while others his age are attending the first grade
Really? That would have them getting out of high school school 12 later at age 20. I suspect there are not really many Korean first graders at age 8. But then this is/. and it's not like the editors check for any accuracy.
Want to know how much harm can be done without a SSN? Everything! As an example, federal law requires a SSN to open a bank account, including getting a credit card. But I got one when I flatty refused to give out my SSN. Here's what happened: This was a few years ago (long before the do no call list, and I got a call from a bank telling me I was pre-approved for a new free card. Like any sane person I hate telemarketers, so I decided to jerk the telemarketer around. I said sure. They started confirming all of my information. I even had them raise the credit limit from the ten grand they were offering me to fiveteen. Then the telemarketer asked for my SSN. I was waiting for this, expecting it, and happily told him that I wouldn't give it. He pointed out to me that federal law required it for the account. I told him I didn't care; that he had already said I was pre-approved, and that I wasn't crazy enough to give out my SSN to someone who called me on the phone, no matter who they claimed they were with. I pointed out that I thought anyone who gave them their SSN under such a premis was a complete idiot, and I didn't care to do business with a bank that had idiots for customers and treated their customers like idiots.
I was feeling quite pleased with myself, but wasn't expecting what happened next: the telemarketer said: O.K., but then went on to confirm a few more things! I asked why they wanted that information; he said to send out the card. I asked what about the Federal Law that required my SSN to open an account? He said, "we're a finanial institution. We already have your SSN. I'll just put it on the form". And in a few days I had a new credit card with a 15 grand limit, even though I had refused to give a bank my SSN.
I do protect my SSN to the extreme. (Once a rental car place tried to refuse to rent me a car if I wouldn't put it on the form. I told them fine, just put that in writing and I'll leave and be back with my lawyer. I got the rental car without giving a SSN.) But don't kid yourself that people can't do things without it.
Why am I willing to pay more for music than I would for video?
I guess pretty much for the same reason that you are willing to pay more for a movie sound track CD than for the DVD of the movie itself. The RIAA has kept the prices artifically high and you go along with it.
Yea, there are plenty of lame exceptions, including for the politicians themselves. I always ask these callers to hold for a few seconds, then put the phone down and don't go back to it. I figure however long they wait for me they can't be bothering someone else in that time.
It has been pretty effective. Telemarketing calls were coming in hot and heavy right up to the last day, then stopped completely the day the ban went into effect. (Our ban is complete, not just an after-hours ban, as long as there is no business ralationship with the caller.) But since then a few telemarketers have figured thay can get away with breaking the law as long as they keep a low profile. I now get perhaps a call a month that is in clear violation of the law. I report these to my state's Atournet General office, but I've never heard of anything being done about them and over all we have only heard of one or two sucessful prosecutions they have done against anyone breaking this law. So it has helped a lot, but it's not perfect and I would like to see even more teeth in it.
It identifies the cow, then finds the udders, milks the cow, cleans it's undercarriage, and lets it go.
Perhaps we should wait for the version with the bug fix, the one that identifies the cow, then finds the udders, cleans it's undercarriage, milks the cow, and lets it go. The cleaning is for the sake of the quality of the milk, not for the cow! Feel free to add a step that does a second pass after the milking, but it needs to be done before.
Don't kid yourselves that you will get anything. For every dollar of "subsidity" to get you to switch, the price of these set top converters and anything else subsidized will go up by at least a dollar, likely more! The only ones getting this money will be the Chinese and Japaneese making the things. You the tax payer get what you always get.
How does one get to the torrents?
on
Quake 4 Linux
·
· Score: 1
I followed the link on http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/quake4/ to the BitTorrent tracker, but it wants me to "log in" to their site and asks my username and password. Since I have none I can't get in. But I can see that tere are 20 leechers, so a few people must have solved this problem? I would much rather use BitTorrent than FTP, how do I get to the torrents?
I have recently had problems with my HP notebook battery and that caused me to take a close look at it. Unfortunately, it's not one of the batteries listed in the article, so I guess no replacement for me. But I noticed on the side of the battery what seems to be some sort of indicator system. It looks like a finger icon and 5 small spots, perhaps LEDs, on the side of the battery. But the way the battery is mounted these spots cannot be seen when the battery is in place, and they don't light or do anything when the battery is removed. I was hoping that the finger icon was some sort of pressure sensitive switch, but that does not seem to be the case. Does anyone know how this thing on the HP lithium ion battery is used?
The bottom line is that the more ads that I block, the more stable my system is and the less often it and the browser crashes. I wouldn't mind at all if ads were simple banner ads that didn't overly hog bandwidth or compromise system security. And there are some ads that I don't even want to block. But when an ad has flash animation, pop-ups, or other sources of problems that I recognize as contributing to issues that crash my browser or even my system, I have another canidate for my hosts file. Sure, I know that the browser should not be crashed or crash the system because of the content in things it downloads, but the sad truth is that this happens, and I need to block ads if I want my system to be more stable. The advertisers have brought this on themselves by using too agressive of techniques in their advertisements.
And some URLs, such as all those that I can determine used by aureate and all of their other alliases, will forever be banned for the nasty problem that their spyware has caused me. It's called being defensive.
Actually, neither do the Canon ink tanks that I buy. Just a hunk of plastic, a sponge that takes up lots of the space, and a little ink. Highly profitable. And I've learned the hard way that if I use replacement ink then the jets stop working and I do have to buy the whole print head assembly, for a little more than I originally paid for the printer (wish I could buy more of this printer at that price, but it is no longer offered).
Sure, it costs 50 cents or more to print a 4x6 photo when the cost of the ink is more than the cost by ounce of Dom Perignon. Maybe the printer makers will get a little less greedy, but that hardly seems likely. Particularly when there is still a good and growing market for office and home color printing. I certainly would do 4x6's at a local store, but the sad truth is that most of what I print is larger format and/or special formats (like half fold photo cards). And the retail outlets are still gouging as badly as the printer vendors on anything larger than 4x6, if not more so. It also doesn't seem likely that the retailers will extend good prices to anything but simple 4x6s, but one can hope.
Sure, I forgot, the MPAA is going to change their stripes over night and become nice reasonable fair people to do business with. And I'm sure that the money they give you back for the use of your bandwidth will be a true and honest savings; they wouldn't think of jacking the price up on the front end to make up for that discount. I doubt if they will even hobble the download with crippling DRM crap, they will likely let you play it back on your home entertainment system as you see fit for content that you paid good money for. This isn't the old MPAA that is buying politicians to try to outlaw fair use after the courts told them they were overstepping. This isn't the old MPAA that is trying to constantly extend copyright terms so that the concept put fourth in the U.S. Constitution of a limited term of protection in return for creative works eventually moving in to the public domain will be efectively destroyed. This is the new friendly MPAA who I should want to enrich not only by buying their product but also by subsidizing their delivery system, in return for being told I'm saving a buck, if I buy again, over a price that they tightly set wherever they want. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
'We want to distribute paid and ad-supported content, using this technology.'"
But what they want and what the user wants and what they really can do can be very different things. BitTorrent works now because a lot of individual users are willing to help pitch in and share their computer resources and electricity and bandwidth to help share files, usually motivated by little more than wanting the system to work so their own next download goes fast and smooth. I'm seeding the new Knoppix DVD by BitTorrent right now, have been for several days, and seeded about 85-90 gig worth of the last version too. But if some company is distributing files that I have to pay for, I'm hardly likely to keep seeding after I get mine. I'm much more likely to exploit some of the vulnerabilities that are known to exist in BitTorrent to make it look like I'm uploading when I'm not and impove my download even more. Pretty much the same if some fat cat is getting rich off of my bandwidth delivering ads.
A more malicious user may even put some effort into poisoning torrents, mucking up the entire model and system.
Of course, they can always take that money and spend a little of it on bandwidth and seeding systems. But then you give up the main concept of BitTorrent; you are back to a central download point (even if it is on multiple computers and even if parts of it are scattered around the country or globe). It really is nothing more than some download manager with the BitTorrent name on it. What we know as BitTorrent would not really be what is going on in such a case. The difference between this new BitTorrent and what we know now as BitToreent would be as large as the difference between the old and new Napsters; they are the same in name only. Napster users were not going to host files and spend their own bandwidth so that the music industry could make a profit from it, and I don't see people downloading large files by BitTorrent making their resources available so that the MPAA, RIAA and others can offer files for download for pay on a BitTorrent system anything like we know now.
if it's paired up with an appliance that drives the phone from a full-size keyboard and display.
Yea, right. Isn't that "appliance" basically the computer then, and the cel phone the Internet access or digital modem? I guess if you want to really cripple yourself you can limit the processing power of the appliance to the point that it's useless without the cel phone, but is there any point in doing so?
I think the point is that by the standards of the list itself the Prisoner would have to be on the list long before (and much higher rated) than The Man From Uncle or Wild Wild West. Personally I wouldn't include any of these shows in a Sci-fi list, but to include the ones they did and leave out The Prisoner makes no sense at all.
They stuck in a lot of shows that are hard to justify as true sci-fi, or are hard to explain other members of the franchise if they are (Xena at 12 but Hercules nowhere on the list at all, when several members of the Trek franchise made the list, showing it's not about only one to a franchise). A show like That Was Then makes the list of 50 best, but they left out so many others, including Time Tunnel, Land of Giants, Men in Space, even the obvious classic The Invaders. Nowhere Man made the list but Menenium did not, nor did Harsh Realm, but I keep coming back to see that That Was Then is in the list, and not even in the bottom 10. It wouldn't take long to come up with a couple dozen other shows that much more deserve to be on this list than many of the choices that they came up with. It would have been better titled "50 Sci-fi shows I can list without much thinking and write a small blurb on each to get a paycheck", the intent sure wasn't to really come up with a list of the 50 best sci-fi shows by any standard.
For any Firebird developers (the e-mail co-product to Fixfox), one extension I would really like is the ability to click on one or a group of e-mail and send back to the sender (or whatever e-mail address the lying spammer has used for the reply address) a official looking "bounce" that the account does not exist. Wouldn't mind if it forwards the e-mail to abuse@ftc.gov in the same click, and reports it anywhere else that might be helpful too, but convincing the sender that the e-mail address is not really valid seems like the only effective way to reduce spam.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? That would have them getting out of high school school 12 later at age 20. I suspect there are not really many Korean first graders at age 8. But then this is /. and it's not like the editors check for any accuracy.
I was feeling quite pleased with myself, but wasn't expecting what happened next: the telemarketer said: O.K., but then went on to confirm a few more things! I asked why they wanted that information; he said to send out the card. I asked what about the Federal Law that required my SSN to open an account? He said, "we're a finanial institution. We already have your SSN. I'll just put it on the form". And in a few days I had a new credit card with a 15 grand limit, even though I had refused to give a bank my SSN.
I do protect my SSN to the extreme. (Once a rental car place tried to refuse to rent me a car if I wouldn't put it on the form. I told them fine, just put that in writing and I'll leave and be back with my lawyer. I got the rental car without giving a SSN.) But don't kid yourself that people can't do things without it.
I guess pretty much for the same reason that you are willing to pay more for a movie sound track CD than for the DVD of the movie itself. The RIAA has kept the prices artifically high and you go along with it.
Yea, there are plenty of lame exceptions, including for the politicians themselves. I always ask these callers to hold for a few seconds, then put the phone down and don't go back to it. I figure however long they wait for me they can't be bothering someone else in that time.
It has been pretty effective. Telemarketing calls were coming in hot and heavy right up to the last day, then stopped completely the day the ban went into effect. (Our ban is complete, not just an after-hours ban, as long as there is no business ralationship with the caller.) But since then a few telemarketers have figured thay can get away with breaking the law as long as they keep a low profile. I now get perhaps a call a month that is in clear violation of the law. I report these to my state's Atournet General office, but I've never heard of anything being done about them and over all we have only heard of one or two sucessful prosecutions they have done against anyone breaking this law. So it has helped a lot, but it's not perfect and I would like to see even more teeth in it.
So I guess, Microsoft being above the law, it's OK when they do that. The end justifies the means, after all.
Perhaps we should wait for the version with the bug fix, the one that identifies the cow, then finds the udders, cleans it's undercarriage, milks the cow, and lets it go. The cleaning is for the sake of the quality of the milk, not for the cow! Feel free to add a step that does a second pass after the milking, but it needs to be done before.
Don't kid yourselves that you will get anything. For every dollar of "subsidity" to get you to switch, the price of these set top converters and anything else subsidized will go up by at least a dollar, likely more! The only ones getting this money will be the Chinese and Japaneese making the things. You the tax payer get what you always get.
I followed the link on http://zerowing.idsoftware.com/linux/quake4/ to the BitTorrent tracker, but it wants me to "log in" to their site and asks my username and password. Since I have none I can't get in. But I can see that tere are 20 leechers, so a few people must have solved this problem? I would much rather use BitTorrent than FTP, how do I get to the torrents?
If they are ethical, why are they working with Microsoft?
It would be nice to find a version of this article that wasn't written in Chinglish. Come on people, this isn't rocket science .....
I have recently had problems with my HP notebook battery and that caused me to take a close look at it. Unfortunately, it's not one of the batteries listed in the article, so I guess no replacement for me. But I noticed on the side of the battery what seems to be some sort of indicator system. It looks like a finger icon and 5 small spots, perhaps LEDs, on the side of the battery. But the way the battery is mounted these spots cannot be seen when the battery is in place, and they don't light or do anything when the battery is removed. I was hoping that the finger icon was some sort of pressure sensitive switch, but that does not seem to be the case. Does anyone know how this thing on the HP lithium ion battery is used?
The bottom line is that the more ads that I block, the more stable my system is and the less often it and the browser crashes. I wouldn't mind at all if ads were simple banner ads that didn't overly hog bandwidth or compromise system security. And there are some ads that I don't even want to block. But when an ad has flash animation, pop-ups, or other sources of problems that I recognize as contributing to issues that crash my browser or even my system, I have another canidate for my hosts file. Sure, I know that the browser should not be crashed or crash the system because of the content in things it downloads, but the sad truth is that this happens, and I need to block ads if I want my system to be more stable. The advertisers have brought this on themselves by using too agressive of techniques in their advertisements. And some URLs, such as all those that I can determine used by aureate and all of their other alliases, will forever be banned for the nasty problem that their spyware has caused me. It's called being defensive.
Actually, neither do the Canon ink tanks that I buy. Just a hunk of plastic, a sponge that takes up lots of the space, and a little ink. Highly profitable. And I've learned the hard way that if I use replacement ink then the jets stop working and I do have to buy the whole print head assembly, for a little more than I originally paid for the printer (wish I could buy more of this printer at that price, but it is no longer offered).
Sure, it costs 50 cents or more to print a 4x6 photo when the cost of the ink is more than the cost by ounce of Dom Perignon. Maybe the printer makers will get a little less greedy, but that hardly seems likely. Particularly when there is still a good and growing market for office and home color printing. I certainly would do 4x6's at a local store, but the sad truth is that most of what I print is larger format and/or special formats (like half fold photo cards). And the retail outlets are still gouging as badly as the printer vendors on anything larger than 4x6, if not more so. It also doesn't seem likely that the retailers will extend good prices to anything but simple 4x6s, but one can hope.
Lance Henriksen and his credit card?????
Sure, I forgot, the MPAA is going to change their stripes over night and become nice reasonable fair people to do business with. And I'm sure that the money they give you back for the use of your bandwidth will be a true and honest savings; they wouldn't think of jacking the price up on the front end to make up for that discount. I doubt if they will even hobble the download with crippling DRM crap, they will likely let you play it back on your home entertainment system as you see fit for content that you paid good money for. This isn't the old MPAA that is buying politicians to try to outlaw fair use after the courts told them they were overstepping. This isn't the old MPAA that is trying to constantly extend copyright terms so that the concept put fourth in the U.S. Constitution of a limited term of protection in return for creative works eventually moving in to the public domain will be efectively destroyed. This is the new friendly MPAA who I should want to enrich not only by buying their product but also by subsidizing their delivery system, in return for being told I'm saving a buck, if I buy again, over a price that they tightly set wherever they want. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
But what they want and what the user wants and what they really can do can be very different things. BitTorrent works now because a lot of individual users are willing to help pitch in and share their computer resources and electricity and bandwidth to help share files, usually motivated by little more than wanting the system to work so their own next download goes fast and smooth. I'm seeding the new Knoppix DVD by BitTorrent right now, have been for several days, and seeded about 85-90 gig worth of the last version too. But if some company is distributing files that I have to pay for, I'm hardly likely to keep seeding after I get mine. I'm much more likely to exploit some of the vulnerabilities that are known to exist in BitTorrent to make it look like I'm uploading when I'm not and impove my download even more. Pretty much the same if some fat cat is getting rich off of my bandwidth delivering ads.
A more malicious user may even put some effort into poisoning torrents, mucking up the entire model and system.
Of course, they can always take that money and spend a little of it on bandwidth and seeding systems. But then you give up the main concept of BitTorrent; you are back to a central download point (even if it is on multiple computers and even if parts of it are scattered around the country or globe). It really is nothing more than some download manager with the BitTorrent name on it. What we know as BitTorrent would not really be what is going on in such a case. The difference between this new BitTorrent and what we know now as BitToreent would be as large as the difference between the old and new Napsters; they are the same in name only. Napster users were not going to host files and spend their own bandwidth so that the music industry could make a profit from it, and I don't see people downloading large files by BitTorrent making their resources available so that the MPAA, RIAA and others can offer files for download for pay on a BitTorrent system anything like we know now.
Yea, right. Isn't that "appliance" basically the computer then, and the cel phone the Internet access or digital modem? I guess if you want to really cripple yourself you can limit the processing power of the appliance to the point that it's useless without the cel phone, but is there any point in doing so?
I think the point is that by the standards of the list itself the Prisoner would have to be on the list long before (and much higher rated) than The Man From Uncle or Wild Wild West. Personally I wouldn't include any of these shows in a Sci-fi list, but to include the ones they did and leave out The Prisoner makes no sense at all.
They stuck in a lot of shows that are hard to justify as true sci-fi, or are hard to explain other members of the franchise if they are (Xena at 12 but Hercules nowhere on the list at all, when several members of the Trek franchise made the list, showing it's not about only one to a franchise). A show like That Was Then makes the list of 50 best, but they left out so many others, including Time Tunnel, Land of Giants, Men in Space, even the obvious classic The Invaders. Nowhere Man made the list but Menenium did not, nor did Harsh Realm, but I keep coming back to see that That Was Then is in the list, and not even in the bottom 10. It wouldn't take long to come up with a couple dozen other shows that much more deserve to be on this list than many of the choices that they came up with. It would have been better titled "50 Sci-fi shows I can list without much thinking and write a small blurb on each to get a paycheck", the intent sure wasn't to really come up with a list of the 50 best sci-fi shows by any standard.
For any Firebird developers (the e-mail co-product to Fixfox), one extension I would really like is the ability to click on one or a group of e-mail and send back to the sender (or whatever e-mail address the lying spammer has used for the reply address) a official looking "bounce" that the account does not exist. Wouldn't mind if it forwards the e-mail to abuse@ftc.gov in the same click, and reports it anywhere else that might be helpful too, but convincing the sender that the e-mail address is not really valid seems like the only effective way to reduce spam.
They don't file lawsuits on Sunday.
We have a credability problem here.
Of course I code sign, I'm deaf and mute you insensitive clod!