Even if those free email places did pay for a.mail domain, would that stop spam? How much spam do you get already that comes from Yahoo! or Hotmail or some other free email survice.
Zero. None at all.
I get lots and lots of spam with Yahoo or Hotmail in the 'From:' header, but the 'Received:' headers tell a very different story. I also get lots of spam using Yahoo or Hotmail for their dropboxes - those get closed down really fast, and hopefully the spammer gets cut off from his 'Yes! I am a sucker! Please charge my card' replies.
I tell ya, one of these days I'll be able to buy a DVD of Bill Hicks' "Revelations", the HBO special, and finally replace the VHS off-air copy some shithead stole because it was in my VCR at the time. That day will be a good day.
It's out in the UK, under the title 'Totally Bill Hicks'. If you're multiregion and are prepared to import from Britain with the currencies the way they are right now, then go right ahead:-)
No, it doesn't...:-( There's a book out now containing full transcripts of some of his classic shows - Relentless in Montreal, Revelations in London - and it's not the same. Without the Man Himself miming and providing sound effects, it just doesn't have the power behind it.
However, the words still ring true: Ball-less, soulless, spiritless little corporate fucking puppets, suckers of Satan's cock each and every one of them!
Once you've signed with one of the big labels, you've practically signed your soul over to the devil.
So, Hammer... it says here on your application that you have no talent, and yet you wish to be a star?... I think we can make a deal. Suck Satan's cock! Ooohhh.... I will lower the standards of the earth! I will put all the money in the hands of young girls! They will think you are sharp and edgy! Aaahhhhhhhh! Aoooooooggghhhh!
The northern hemisphere's at the top of most maps, and Australia's down at the bottom. Close enough for a figure of speech...
I actually did look it up. In fact, Australia's just as much down under for (East Coast) Americans as it is for Britons. Australia's antipodal to a region in the mid-Atlantic, just east of the Caribbean, and NZ is antipodal to an area stretching from the Bay of Biscay down into Spain.
In that case, feel free to choose a different field to research. A lot of people think there's something in string theory, enough so that they're prepared to dedicate a whole lot of time and energy to developing the theory - but if you don't agree then nobody's forcing you to contribute. Pick a different project. Work on quantum computation, perhaps. Or maybe the astrophysics of active galaxies? Perhaps particle physics is more your game? - the standard model is undergoing some rewrites at the moment, what with neutrino mixing and all.
It's not as if there's a science fascist herding everyone towards string theory at gunpoint. Study whatever field you like, if strings don't appeal to you, and good luck to you.
I find it interesting that Americans refer to Australia as 'down under'. I would have thought that would be a UK thing... I'll have to consult an atlas, find the antipodal region to the US...
I just wish I had the time to compose a full-scale filk on this, though. It's such a rich seam to mine:-)
The major difference then between String Theory and religion is, we will find observable consequences of String Theory and we will test them.
So are you asking me to believe in string theory until then?
No. Feel free to completely ignore string theory and stick with relativity and quantum mechanics - that's what most physicists are doing anyway. Not everyone's a cosmologist interested in the first few nanoseconds of the Big Bang, or in the more exotic properties of black holes - string theory simply isn't an issue to most people. Hell, NASA still use Newtonian gravity to navigate their spacecraft - it's inaccurate compared to general relativity, but it's good enough and it's much, much easier to work with.
And you do realise that it's permissible to reserve judgment until the evidence is in, right?
You know, this is the sort of troll I just don't get. There's no way it's for real - throwing out Opterons?! - but it's not inflammatory, or even particularly interesting. Is there a '-1, Pointless' moderation?
Knowing Wile E. Coyote, I hope not. The very first thing he'd do is try to lurk inside there while he takes his Acme Bloody Huge Roadrunner-Slaying Device out of its infinite-capacity Acme shipping crate. The consequences of this sort of thing, I'm reliably informed by D&D geeks, are bad.
Are you kidding? Mir was designed for a five-year lifespan. After something like 12 years they crashed a cargo ship into it, depressurised half the station, set the rest on fire and for good measure took down all the computers and it still wouldn't die...
If the Russians say it's designed for 25 flights, I'd start to worry around flight 78:-)
Well, that's just it. In the model I proposed upthread:
I know that at BigMediaCartel.com I can access a huge library of free, unencumbered and high-bitrate mp3 singles. Wonderful! No need to bother with Kazaa, combing through countless crappy rips, when I can get the good stuff straight from the source. Off I go, then...
I navigate to the artist of my choice and I start slurping some singles. Let's say I download Radiohead's Paranoid Android, Karma Police and No Surprises. They're brilliant. I want more. I just got these from a page called OK Computer, which has a number of other tracks: I can buy access to the lot of them for (say) 10 quid. Hell, we're talking about a possible higher-bandwidth future: maybe they're even FLACs.
Now, I could go to Kazaa and look for the other tracks, but I'd have inconsistent quality, and I'd have to waste a lot of time doing it. If I spend an hour working to try to get OK Computer for free, have I really profited by it? And I'm _already_ at BigMediaCartel.com, and I've just had a good experience of their high bandwidth server.
That's a great offering. I don't have to go into town, find a CD, stand in line, etc... I could easily see myself typing in my card details and spending a _fortune_ at BigMediaCartel.com. iTunes and its competitors have part of this, but they don't have the initial hook - the lure of freebies to get you in there to start with. I notice free songs being given away as prizes in Coke bottles lately, so maybe that's a step in the right direction...
As for your mention of DVDs giving more than the movie... Personally, I'm interested in added features on DVDs, but not on CDs. I just want the music. I sit down and give a DVD my complete undivided attention for two hours; with a CD, I put it on the stereo and do something else while it plays. When will I get around to watching these bonus features on that CD? Probably never.
Optical scanning by a computer sounds like e-voting to me. OK, it's not the full-on Diebold 'touch the screen and trust us' kind of democracy, but it's not far off.
As far as I'm concerned, any form of voting where I have to trust somebody else's electronic black box to behave itself is subject to the same concerns.
The singles market is held up by children, hence the dominance of manufactured pop acts, while the market for albums is older - Fifty Quid Man, as that article says.
My own opinion on what the recording industry should do is this: Give Up Selling Singles.
Treat the single as an advertisement for the album. That's why you want it to be played on the radio and MTV and on TotP, right? You want people to hear the song, to like it and to want more - and then buy the album. So: release high-quality mp3s onto the net with no restrictions whatever (except maybe 'No Commercial Use') and positively encourage their trading. Make the rest of the tracks available from the same site on payment.
You'd lose some revenue from singles sales, but that revenue stream is dying anyway; this could help strengthen the real cash cow, the album.
It worked for iD Software - why shouldn't it work for EMI?
I, for one am waiting for the new DVDxRW and DVD/RW.
Early adopter, are we? Myself, I'm waiting for DVD mod RW. Some friends of mine plan to hold on until the launch of DVD exp RW, but I think that's just going too far...
The US was long a nation that didn't need the rest of the world. The converse hasn't been true in hundreds of years.
Hundreds? Some decades, maybe... I thought the US was only founded a little over two hundred years ago. Hundreds of years ago, what is now the USA was Sir Walter Raleigh's tobacco farm and a whole lot of natives just learning about the joys of smallpox.
There are hundreds of thousands of American soldiers already in Europe.
Plus a whole load of American planes - they probably outnumber the RAF even in England itself. Obviously in any conceivable war scenario NATO would have disbanded and the Americans long ago gone home, but if Bush went mad(der?) and declared war on Europe as of right now then Europe wouldn't have much of a chance...
I was wondering whether it might be an attempt to launch a trojan, myself. But surely nobody here is dumb enough to decode and then run (probably as root) a script from an unknown source without at least checking first?
Go running to Washington, and ask for a trade embargo to be imposed on European software?
Brussels has never been afraid of a trade war. EU dreams of becoming a second superpower may be far-off in many areas, but in this one Europe is certainly a match for the USA. We've recently had some big rows over steel and bananas; IIRC, Europe lost over the bananas but won on the steel.
And anyway... the EU's number one software product is that Finnish thing, and it's free, so Washington can put a tax of 10,000% on European software for all anyone cares;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Zero. None at all.
I get lots and lots of spam with Yahoo or Hotmail in the 'From:' header, but the 'Received:' headers tell a very different story. I also get lots of spam using Yahoo or Hotmail for their dropboxes - those get closed down really fast, and hopefully the spammer gets cut off from his 'Yes! I am a sucker! Please charge my card' replies.
When you log on to a network service, and it asks you for a username _and_ a password, do you call it double log-on? No? You just say 'log on'?
So why do you say 'double opt-in' when you actually mean 'opt-in'?
It's out in the UK, under the title 'Totally Bill Hicks'. If you're multiregion and are prepared to import from Britain with the currencies the way they are right now, then go right ahead :-)
However, the words still ring true: Ball-less, soulless, spiritless little corporate fucking puppets, suckers of Satan's cock each and every one of them!
So, Hammer... it says here on your application that you have no talent, and yet you wish to be a star?... I think we can make a deal. Suck Satan's cock! Ooohhh.... I will lower the standards of the earth! I will put all the money in the hands of young girls! They will think you are sharp and edgy! Aaahhhhhhhh! Aoooooooggghhhh!
-- Bill Hicks
It's a good thing we're getting millions of Hungarians in the EU, though. We'll need someone who can read all that MS code...
Either way, I'm happy.
I actually did look it up. In fact, Australia's just as much down under for (East Coast) Americans as it is for Britons. Australia's antipodal to a region in the mid-Atlantic, just east of the Caribbean, and NZ is antipodal to an area stretching from the Bay of Biscay down into Spain.
It's not as if there's a science fascist herding everyone towards string theory at gunpoint. Study whatever field you like, if strings don't appeal to you, and good luck to you.
I just wish I had the time to compose a full-scale filk on this, though. It's such a rich seam to mine :-)
So are you asking me to believe in string theory until then?
No. Feel free to completely ignore string theory and stick with relativity and quantum mechanics - that's what most physicists are doing anyway. Not everyone's a cosmologist interested in the first few nanoseconds of the Big Bang, or in the more exotic properties of black holes - string theory simply isn't an issue to most people. Hell, NASA still use Newtonian gravity to navigate their spacecraft - it's inaccurate compared to general relativity, but it's good enough and it's much, much easier to work with.
And you do realise that it's permissible to reserve judgment until the evidence is in, right?
Maybe in your inertial reference frame...
You know, this is the sort of troll I just don't get. There's no way it's for real - throwing out Opterons?! - but it's not inflammatory, or even particularly interesting. Is there a '-1, Pointless' moderation?
Knowing Wile E. Coyote, I hope not. The very first thing he'd do is try to lurk inside there while he takes his Acme Bloody Huge Roadrunner-Slaying Device out of its infinite-capacity Acme shipping crate. The consequences of this sort of thing, I'm reliably informed by D&D geeks, are bad.
If the Russians say it's designed for 25 flights, I'd start to worry around flight 78 :-)
Yes, I've voted, but using the 'big X in pencil' method; the vote being read by the Mk 1 Eyeball (Darwin plc, pat. pending)...
I know that at BigMediaCartel.com I can access a huge library of free, unencumbered and high-bitrate mp3 singles. Wonderful! No need to bother with Kazaa, combing through countless crappy rips, when I can get the good stuff straight from the source. Off I go, then...
I navigate to the artist of my choice and I start slurping some singles. Let's say I download Radiohead's Paranoid Android, Karma Police and No Surprises. They're brilliant. I want more. I just got these from a page called OK Computer, which has a number of other tracks: I can buy access to the lot of them for (say) 10 quid. Hell, we're talking about a possible higher-bandwidth future: maybe they're even FLACs.
Now, I could go to Kazaa and look for the other tracks, but I'd have inconsistent quality, and I'd have to waste a lot of time doing it. If I spend an hour working to try to get OK Computer for free, have I really profited by it? And I'm _already_ at BigMediaCartel.com, and I've just had a good experience of their high bandwidth server.
That's a great offering. I don't have to go into town, find a CD, stand in line, etc... I could easily see myself typing in my card details and spending a _fortune_ at BigMediaCartel.com. iTunes and its competitors have part of this, but they don't have the initial hook - the lure of freebies to get you in there to start with. I notice free songs being given away as prizes in Coke bottles lately, so maybe that's a step in the right direction...
As for your mention of DVDs giving more than the movie... Personally, I'm interested in added features on DVDs, but not on CDs. I just want the music. I sit down and give a DVD my complete undivided attention for two hours; with a CD, I put it on the stereo and do something else while it plays. When will I get around to watching these bonus features on that CD? Probably never.
As far as I'm concerned, any form of voting where I have to trust somebody else's electronic black box to behave itself is subject to the same concerns.
My own opinion on what the recording industry should do is this: Give Up Selling Singles.
Treat the single as an advertisement for the album. That's why you want it to be played on the radio and MTV and on TotP, right? You want people to hear the song, to like it and to want more - and then buy the album. So: release high-quality mp3s onto the net with no restrictions whatever (except maybe 'No Commercial Use') and positively encourage their trading. Make the rest of the tracks available from the same site on payment.
You'd lose some revenue from singles sales, but that revenue stream is dying anyway; this could help strengthen the real cash cow, the album.
It worked for iD Software - why shouldn't it work for EMI?
Early adopter, are we? Myself, I'm waiting for DVD mod RW. Some friends of mine plan to hold on until the launch of DVD exp RW, but I think that's just going too far...
Hundreds? Some decades, maybe... I thought the US was only founded a little over two hundred years ago. Hundreds of years ago, what is now the USA was Sir Walter Raleigh's tobacco farm and a whole lot of natives just learning about the joys of smallpox.
There are hundreds of thousands of American soldiers already in Europe.
Plus a whole load of American planes - they probably outnumber the RAF even in England itself. Obviously in any conceivable war scenario NATO would have disbanded and the Americans long ago gone home, but if Bush went mad(der?) and declared war on Europe as of right now then Europe wouldn't have much of a chance...
I was wondering whether it might be an attempt to launch a trojan, myself. But surely nobody here is dumb enough to decode and then run (probably as root) a script from an unknown source without at least checking first?
Is this the Spinal Tap approach to biohazard classification?
Brussels has never been afraid of a trade war. EU dreams of becoming a second superpower may be far-off in many areas, but in this one Europe is certainly a match for the USA. We've recently had some big rows over steel and bananas; IIRC, Europe lost over the bananas but won on the steel.
And anyway... the EU's number one software product is that Finnish thing, and it's free, so Washington can put a tax of 10,000% on European software for all anyone cares ;-)