Consider though the other comments mentioning that you don't pay to receive snail-junk.
Now consider another thing: not only do you get it for free, but the sender is spending exorbiant amounts of money on their junk mail! There's the cost of typesetting, printing, binding, and then there's the postage, which is a minimum of US$.15 per article. So let's say it is going to cost them US$.20 (20 cents) per mailer.
Take for instance the perennial Pennysaver, which is broadcast to everybody with an address. Harte-Hankes, their owner, is broadcasting this to every resident with a postal address, General Delivery addresses excepted, once per week. Now lets consider that in Anaheim, CA there are around 350,000 people covering 11-12 zip codes. In short, Harte-Hankes is spending US$70,000 per week to send a circular - that's US$3,640,300 PER YEAR in postage for the circulars alone, including the $150 fee for the permit to send bulk mail and another $150 fee for a permit to send the mail with a "postage paid" indicia on it (in lieu of a stamp or meter mark). That's in Anaheim ALONE, so you can imagine how much it costs to send these out once per week throughout the United States. It is on this kind of stuff that your mailman is making his bread and butter - you think your $.37 stamp for sending off the money to the phone company is keeping him fed?
So now that we have established that companies who spam your snail mail box spend exorbiant amounts of money in merely dropping this stuff at the post office, let's consider how much a spammer spends on his spam run:
$19.95 per month for his internet connection on a reputable ISP
$300 for a mass-mailing package if he gets one from another spammer
$600 on a decent computer with the latest greatest Windoze version
So this guy made a one-time go of $900, and if he is lucky he'll spend a total of $39.90 because his ISP overlooks him for a month. (Or worse, he has a contract that exempts him from the TOS rules and is perpetually on until somebody sues his ass blue.)
So this guy is making a trivial investment and gets to distribute the cost of his stupidity over the entire 'net.
More information can be found on the United States Postal Service website, and postage rates for US Domestic mail can be reviewed by looking at a PDF of USPS Notice 123 (WARNING: PDF LINK).
Ooh, ooh, ooh! I have one! It's second hand though.
A friend who has since moved to Chicago had described to me the kernel panic message in SCO Unix. When it finished panicking, the machine's last words were "Aieeee! I'm going to die now!..." The machine never rebooted after than, and they just installed Linux on it afterwards.
For the record, I had an older version of Linux on a 486 once that KP'ed on me - it had a similar message at the bottom of the screen. Have any other Linux users out there experienced this?
When somebody in the corporate development sector develops something intended to be a standard and it's considered subpar, I've noticed that people generally don't use it and/or develop something that is superior to the other product. Case in point: the internet uses TCP/IP rather than ISO-7 layer, DreckNet, X.25, and other things developed as established "standards", and anybody can implement it, and work around or patch through the "standard" networks out there.
This seems to be another case of this - Microsoft wants to establish a standard method of copy protection and protocols to link all programs into their system given the proper set of keys. That it is a proposed standard by a single corporation tells me that it will fail miserably.
Of course, it's probably just simpler to rant yet again that Copy Protection Doesn't Work(TM).
These guys have been doing this for at least a year that I know of - I saw the data on this mailing list a while back. (Boy, Randy's gonna love me now.)
When I first heard, they were well above 10000, but at the rate things are going it could take a few years - and with the trouble that America Online is reportedly in, they regretfully may not get the opportunity to bring in the sheaves, as it were.
Anybody remember that episode of Star Trek, "The Perfect Computer"? Or Emerson Lake and Palmer's "Karn Evil 9 (third impression)" and the last verse thereof?
Counter to my previous idea of a beowulf cluster of these, is anybody even remotely concerned about the possible outcome? Frankly, I'm scared shitless.
You mean that Microsoft is going to pay me to use Windows at my home, when I can download the three ISO's that make up Mandrake Linux for the price of the electricity and whatever coasters come out of the CD-R drive?? I'm not sure of the logic behind this - I mean, aren't corporations in the business of not giving away money like that?
One thing I read when passing by a copy of the book "Like Water For Chocolate" a while back is that if you put a bit of the onion's juice on your forehead it abates the tears. Testing on this has it that it works a bit, but perhaps the other methods mentioned in the comments here would work better.
But why "descent" an onion? It seems to me that this would remove some of the character from the onion, even if they did have a way to do it without removing the flavor.
Perhaps instead they could work on garlic that doesn't give you breath bad enough to slay dragons with.
Look at it this way, though, it's another treatment for allergies, sinusitis, etc. But please, if you're making soup for somebody else, try to have clear sinuses (sini?) to begin with, lest they drain into the soup.
(Eeew.)
Re:Who will it be?
on
Brains on a Chip
·
· Score: 2, Informative
They already have used animals. Note the article mentions rat {and,or} mouse brain tissue.
Think of this too: how many instant messenger products are out there? This seems to be a case of Yet Another. Or since M$ jumps on after a technology comes in that looks good, would this be a case of M$ yelling "AOL!!!!!1"?
Microsoft, a company I don't trust, wants to put a program on my computer direcly or otherwise that allows me to use just one password to access any other password controlled site I have out there.
All of the Linux browsers out there have a password manager, with the possible exception of Lynx or Opera.
Can somebody tell me why I need.NET passport, especially when it strikes me as a security hole I could pilot the Starship Enterprise through sideways and not hit the edge?
So water exists on Mars. This is fairly fascinating.
Granted H(2)O is required for sustaining life, but water can theoretically exist on any planet without sustaining life, yesno? That there's water, AFAIK, doesn't mean there is life.
Troll me if you will, but consider that the media has a habit of reporting half of the information in their attempt to jack up their ratings before you do.
Sure, if you don't mind dealing with a PDF or.DOC of the submission form. =p
Re:No longer profitable as payware
on
Blender Is GPL
·
· Score: 1
August 29th - 2:14 a.m. Freedows becomes self-aware.
And a few hundred years into the future, we will have ships whose purpose in life it is to send intelligent bombs out to dying planets, as to destroy them and prevent them from causing other stellar trouble. These bombs will operate using Freedows. A few years after this program is implemented, one might hear a transmission: "Bomb, this is the captain. You will not detonate in the bomb bay! I repeat, do not detonate in the bomb bay!"
Just like I posted it, here it is.
-
As a voter and a citizen of the United States of America, I think it is time to make a comment to congress regarding the recent proposal of a chip to be placed in new computers to control what can (not) be copied.
In short, this is a very bad idea.
I honestly see this chip as proposed by DRM proponents as something Congress could use to control what we could move around on our computers. Basically, it would be an embedded dongle. The problem here is that these proposals are being foisted around by people who don't understand technology, and unlike the V-chip, would shake the foundations of the computing world, requiring major redesigns in every aspect of computing.
I also see this as something of a violation of our rights as granted in the first and fourth amendments to the US Constitution. It is Congress passing legislation that controls what is stated by the people, which per the first is wrong, and it would also have Congress assuming that everybody in the US is committing a crime. This brings up another tenet of the constitution: was not one of the principles this country was founded upon being that all people (criminals included) were innocent until proven guilty by the courts? We've stepped away from that because of media distortion, however this brings the ideal that the government assumes we must all be stopped from committing these crimes.
The third reason I am against this is due to the waste. Plain and simple, such a device will not work. Whereas in the physical realms, one must exert tremendous effort and/or money to work around something put in place as to block them from doing something (let's say a tax lien being a problem that prevents somebody from taking a loan out, for instance), in the "cyber" realm, as it were, one can easily crack through the chip. It is not foolproof, nor will it be, and it will be worked around.
In short, please do not waste your time on something that cannot be enforced.
I learned to be aware of the problem the hard way one year. I had adjusted PDT->PST on my watch in 1998 at 00:30 PDT, making it 23:30 on my watch again. The problem remained when I had forgotten to adjust the day back one increment, so when Tuesday came around (the day I was to go back to work), I had thought I missed a day of work.
Now I am very careful about what cron jobs I run between 01:00 and 03:00 on any unix box (they might check for the existance of something at most), and accordingly leave ntpd running.
Logical moderation: -1 for copyrighted material, +1 for violating the DMCA, +1 because I like the Moody Blues, +1 interesting. Your total LM is +2. Have a nice day. =)
I specifically remember in 1st grade, the music appreciation teacher had attempted to get us to learn to more or less do this - basically, seeing with one's ear and hearing with one's eyes. Sort of an exercise in learning how to read/transcribe music. I really wish I could remember the name of the text, but then this is from over 20 years ago.
Another one is from Thomas Appell's material, "Can you sing a high C without straining?", brought to you by Vocal Dynamics - within the material, Tom instructs the prospective student to "see" the notes as individual colors, even providing a standard major scale in C (the musical key, not the language) as an example in living color.
It makes me curious then, how many musicians on any scale are even slightly affected by this condition?
In my toolbox are several flavors of screws that are otherwise associated with AT type computer cases, a couple of Anderson Power Pole type connectors that were never used, soem tie tacks, a pin advertising Anime Expo 1998, about 40 feet of RJ-8U coaxial cable, 15 feet of 300 ohm twin-lead TV antenna wire, a cheap Radio Shack soldering iron, a Radio Shack solder feeder device for mounting on the cheap iron (wow, I can almost build another J-pole antenna!), two bulbs for a 2AA Maglite in an unopened package that I got at Fry's, a package of Radio Shack brand zip ties, a hammer, and 1/2 cup of chopped nuts.
I think I need to clean it out and actually stick some tools in there. =O.o=
Slashdot Mirror
Now consider another thing: not only do you get it for free, but the sender is spending exorbiant amounts of money on their junk mail! There's the cost of typesetting, printing, binding, and then there's the postage, which is a minimum of US$.15 per article. So let's say it is going to cost them US$.20 (20 cents) per mailer.
Take for instance the perennial Pennysaver, which is broadcast to everybody with an address. Harte-Hankes, their owner, is broadcasting this to every resident with a postal address, General Delivery addresses excepted, once per week. Now lets consider that in Anaheim, CA there are around 350,000 people covering 11-12 zip codes. In short, Harte-Hankes is spending US$70,000 per week to send a circular - that's US$3,640,300 PER YEAR in postage for the circulars alone, including the $150 fee for the permit to send bulk mail and another $150 fee for a permit to send the mail with a "postage paid" indicia on it (in lieu of a stamp or meter mark). That's in Anaheim ALONE, so you can imagine how much it costs to send these out once per week throughout the United States. It is on this kind of stuff that your mailman is making his bread and butter - you think your $.37 stamp for sending off the money to the phone company is keeping him fed?
So now that we have established that companies who spam your snail mail box spend exorbiant amounts of money in merely dropping this stuff at the post office, let's consider how much a spammer spends on his spam run:
$19.95 per month for his internet connection on a reputable ISP
$300 for a mass-mailing package if he gets one from another spammer
$600 on a decent computer with the latest greatest Windoze version
So this guy made a one-time go of $900, and if he is lucky he'll spend a total of $39.90 because his ISP overlooks him for a month. (Or worse, he has a contract that exempts him from the TOS rules and is perpetually on until somebody sues his ass blue.)
So this guy is making a trivial investment and gets to distribute the cost of his stupidity over the entire 'net.
More information can be found on the United States Postal Service website, and postage rates for US Domestic mail can be reviewed by looking at a PDF of USPS Notice 123 (WARNING: PDF LINK).
A friend who has since moved to Chicago had described to me the kernel panic message in SCO Unix. When it finished panicking, the machine's last words were "Aieeee! I'm going to die now!..." The machine never rebooted after than, and they just installed Linux on it afterwards.
For the record, I had an older version of Linux on a 486 once that KP'ed on me - it had a similar message at the bottom of the screen. Have any other Linux users out there experienced this?
This seems to be another case of this - Microsoft wants to establish a standard method of copy protection and protocols to link all programs into their system given the proper set of keys. That it is a proposed standard by a single corporation tells me that it will fail miserably.
Of course, it's probably just simpler to rant yet again that Copy Protection Doesn't Work(TM).
When I first heard, they were well above 10000, but at the rate things are going it could take a few years - and with the trouble that America Online is reportedly in, they regretfully may not get the opportunity to bring in the sheaves, as it were.
Counter to my previous idea of a beowulf cluster of these, is anybody even remotely concerned about the possible outcome? Frankly, I'm scared shitless.
You mean that Microsoft is going to pay me to use Windows at my home, when I can download the three ISO's that make up Mandrake Linux for the price of the electricity and whatever coasters come out of the CD-R drive?? I'm not sure of the logic behind this - I mean, aren't corporations in the business of not giving away money like that?
No, no, no! Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
But why "descent" an onion? It seems to me that this would remove some of the character from the onion, even if they did have a way to do it without removing the flavor.
Perhaps instead they could work on garlic that doesn't give you breath bad enough to slay dragons with.
(Eeew.)
Simple, wot?
Think of this too: how many instant messenger products are out there? This seems to be a case of Yet Another. Or since M$ jumps on after a technology comes in that looks good, would this be a case of M$ yelling "AOL!!!!!1"?
...for the first amendment.
All of the Linux browsers out there have a password manager, with the possible exception of Lynx or Opera.
Can somebody tell me why I need .NET passport, especially when it strikes me as a security hole I could pilot the Starship Enterprise through sideways and not hit the edge?
Granted H(2)O is required for sustaining life, but water can theoretically exist on any planet without sustaining life, yesno? That there's water, AFAIK, doesn't mean there is life.
Troll me if you will, but consider that the media has a habit of reporting half of the information in their attempt to jack up their ratings before you do.
Yes, but at least with Troma, the crap is so bad it's good.
Sure, if you don't mind dealing with a PDF or .DOC of the submission form. =p
And a few hundred years into the future, we will have ships whose purpose in life it is to send intelligent bombs out to dying planets, as to destroy them and prevent them from causing other stellar trouble. These bombs will operate using Freedows. A few years after this program is implemented, one might hear a transmission: "Bomb, this is the captain. You will not detonate in the bomb bay! I repeat, do not detonate in the bomb bay!"
It's the sound you make when the RF from your cellphone powered by these turns your neurons into Kentucky Fried Brains.
Man dies from sleep deprivation and dehydration. Film at eleven.
Just like I posted it, here it is. - As a voter and a citizen of the United States of America, I think it is time to make a comment to congress regarding the recent proposal of a chip to be placed in new computers to control what can (not) be copied. In short, this is a very bad idea. I honestly see this chip as proposed by DRM proponents as something Congress could use to control what we could move around on our computers. Basically, it would be an embedded dongle. The problem here is that these proposals are being foisted around by people who don't understand technology, and unlike the V-chip, would shake the foundations of the computing world, requiring major redesigns in every aspect of computing. I also see this as something of a violation of our rights as granted in the first and fourth amendments to the US Constitution. It is Congress passing legislation that controls what is stated by the people, which per the first is wrong, and it would also have Congress assuming that everybody in the US is committing a crime. This brings up another tenet of the constitution: was not one of the principles this country was founded upon being that all people (criminals included) were innocent until proven guilty by the courts? We've stepped away from that because of media distortion, however this brings the ideal that the government assumes we must all be stopped from committing these crimes. The third reason I am against this is due to the waste. Plain and simple, such a device will not work. Whereas in the physical realms, one must exert tremendous effort and/or money to work around something put in place as to block them from doing something (let's say a tax lien being a problem that prevents somebody from taking a loan out, for instance), in the "cyber" realm, as it were, one can easily crack through the chip. It is not foolproof, nor will it be, and it will be worked around. In short, please do not waste your time on something that cannot be enforced.
Now I am very careful about what cron jobs I run between 01:00 and 03:00 on any unix box (they might check for the existance of something at most), and accordingly leave ntpd running.
Logical moderation: -1 for copyrighted material, +1 for violating the DMCA, +1 because I like the Moody Blues, +1 interesting. Your total LM is +2. Have a nice day. =)
Another one is from Thomas Appell's material, "Can you sing a high C without straining?", brought to you by Vocal Dynamics - within the material, Tom instructs the prospective student to "see" the notes as individual colors, even providing a standard major scale in C (the musical key, not the language) as an example in living color.
It makes me curious then, how many musicians on any scale are even slightly affected by this condition?
I think I need to clean it out and actually stick some tools in there. =O.o=
I won't be completely impressed until they implement this technology in spandex.