The young ladies answering the phones were very polite and kind (also can mean beautiful, pleaseant, friendly, all the things you want a young lady to be.)
After they listened to my request they wanted to turn me down, but when I quoted the appropriate part of the license they asked for a couple of days to get the exact status from company management.
I had apparently a high enough level (of being annoying? Persistent?) as several rounds of telephonce calls resulted.
Doesn't quite translate but Czech and English don't share the same concepts in many ways.
Anyway, the article talks about just being persistent, and getting a variety of reasons why a refund is impossible.
One place I worked we had 'suggestion drives'. You got prizes for making suggestions, and such. The only result is that we got deluged with worthless suggestions - and we'd have to spend days writing justifications for denying totally boneheaded ideas.
I'd love to see the quality of the bug reports they got as a result.
Seriously. There are enough excellent articles there to teach most of the undergrad curriculum. You can teach most of common math from http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ and so on.
And you get the added benefit that you learn to approach all of that material with a healthy dose of skepticism - after all, someone with an agenda can skew the article to their point of view.
What a concept - teaching skepticism, corroboration from multiple sources, and independent thinking.... Nah, it will never work. No money in it.
In this case, the USAF owned the software. The people who bought it were wrong.
If you read the enlistment contract, it clearly spells out that you are on duty pretty much all the time - as in 24/7. That's why the military doesn't pay overtime and why you get 30 days vacation - because you don't have to get any other time off. Even at home, you're still on duty.
I know, I did it for 21 years. Stuff you develop for the military while in uniform belongs to the military.
So it really wasn't a DMCA issue at all. (Not that I don't think the DMCA is a crock, but it doesn't even apply in this case.)
Well, here's what IE7 has to say about StartSLL's own SSL cert:
There is a problem with this website's security certificate.
The security certificate presented by this website was not issued by a trusted certificate authority.
Security certificate problems may indicate an attempt to fool you or intercept any data you send to the server.
We recommend that you close this webpage and do not continue to this website.
Click here to close this webpage.
Continue to this website (not recommended).
More information
Humph.... The last two businesses I sold went for more than many people make in a lifetime. I know a thing or two about running a business. This particular business grew out of a favor for a friend; it has since then attracted a few more customers. It's still in the infancy stage and in the 'personal hobby' stage - I'm not interested in 80 hour weeks on top of my regular job. But since the business is spread through word of mouth by existing customers, trust isn't an issue - people come to me, I don't advertise for them.
So it makes sense for me to have a self-signed certificate. It's just annoying to have to explain to a secretary to click through the 'Click here and you die' warnings spewed forth by FF3 and IE7.
WHat annoys about this is that FF doesn't support CACert, which is an 'Open' certificate outfit. http://www.cacert.org/
I can buy a BS certificate from Godaddy.com for $10 and that's OK but a verified cert from CA Cert is no good. Go figure.
I run a small sideline business, and my whole yearly income would barely pay for a cert from someone like MS and the like. So I explain to my clients to click through the certificate BS. I'm after the in-route encryption; my clients know who they're connecting to.
I work for a city, and the Librarian most emphatically does not have the right to give away, loan, or otherwise remove any city property. That is a crime.
There is a due process for disposing of City property. No employee can make that decision.
What the FBI has done is sweet talked some innocent person into committing a crime.
Heh. IN ancient China, the applicants used to write the classics in tiny characters on their silk undergarments.
I think there's merit to this. Come in to the US in a white silk suit and underwear covered with near-microscopic writing from all the holy texts in the world - Bible, Upanishads, Koran, whatever else comes to mind.
I'd love to come in to the US naked after the over-zealous border guards confiscated all my clothes.
I second that. I work out at a gym (and also teach there.) The group is incredibly supportive - we know who's on vacation, and who's screwing off. And we pester each other to show up - and to make sure everyone is OK, doing fine, etc. If you don't show up for a few days, someone will call or email you to make sure you're OK.
Oh, and just a handful are true athletes. The rest of us are pilsbury doughboys - but that doesn't stop us from having fun.
adherence to environmental regulations is something the oil companies and mining companies have really shown they can be good at now. They are good.
Gah. Horsepuckey. Didn't BP just settle some big lawsuit over letting a few gallons of oil run all over the ground due to an utter lack of maintenance?
Where I live, we have mercury in our rivers because the mining companies have all gone 'bankrupt' leaving the taxpayers with the mess.
Anyway, that statement alone is enough to cast serious doubt on everything else you said. Basically, your position as as long as it's a Republican crook, it's OK with you.
The price of the dollar. Currently, the US$ is pretty much toilet paper. It's so bad that 3 German banks refused to exchange US$ for E. So it's no wonder that *right now* things cost more.
But I've always wondered at the seemingly high prices in Europe for certain things. I think Europeans value money differently from Americans. Some things are very cheap; others are expensive. And some places are just plain expensive all around; buy a soda in Amsterdam and you will know what I mean.
I can only guess that salaries in Amsterdam must be higher than in the US.
Americans tend to talk quality and then buy the cheapest thing they can find. From my limited experience, Europeans tend to value quality a bit higher than Americans. Also, service tends to be better in Europe than in the US. (OK, these are gross generalizations but I have relatives in Europe who work in the same industry as I do...)
Humph. I actually went to one of those Ivy league schools you rant about. Yes, many of the kids were wealthy. OTOH, Princeton is currently the only school that I know of that gives outright grants - not loans - to incoming students. The admission process is needs-blind; the admissions office never even sees the financial status of the student.
So... I was in the top 5% of one of the best private schools in NYC. Nearly perfect SATs, International Baccalaureate, you name it. I was barely average at Princeton. I later taught at a small, private, non-exclusive university. I can tell you that there are bright students everywhere, but you can rise higher and learn much more at a school like Princeton. Google for Gerard O'Neil; he was my freshman year physics instructor. Not lecturer, mind you - the instructor with 12 or so students. You don't find that in a college like where I taught.
And the reason you learn more is that the profs demand more, much more. I argued vehemently for allowing K&R to be used as a textbook when I was teaching. I was not allowed, since the 'dean' deemed it too difficult for the students. At Princeton, K&R was assumed self-study reference and the profs assumed you had read it and understood it - at freshman level. That is the difference. A 70 hour / week study load for incoming engineering students was normal.
Things are pretty hazy, but I think this may be the first game I wrote.... ISTR working on the code; maybe I got it from somewhere first and moded it. Or maybe this is the original code without my mods...
Anyway, it doesn't have to be too complex to be fun. This game got so popular that the powers than be prohibited its use as it consumed prodigious quantities of paper.
Well, my parents own a mac.. They're completely computer illiterate. They are happy to pay the upgrade prices because the Mac upgrades are guaranteed to work. Plus they get free support from the Mac store they purchase from.
Heh, I see a lot of NC plates on E-Bay soon. If I had one of those, I'd be hawking it...
I remember seeing a german plate one time that had 'FUCK-nnn' or something. Turned out that FUCK was the designation of some town or other.
Didn't Exxon pick that name because it was meaningless in every language?
Re:DIY hack = take apart consumer stuff.
on
DIY Solar Resources?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Look at RV sources as well; same stuff as marine, but 1/10 the price.
One major caveat: a car battery will *not* work for this. A car battery is designed to provide very high current for a limited length of time, the exact opposite of a solar system need. A car battery will fail quickly in this application.
You want deep cycle batteries; google for trojan batteries.
Christ, did anyone look at the names of those yachts? What a bunch of dweebs!
If I had a yacht that big, I'd give it some really hot chick name, something really sexy. Pandora, Alastrina, Ailis, Iona, Andromeda would be good. Not Octopus! Fer chissakes, they're slimy and cold and have a sharp beak!
Then again, my boat is 14' long and 40 years old.... So what do I know.
Well, yes, it has to be controlled somehow, but limiting it to some artificial threshhold is silly. You don't disqualify teachers because they're single and male. The problem is that any simple litmus test will remove a significant portion of the population without actually addressing the problem. In this case the problem is one of possible child abuse and molestation.
Removing single men, gays, or men who don't have children in the group will do nothing to address that problem. At a total guess, I would think the % of child abusers pretty much cuts across all such stereotypes and holds steady no matter which group you choose.
I own a 1989 Isuzu Trooper, arguably one of the last true SUVs to be built before the soccer moms discovered the SUV. I also own a 2000 Ford Econoline van that's converted to a small RV. I drive perhaps 6K miles / year on both vehicles. My 'fleet average' is around 17 MPG.
My family owns 6 bicycles and those are our main mode of transportation. We pretty much have to clear the cobwebs off the steering wheels every time we get in the car.
We could buy a hybrid, but think about the resources building a new car takes. It takes a lot of resources - fuel, electricity, raw materials - and also creates a lot of extremely polluting stuff that inevitably gets dumped somewhere, most likely in some backyard in China.
So at least for some, keeping an SUV makes perfect sense.
If you're like me and a bunch of very smart students, you can't fail to be impressed. I must be dumb.... Stiching together an image of higher-res photos might be a technical wow, but sorry, I'm not really impressed. This sort of thing I might expect from a college lab, but for a multi-billion dollar company to present this as some sort of earth-shaking innovation?
Slashdot Mirror
The young ladies answering the phones were very polite and kind (also can mean beautiful, pleaseant, friendly, all the things you want a young lady to be.)
After they listened to my request they wanted to turn me down, but when I quoted the appropriate part of the license they asked for a couple of days to get the exact status from company management.
I had apparently a high enough level (of being annoying? Persistent?) as several rounds of telephonce calls resulted.
Doesn't quite translate but Czech and English don't share the same concepts in many ways.
Anyway, the article talks about just being persistent, and getting a variety of reasons why a refund is impossible.
just fine.
See how good Vista is?
One place I worked we had 'suggestion drives'. You got prizes for making suggestions, and such. The only result is that we got deluged with worthless suggestions - and we'd have to spend days writing justifications for denying totally boneheaded ideas.
I'd love to see the quality of the bug reports they got as a result.
But a $10/year cert is really worthless. It's about the same as a self-signed cert. Basically, it says:
Yes I can receive email at this domain name.
Duh. Great. So I get fakepaypal.com, complete with an MX record, pay $10 for a 'real' cert and BANG! I'm legitimate.
The problem is the confusion of saying:
This transmission is encrypted and is difficult to spy on
I am really talking to whoever it is I think I'm talking to
The two are different issues and the current SSL certs confuse (or should I say) monetize the second issue.
Heck, just use wikipedia.
Seriously. There are enough excellent articles there to teach most of the undergrad curriculum. You can teach most of common math from http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ and so on.
And you get the added benefit that you learn to approach all of that material with a healthy dose of skepticism - after all, someone with an agenda can skew the article to their point of view.
What a concept - teaching skepticism, corroboration from multiple sources, and independent thinking.... Nah, it will never work. No money in it.
In this case, the USAF owned the software. The people who bought it were wrong.
If you read the enlistment contract, it clearly spells out that you are on duty pretty much all the time - as in 24/7. That's why the military doesn't pay overtime and why you get 30 days vacation - because you don't have to get any other time off. Even at home, you're still on duty.
I know, I did it for 21 years. Stuff you develop for the military while in uniform belongs to the military.
So it really wasn't a DMCA issue at all. (Not that I don't think the DMCA is a crock, but it doesn't even apply in this case.)
Well, here's what IE7 has to say about StartSLL's own SSL cert:
There is a problem with this website's security certificate.
The security certificate presented by this website was not issued by a trusted certificate authority.
Security certificate problems may indicate an attempt to fool you or intercept any data you send to the server.
We recommend that you close this webpage and do not continue to this website.
Click here to close this webpage.
Continue to this website (not recommended).
More information
Humph.... The last two businesses I sold went for more than many people make in a lifetime. I know a thing or two about running a business. This particular business grew out of a favor for a friend; it has since then attracted a few more customers. It's still in the infancy stage and in the 'personal hobby' stage - I'm not interested in 80 hour weeks on top of my regular job. But since the business is spread through word of mouth by existing customers, trust isn't an issue - people come to me, I don't advertise for them.
So it makes sense for me to have a self-signed certificate. It's just annoying to have to explain to a secretary to click through the 'Click here and you die' warnings spewed forth by FF3 and IE7.
WHat annoys about this is that FF doesn't support CACert, which is an 'Open' certificate outfit.
http://www.cacert.org/
I can buy a BS certificate from Godaddy.com for $10 and that's OK but a verified cert from CA Cert is no good. Go figure.
I run a small sideline business, and my whole yearly income would barely pay for a cert from someone like MS and the like. So I explain to my clients to click through the certificate BS. I'm after the in-route encryption; my clients know who they're connecting to.
I work for a city, and the Librarian most emphatically does not have the right to give away, loan, or otherwise remove any city property. That is a crime.
There is a due process for disposing of City property. No employee can make that decision.
What the FBI has done is sweet talked some innocent person into committing a crime.
Heh. IN ancient China, the applicants used to write the classics in tiny characters on their silk undergarments.
I think there's merit to this. Come in to the US in a white silk suit and underwear covered with near-microscopic writing from all the holy texts in the world - Bible, Upanishads, Koran, whatever else comes to mind.
I'd love to come in to the US naked after the over-zealous border guards confiscated all my clothes.
I second that. I work out at a gym (and also teach there.) The group is incredibly supportive - we know who's on vacation, and who's screwing off. And we pester each other to show up - and to make sure everyone is OK, doing fine, etc. If you don't show up for a few days, someone will call or email you to make sure you're OK.
Oh, and just a handful are true athletes. The rest of us are pilsbury doughboys - but that doesn't stop us from having fun.
adherence to environmental regulations is something the oil companies and mining companies have really shown they can be good at now. They are good.
Gah. Horsepuckey. Didn't BP just settle some big lawsuit over letting a few gallons of oil run all over the ground due to an utter lack of maintenance?
Where I live, we have mercury in our rivers because the mining companies have all gone 'bankrupt' leaving the taxpayers with the mess.
Anyway, that statement alone is enough to cast serious doubt on everything else you said. Basically, your position as as long as it's a Republican crook, it's OK with you.
Well, the price structure was established when the dollar was high against the Euro. Then the dollar fell, but the Euro prices remained the same.
Profit!
The price of the dollar. Currently, the US$ is pretty much toilet paper. It's so bad that 3 German banks refused to exchange US$ for E. So it's no wonder that *right now* things cost more.
But I've always wondered at the seemingly high prices in Europe for certain things. I think Europeans value money differently from Americans. Some things are very cheap; others are expensive. And some places are just plain expensive all around; buy a soda in Amsterdam and you will know what I mean.
I can only guess that salaries in Amsterdam must be higher than in the US.
Americans tend to talk quality and then buy the cheapest thing they can find. From my limited experience, Europeans tend to value quality a bit higher than Americans. Also, service tends to be better in Europe than in the US. (OK, these are gross generalizations but I have relatives in Europe who work in the same industry as I do...)
Humph. I actually went to one of those Ivy league schools you rant about. Yes, many of the kids were wealthy. OTOH, Princeton is currently the only school that I know of that gives outright grants - not loans - to incoming students. The admission process is needs-blind; the admissions office never even sees the financial status of the student.
So... I was in the top 5% of one of the best private schools in NYC. Nearly perfect SATs, International Baccalaureate, you name it. I was barely average at Princeton. I later taught at a small, private, non-exclusive university. I can tell you that there are bright students everywhere, but you can rise higher and learn much more at a school like Princeton. Google for Gerard O'Neil; he was my freshman year physics instructor. Not lecturer, mind you - the instructor with 12 or so students. You don't find that in a college like where I taught.
And the reason you learn more is that the profs demand more, much more. I argued vehemently for allowing K&R to be used as a textbook when I was teaching. I was not allowed, since the 'dean' deemed it too difficult for the students. At Princeton, K&R was assumed self-study reference and the profs assumed you had read it and understood it - at freshman level. That is the difference. A 70 hour / week study load for incoming engineering students was normal.
Things are pretty hazy, but I think this may be the first game I wrote.... ISTR working on the code; maybe I got it from somewhere first and moded it. Or maybe this is the original code without my mods...
http://www.pdp8online.com/pdp8cgi/os8_html/GUNNER.30?act=file;fn=images/os8/edu30.tu56;blk=283,3,0;to=auto/
Anyway, it doesn't have to be too complex to be fun. This game got so popular that the powers than be prohibited its use as it consumed prodigious quantities of paper.
Well, my parents own a mac.. They're completely computer illiterate. They are happy to pay the upgrade prices because the Mac upgrades are guaranteed to work. Plus they get free support from the Mac store they purchase from.
So it's a win-win - happy customer, big profits.
Me, I build my own servers. They plug and ask.
Heh, I see a lot of NC plates on E-Bay soon. If I had one of those, I'd be hawking it...
I remember seeing a german plate one time that had 'FUCK-nnn' or something. Turned out that FUCK was the designation of some town or other.
Didn't Exxon pick that name because it was meaningless in every language?
Look at RV sources as well; same stuff as marine, but 1/10 the price.
One major caveat: a car battery will *not* work for this. A car battery is designed to provide very high current for a limited length of time, the exact opposite of a solar system need. A car battery will fail quickly in this application.
You want deep cycle batteries; google for trojan batteries.
Christ, did anyone look at the names of those yachts? What a bunch of dweebs!
If I had a yacht that big, I'd give it some really hot chick name, something really sexy. Pandora, Alastrina, Ailis, Iona, Andromeda would be good. Not Octopus! Fer chissakes, they're slimy and cold and have a sharp beak!
Then again, my boat is 14' long and 40 years old.... So what do I know.
Well, yes, it has to be controlled somehow, but limiting it to some artificial threshhold is silly. You don't disqualify teachers because they're single and male. The problem is that any simple litmus test will remove a significant portion of the population without actually addressing the problem. In this case the problem is one of possible child abuse and molestation.
Removing single men, gays, or men who don't have children in the group will do nothing to address that problem. At a total guess, I would think the % of child abusers pretty much cuts across all such stereotypes and holds steady no matter which group you choose.
What, do married men get their dick cut off? WTF does being married or single have to do with child abuse?
ANd then there's the Mitsubishi Delica http://www.delica.ca/. Of course I can't find the japanese site...
Well, yes and no.
I own a 1989 Isuzu Trooper, arguably one of the last true SUVs to be built before the soccer moms discovered the SUV. I also own a 2000 Ford Econoline van that's converted to a small RV. I drive perhaps 6K miles / year on both vehicles. My 'fleet average' is around 17 MPG.
My family owns 6 bicycles and those are our main mode of transportation. We pretty much have to clear the cobwebs off the steering wheels every time we get in the car.
We could buy a hybrid, but think about the resources building a new car takes. It takes a lot of resources - fuel, electricity, raw materials - and also creates a lot of extremely polluting stuff that inevitably gets dumped somewhere, most likely in some backyard in China.
So at least for some, keeping an SUV makes perfect sense.