Such an easy question. The USDA totally caters to huge corporate interests like Monsanto and Smithfield, helping to ensure that America's food supply is dominated by sugary junk food, GMO crops, and the cruelest factory farmed meat and egg products imaginable. And don't even get me started about the sham that is American's meat inspection system. Nearly everything that's wrong with the Standard American Diet can be traced directly to USDA policies, that sell out the interests of consumers, the environment, and farmed animals at every turn.
If the USDA doesn't deserve a spot on the list of the world's four worst government departments, I don't know what agency does.
This is hands down the best RSS reader I've ever used, and I think tablet computers are by far the best platform for reading RSS feeds. Mr. Reader is elegant, massively customizable, and constantly improving. I use it every day and I can't recommend it more highly.
It currently synchs with Google Reader, and like every active RSS reader client the developer is now researching a replacement RSS service.
To me, the biggest advantage to owning the Kindle edition isn't anything you've written. It's that, when I purchase the Kindle edition, it's one less item I need to keep in my house, tote the next time I move, and ultimately get rid of.
On top of that, it's environmentally the right thing to do—one less book that needs to be manufactured and shipped somewhere.
And don't even get me started on how great the highlighting feature is, where you can underline and automatically collect key passages without defacing your book. It's changed how I read.
I personally refuse to buy books from publishers who price their Kindle books higher than the discounted paperback price. If they don't want to embrace where the publishing world is headed, then screw 'em.
On the one hand, this article makes a clear case that there will be children in Chad mindlessly turning a crank for one hour and 47 minutes in order to do their homework for the night.
Yet on the other hand, these kids have orders of magnitude more computing horsepower than I did as a Reagan-era high school kid in an upper middle class community. Hard to know who should envy who.
Mexico is a failed state well on its way to anarchy. This is a country that can't even keep its police chiefs from getting assassinated by drug cartel thugs, and they think iris scanners are going to make a damned bit of difference? Give me a break.
There's a much more elegant solution to your problem.
1) In Facebook's left column, select "Create a New List."
2) Call it "Non Bozos."
3) Select every non-Farmville playing friend who you actually want to be part of your news feed.
4) When you're finished, click your "Non Bozos" list, and you'll see a news feed made up of just those people.
5) Bookmark that page, and make that bookmark the normal way you visit Facebook from now on.
This will solve your Farmville problem and also make your news feed experience 100 times better, since you'll only be getting updates from people you care about.
Re:Just to start us off with a car analogy...
on
Lulu Introduces DRM
·
· Score: 1
you never actually buy anything with DRM, you simply rent it.
I've never heard it put this way before, and it's a wonderful point.
And it also frames my purchasing behavior in a way that makes a lot of sense. Specifically, I have no problem whatsoever paying for DRM stuff, if it's offered at a steeply discounted price that makes one-time use attractive.
I would never buy DRM music from iTunes, or for that matter even pay for non-DRM music in Apple's proprietary codecs, because if I'm paying money for music I want to feel like I own it for life.
Even if DRM technically gives me lifetime access to a given product, I assume I'm going to lose the key, or the company running the DRM valdiation server will go out of business.
That's why, like iTunes music, Kindle doesn't make any sense to me. I assume at some point, whether in five years or twenty, I'm going to get locked out of all the books I supposedly own --- if for no other reason than I'm likely to switch to a different eBook reader five or twenty years from now that's not Kindle compatible. Given that I don't feel like Kindle truly offers permanent ownership, I think its prices aren't nearly discounted enough to be attractive.
The best book I've read lately is _Eating Animals_ which Amazon currently sells for $14.90. This for a hardcover book printed on acid-free paper. It'll last the rest of my life and then some, so the only way I lose ownership is if I decide to give it away. The Kindle version,by contrast, is $11.92 --- barely a $3 discount. Given the DRM and the device lock-in, that's ridiculously expensive compared to the hardcover.
What would make infinitely more sense is if I could *rent* the book on Kindle for, say, $3 or $4 --- for a six month period. As dstar said in the parent post, "you never actually buy anything with DRM, you simply rent it."
And to me, there's nothing at all wrong with that --- if things are priced accordingly, and even with DRM expiration dates. Where things become morally suspect is when a DRM item is sold under the pretense that the buyer has gained lifetime ownership. It just ain't true.
Returning to the Slashdot story on Lulu, I've got no problem at all with Lulu deciding to offer DRM books. But I think they should be offered in such a way that it's clear that readers are renting them for one-time use, not buying them for a lifetime --- and they should be priced accordingly. If these terms are explicit and DRM is part of the deal, I don't have any problem with that. Just like I don't have any problem with the fact that I currently rent my access both to NFL Game Rewind and to NetFlix's "Watch Instantly" feature. There's DRM in both these products, but there are no false pretenses that the reasonable price I'm paying is buying me lifetime access to what I see.
In the case of NFL Replay and Netflix's "Watch Instantly," I'm getting one-time access to stuff I very much want to see but don't want to own, at a very fair price. DRM makes this sort of deal attractive and workable to both me and to the rights holders, and I think that's great. I don't think DRM's the devil at all. In fact, I'd like to see more products wrapped in DRM and available at a steep discount for one-time use. The world would be a better place for rights holders and consumers alike.
Just like the iPods suddenly being introduced as solid state units, things for SSD's will soon pass the threshold where it's suddenly viable for everyone. Only Samsung knows exactly when, but it seems clear that in the next six to eighteen months widespread SSD availability will trickle down from elite systems to mid-range.
>I thought everyone knew that you get what you pay for, both speed and durability.
Sure, you get what you pay for. But the problem here is that these drives don't indicate on the packaging whether they use SLC or MLC memory, or whether they offer more than one channel.
So let's say the crappy variety of 4 GB USB drives currently go for $25, and the better, faster variety will never sell at that price. Right now, you have no way of knowing whether that 4 GB drive going for $50 is made with the faster, more durable SLC memory, or whether the drive is simply overpriced.
You can therefore spend $50 for a drive and not get what you paid for. And the only way to safeguard yourself is to waste time researching your drive -- something you shouldn't have to do, since this info ought to be published as part of the drive's specifications.
Yeah, except I think television actually did make people stupid. Compare anything on the Internet to 1970s Love Boat reruns, or for that matter anything currently on MTV, and it's obvious that the Internet is a giant step up. Then consider that starting in the 1950s, most Americans spent the majority of their free time glued to the TV. It wasn't called the boob tube for nothing, especially back in the days where you had three networks producing almost nothing but total crap.
OK, you're right and I blew it. I did look before, but confused the "from" field with the "sender" field.
Anyway, the most important point is that apart from hotmail, it seems that every email service displays only your personal domain's email in your email's header, and not your gmail account (unless the recipient chooses to view full headers.)
>Except that goolge will silently add a header to your email which contains the GMail address which it was sent from: "Sender:"
No, Not "Sender." Actually all Google tacks on is "Return Path," in your email's full header, which is both an accurate and elegant approach to what's being done. Nobody with well-designed email software operating in default mode would ever see your email's return path.
>Try sending an email to a hotmail address. It will say:
>From: sendingAddress@gmail.com on behalf of yourFromAddress@yourDomain
>It looks very unprofessional.
Please don't take this as a flame, but I'm supposed to worry that Hotmail users might think I'm being unprofessional with my email handling?
No other email service that I'm aware of does the behavior you describe. But then I guess you can count on Microsoft to purposely make an elegant service offered by their competitors appear clumsy once you are within Microsoft's ecosystem.
>I never "got" why people fell all over themselves about GMail and getting a GMail account.
Maybe you don't know how terrific GMail's feature set now is. It has been steadily improving, and some recent additions give it compelling advantages over your current setup.
You said you own your own domain that you use for your email account. Did you know that you can now forward all your email to Gmail, enjoy the benefits of a superb spam filter, and then use either Gmail's excellent web interface or an IMAP client? Did you know that you can now use Google to have your default return address be your custom domain name, so nobody even knows your using GMail? Did you know that GMail offers unlimited filters, so that every time some clown decides to add you to his BCC "Ron Paul 2008" list, you can click the filter button and never, ever hear from him again?
All of this is free. Like you I have my own domain -- but Gmail's excellent suite of services is too useful to miss out on.
>Um, why bitch at kongregate.com or other sites for using Beacon, instead of just ditching Facebook? Without a Facebook account, this won't a problem on any site.
Um, why not bitch at every site that buys into an abusive scheme to violate privacy -- not just Facebook, but all its minions?
No doubt Gmail's filtering technology is really impressive, especially compared to that done by Yahoo and Hotmail. It's a shame that the big providers don't throw a few million dollars into lobbying congress to enact harsh criminal penalties for spammers. Spammers, as a class, are doubtless smarter and better informed than most other criminals, and the existence of mandatory minimum prison sentences and so forth would likely deter US spammers to a much greater degree than it does for, say, crack cocaine users.
Admittedly, such legislation would do little to deter spammers outside the US. But it would cut the Viagra/Levitra spammers off at the knees. Plus, it would be immensely satisfying to know that at least a handful of spammers are doing serious time in the clink.
DRM sucks, and inevitiably produces unfair situations like this, where legitimate licencees get screwed. But having said that, what kind of person has so much time on their hands that they would ever want to watch a baseball game from previous seasons? And I thought posting to Slashdot was a time waste;)
>If those figures are to be believed, that works out at USD$233 per year per domain, on average. That's not even taking into account the fact that there are probably a large proportion of domains which make many times that.
And a large proportion of those domains would likewise be substantially below that. There would probably be tens of thousands of domains where garbage adsense splogs couldn't make back a $70 renewal fee each year. And they would therefore be allowed to expire.
>...all while putting even more money into the pockets of registrars. Is that what we really want?
To have registrars make even more money? Of course not. The registrars should keep the $5 or whatever they're making now. And the rest could go to some project that benefits the public good. AIDS relief in Africa, or C02 reduction projects, for instance. Having millions of domains in the pockets of bottom-fish, all because renewal fees are lower than what adsense splogs will generate, benefits nobody.
As a website publisher, I think it would be very much in the public interest to raise annual registration fees to, say, $70 a year. At that price, domain parking for "junk" domains would be prohibitively expensive.
Mixed amongst these junk domains are some great names that deserve to be developed, and will be if they are available. Unfortunately, the bottom-feeders of the online world have control of this vast assortment of names, which they are essentially holding largely for ransom purposes. I think that's a scummy way to make a living. But it's possible so long as annual registration fees are less than the small amounts of revenue that can be generated through generic google adsense programs and their ilk.
I would love to see the price of annual registration hit the point where, say, the guy who owns "waterfalls.com" would have to develop it in a meaningful way or surrender it. Sitting on a domain and putting up generic ads should be a losing proposition financially, and an increased annual fee would correct this situation and work to the public good.
Slashdot Mirror
Such an easy question. The USDA totally caters to huge corporate interests like Monsanto and Smithfield, helping to ensure that America's food supply is dominated by sugary junk food, GMO crops, and the cruelest factory farmed meat and egg products imaginable. And don't even get me started about the sham that is American's meat inspection system. Nearly everything that's wrong with the Standard American Diet can be traced directly to USDA policies, that sell out the interests of consumers, the environment, and farmed animals at every turn.
If the USDA doesn't deserve a spot on the list of the world's four worst government departments, I don't know what agency does.
Disclosure: I'm an (unpaid) beta tester.
This is hands down the best RSS reader I've ever used, and I think tablet computers are by far the best platform for reading RSS feeds. Mr. Reader is elegant, massively customizable, and constantly improving. I use it every day and I can't recommend it more highly.
It currently synchs with Google Reader, and like every active RSS reader client the developer is now researching a replacement RSS service.
To me, the biggest advantage to owning the Kindle edition isn't anything you've written. It's that, when I purchase the Kindle edition, it's one less item I need to keep in my house, tote the next time I move, and ultimately get rid of.
On top of that, it's environmentally the right thing to do—one less book that needs to be manufactured and shipped somewhere.
And don't even get me started on how great the highlighting feature is, where you can underline and automatically collect key passages without defacing your book. It's changed how I read.
I personally refuse to buy books from publishers who price their Kindle books higher than the discounted paperback price. If they don't want to embrace where the publishing world is headed, then screw 'em.
From the summary:
>and to make sure ISPs are holding up their end of the bandwidth bargain.
It's hardly a bargain if it's a term forced on you from lack of ability to take your business elsewhere.
Because we're a bunch of idiots. Next question?
On the one hand, this article makes a clear case that there will be children in Chad mindlessly turning a crank for one hour and 47 minutes in order to do their homework for the night.
Yet on the other hand, these kids have orders of magnitude more computing horsepower than I did as a Reagan-era high school kid in an upper middle class community. Hard to know who should envy who.
Mexico is a failed state well on its way to anarchy. This is a country that can't even keep its police chiefs from getting assassinated by drug cartel thugs, and they think iris scanners are going to make a damned bit of difference? Give me a break.
That was the most awesome comment I've seen here in years.
There's a much more elegant solution to your problem.
1) In Facebook's left column, select "Create a New List."
2) Call it "Non Bozos."
3) Select every non-Farmville playing friend who you actually want to be part of your news feed.
4) When you're finished, click your "Non Bozos" list, and you'll see a news feed made up of just those people.
5) Bookmark that page, and make that bookmark the normal way you visit Facebook from now on.
This will solve your Farmville problem and also make your news feed experience 100 times better, since you'll only be getting updates from people you care about.
you never actually buy anything with DRM, you simply rent it.
I've never heard it put this way before, and it's a wonderful point.
And it also frames my purchasing behavior in a way that makes a lot of sense. Specifically, I have no problem whatsoever paying for DRM stuff, if it's offered at a steeply discounted price that makes one-time use attractive.
I would never buy DRM music from iTunes, or for that matter even pay for non-DRM music in Apple's proprietary codecs, because if I'm paying money for music I want to feel like I own it for life.
Even if DRM technically gives me lifetime access to a given product, I assume I'm going to lose the key, or the company running the DRM valdiation server will go out of business.
That's why, like iTunes music, Kindle doesn't make any sense to me. I assume at some point, whether in five years or twenty, I'm going to get locked out of all the books I supposedly own --- if for no other reason than I'm likely to switch to a different eBook reader five or twenty years from now that's not Kindle compatible. Given that I don't feel like Kindle truly offers permanent ownership, I think its prices aren't nearly discounted enough to be attractive.
The best book I've read lately is _Eating Animals_ which Amazon currently sells for $14.90. This for a hardcover book printed on acid-free paper. It'll last the rest of my life and then some, so the only way I lose ownership is if I decide to give it away. The Kindle version,by contrast, is $11.92 --- barely a $3 discount. Given the DRM and the device lock-in, that's ridiculously expensive compared to the hardcover.
What would make infinitely more sense is if I could *rent* the book on Kindle for, say, $3 or $4 --- for a six month period. As dstar said in the parent post, "you never actually buy anything with DRM, you simply rent it."
And to me, there's nothing at all wrong with that --- if things are priced accordingly, and even with DRM expiration dates. Where things become morally suspect is when a DRM item is sold under the pretense that the buyer has gained lifetime ownership. It just ain't true.
Returning to the Slashdot story on Lulu, I've got no problem at all with Lulu deciding to offer DRM books. But I think they should be offered in such a way that it's clear that readers are renting them for one-time use, not buying them for a lifetime --- and they should be priced accordingly. If these terms are explicit and DRM is part of the deal, I don't have any problem with that. Just like I don't have any problem with the fact that I currently rent my access both to NFL Game Rewind and to NetFlix's "Watch Instantly" feature. There's DRM in both these products, but there are no false pretenses that the reasonable price I'm paying is buying me lifetime access to what I see.
In the case of NFL Replay and Netflix's "Watch Instantly," I'm getting one-time access to stuff I very much want to see but don't want to own, at a very fair price. DRM makes this sort of deal attractive and workable to both me and to the rights holders, and I think that's great. I don't think DRM's the devil at all. In fact, I'd like to see more products wrapped in DRM and available at a steep discount for one-time use. The world would be a better place for rights holders and consumers alike.
>>and has a simple easy to use interface.
>Of course not. That's a good LaTeX editor.
I've published two books in LaTeX and will sing its praises for hours, but it cannot sanely be called simple or easy to use.
Sounds super appealing. I'd love to know what model of antenna you have and how much it cost.
Just like the iPods suddenly being introduced as solid state units, things for SSD's will soon pass the threshold where it's suddenly viable for everyone. Only Samsung knows exactly when, but it seems clear that in the next six to eighteen months widespread SSD availability will trickle down from elite systems to mid-range.
>I thought everyone knew that you get what you pay for, both speed and durability.
Sure, you get what you pay for. But the problem here is that these drives don't indicate on the packaging whether they use SLC or MLC memory, or whether they offer more than one channel.
So let's say the crappy variety of 4 GB USB drives currently go for $25, and the better, faster variety will never sell at that price. Right now, you have no way of knowing whether that 4 GB drive going for $50 is made with the faster, more durable SLC memory, or whether the drive is simply overpriced.
You can therefore spend $50 for a drive and not get what you paid for. And the only way to safeguard yourself is to waste time researching your drive -- something you shouldn't have to do, since this info ought to be published as part of the drive's specifications.
Anyway, the most important point is that apart from hotmail, it seems that every email service displays only your personal domain's email in your email's header, and not your gmail account (unless the recipient chooses to view full headers.)
No, Not "Sender." Actually all Google tacks on is "Return Path," in your email's full header, which is both an accurate and elegant approach to what's being done. Nobody with well-designed email software operating in default mode would ever see your email's return path.
>Try sending an email to a hotmail address. It will say:
>From: sendingAddress@gmail.com on behalf of yourFromAddress@yourDomain
>It looks very unprofessional.
Please don't take this as a flame, but I'm supposed to worry that Hotmail users might think I'm being unprofessional with my email handling?
No other email service that I'm aware of does the behavior you describe. But then I guess you can count on Microsoft to purposely make an elegant service offered by their competitors appear clumsy once you are within Microsoft's ecosystem.
Maybe you don't know how terrific GMail's feature set now is. It has been steadily improving, and some recent additions give it compelling advantages over your current setup.
You said you own your own domain that you use for your email account. Did you know that you can now forward all your email to Gmail, enjoy the benefits of a superb spam filter, and then use either Gmail's excellent web interface or an IMAP client? Did you know that you can now use Google to have your default return address be your custom domain name, so nobody even knows your using GMail? Did you know that GMail offers unlimited filters, so that every time some clown decides to add you to his BCC "Ron Paul 2008" list, you can click the filter button and never, ever hear from him again?
All of this is free. Like you I have my own domain -- but Gmail's excellent suite of services is too useful to miss out on.
Um, why not bitch at every site that buys into an abusive scheme to violate privacy -- not just Facebook, but all its minions?
Admittedly, such legislation would do little to deter spammers outside the US. But it would cut the Viagra/Levitra spammers off at the knees. Plus, it would be immensely satisfying to know that at least a handful of spammers are doing serious time in the clink.
And a large proportion of those domains would likewise be substantially below that. There would probably be tens of thousands of domains where garbage adsense splogs couldn't make back a $70 renewal fee each year. And they would therefore be allowed to expire.
>...all while putting even more money into the pockets of registrars. Is that what we really want?
To have registrars make even more money? Of course not. The registrars should keep the $5 or whatever they're making now. And the rest could go to some project that benefits the public good. AIDS relief in Africa, or C02 reduction projects, for instance. Having millions of domains in the pockets of bottom-fish, all because renewal fees are lower than what adsense splogs will generate, benefits nobody.
Mixed amongst these junk domains are some great names that deserve to be developed, and will be if they are available. Unfortunately, the bottom-feeders of the online world have control of this vast assortment of names, which they are essentially holding largely for ransom purposes. I think that's a scummy way to make a living. But it's possible so long as annual registration fees are less than the small amounts of revenue that can be generated through generic google adsense programs and their ilk.
I would love to see the price of annual registration hit the point where, say, the guy who owns "waterfalls.com" would have to develop it in a meaningful way or surrender it. Sitting on a domain and putting up generic ads should be a losing proposition financially, and an increased annual fee would correct this situation and work to the public good.