Perhaps 10 years ago, you could have done it, and no one would have complained too much, but times have changed. All the creeps have pissed in the pot and poisoned the well.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
The other problem with "legitimate" offers like that is that they don't scale up. What I mean by that is if 10 businesses send me an offer in a year, no big deal. What if 100,000 do it? What if small businesses around the world do it? Even if they all had a valid remove, I'd still be opting out all day long.
The use of untargetted mail is a long-standing practice and has an ROI threshold that's not hard to identify. The more general solicitations exist, the less effective any individual campaign is, and therefore the lower the return. Therefore, only those that actually *work* continue as long as there's a baseline cost. Allow me to point out that I've long been an advocate of e-mail postage, and was even in this context. Being charged a penny a message in this case would still allow the business model to be profitable, while the 80-million-a-day spammers couldn't stay in business.
And some even with a valid remove, don't keep a "do not email" list, they only remove my record. Then, when they get another "millions" CD and merge it, I'm back on the list.
Acknowledged. As I said elsewhere, I wrote this part of the process. Database merges were filtered against remove lists. So if your name was on a merge source, (we didn't purchase CD lists, by the way. We dealt mostly with lists from existing mystery shopping partners, though occassionally did chained screen-scrapes from Anywho, since it was searchable by ZIP code.) it was not merged if found on the remove list.
Obviously, this isn't a common practice. Unfortuantely.
My mailbox, my property, my rules.
Okay, so set a list of who is *allowed* to send in the first place. Don't wanna do that? Fine. Since we didn't rotate source addresses -- but messages were always from a CONSTANT ADDRESS -- denying that address actually meant *NO MORE MAIL.*
Unsolicited bulk email? Sure. Genuine nuisance? Only if you're into over-generalizations.
The point is, I did not request e-mails from your sneaky little company.
I didn't request a response from you to my post, but you are free to make it, because that is the nature of this medium. Why is email different? How many emails do you *request?* Before you ever get emails, do you call people and say "hey, would you mind emailing me?"
It's not that I'm calling something "appropriate" and something else not. I'm calling something a legitimate business operation that functioned as advertised. The email was tracable, credible and truthful. So if you really hate making money and love barnyard pr0n, then requesting removal *actually resulted in no further messages*. (I wrote that portion of the code myself.)
Shall I bother to point out that I'm not longer in the business? I'm fairly sure you wouldn't care.
If the spam world isn't about fraud and shady dealings, but is instead about costing someone time and effort and money, do you have the same complaints about snail mail? Getting stuff out of your mail box and sorting through it costs you time and effort and money, whether the solicitation is legit or not. But if you receive a fraudulent offer in snail mail, it's considered mail fraud and is a federal offense. Therefore you can be reasonably sure that a coupon for $.50 off your next box of Lucky Charms is actually for real.
Spam *IS* about fraud and shady dealings -- by promoting illegitimate offers; by disguising the source; by relaying through other people's open servers; and by not honoring remove requests. Beyond that, bulk, unsolicited, commercial email is *NO* different than bulk, unsolicited commercial snail mail.
I'd love for you to tell me you've never ordered from Domino's with a coupon you received in an unsolicited flier. (If you live in the US, at least.)
Indeed there are. As I said, the industry is unfortunately plagued with snake-oil offers -- particularly ones that ask people to pay to get on lists of eligible mystery shoppers.
It's a bit like being a used-car salesman or a personal injury lawyer. Even if you practice ethically, you're still regarded as the underbelly of the snake.
How did the legitimate offer differ? A) didn't ask people to pay to get on lists (which is indicative of a faulty business model); B) was a tracable and identifyable company who did not disguise email addresses or spam remailers; C) actually removed in accordance with user requests; and D) made the user available to a broad list of mystery shopping services registered with local BBBs and the MSPA (mspa.org).
Perhaps you don't consider that "legitimate" and I can understand. My point is that this was an organization that was truely paying out millions of dollars per month for completed surveys of local business locations. As many *bad* companies exist within this arena, there are some honest, ethical organizations that contibute value across a wide spectrum of the consumer market.
KKK members physically assault victims. We didn't.
The differentiation in size is a matter of how much *bandwidth* we consumed, not how much longer your list of emails is. I understand that it was one more thing to delete, but it wasn't an HTML email that took 30 second to download and threw JavaScript errors on you.
My point in responding was that there was a *legitimate* offer being made. It wasn't penis enlargement, or MLM scams, or requests to hold $50 million from Nigeria, or barn animal porn. People made money by signing up. They could unregister themselves.
But when legitimate services were offered in this fashion, they are regarded as having identical value as the general world of spam.
Though famous for being an industry of fly-by-night operators, mystery shopping (also known as secret shopping) is an example of an industry in which users are spammed on a fairly broad basis with legitimate opportunities.
I used to work in the industry, and while we'd never send mail on the 80-million-a-day scale that some of these guys do, we'd certainly send half-a-million in a given day, to broadly scattered email addresses. We always made a specific point of keeping the email small (under 1K) and it was *very* clear who the source of the message was (never luv384j6@h0tmail.com).
The mail itself invited the recipient to sign up as a mystery shopper, which would give them the opportunity to get paid to evaluate services in their local neighborhood.
Unfortunately, in a world of snake-oil salesmen, we took a lot of grief for the approach, even though it still paid for us to do it. Because the offered product (which was really a part time job offer) was legitimate, we never attempted to disguise the identity of the source. Bounced mails were automatically flushed from the database. Removal requests were honored. The advertising business was tracable. (Our address, phone number, president's name and industry association registration was on the first web page link in the message.) But because of all the charlatans out there, we were taken to be just one more instance of spam -- which in some sense we were, but with at most a tiny fraction of the rudeness which permeates the practice.
Aqua's keyboard navigability: It's well known that keyboard shortcuts will improve your efficiency when using a GUI.
This is an ironic statement about an Apple interface. Pick up a copy of Togzanini's "Tog on Interface." The original father of the Apple GUI is religiously against keyboard shortcuts, claiming that their apparently accelerating effect is a user illusion as the mind is distracted by the complexity of hitting the keys.
I laughed myself silly when I read it, but that was a key component of Apple's earlier design philosophy for Mac OS.
Anyone remember what the nail in the coffin was for the Clipper Chip? It was when Matt Blaze found a technical hole in the implementation that meant that spoofing the government's PKI was a trivial effort.
So... two things to undermine Palladium...
1) A competing open standard for consumer-level trusted computing. That means convincing Intel and AMD to deliver specs on the hardware standards they'll implement for the Palladium architecture so that it can be mimicked in an open source environment. It also means establishing a PKI without a single trusted root -- since Microsoft's will be almost entirely dependent on trust of MS itself.
2) A concerted effort to attack Palladium and find a weakness in its implementation -- and there will almost certainly be one, since it's a closed source implementation. Of course, this effort may have to be focused offshore, since it's in violation of the DCMA. But it might also make great grounds for a test case on the DCMA as it relates to privacy rights. MS claims that Palladium protects use privacy; reverse engineering is required to determine the truth of this claim; if the claim is false then MS is violating a number of corporate privacy statutes and precedents.
Another angle that's key is that this will only become an effective infrastructure if it's embraced by corporate customers, who represent the vast majority of purchases of Office -- MS's current cash cow. Well, it's easy to get a corporation to avoid embracing something -- just get their legal department involved and point out that there might exist some threat of liability for them. If company XYZ implements a Palladium web infrastructure and it turns out that some attacker accesses their transaction information, is the company liable to their customers or vendors? If so, then shouldn't the company be using products that they can certify are protected?
Of course, this last point is usable even now. Given the number of Slashdot readers and general open source advocates that work in corporate IT departments, I'm stunned we don't see this approach more often.
Well, if the problem now is that the recording industry is paying radio stations for airplay, then getting radio airplay for free should be a good trade-off.
Don't think they'd go for that? Admittedly, I tend to doubt it, too. Which is a good argument against that kind of royalty collection as such. But to the extent that this kind of intellectual property model continues to exist, it's reasonable for some regulation to exist. For instance, ASCAP already operates under an anti-trust consent decree which could be easily modified to require a low-cost payment design for smaller broadcast centers.
Actually, I worked for ASCAP's field sales group for a while. For a multi-billion dollar organization, they have no clue how to handle technology. It is *well* withing their reach to allow micropayments for MP3s, internet radio, or even home broadcasting. They've already got standard contract agreements for, say, bars and restaurants who play radios for their customers' entertainment. The typical bar is less than $1000 each.
So think about it... 3000 or so home broadcast stations on a cooperative network. Some set of music publishing companies could cough up the royalty payments to the tune of $3 million, on a network that could guarantee playtime at a much better per-song rate than ClearChannel.
That's just one option. Since the ASCAP payments go at least in part bad to the publisher, how 'bout we just cut 'em out of the equation altogether?:)
Nah. Homesteading has a long history in the common law. For instance, a party broadcasting on a given frequency for a given amount of time over a given area would hold de facto rights over that frequency in that area. Abandonment rules aren't tough to establish either.
Turn on your radio, and check and see what percentage of available FM frequencies are actually in use. This gives you some idea of number of competing stations that *could* exist if not for the FCC.
With all the whining about "de-regulated radio"...
on
Shocked, Shocked at Payola
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...why don't you people observe that while radio *ownership* was deregulated, radio *broadcasting* is as tightly controlled as ever.
Setting up a local FM radio station has been cheaper for the last 15 years than most internet-based radio today. I broadcasted pirate FM radio in junior high-school using a rig that cost me less than $100.
Why can four companies control 60% of the radio market? Because the FCC has established extremely high barriers to entry. So new radio stations require investments of millions of dollars. Withour regulation on ownership, but with high barriers to entry, oligopoly is inevitable. It's microeconomics 102.
'Net radio and sat radio are good paths out, but we could also see significant improvements in radio diversity by simply allowing localized homesteading of frequencies without "broadcast purchase" policies taken by the FCC now.
Imagine an open-ended cooperative of home-based rebroadcast stations on an FM frequency that relayed an internet radio station. Imagine being able to tune your home broadcast station to a 'net radio source for 20 hours a day, then come home and do your own show.
Before people start screaming for "trust-busting" of Clear Channel, how about screaming for deregulation of frequency allocation? I'd love to see how long the payola scheme would last in a world of nerds with $100 FM broadcast stations doing a relay of Radio Free Slashdot.
The weapon fighting in Ep 1 and 2 is absolutely retarded. Anyone who's ever held a quarterstaff or a sword can figure out better ways to use them in about half-a-second.
Problem 1: All attacks/parries made with lightsabres are based on kendo. Kendo is designed for a sword with a *single cutting edge*. But the lightsabre cuts at all angles. It also requires zero force to sever flesh. This would lead to two basic principles in lightsabre fighting -- 1) wield your sabre with only one hand, because strong strokes aren't necessary; and 2) get inside your opponent's blade, because any parry can be bounced off the opponent's blade and turned into an attack.
Really, any decent blade fighter knows that goading your opponent into committing to an attack is the surest path to victory. With all the flips and tricks the Jedi do, all that's really needed by any competant fighter is a single parry of a highly-telegraphed attack, which would get inside the Jedi's circle. As the Jedi circles around as if his sabre had only a single cutting edge that needed massive power to hurt his opponent, you just touch your sabre tip against his chest and watch him fall. Duh.
I was a little excited when we saw Dooku wielding his sabre with one-hand, but he was clearly too stupid to use this to his advantage.
Problem 2: staff beats sword. Historically, the difference between using a staff and a sword was one of subduing vs. lethal force. With Maul's "lightstaff", his weapon is every bit as lethal as the lightsabre. But a staff is a *much* more effective weapon than a sword. Demonstrating this technique is remarkably simple and can be done with a couple of broomsticks. One person holds the broomstick in the center like a staff. The other holds it at the end like a sword. The first person swings one end of the staff towards the other, who must parry with the sword. Then the staff-wielder switches direction to attack with the other side of the staff.
It's simple physics. With a staff, you can attack at approximately *4 times* the rate than your opponent can parry with a sword! Your hands need only move a few inches back and forth to attack your opponent from two different sides, while the sword fights must adjust his *entire body* to parry attacks from opposite sides. In a sword vs. staff fight, the sword fighter is constantly on the defensive.
In the real world, were such a battle to occur, the sword wielder will generally just take a blow from the staff in order to get inside the staff-wielder's range and strike a killing blow. But with a lightstaff, any contact from the staff is as deadly as the lightsabre itself.
Get the Phantom Menance DVD and slow-mo the Jedi vs. Sith battles. Note how many times Maul simply doesn't bother to execute an obvious attack that would have killed his opponent. Obi-wan does a smart thing at the beginning of the fight by getting himself on the opposite side of the opponent, but once Maul got them both coming from one side, defeating them with 4 times the attack rate would have been a no-brainer.
Problem 3: when you have *2* lightsabres, like Anakin did in the big climax, you attack with *BOTH AT THE SAME TIME!*. All he had to do was parry with one while attacking with the other, and Dooku would have been purely motion-defensive. Then you just drive his ass into a wall and watch him die. Duh.
Problem 4: for a group that's dedicated to never using aggression, the fact that the only weapon the Jedi carry *KILLS ON CONTACT* is a testament to Lucas' rampant stupidity. If Jedi's are keepers of the peace, why don't they carry nightsticks? They think nothing of slicing off someone's arm, when it's well within their power to simply pull a gun out of the person's hand. That's called "excessive force" and is aggression by definition.
Problem 5: why would anyone who can Force-push ever bother to pull out the sabre in the first place? You're a telekinetic. Just pull your opponent's shoes out from under him.
The president of CoolChips is also the president of Chorus Motors, another Borealis company. Googling him reveals a number of references. Here's an interesting one...
http://www.memagazine.org/mepower01/5thharm/5thhar m.html
Check out the same companies claims on the PowerChip -- a heat-to-electricity conversion device on the same principle.
I am not even close to competant enough in physics to evaluate the truth of their claims, but if the CoolChip is real, and the PowerChip is real, then stacking the two would offer a way to pull heat, then convert it to electrical energy to feed back into the device. (Yes, I know it's less than 100% efficiency. In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics.) It'd be a bit like the alternator in a car, converting part of the kinetic energy back into electrical to initiate the whole process again.
Reminds me a bit about a story of a motor that produced electricity from atmospheric static.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed wholeheartedly.
The other problem with "legitimate" offers like that is that they don't scale up. What I mean by that is if 10 businesses send me an offer in a year, no big deal. What if 100,000 do it? What if small businesses around the world do it? Even if they all had a valid remove, I'd still be opting out all day long.
The use of untargetted mail is a long-standing practice and has an ROI threshold that's not hard to identify. The more general solicitations exist, the less effective any individual campaign is, and therefore the lower the return. Therefore, only those that actually *work* continue as long as there's a baseline cost. Allow me to point out that I've long been an advocate of e-mail postage, and was even in this context. Being charged a penny a message in this case would still allow the business model to be profitable, while the 80-million-a-day spammers couldn't stay in business.
And some even with a valid remove, don't keep a "do not email" list, they only remove my record. Then, when they get another "millions" CD and merge it, I'm back on the list.
Acknowledged. As I said elsewhere, I wrote this part of the process. Database merges were filtered against remove lists. So if your name was on a merge source, (we didn't purchase CD lists, by the way. We dealt mostly with lists from existing mystery shopping partners, though occassionally did chained screen-scrapes from Anywho, since it was searchable by ZIP code.) it was not merged if found on the remove list.
Obviously, this isn't a common practice. Unfortuantely.
My mailbox, my property, my rules.
Okay, so set a list of who is *allowed* to send in the first place. Don't wanna do that? Fine. Since we didn't rotate source addresses -- but messages were always from a CONSTANT ADDRESS -- denying that address actually meant *NO MORE MAIL.*
Unsolicited bulk email? Sure. Genuine nuisance? Only if you're into over-generalizations.
I didn't request a response from you to my post, but you are free to make it, because that is the nature of this medium. Why is email different? How many emails do you *request?* Before you ever get emails, do you call people and say "hey, would you mind emailing me?"
It's not that I'm calling something "appropriate" and something else not. I'm calling something a legitimate business operation that functioned as advertised. The email was tracable, credible and truthful. So if you really hate making money and love barnyard pr0n, then requesting removal *actually resulted in no further messages*. (I wrote that portion of the code myself.)
If the spam world isn't about fraud and shady dealings, but is instead about costing someone time and effort and money, do you have the same complaints about snail mail? Getting stuff out of your mail box and sorting through it costs you time and effort and money, whether the solicitation is legit or not. But if you receive a fraudulent offer in snail mail, it's considered mail fraud and is a federal offense. Therefore you can be reasonably sure that a coupon for $.50 off your next box of Lucky Charms is actually for real.
Spam *IS* about fraud and shady dealings -- by promoting illegitimate offers; by disguising the source; by relaying through other people's open servers; and by not honoring remove requests. Beyond that, bulk, unsolicited, commercial email is *NO* different than bulk, unsolicited commercial snail mail.
I'd love for you to tell me you've never ordered from Domino's with a coupon you received in an unsolicited flier. (If you live in the US, at least.)
It's a bit like being a used-car salesman or a personal injury lawyer. Even if you practice ethically, you're still regarded as the underbelly of the snake.
How did the legitimate offer differ? A) didn't ask people to pay to get on lists (which is indicative of a faulty business model); B) was a tracable and identifyable company who did not disguise email addresses or spam remailers; C) actually removed in accordance with user requests; and D) made the user available to a broad list of mystery shopping services registered with local BBBs and the MSPA (mspa.org).
Perhaps you don't consider that "legitimate" and I can understand. My point is that this was an organization that was truely paying out millions of dollars per month for completed surveys of local business locations. As many *bad* companies exist within this arena, there are some honest, ethical organizations that contibute value across a wide spectrum of the consumer market.
KKK members are anonymous. We weren't.
KKK members physically assault victims. We didn't.
The differentiation in size is a matter of how much *bandwidth* we consumed, not how much longer your list of emails is. I understand that it was one more thing to delete, but it wasn't an HTML email that took 30 second to download and threw JavaScript errors on you.
My point in responding was that there was a *legitimate* offer being made. It wasn't penis enlargement, or MLM scams, or requests to hold $50 million from Nigeria, or barn animal porn. People made money by signing up. They could unregister themselves.
But when legitimate services were offered in this fashion, they are regarded as having identical value as the general world of spam.
I used to work in the industry, and while we'd never send mail on the 80-million-a-day scale that some of these guys do, we'd certainly send half-a-million in a given day, to broadly scattered email addresses. We always made a specific point of keeping the email small (under 1K) and it was *very* clear who the source of the message was (never luv384j6@h0tmail.com).
The mail itself invited the recipient to sign up as a mystery shopper, which would give them the opportunity to get paid to evaluate services in their local neighborhood.
Unfortunately, in a world of snake-oil salesmen, we took a lot of grief for the approach, even though it still paid for us to do it. Because the offered product (which was really a part time job offer) was legitimate, we never attempted to disguise the identity of the source. Bounced mails were automatically flushed from the database. Removal requests were honored. The advertising business was tracable. (Our address, phone number, president's name and industry association registration was on the first web page link in the message.) But because of all the charlatans out there, we were taken to be just one more instance of spam -- which in some sense we were, but with at most a tiny fraction of the rudeness which permeates the practice.
Now we know he's not just a jerk spammer, but he's also an idiot!
"Hi, I'm one of the most hated people in America. Here's my name, a photo of me, what kind of car I drive, and where I live."
I'm suddenly having Pulp Fiction flashbacks. I need a couple of pipe-hittin bruthas with a pair of pliers and blowtorch.
AHAHAHAHAHHHAAHHAAHA
Oh man, that had to be really cool for about a day after the movie came out, and then completely sucked. Good thing you have such a low user #.
*sigh* Man... that really is funny.
This is an ironic statement about an Apple interface. Pick up a copy of Togzanini's "Tog on Interface." The original father of the Apple GUI is religiously against keyboard shortcuts, claiming that their apparently accelerating effect is a user illusion as the mind is distracted by the complexity of hitting the keys.
I laughed myself silly when I read it, but that was a key component of Apple's earlier design philosophy for Mac OS.
Anyone remember what the nail in the coffin was for the Clipper Chip? It was when Matt Blaze found a technical hole in the implementation that meant that spoofing the government's PKI was a trivial effort.
So... two things to undermine Palladium...
1) A competing open standard for consumer-level trusted computing. That means convincing Intel and AMD to deliver specs on the hardware standards they'll implement for the Palladium architecture so that it can be mimicked in an open source environment. It also means establishing a PKI without a single trusted root -- since Microsoft's will be almost entirely dependent on trust of MS itself.
2) A concerted effort to attack Palladium and find a weakness in its implementation -- and there will almost certainly be one, since it's a closed source implementation. Of course, this effort may have to be focused offshore, since it's in violation of the DCMA. But it might also make great grounds for a test case on the DCMA as it relates to privacy rights. MS claims that Palladium protects use privacy; reverse engineering is required to determine the truth of this claim; if the claim is false then MS is violating a number of corporate privacy statutes and precedents.
Another angle that's key is that this will only become an effective infrastructure if it's embraced by corporate customers, who represent the vast majority of purchases of Office -- MS's current cash cow. Well, it's easy to get a corporation to avoid embracing something -- just get their legal department involved and point out that there might exist some threat of liability for them. If company XYZ implements a Palladium web infrastructure and it turns out that some attacker accesses their transaction information, is the company liable to their customers or vendors? If so, then shouldn't the company be using products that they can certify are protected?
Of course, this last point is usable even now. Given the number of Slashdot readers and general open source advocates that work in corporate IT departments, I'm stunned we don't see this approach more often.
Well, if the problem now is that the recording industry is paying radio stations for airplay, then getting radio airplay for free should be a good trade-off.
:)
Don't think they'd go for that? Admittedly, I tend to doubt it, too. Which is a good argument against that kind of royalty collection as such. But to the extent that this kind of intellectual property model continues to exist, it's reasonable for some regulation to exist. For instance, ASCAP already operates under an anti-trust consent decree which could be easily modified to require a low-cost payment design for smaller broadcast centers.
Actually, I worked for ASCAP's field sales group for a while. For a multi-billion dollar organization, they have no clue how to handle technology. It is *well* withing their reach to allow micropayments for MP3s, internet radio, or even home broadcasting. They've already got standard contract agreements for, say, bars and restaurants who play radios for their customers' entertainment. The typical bar is less than $1000 each.
So think about it... 3000 or so home broadcast stations on a cooperative network. Some set of music publishing companies could cough up the royalty payments to the tune of $3 million, on a network that could guarantee playtime at a much better per-song rate than ClearChannel.
That's just one option. Since the ASCAP payments go at least in part bad to the publisher, how 'bout we just cut 'em out of the equation altogether?
Nah. Homesteading has a long history in the common law. For instance, a party broadcasting on a given frequency for a given amount of time over a given area would hold de facto rights over that frequency in that area. Abandonment rules aren't tough to establish either. Turn on your radio, and check and see what percentage of available FM frequencies are actually in use. This gives you some idea of number of competing stations that *could* exist if not for the FCC.
...why don't you people observe that while radio *ownership* was deregulated, radio *broadcasting* is as tightly controlled as ever.
Setting up a local FM radio station has been cheaper for the last 15 years than most internet-based radio today. I broadcasted pirate FM radio in junior high-school using a rig that cost me less than $100.
Why can four companies control 60% of the radio market? Because the FCC has established extremely high barriers to entry. So new radio stations require investments of millions of dollars. Withour regulation on ownership, but with high barriers to entry, oligopoly is inevitable. It's microeconomics 102.
'Net radio and sat radio are good paths out, but we could also see significant improvements in radio diversity by simply allowing localized homesteading of frequencies without "broadcast purchase" policies taken by the FCC now.
Imagine an open-ended cooperative of home-based rebroadcast stations on an FM frequency that relayed an internet radio station. Imagine being able to tune your home broadcast station to a 'net radio source for 20 hours a day, then come home and do your own show.
Before people start screaming for "trust-busting" of Clear Channel, how about screaming for deregulation of frequency allocation? I'd love to see how long the payola scheme would last in a world of nerds with $100 FM broadcast stations doing a relay of Radio Free Slashdot.
The weapon fighting in Ep 1 and 2 is absolutely retarded. Anyone who's ever held a quarterstaff or a sword can figure out better ways to use them in about half-a-second.
Problem 1: All attacks/parries made with lightsabres are based on kendo. Kendo is designed for a sword with a *single cutting edge*. But the lightsabre cuts at all angles. It also requires zero force to sever flesh. This would lead to two basic principles in lightsabre fighting -- 1) wield your sabre with only one hand, because strong strokes aren't necessary; and 2) get inside your opponent's blade, because any parry can be bounced off the opponent's blade and turned into an attack.
Really, any decent blade fighter knows that goading your opponent into committing to an attack is the surest path to victory. With all the flips and tricks the Jedi do, all that's really needed by any competant fighter is a single parry of a highly-telegraphed attack, which would get inside the Jedi's circle. As the Jedi circles around as if his sabre had only a single cutting edge that needed massive power to hurt his opponent, you just touch your sabre tip against his chest and watch him fall. Duh.
I was a little excited when we saw Dooku wielding his sabre with one-hand, but he was clearly too stupid to use this to his advantage.
Problem 2: staff beats sword. Historically, the difference between using a staff and a sword was one of subduing vs. lethal force. With Maul's "lightstaff", his weapon is every bit as lethal as the lightsabre. But a staff is a *much* more effective weapon than a sword. Demonstrating this technique is remarkably simple and can be done with a couple of broomsticks. One person holds the broomstick in the center like a staff. The other holds it at the end like a sword. The first person swings one end of the staff towards the other, who must parry with the sword. Then the staff-wielder switches direction to attack with the other side of the staff.
It's simple physics. With a staff, you can attack at approximately *4 times* the rate than your opponent can parry with a sword! Your hands need only move a few inches back and forth to attack your opponent from two different sides, while the sword fights must adjust his *entire body* to parry attacks from opposite sides. In a sword vs. staff fight, the sword fighter is constantly on the defensive.
In the real world, were such a battle to occur, the sword wielder will generally just take a blow from the staff in order to get inside the staff-wielder's range and strike a killing blow. But with a lightstaff, any contact from the staff is as deadly as the lightsabre itself.
Get the Phantom Menance DVD and slow-mo the Jedi vs. Sith battles. Note how many times Maul simply doesn't bother to execute an obvious attack that would have killed his opponent. Obi-wan does a smart thing at the beginning of the fight by getting himself on the opposite side of the opponent, but once Maul got them both coming from one side, defeating them with 4 times the attack rate would have been a no-brainer.
Problem 3: when you have *2* lightsabres, like Anakin did in the big climax, you attack with *BOTH AT THE SAME TIME!*. All he had to do was parry with one while attacking with the other, and Dooku would have been purely motion-defensive. Then you just drive his ass into a wall and watch him die. Duh.
Problem 4: for a group that's dedicated to never using aggression, the fact that the only weapon the Jedi carry *KILLS ON CONTACT* is a testament to Lucas' rampant stupidity. If Jedi's are keepers of the peace, why don't they carry nightsticks? They think nothing of slicing off someone's arm, when it's well within their power to simply pull a gun out of the person's hand. That's called "excessive force" and is aggression by definition.
Problem 5: why would anyone who can Force-push ever bother to pull out the sabre in the first place? You're a telekinetic. Just pull your opponent's shoes out from under him.
Don't even get me started on plot holes. *sigh*
The president of CoolChips is also the president of Chorus Motors, another Borealis company. Googling him reveals a number of references. Here's an interesting one... http://www.memagazine.org/mepower01/5thharm/5thhar m.html
Check out the same companies claims on the PowerChip -- a heat-to-electricity conversion device on the same principle. I am not even close to competant enough in physics to evaluate the truth of their claims, but if the CoolChip is real, and the PowerChip is real, then stacking the two would offer a way to pull heat, then convert it to electrical energy to feed back into the device. (Yes, I know it's less than 100% efficiency. In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics.) It'd be a bit like the alternator in a car, converting part of the kinetic energy back into electrical to initiate the whole process again. Reminds me a bit about a story of a motor that produced electricity from atmospheric static. ;)