I think we may see the development of a parallel English. You have spoken English, written English and net English. Written English, used in formal contexts, will mirror spoken English; spellings may evolve, as we've seen with the divergence of US English and English English, but you won't see 'tnx'.
Meanwhile on the net, in the context of chatrooms, IMs and text messages, we see a language evolving that does not ever need to be spoken, that will never have to be read aloud. In this case, the key thing is to eliminate redundancy - you want to get your message done quickly if you're in an interactive, realtime chatroom, and you want to get it done cheaply if you're paying by length. So you get tnx, txt, u, lol and so forth.
Should the text-only chatroom survive into the era of ultra-high bandwidth that lies ahead (and I think it will - you can keep up with ten people chatting at once in text, but not in sound) then I would not be surprised to see netspeak becoming a real dialect.
Re:didnt stalin call churchill a warmongerer too?
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
Churchill? This Churchill? The guy who used weapons of mass destruction against civilian populations - specifically the Kurds?
'I do not understand this sqeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.'
Churchill is remembered for 1940, making a desperate stand, his country alone against overwhelming power. Now, who's making a stand against overwhelming power in this situation? Bush, is it? I don't think so.
Re:to the tune of "if your'e happy & you know
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
Are you people so stupid you don't release a full 50% of the planet considers "fall" to be exactly the opposite as you?
1) The southern hemisphere is mostly ocean. The vast majority of the human race lives in the north. They're not being so very self-centred on that count. But...
2) In a whole lot of places there aren't the traditional four seasons; instead there are two, dry and rainy. So they don't call it fall, because it isn't.
3) In a whole lot of other places most of the trees are coniferous. So they don't call it fall either, because the leaves don't.
4) Most people alive, even those with four seasons and deciduous forests, don't speak English, and so don't call it fall anyway.
5) Of those who do speak English, live in areas with a four-season climate and deciduous plant life, a whole lot STILL don't call it fall, they call it autumn.
Please do not forward this to your spam mailing list provider in a show of 'good faith' to 'opt me out'. All this will do is inform them that this is a valid email address, and place me on numerous other mailing lists. Like I said, these are not honest business people. If you doubt this, ask them exactly where and where I 'opted in' to get this junk.
Otherwise excellent and bang on-message, but I suspect this bit needs some more thought. Company C are to ask spammers S when and where recipient X opted-in, but in doing so they must not divulge the identity of X. How, then, even if S is running a fully correct confirmed opt-in system, are they ever going to be able to answer?
Step 1: use stone and concrete. The Romans used stone and concrete extensively, and many of their public works projects are STILL standing two thousand years later.
Step 7: Cultivate the area around the house into a wetland, then make sure every environmentalist in the area is aware that it's there. Then, get the EPA in to declare it a wetland. This is way easier than you might think. It makes it just about impossible for anyone to build anything there ever again.
All the other kings said it were daft to build a castle in a swamp, but I built it anyway! It sank into the swamp. I built another one; it sank into the swamp too. I built a third one; it caught fire, fell over and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up! And that's what you'll be getting, my lad - the strongest castle in these islands!
Email advertising is even less effective in my opinion than flyers that are sent in the mail.
Spamming me is negatively effective. If I get a flyer in the mail, I'll read it and I might, if interested, buy what's advertised in it. If I get a spam, I'll read it and make damn certain I never in my life buy anything whatsoever from the spamming company - in fact if the product is something I actually want I'll go out and buy it from the spammer's chief competitor, and let both know why. Then I'll track down the ISP from which the mail was sent and the one at which the website (if any) is hosted, forward them a copy of the spam and request that they enforce their respective AUPs.
Compare and contrast the original Blade Runner with Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep. The film massacred the book. The recent edited version was a lot better, but still cut out the whole religion and culture of the world; I suppose those couldn't realistically fit into a film.
Obviously the Niven book that would make the best big-budget effects monstrosity of a film would be Ringworld... but cast the wrong person as Louis and you face disaster. Making Speaker-to-Animals and Nessus look plausible would be a heck of a job, too. Compared to that, the CG involved in creating the ring, the flycycles and the flying buildings would be trivial.
More importantly... is this just the original GTA, or is London included? GTA was good, but London was awesome. Mod scooters and Mini Coopers and James Bond missions - about as cheesy as it gets but tremendous fun.
Site's slashdotted so hard it's showing up on seismographs, so I can't go check:-(
Brilliant troll. Kudos. I'm astounded that people are taking this seriously.
Ever read news.admin.net-abuse.email? Spammers talk like this _all the time_. This one maybe scores a 4 / 10; it was too coherent to achieve even an average score, and didn't even threaten to sue anybody. Didn't accuse anyone of being anti-commerce radicals against the little guy who wanted the net for themselves, either.
Oh, watch that post's score sink! I suppose that violates his free speech too...;-)
The KKK and the NOI can publicly advertise their unwanted speech because the First Amendment protects them. They cannot be barred from advertising in newspapers
Yes they can. The newspaper owners can say to the KKK, 'No, piss off, we don't want your dirty money, and we don't want your adverts soiling our newspaper's reputation.'
they cannot be barred from advertising on billboards
Yes they can. The billboard owner can say to the KKK, 'No, piss off, we don't want your dirty money...' etc.
and they cannot be barred from posting in open forums.
Like, say, Slashdot? Just watch anything pro-KKK go to -1 in seconds.
But spammers don't have these rights?
Sure they do. But AOL have the same rights the newspaper owner, the billboard owner and the forum owner have: the right to say 'piss off'.
They came for the spammers, but I wasn't a spammer so I didn't speak up.
They came for the spammers, and I came along and got a brown shirt and knuckleduster of my very own, plus a great big baseball bat marked CLUE and a plank with a nail in it marked LART. And I did my bit - did you?
Fuck you AOL for making yourself judge, jury, and executioner of the First Amendment.
Ah, frea speach. What an overrated 'right' that is. Sorry, but your precious Amendment only prevents the government from shutting you up. There's no reason AOL can't censor you, and there's nothing to stop the Slashdot mods putting you to -1. That was settled long ago; Sanford Wallace, the Ralsky of his day, sued AOL and Compuserve for filtering his junk out, and he lost.
It costs AOL $2 per month per user just to handle the spam traffic. AOL's huge userbase makes them a magnet for dictionary attacks. If you want an unfiltered mail feed, then by all means pay someone extra for spam storage, or run your own mail server.
Once laws start up the SPAMMERS will move offshore. Just like the guy who lives in Detroit. This SPAMMER lives in the US, but does not send the SPAM via the US.
Pedant point: SPAM is a luncheon meat made by Hormel Foods. Spam is unsolicited bulk email. That said...
Are these spammers actually going to move offshore? Move themselves, physically? Because if not then they're Americans in America sending emails on behalf of American companies also in America to American citizens living in America. I get the feeling there's somebody there to go after.
Right now their motive in moving their electronic operations overseas is to avoid getting shut down. US ISPs have, to their credit, been learning about spammers lately; it's fairly hard for the major spammers to do business, though the chickenboners who go through throwaway dialups are unaffected. If a law were passed allowing the spammer to be pursued, rather than just his internet access, then the spammer's meatspace operation would have to leave the country too. Maybe the big boys will consider it, but it'll be too much for most of them to contemplate.
Re:Something Smarter Is Needed
on
Cornucopia of Spam
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Creating laws, regulations, and whatnot will come nowhere near solving the problems. Sure, if a spammer lives in the US then maybe this would work; but what about all these scams from Europe, Australia, Britain, etc.
The vast majority of my spam comes from Americans, though not always via US ISPs. I get the occasional pyramid scheme - the same one every time, and it's fun to watch it wander around the world - and of course the Nigerian fraud, and once in a while a spam all in Chinese, but on the whole it's Americans who are the problem. A strong US spam law would go a long way to solving this.
Actually, had the US not intervened it's probable that Europe would have been on the Moon long ago, well ahead of the US. German rocketry was superb. Both the US and Soviet space efforts depended to a great extent on the expertise of captured German scientists; the mastermind behind the Apollo rockets was Wernher von Braun, the man responsible for the V2 ballistic missiles that pounded London towards the end of the war.
Of course, a Nazi Moon would be no fun at all. I don't even want to imagine the ways they would have found to militarise space.
Granted, it'd be the day when you see muslim (like, say, from Saudi) or chinese (as in, from Beijing) flying to the ISS on a regular basis, so maybe it's not that international...
Sure you would see that - the US would even put them up there. All NASA needs is a qualified Muslim or Chinese to step up to the plate. From what I understand, it takes many years for the training, so don't expect it to happen tomorrow, unless these people are already waiting in the wings.
In a gratuitous effort to keep their oil pusher friendly, the US sent Prince Sultan Abdul Aziz Al-Saud into orbit aboard STS 51-G, Discovery, on 17 June 1985. The official excuse was that Saudi Arabia was having a satellite launched by this mission, and the prince went up as a 'payload specialist'.
Oops: didn't read article closely enough. ASA, not government: absolutely no force of law, just guidelines for responsible advertisers. Such people generally don't spam anyway. One plus point, though - some of them were beginning to experiment with SMS spam, ISTR Sainsbury's did so a while back. Nice to see that being discouraged, even if it's not actually a ban.
They're an industry self-regulatory body. This means that respectable advertisers won't spam, but mainsleaze was never the big problem. Pyramid frauds and penis pill salesmen don't care what the ASA says.
... a UK law will only affect spam sent by UK citizens. I don't get much of that. I see a whole hell of a lot of stuff from the US, and occasionally from China or Korea (not just from America _via_ China, but actually sent by the Chinese); hardly ever anything from Europe.
The only thing I see from British spammers is pyramid schemes and the guy on Blueyonder who keeps sending out virus mails. Hopefully they'll get whacked a bit harder now, which can only be a good thing:-)
I *told* them keeping a kitten in the lab was a bad idea, but would they listen to me? Nooooooooooooo!
In quantum information, kittens are important. In order to get the entangled states to survive long enough to do any useful work, we must offer cats to the Great God Schrodinger. If Schrodinger is pleased with the sacrifice, the cat dies and the computer works. If Schrodinger is displeased, the cat lives and the computer fails. Sometimes the cat dies AND the computer fails, but that's just experimental error.
The sacrifice of cats is quite essential, and a well-respected scientific procedure. Please don't tell the animal rights people, they won't understand.
When was the last time you played a game you honestly thought was innovative?
Probably the original GTA. The London expansion was too easy, but quite possibly the best fun I've had in a game in years. Zipping about the place on a Mod scooter or in Austin Powers' car... ah, the memories:-)
Obviously I'm going to buy Orion 3 at the first opportunity (damn late release in.uk, gits gits gits) but the game that I'd go mad for would be a 3D version of Solar Jetman. Something similar to Descent would do the job quite nicely, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile on the net, in the context of chatrooms, IMs and text messages, we see a language evolving that does not ever need to be spoken, that will never have to be read aloud. In this case, the key thing is to eliminate redundancy - you want to get your message done quickly if you're in an interactive, realtime chatroom, and you want to get it done cheaply if you're paying by length. So you get tnx, txt, u, lol and so forth.
Should the text-only chatroom survive into the era of ultra-high bandwidth that lies ahead (and I think it will - you can keep up with ten people chatting at once in text, but not in sound) then I would not be surprised to see netspeak becoming a real dialect.
'I do not understand this sqeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.'
Churchill is remembered for 1940, making a desperate stand, his country alone against overwhelming power. Now, who's making a stand against overwhelming power in this situation? Bush, is it? I don't think so.
You are Tom Lehrer and I claim my £5.
1) The southern hemisphere is mostly ocean. The vast majority of the human race lives in the north. They're not being so very self-centred on that count. But...
2) In a whole lot of places there aren't the traditional four seasons; instead there are two, dry and rainy. So they don't call it fall, because it isn't.
3) In a whole lot of other places most of the trees are coniferous. So they don't call it fall either, because the leaves don't.
4) Most people alive, even those with four seasons and deciduous forests, don't speak English, and so don't call it fall anyway.
5) Of those who do speak English, live in areas with a four-season climate and deciduous plant life, a whole lot STILL don't call it fall, they call it autumn.
Otherwise excellent and bang on-message, but I suspect this bit needs some more thought. Company C are to ask spammers S when and where recipient X opted-in, but in doing so they must not divulge the identity of X. How, then, even if S is running a fully correct confirmed opt-in system, are they ever going to be able to answer?
Step 7: Cultivate the area around the house into a wetland, then make sure every environmentalist in the area is aware that it's there. Then, get the EPA in to declare it a wetland. This is way easier than you might think. It makes it just about impossible for anyone to build anything there ever again.
All the other kings said it were daft to build a castle in a swamp, but I built it anyway! It sank into the swamp. I built another one; it sank into the swamp too. I built a third one; it caught fire, fell over and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up! And that's what you'll be getting, my lad - the strongest castle in these islands!
Spamming me is negatively effective. If I get a flyer in the mail, I'll read it and I might, if interested, buy what's advertised in it. If I get a spam, I'll read it and make damn certain I never in my life buy anything whatsoever from the spamming company - in fact if the product is something I actually want I'll go out and buy it from the spammer's chief competitor, and let both know why. Then I'll track down the ISP from which the mail was sent and the one at which the website (if any) is hosted, forward them a copy of the spam and request that they enforce their respective AUPs.
Obviously the Niven book that would make the best big-budget effects monstrosity of a film would be Ringworld... but cast the wrong person as Louis and you face disaster. Making Speaker-to-Animals and Nessus look plausible would be a heck of a job, too. Compared to that, the CG involved in creating the ring, the flycycles and the flying buildings would be trivial.
More importantly... is this just the original GTA, or is London included? GTA was good, but London was awesome. Mod scooters and Mini Coopers and James Bond missions - about as cheesy as it gets but tremendous fun.
:-(
Site's slashdotted so hard it's showing up on seismographs, so I can't go check
At least the actual page itself is nice and lightweight. Might keep the server from imploding for at least a few minutes...
I'll see your station wagon full of backup tapes, and raise you an Antonov cargo plane full of DVDs.
Ever read news.admin.net-abuse.email? Spammers talk like this _all the time_. This one maybe scores a 4 / 10; it was too coherent to achieve even an average score, and didn't even threaten to sue anybody. Didn't accuse anyone of being anti-commerce radicals against the little guy who wanted the net for themselves, either.
Oh, watch that post's score sink! I suppose that violates his free speech too... ;-)
Yes they can. The newspaper owners can say to the KKK, 'No, piss off, we don't want your dirty money, and we don't want your adverts soiling our newspaper's reputation.'
they cannot be barred from advertising on billboards
Yes they can. The billboard owner can say to the KKK, 'No, piss off, we don't want your dirty money...' etc.
and they cannot be barred from posting in open forums.
Like, say, Slashdot? Just watch anything pro-KKK go to -1 in seconds.
But spammers don't have these rights?
Sure they do. But AOL have the same rights the newspaper owner, the billboard owner and the forum owner have: the right to say 'piss off'.
They came for the spammers, and I came along and got a brown shirt and knuckleduster of my very own, plus a great big baseball bat marked CLUE and a plank with a nail in it marked LART. And I did my bit - did you?
Ah, frea speach. What an overrated 'right' that is. Sorry, but your precious Amendment only prevents the government from shutting you up. There's no reason AOL can't censor you, and there's nothing to stop the Slashdot mods putting you to -1. That was settled long ago; Sanford Wallace, the Ralsky of his day, sued AOL and Compuserve for filtering his junk out, and he lost.
It costs AOL $2 per month per user just to handle the spam traffic. AOL's huge userbase makes them a magnet for dictionary attacks. If you want an unfiltered mail feed, then by all means pay someone extra for spam storage, or run your own mail server.
'And may I propose a small adjustment to your wits! You who would drain the taxes from the royal coffers!'
Pedant point: SPAM is a luncheon meat made by Hormel Foods. Spam is unsolicited bulk email. That said...
Are these spammers actually going to move offshore? Move themselves, physically? Because if not then they're Americans in America sending emails on behalf of American companies also in America to American citizens living in America. I get the feeling there's somebody there to go after.
Right now their motive in moving their electronic operations overseas is to avoid getting shut down. US ISPs have, to their credit, been learning about spammers lately; it's fairly hard for the major spammers to do business, though the chickenboners who go through throwaway dialups are unaffected. If a law were passed allowing the spammer to be pursued, rather than just his internet access, then the spammer's meatspace operation would have to leave the country too. Maybe the big boys will consider it, but it'll be too much for most of them to contemplate.
The vast majority of my spam comes from Americans, though not always via US ISPs. I get the occasional pyramid scheme - the same one every time, and it's fun to watch it wander around the world - and of course the Nigerian fraud, and once in a while a spam all in Chinese, but on the whole it's Americans who are the problem. A strong US spam law would go a long way to solving this.
Of course, a Nazi Moon would be no fun at all. I don't even want to imagine the ways they would have found to militarise space.
Sure you would see that - the US would even put them up there. All NASA needs is a qualified Muslim or Chinese to step up to the plate. From what I understand, it takes many years for the training, so don't expect it to happen tomorrow, unless these people are already waiting in the wings.
In a gratuitous effort to keep their oil pusher friendly, the US sent Prince Sultan Abdul Aziz Al-Saud into orbit aboard STS 51-G, Discovery, on 17 June 1985. The official excuse was that Saudi Arabia was having a satellite launched by this mission, and the prince went up as a 'payload specialist'.
Oops: didn't read article closely enough. ASA, not government: absolutely no force of law, just guidelines for responsible advertisers. Such people generally don't spam anyway. One plus point, though - some of them were beginning to experiment with SMS spam, ISTR Sainsbury's did so a while back. Nice to see that being discouraged, even if it's not actually a ban.
They're an industry self-regulatory body. This means that respectable advertisers won't spam, but mainsleaze was never the big problem. Pyramid frauds and penis pill salesmen don't care what the ASA says.
The only thing I see from British spammers is pyramid schemes and the guy on Blueyonder who keeps sending out virus mails. Hopefully they'll get whacked a bit harder now, which can only be a good thing :-)
In quantum information, kittens are important. In order to get the entangled states to survive long enough to do any useful work, we must offer cats to the Great God Schrodinger. If Schrodinger is pleased with the sacrifice, the cat dies and the computer works. If Schrodinger is displeased, the cat lives and the computer fails. Sometimes the cat dies AND the computer fails, but that's just experimental error.
The sacrifice of cats is quite essential, and a well-respected scientific procedure. Please don't tell the animal rights people, they won't understand.
Probably the original GTA. The London expansion was too easy, but quite possibly the best fun I've had in a game in years. Zipping about the place on a Mod scooter or in Austin Powers' car... ah, the memories :-)
Obviously I'm going to buy Orion 3 at the first opportunity (damn late release in .uk, gits gits gits) but the game that I'd go mad for would be a 3D version of Solar Jetman. Something similar to Descent would do the job quite nicely, I think.