands, using newer technologies (the author seemed to be rambling something about voice recognition...whatever), anyone can ignore commercials. This is true. My VCR has something called 'Commercial advance (credits where due, I think this is trademarked)', whereby recorded programs are scanned and marked for commercials, and when you play the tape, commercials are skipped over. Furthermore, we can scan out banner ads using GPL'd filtering proxies.
However, I don't think this is justification for targetted privacy invading advertisement. The two points I think the author, and, in fact, the entire company, is overlooking is that no one wants to be advertised to, and no one has a god given right to advertise.
First things first, as the author of the originally linked article in slashdot mentioned, how about ASKING the `subscribers' what advertising they'd like to view? The answer is, of course, that everyone knows that no one will want any... so they just go around our backs.
But my final point, and what the author of the article on Predictive Networks (the very name runs chills down my spine) seemed to overlook is that no one has any `right' to advertise, and no one enjoys it. The only advertising currently allowed is shotgun-approach advertising: globally broadcast television and radio commercials, and randomly alternating ads. I'm sure no one minds, or even notices, ads like the one that appears on this very site, it's what keeps it running, and everyone knows that. My argument is that this should be all that's allowed. No one can find out what you're watching on television, and when anayone tries to, they're quickly snuffed out by privacy advocates. The same should go for the internet. There's no difference. We pay for cable tv access, but we don't pay to keep the shows running, they're paid by advertisers (or they are advertisers, i.e. informercials). The internet operates the same way: we pay for bandwidth and equipment, the sites pay to send to us, and they sponser how the want. No one wants to be profiled and forcefed advertisement that someone deems we'd like (I can just imagine how this'd be abused), and before now, no one's been allowed to.
Merely using the first 50 is not a random sample.
Sure it is! Flip a coin. It comes up heads. Is there a better chance for the next flip to be tails? No, the chances for tails are still 50-50. Selecting the first 50 URLs is just as random as selecting the last 50, or 50 arbitrary ones in the middle. It's even conceivable that a purely arbitrary method of selecting 50 URLs could, in fact, select the first 50. In this case, would you suggest resampling so as not to get those certain first 50? In that case, you would in fact be making the sampling less random. You never know. Statistically, though, selecting the first 50 still constitutes a random sampling.
So, if I were a porn site operator, all I'd need to do is disallow access to User-agent: "Mudcrawler" and then kids can surf my site freely.
Do you get the feeling that even the programmers know that their software is pretty much useless?
My guess would be that if Mudcrawler couldn't access your page, it would be assumed to be smut and blocked.
The more interesting twist to this is that currently, through a filtered connection (bess proxy at my highschool) I can view wordlists.com including that interesting picture on the left. Heh. Score one for filters, I guess.
Actually, it seems I already had my nintendo out to play dr. mario, you know, when you get nostalgic for the old 8bit days ;) So, I dug up my gun and gave it a try. I saw that yes, the white squares do flash. I tried fiddling with my controls to no avail, I can't confuse it. I guess my tv set's not fancy enough ;) And by the way, you CAN select which game you want with the first-player controller and your gun in the second controller slot. So it's not calibrating. ;)
I couldn't fool it with average incandescent lights (and by the way, I was wrong, incandescents are the ones that don't blink, fluorescents do, but I imagine it has to do with the color.)
So, I set out to scientifically (?) test the theory that it flashes each target in succession. I figured that if I blinked fast enough, I could catch it when just one was lit and the other wasn't, and that would prove my theory that the target hit is decided by lighting each seperately. If I _COULDN'T_ see only one square, though, that wouldn't mean I was wrong, it would mean I hadn't proven the hypothesis.
It took several tries, but I _DID_ manage to have my eyes open at one point just long enough to see only one square. Only once, mind you, but I think that that, coupled with the fact that this is the simplest and "most portable" solution, means I'm probably right. Ideas? How many of you are going to go try this now?
No, I don't think that's how it works. Remember, Nintendo has to be able to make their product REALLY SUPER compatible with everything out there; you can't patch a cartridged game. I don't even think it has to do with rastering, because lcd's might be used, and quite definitely, EVERY different brand/make of TV has different synchronization rates (I think? I mean, this sounds quite logical to me.) Furthermore, tv sets can be different. I doubt it has to do with the rendering of pixels and the time it takes to get to a certain one.
That's a good point. Perhaps we should look at hogan's alley, and other shooting games, see if they do the same. One thing though.
Shooting away from the screen is how you select the game, and shooting the screen is how you start it. How's it going to tell the difference? Now, my guess has to be that it just gets a brightish color. Someone should try with weird colorization on their TV, see what the game does. Furthermore, think from a design point of view, specifically from the view of "What can the user do to screw this up?" Once it's calibrated, they could easily just change the colors. Especially if it had to be a different color for their favorite TV show, but they decided that reddish brown hills didn't look good for clay pigeon shooting. So, though I had thought briefly of the fact that it could calibrate, I think it doesn't.
BTW, note that the gun itself has a little lens in it. I think it looks at a VERY narrow part of the screen in doing its calculations.
Alright, I was attempting to cover both bases by saying that either it won't work on lights, or it would but it'd be boring. That's interesting that it CAN be fooled like that.
Well, first of all, you can see, if you shoot the gun, that the display flashes white squares where possible targets are. I haven't played for ages, maybe I should break out my nintendo. Now, the problem of detecting a hit is simple, based on the white-square-flash. It's a matter of contrasting colors. :)
But that brings up a good point. I was thinking perhaps that the color of light might be used to detect which out of several possible targets was hit. But you have to think about this, they had to make the nintendo/gun to work on the widest range of technologies possible. I don't think they would have gone with the raster-timing method, for the simple reason of LCD screens. I don't know if lcd screens were OUT then, but they had to be thinking about possible technologies for which this wouldn't work.
That brings up another point: You can easily change the colors on your television set. The set can be black/white or color, and especially if it's color, you could make that nice pearly "white" show up as greenish, bluish, or reddish. So it has to be done by contrasting colors.
Ah, idea just occurred. You pull the trigger, the game flashes black, whites out _ONE_ location of an object, blacks that, lights the second, blacks that, etc. All the while reading input from the gun. If the gun can detect simple contrasting colors, this'll work. Furthermore, the chances of shooting at a light and hitting it at the right instant (think 60 hz bulbs, or different, people) makes it unlikely to register a hit. And if it does? So what. Easy win. D'oh. Play fair, dorks
>They are demanding that a comment with the title >"SmartHost for dummies"
>be stripped from the archives of a mailing list.
Not only that, but their little trademark phrase,
"...for dummies", is so darn popular, that people
use it without realizing it. We're not infringing, because we're not selling it, instead, we're popularizing and accepting their little trademark!
"Get a hobby..." :)
Oh, I wasn't saying that I DON'T have music as a hobby. I do. I like it. I was just saying, how is this little gift of mine going to help me in the profession I'm aiming at?
Well, as far as listening to music during coding, I find that when I code, my mind wanders often... music sometimes succeeds to take my mind off what I'm coding. Oops. However, I do like a good rhythmic quiet background to my music, either something whose words i've memorized, or something with no words. They Might Be Giants is usually my choice. :) It's a real useful skill... I can play back sounds and music in my head. A friend suggested a sort of "ekg" system for system administrating... things beep differently depending on what their status is, and different boxes "talk" different pitches. It's an interesting skill, I'm going to have to look into what I can do with it.
Anyway, interesting sidenote: I discovered the other night that, in fact, I have perfect pitch. Sure I like playing an instrument, but what the heck am I going to do with perfect pitch as a CS student?
Unfortunately, we have to take such situations with good the good ones in trying to make a free market society. The point here is that yes, it's unfair that your website is blocked and yes, the blocking software is voluntary. In using Cyber Patrol, you are, in essence, asking the company what web sites it thinks you should go to. You're not asking WHY, and you're not even allowed to know their criteria; but you pay good money for it and you run their program.
It's not libel to label a website or domain as bad, it's simply an error that happens. Remember that when you run the program you're trusting your browsing experience to Cyber Patrol.
It's an unfortunate situation you're in, I won't disagree. The problem is, as a customer, there's not much you can do to make your ISP pay attention and tell people, nor can you get Cyber Patrol to remove your block.
The point is, this is a competitive economy. We pay for services, and if we don't _like_ them, we go elsewhere to get the same service at a different quality. Hence if you don't like your ISP's policy, oops, you're SOL, but now you've learned, and now you can post the name of the ISP so we all put them on our do-not-patronize list. You also realize that Cyber Patrol isn't so great at blocking, and again, you probably won't buy it after this.
This economy that we have in America is based on a "take the bad with the good" stance. If you don't like it, take your business elsewhere. There's not much suing you can do, because you didn't do any kind of research before making your purchase. I'll agree it's a bad position you're in and you can't be expected to have thought that your site might be blocked, but the point is that if you want an economy in which we have competitively low prices and relatively good quality services, you have to also take the fact that bad things might happen, and move on. Remember your position as the money-spender, you're the most powerful of all.