if they had your interests as a USA citizen at heart, you would have
free health care
free good quality education to tertiary level(ie everyone gets the same quality environment, and texts to learn from)
social welfare for anyone who fell out of a job or house for what ever reason.
rehab not punishment for criminals, ie provide them with the life skills they need to live straight when they get out.
no capital punishment
proper minimum wage and benefits that people could actually live on
enviromental control on pollution, so that you are not made sick by where you work or live.
proportional representation (see NZ) and independent election supervisors (see Florida for how not to do this)
Foreign aid that actually benefited foreigners not USA companies. Ie make it nice to stay at home.
Notice that only rich people are doing well in the USA and that the revolution may well come from within, just like what happened to Russia.
Personally I'd much rather support social welfare and prescription heroin programs and the like than be mugged, or burgled because I am lucky enough to have what someone else wants and doesn't have the opportunity to get legally.
Having the USA government in charge of everything means that truly nasty people like Dick Cheney and Halliburton make off with all the money, wealth and resources of the world, and dump all their toxic waste and anger of the exploited on your doorstep.
You are right about France. But I'd love to have Medicin sans Frontiers in charge.
So this backfire thing might backfire on the backfirer? ie what goes around comes around goes around comes around x 6000.
Personally I like the one about internet cleanup day (there goes my cobweb).
As many of you know, each year the Internet must be shutdown for 24 hours in order to allow us to clean it. The cleaning process, which eliminates dead email and inactive ftp, www and gopher sites, allows for a better working and faster Internet.
This year, the cleaning process will take place from 12:01 a.m. GMT on April 1st until 12:01 a.m, GMT on April 2nd. During that 24-hour period, five powerful Internet search engines situated around the world will search the Internet and delete any data that they find.
In order to protect your valuable data from deletion we ask that you do the following:
1. Disconnect all terminals and local area networks from their Internet connections.
2. Shut down all Internet servers, or disconnect them from the Internet.
3. Disconnect all disks and hardrives from any connections to the Internet.
4. Refrain from connecting any computer to the Internet in any way.
We understand the inconvenience that this may cause some Internet users, and we apologize. However, we are certain that any inconveniences will be more than made up for by the increased speed and efficiency of the Internet, once it has been cleared of electronic flotsam and jetsam.
We thank you for your cooperation.
Interconnected Network Maintenance staff,
Main branch,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The complaints from the supervisors of elections and from Floridians in the aftermath of the election illustrate that indifferent attitudes and careless practices prevailed over the more cautious approach for the protection of voting rights advocated by Ms. Baxter. [she advocated leaving a voter on the roll if in doubt, or allowing them to vote using and affadavit]
According to Linda Howell it can take 6 months or more to get back on the list if you are incorrectly removed from it, ie the falsely removed would not have been able to get back on the roll in time for the election anyway. And there is no uniform system across Florida (let alone the rest of the country) for getting removed from the roll or getting re-instated.
The link clearly shows that the people most affected were black and these would mostly have voted democrat, more than enough stuff ups to overturn the result.
But as you said, perhaps in Florida they don't have to bother with a vote at all.
Which is even more frightening that what did happen.
We should be more scared of people with cars than iraqis or al quaeda. And we should be more frightened of laws that remove our freedoms in order to "protect" them.
Interesting that they protect the freedom of the likes of Mrs Jeb Bush, caught sneaking $19000 worth of jewelry in to the USA without declaring it for paying the tax on it - a felony. Caught, I guess, but presumably not punished by having her name removed from the roll.
From the New York Times and the BBC via Stupid White Men (the awful truth)
Katherine Harris was both George W's presidentail campaign co-chair and Florida secretary of state in charge of elections ie who was allowed to be on the roll and vote counting. No conflict of interest here?
Katherine had anyone "suspected" of commiting a felon removed from the rolls, this included anyone with a "similar" name to a felon. This mostly affected black democrat voters. 173000 registered Florida voters were removed. A black list of a further 8000 peole was supplied from Texas of people who had moved from Texas to Florida, and these all had their names crossed off, even though they were actually eligible to vote.
One of these "supposed felons" was Linda Howell, elections supervisor of Madison County, Florida. The only way to get back on the roll was to agree to fingerprinting. Ie guilty until "proven" innocent.
Of the Florida overseas ballots many were counted that did not meet florida law, specifically
Overseas ballots can only be counted if they were cast and signed on or before election day and mailed and postmarted from another country by election day.
544 overseas votes that counted towards George W Bush did not meet this criteria.
As for the supreme court, the ancient republican appointees Sandra Oconnor and William Rehnquist did not want to retire until there was a republican government in power to appoint more republicans to the court. Clarence Thomas's wife had just got a job with George W Bush and the son of Antoni Scalia was working for the law firm that was representing George W Bush.
And there's more and it gets worse.
Personally I don't think the result should have hinged just on Florida and some of the other state results looked dodgy too. If I was a USA citizen I would have voted for Nadar, not because I thought he could win, but because the Democrat and the Republican are almost identically pro Corporate America and against everyone else. Except we probably wouldn't be wasting money on a stupid war if the Democrat had got in. I could be wrong about that.
What's best for Iraq? or What's best for Bush's friends?
USA is not the only ones "paying" for this and yet there are no open tenders, even within the USA economy, stuff is going directly to the republican cronies of GW Bush.
Surely if the USA people are paying for this (which I dispute that they are the only contributors), then shouldn't they be getting the best value for money available - which usually means some form of tender process, even if evaluation is fast tracked. This stuff shouldn't be automatically awarded to Bush's mates.
So what the hell happened to the "best interests of Afghanistan" after they were "liberated"?
USA global domination manifesto These people want to stop anyone anywhere from acting against their interest. So the only interests allowed will be their own. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Presently the rest of us who are not "against the USA" will be paying tribute taxes just to be left alone.
I'm sure we sung two verses on july 4 years ago to celebrate for our foreign exchange student at school. Unfortunately we all cracked up when we got to the bit about Freemen, because that was our teacher's name.
And lo and behold the version I looked up, the Freemen bit is in verse 4 and I'm sure we never got through that many.
If you want to tease an Aussie about being patriotic, or being ignorant, ask him/her to recite the words to the second verse of our National Anthem. It's probable they won't be able to do the first verse either. (OMG - I found a lyric site with five gawd-awful verses)
Most of us like Waltzing Matilda about the sheep stealing tramp better than stuff that includes lyrics like "our land is girt by sea". Girt???
Like an Aussie has any business trying to keep tabs of which president was presiding when. I can tell you the Australian PM at the time, ie up to 1975 Whitlam, then Fraser (by some serious dodgy business for which he is still not forgiven), then 1983 - Hawke. Then Keating, 1991, then Howard from 96 sigh. At least I know how to find the info thats missing. Never was much of a history student. I am sitting next to a stack of punch magazines going back to 1880 - what they say about Lloyd George and Winston Churchill is less than flattering even during the wars.
Anyway Carter was only in till 1981, then Reagan got in. Sometimes it's hard to tell a donkey from an elephant.
I still think there is a close link to W. Bush's drunk years in there. Or something more juicy.
sbs dateline
video of the shi'ite story from sbs...
I guess since this is current affairs it will be here for a little while and then they'll move onto something else scary.
Yes that's the one. They just reported it on our SBS TV too. And they reported a lot of disturbing stuff about Shi'ites and Kurdistan, ie the uprising that the USA is calling for now, is most likely to come from these people and yet USA doesn't want them to take over from Saddam at all. Interestingly in the marches/ceremonies there were massive numbers of women in black headscarves with no sign of their chaperone uncles or brothers, just hundreds and hundreds of women.
I remember being upset about the invasion of Afghanistan around 1980, but completely not interested in Iran and Iraq fighting each other or what weapons they are using.
When are the War Analysts going to tell us why Saddam has not used any of his weapons of mass destruction yet? I'd pay closer attention if I thought anyone was telling the truth.
Oh yeah, thats when Russia invaded Afghanistan and USA sponsored Osama B-L's resistance movement. I wonder if there is a similar aged connection to USA support of Saddam?
Apart from disco music? Are these George W Bush's lost years? When he wasn't really doing what he said he was doing? What did he have to do with the loss of the America's Cup?
Either that or the money that they would have spent properly reviewing (read shredding) sensitive stuff, is now being dumped from a great height on Iraq.
And do you think I can get google to tell me who was president in 1978? Google: President 1978 USA - gets me stuff on a maths club.
I can't think there would be many basque people and I never understood why it seemed necessary to send the install disks for foreign language to english speaking only offices. I learnt a lot about languages of the world and where Microsoft thought there were computers from those "microsft select" disks and the MSDN disks. And that was in 1996 or earlier. I can understand why they didn't make one in Pitjanjatjarra - there were hardly any computers out there let alone people who could translate.
In Australia, even our universities couldn't afford an ibm (compatible) mainframe to teach. All the big employers who had them had to train in house and on the job the staff to operate them.
But now the jobs to operate those things seem to be invisible. I never see them advertised or meet anyone who currently has a job with the mainframes.
As for mind numbing. I used to make a regular trek with home made choc-chip cookies to the operator's center in order to keep them happy, so if I needed something done urgently, they'd be happy to help out. They used to keep each other amused by playing cricket (like baseball) with paper balls and, um, real bats, or playing practical jokes with "bit buckets" (buckets of chads). Occasionally they would have to put more paper into the printer, I've yet to see that successfully automated, ie that the paper could somehow get from the delivery truck to the paper bin by itself? And much trickier if you're dealing with sprockets.
And the backup tapes. Great reels of ribbon like movie film. If one of those stuffed itself it needed several humans to fix it. And it also took humans to get the things from the tape drives (fridge with eyes) to the storage racks and to manage which tapes went to offsite storage. Cartridge tapes and racks were more automated but every now and again the cartridge robot would break or a programmer would need a cartrige out of the chamber to send elsewhere. Ie the old fashioned sneaker net for data.
I guess these days it would be easier to keep oneself entertained with the internet perhaps. The best operators I knew went on to be systems programmers on the IBMs. I used to butter up those guys as well. Very important. I never understood why various members of the applications programmers (ie cobol hackers) used to look down on the ops and sysprogs, because guess who could completely stuff a application run or rescue it or speed it up?
after all don't they make the mp3 players, and they also make copy-protected cds. So if all their customers behaved legally the only thing they could play on the mp3 is their home recordings of the kiddies playing recorder (eek)?
that doesn't seem to match the
sony marketing of their mp3 players. (create your own music mixes - for me that means no recorder music thanks)
So is it legal in the USA to be promoting something that encourages illegal behavior? And is it good business practice to be building copy protected cds that hurt the mp3 player business when you're in both?
Phillip Goldman is either another rich guy with a death wish or a man on the verge of etching his name into tech history.
All that has to be music to Goldman's ears, because his new company, Los Altos, Calif.-based Mailblocks, claims it can provide 100 percent protection against unsolicited junk e-mail. For long-suffering Web surfers, that would be the holy grail, the Super Bowl and the World Cup all wrapped into one.
Yeah by clicking on that submit button you agree that you solicit email, ie it's 100% solicited email by definition in the TOS...
But I'm sure that the same people who sign up with the Nigerians will fall for this one.
I hate TOS which assume you agree to terms that they reserve the right to change at any time. I think if they change it they should send it out and make you agree again.
And clicking on the submit button automatically makes you 18.
And it isn't free. Why is it being promoted as free?
And rego is non-refundable whether they accept you rego or not? I am not sure that is legal in Australia, to accept a fee for service and then not provide the service...
Terms of Service
Last revised: March 17, 2003
Mailblocks, Inc. Terms of Service Agreement
PLEASE READ THIS TERMS OF SERVICE AGREEMENT CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THE MAILBLOCKS SERVICES. Mailblocks, Inc. ("Company," "we," or "us") provides online services, including, without limitation, personal email, (collectively, the "Services") subject to your compliance with the terms and conditions set forth in this Terms of Service Agreement (the "Agreement"). This Agreement governs the relationship between Company and you, the user ("you") with respect to your use of the Services and your access to the web site located at www.mailblocks.com (the "Site"). It is important that you read carefully and understand the terms and conditions of this Agreement.
If you are under the age of 18, you may not CURRENTLY use the Services. BY CLICKING THE "SUBMIT" BUTTON LOCATED ON THE REGISTRATION PAGE OR BY PAYING FOR THE SERVICES, YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THIS AGREEMENT WITHOUT MODIFICATION. IF YOU DO NOT ACCEPT THIS AGREEMENT, YOU WILL BE DENIED REGISTRATION TO USE THE SERVICES.
WE RESERVE THE RIGHT AT ANY TIME TO:
Change the terms and conditions of this Agreement; Change the Services, including eliminating or discontinuing any Services; or Change any fees or charges for use of the Services. Any changes we make will be effective automatically immediately after posting such changes on the Site. Your continued use of the Services following such changes will be deemed acceptance of such changes. Be sure to review this Agreement periodically to ensure familiarity with the most current version. You can determine when this Agreement was last revised by checking the "Last revised" legend at the top of the Agreement.
1. Services. Mailblocks provides a fast, low-cost email service to its users. Other new features may be added in the future; unless expressly stated otherwise, any new or enhanced features will be subject to the then-current version of this Agreement. In exchange for your use of the Services, you expressly permit and authorize Company, and such third parties as may be authorized by Company, to furnish to you from time to time, through the Services or any other means, with information prepared by Company or by (or on behalf of) other entities, including onsite advertisements (such information, "Third Party Content" or "Advertising"). You acknowledge that such Third Party Content may be an inseparable part of the Services, and that furnishing such Third Party Content to you cannot be terminated unless the Services are terminated.
For more information, please review our Privacy Policy here.
Company neither endorses nor is responsible for Third Party Content, and you may be exposed to Third Party Content that is offensive, inaccurate, misleading, deceptive, out-of-date, or incomplete. You must evaluate, and bear all risks associated with, the Third Party Content, and your use of and reliance on any such content. We are not responsible for any errors or omissions in Third Party Content, for hyperlinks embedded in Third Party Content or for any results obtained from the use of such content. Under no circumstances will we be liable for any loss or damage caused by your reliance on any such Third Party Content. Your correspondence or business dealings with, or participation in promotions sponsored by, any such third party advertisers, or any other third party providers of goods or services accessed through the Services, and any terms, conditions, warranties or representations associat
meanwhile our Chief Marketing insists we have a secure product to run on windows. So we promise him a product "as secure as windows is". And he's happy. Dumb but happy.
If we get a client that is serious about security, they get the copy on freebsd customised, apache customised...
ie leak a good piece of fiction to influence the stock market.
I'd like to liberate the pay scale from several of my former employers. The lies they told me about who got paid what were astounding when I finally found the list.
Things I'd rather see kept in the closet: the personal lives of the rich and famous, people's medical history, my home address and phone number (one stalker is one too many). Advert for penis enlargement, and instant uni degrees.
Kids with phones are very vulnerable to bigger kids who steal the phones Phone Crime.
So maybe the phone monitoring may prevent or slow down phone theft?
Anyway is this so very different to offices that have card access systems where you have to swipe your card at every doorway (including the toilet). So very very annoying.
I used to keep a stash of one or more of these things and the stash used to get raided on a regular basis. Especially after hours. I could understand the jokes about lacing stashes with laxatives although I never did that. I always thought that kind of revenge would backfire.
anyway the contractors would quite happily eat the toffees too.
My experience of contractors and being seen as a contractor (even though I was always a permanent employee of a company), was that as a newbie permanent in an office I was always thought unable to do the job, but as a contractor, they just handed it over and expected me to get on with it. Whether or not I had the knowledge required was irrelevant, and if I was a contractor and asked a question it was seen as "getting familiar with the system" but if I was permanent and asked the same kind of question it was seen as "ignorance".
And I've worked with brilliant contractors and absolutely hopeless ones, at all levels of the action, from coders to management.
I guess that means my age is showing. Anyway the hopeless ones survived by a combination at being better bullshit spinners combined with blowing their own trumpet, something generally frowned upon in Australia, but seems to work when combined with a bit of brown nosing.
We got confronted with this option, mostly because the owner wanted to sack another person, and the manager didn't want to. So we all went 4 day week and 4 day pay.
but somebody got the sack anyway, and we didn't get to go back to 5 day week/pay.
The owner of this company regularily every november/december sacked about 1/3 the work force (averaging around 60 people, down from 140 when I started with them), and rehired new or the same people again in March.
Christmas was always a slow period with lots of unprofitable public holidays so the owner saved much in salary and on costs. But in the meantime most of the rest of us couldn't give a stuff about doing the job well or at all.
Eventually all the people who knew anything about anything had quit and found jobs elsewhere. Even the headhunters wouldn't see 6 - 8 months at this particular company as a downside. I think the head hunters loved it.
The owner failed to see that it was costing him in lost expertise and skill about twice as much as he saved in salary costs. Ie the new people would take twice as long to get anything done as the experienced people. And as soon as the new people had figured out how to get things done, it would be Christmas again, and they'd be laid off.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it was offended because somebody installed gator on it.
Is that like the difference between fear of flying and fear of crash landing? I'm not scared of flying. I'm scared of crashing and burning.
And making the rich get richer.
if they had your interests as a USA citizen at heart, you would have
free health care
free good quality education to tertiary level(ie everyone gets the same quality environment, and texts to learn from)
social welfare for anyone who fell out of a job or house for what ever reason.
rehab not punishment for criminals, ie provide them with the life skills they need to live straight when they get out.
no capital punishment
proper minimum wage and benefits that people could actually live on
enviromental control on pollution, so that you are not made sick by where you work or live.
proportional representation (see NZ) and independent election supervisors (see Florida for how not to do this)
Foreign aid that actually benefited foreigners not USA companies. Ie make it nice to stay at home.
Notice that only rich people are doing well in the USA and that the revolution may well come from within, just like what happened to Russia.
Personally I'd much rather support social welfare and prescription heroin programs and the like than be mugged, or burgled because I am lucky enough to have what someone else wants and doesn't have the opportunity to get legally.
Having the USA government in charge of everything means that truly nasty people like Dick Cheney and Halliburton make off with all the money, wealth and resources of the world, and dump all their toxic waste and anger of the exploited on your doorstep.
You are right about France. But I'd love to have Medicin sans Frontiers in charge.
So this backfire thing might backfire on the backfirer? ie what goes around comes around goes around comes around x 6000.
Personally I like the one about internet cleanup day (there goes my cobweb).
As many of you know, each year the Internet must be shutdown for 24 hours in order to allow us to clean it. The cleaning process, which eliminates dead email and inactive ftp, www and gopher sites, allows for a better working and faster Internet.
This year, the cleaning process will take place from 12:01 a.m. GMT on April 1st until 12:01 a.m, GMT on April 2nd. During that 24-hour period, five powerful Internet search engines situated around the world will search the Internet and delete any data that they find.
In order to protect your valuable data from deletion we ask that you do the following:
1. Disconnect all terminals and local area networks from their Internet connections.
2. Shut down all Internet servers, or disconnect them from the Internet.
3. Disconnect all disks and hardrives from any connections to the Internet.
4. Refrain from connecting any computer to the Internet in any way.
We understand the inconvenience that this may cause some Internet users, and we apologize. However, we are certain that any inconveniences will be more than made up for by the increased speed and efficiency of the Internet, once it has been cleared of electronic flotsam and jetsam.
We thank you for your cooperation.
Interconnected Network Maintenance staff,
Main branch,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Try this link florida voting irregularities
There were 3600 complaints.
The complaints from the supervisors of elections and from Floridians in the aftermath of the election illustrate that indifferent attitudes and careless practices prevailed over the more cautious approach for the protection of voting rights advocated by Ms. Baxter. [she advocated leaving a voter on the roll if in doubt, or allowing them to vote using and affadavit]
According to Linda Howell it can take 6 months or more to get back on the list if you are incorrectly removed from it, ie the falsely removed would not have been able to get back on the roll in time for the election anyway. And there is no uniform system across Florida (let alone the rest of the country) for getting removed from the roll or getting re-instated.
The link clearly shows that the people most affected were black and these would mostly have voted democrat, more than enough stuff ups to overturn the result.
But as you said, perhaps in Florida they don't have to bother with a vote at all.
Which is even more frightening that what did happen.
We should be more scared of people with cars than iraqis or al quaeda. And we should be more frightened of laws that remove our freedoms in order to "protect" them.
Interesting that they protect the freedom of the likes of Mrs Jeb Bush, caught sneaking $19000 worth of jewelry in to the USA without declaring it for paying the tax on it - a felony. Caught, I guess, but presumably not punished by having her name removed from the roll.
From the New York Times and the BBC
via Stupid White Men (the awful truth)
Katherine Harris was both George W's presidentail campaign co-chair and Florida secretary of state in charge of elections ie who was allowed to be on the roll and vote counting. No conflict of interest here?
Katherine had anyone "suspected" of commiting a felon removed from the rolls, this included anyone with a "similar" name to a felon. This mostly affected black democrat voters. 173000 registered Florida voters were removed. A black list of a further 8000 peole was supplied from Texas of people who had moved from Texas to Florida, and these all had their names crossed off, even though they were actually eligible to vote.
One of these "supposed felons" was Linda Howell, elections supervisor of Madison County, Florida. The only way to get back on the roll was to agree to fingerprinting. Ie guilty until "proven" innocent.
Of the Florida overseas ballots many were counted that did not meet florida law, specifically
Overseas ballots can only be counted if they were cast and signed on or before election day and mailed and postmarted from another country by election day.
544 overseas votes that counted towards George W Bush did not meet this criteria.
As for the supreme court, the ancient republican appointees Sandra Oconnor and William Rehnquist did not want to retire until there was a republican government in power to appoint more republicans to the court. Clarence Thomas's wife had just got a job with George W Bush and the son of Antoni Scalia was working for the law firm that was representing George W Bush.
And there's more and it gets worse.
Personally I don't think the result should have hinged just on Florida and some of the other state results looked dodgy too. If I was a USA citizen I would have voted for Nadar, not because I thought he could win, but because the Democrat and the Republican are almost identically pro Corporate America and against everyone else. Except we probably wouldn't be wasting money on a stupid war if the Democrat had got in. I could be wrong about that.
so much for the security clearance excuse
What's best for Iraq? or What's best for Bush's friends?
USA is not the only ones "paying" for this and yet there are no open tenders, even within the USA economy, stuff is going directly to the republican cronies of GW Bush.
Eg Cheney's company Halliburton has the oil well capping project already, nobody else got a look in.
Surely if the USA people are paying for this (which I dispute that they are the only contributors), then shouldn't they be getting the best value for money available - which usually means some form of tender process, even if evaluation is fast tracked. This stuff shouldn't be automatically awarded to Bush's mates.
So what the hell happened to the "best interests of Afghanistan" after they were "liberated"?
USA global domination manifesto These people want to stop anyone anywhere from acting against their interest. So the only interests allowed will be their own. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Presently the rest of us who are not "against the USA" will be paying tribute taxes just to be left alone.
I'm sure we sung two verses on july 4 years ago to celebrate for our foreign exchange student at school. Unfortunately we all cracked up when we got to the bit about Freemen, because that was our teacher's name.
And lo and behold the version I looked up, the Freemen bit is in verse 4 and I'm sure we never got through that many.
Could be worse, ie the Canadian national anthem.
dammit the dog farted again - argh.
If you want to tease an Aussie about being patriotic, or being ignorant, ask him/her to recite the words to the second verse of our National Anthem. It's probable they won't be able to do the first verse either. (OMG - I found a lyric site with five gawd-awful verses)
Most of us like Waltzing Matilda about the sheep stealing tramp better than stuff that includes lyrics like "our land is girt by sea". Girt???
Like an Aussie has any business trying to keep tabs of which president was presiding when. I can tell you the Australian PM at the time, ie up to 1975 Whitlam, then Fraser (by some serious dodgy business for which he is still not forgiven), then 1983 - Hawke. Then Keating, 1991, then Howard from 96 sigh. At least I know how to find the info thats missing. Never was much of a history student. I am sitting next to a stack of punch magazines going back to 1880 - what they say about Lloyd George and Winston Churchill is less than flattering even during the wars.
Anyway Carter was only in till 1981, then Reagan got in. Sometimes it's hard to tell a donkey from an elephant.
I still think there is a close link to W. Bush's drunk years in there. Or something more juicy.
sbs dateline video of the shi'ite story from sbs... I guess since this is current affairs it will be here for a little while and then they'll move onto something else scary.
Yes that's the one. They just reported it on our SBS TV too. And they reported a lot of disturbing stuff about Shi'ites and Kurdistan, ie the uprising that the USA is calling for now, is most likely to come from these people and yet USA doesn't want them to take over from Saddam at all. Interestingly in the marches/ceremonies there were massive numbers of women in black headscarves with no sign of their chaperone uncles or brothers, just hundreds and hundreds of women.
I remember being upset about the invasion of Afghanistan around 1980, but completely not interested in Iran and Iraq fighting each other or what weapons they are using.
When are the War Analysts going to tell us why Saddam has not used any of his weapons of mass destruction yet? I'd pay closer attention if I thought anyone was telling the truth.
Oh yeah, thats when Russia invaded Afghanistan and USA sponsored Osama B-L's resistance movement. I wonder if there is a similar aged connection to USA support of Saddam?
Apart from disco music? Are these George W Bush's lost years? When he wasn't really doing what he said he was doing? What did he have to do with the loss of the America's Cup?
Either that or the money that they would have spent properly reviewing (read shredding) sensitive stuff, is now being dumped from a great height on Iraq.
And do you think I can get google to tell me who was president in 1978? Google: President 1978 USA - gets me stuff on a maths club.
and even every flavour of Yugoslavian
I can't think there would be many basque people and I never understood why it seemed necessary to send the install disks for foreign language to english speaking only offices. I learnt a lot about languages of the world and where Microsoft thought there were computers from those "microsft select" disks and the MSDN disks. And that was in 1996 or earlier. I can understand why they didn't make one in Pitjanjatjarra - there were hardly any computers out there let alone people who could translate.
In Australia, even our universities couldn't afford an ibm (compatible) mainframe to teach. All the big employers who had them had to train in house and on the job the staff to operate them.
But now the jobs to operate those things seem to be invisible. I never see them advertised or meet anyone who currently has a job with the mainframes.
As for mind numbing. I used to make a regular trek with home made choc-chip cookies to the operator's center in order to keep them happy, so if I needed something done urgently, they'd be happy to help out. They used to keep each other amused by playing cricket (like baseball) with paper balls and, um, real bats, or playing practical jokes with "bit buckets" (buckets of chads). Occasionally they would have to put more paper into the printer, I've yet to see that successfully automated, ie that the paper could somehow get from the delivery truck to the paper bin by itself? And much trickier if you're dealing with sprockets.
And the backup tapes. Great reels of ribbon like movie film. If one of those stuffed itself it needed several humans to fix it. And it also took humans to get the things from the tape drives (fridge with eyes) to the storage racks and to manage which tapes went to offsite storage. Cartridge tapes and racks were more automated but every now and again the cartridge robot would break or a programmer would need a cartrige out of the chamber to send elsewhere. Ie the old fashioned sneaker net for data.
I guess these days it would be easier to keep oneself entertained with the internet perhaps. The best operators I knew went on to be systems programmers on the IBMs. I used to butter up those guys as well. Very important. I never understood why various members of the applications programmers (ie cobol hackers) used to look down on the ops and sysprogs, because guess who could completely stuff a application run or rescue it or speed it up?
after all don't they make the mp3 players, and they also make copy-protected cds. So if all their customers behaved legally the only thing they could play on the mp3 is their home recordings of the kiddies playing recorder (eek)?
that doesn't seem to match the sony marketing of their mp3 players. (create your own music mixes - for me that means no recorder music thanks)
So is it legal in the USA to be promoting something that encourages illegal behavior? And is it good business practice to be building copy protected cds that hurt the mp3 player business when you're in both?
An answer to spam's discontent?
By Charles Cooper March 24, 2003, 4:00 AM PT
Phillip Goldman is either another rich guy with a death wish or a man on the verge of etching his name into tech history.
All that has to be music to Goldman's ears, because his new company, Los Altos, Calif.-based Mailblocks, claims it can provide 100 percent protection against unsolicited junk e-mail. For long-suffering Web surfers, that would be the holy grail, the Super Bowl and the World Cup all wrapped into one.
Yeah by clicking on that submit button you agree that you solicit email, ie it's 100% solicited email by definition in the TOS...
But I'm sure that the same people who sign up with the Nigerians will fall for this one.
I hate TOS which assume you agree to terms that they reserve the right to change at any time. I think if they change it they should send it out and make you agree again.
And clicking on the submit button automatically makes you 18.
And it isn't free. Why is it being promoted as free?
And rego is non-refundable whether they accept you rego or not? I am not sure that is legal in Australia, to accept a fee for service and then not provide the service...
Terms of Service
Last revised: March 17, 2003
Mailblocks, Inc. Terms of Service Agreement
PLEASE READ THIS TERMS OF SERVICE AGREEMENT CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THE MAILBLOCKS SERVICES. Mailblocks, Inc. ("Company," "we," or "us") provides online services, including, without limitation, personal email, (collectively, the "Services") subject to your compliance with the terms and conditions set forth in this Terms of Service Agreement (the "Agreement"). This Agreement governs the relationship between Company and you, the user ("you") with respect to your use of the Services and your access to the web site located at www.mailblocks.com (the "Site"). It is important that you read carefully and understand the terms and conditions of this Agreement.
If you are under the age of 18, you may not CURRENTLY use the Services. BY CLICKING THE "SUBMIT" BUTTON LOCATED ON THE REGISTRATION PAGE OR BY PAYING FOR THE SERVICES, YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THIS AGREEMENT WITHOUT MODIFICATION. IF YOU DO NOT ACCEPT THIS AGREEMENT, YOU WILL BE DENIED REGISTRATION TO USE THE SERVICES.
WE RESERVE THE RIGHT AT ANY TIME TO:
Change the terms and conditions of this Agreement;
Change the Services, including eliminating or discontinuing any Services; or
Change any fees or charges for use of the Services.
Any changes we make will be effective automatically immediately after posting such changes on the Site. Your continued use of the Services following such changes will be deemed acceptance of such changes. Be sure to review this Agreement periodically to ensure familiarity with the most current version. You can determine when this Agreement was last revised by checking the "Last revised" legend at the top of the Agreement.
1. Services. Mailblocks provides a fast, low-cost email service to its users. Other new features may be added in the future; unless expressly stated otherwise, any new or enhanced features will be subject to the then-current version of this Agreement. In exchange for your use of the Services, you expressly permit and authorize Company, and such third parties as may be authorized by Company, to furnish to you from time to time, through the Services or any other means, with information prepared by Company or by (or on behalf of) other entities, including onsite advertisements (such information, "Third Party Content" or "Advertising"). You acknowledge that such Third Party Content may be an inseparable part of the Services, and that furnishing such Third Party Content to you cannot be terminated unless the Services are terminated.
For more information, please review our Privacy Policy here.
Company neither endorses nor is responsible for Third Party Content, and you may be exposed to Third Party Content that is offensive, inaccurate, misleading, deceptive, out-of-date, or incomplete. You must evaluate, and bear all risks associated with, the Third Party Content, and your use of and reliance on any such content. We are not responsible for any errors or omissions in Third Party Content, for hyperlinks embedded in Third Party Content or for any results obtained from the use of such content. Under no circumstances will we be liable for any loss or damage caused by your reliance on any such Third Party Content. Your correspondence or business dealings with, or participation in promotions sponsored by, any such third party advertisers, or any other third party providers of goods or services accessed through the Services, and any terms, conditions, warranties or representations associat
meanwhile our Chief Marketing insists we have a secure product to run on windows. So we promise him a product "as secure as windows is". And he's happy. Dumb but happy.
If we get a client that is serious about security, they get the copy on freebsd customised, apache customised...
ie leak a good piece of fiction to influence the stock market.
I'd like to liberate the pay scale from several of my former employers. The lies they told me about who got paid what were astounding when I finally found the list.
Things I'd rather see kept in the closet: the personal lives of the rich and famous, people's medical history, my home address and phone number (one stalker is one too many). Advert for penis enlargement, and instant uni degrees.
Kids with phones are very vulnerable to bigger kids who steal the phones Phone Crime.
So maybe the phone monitoring may prevent or slow down phone theft?
Anyway is this so very different to offices that have card access systems where you have to swipe your card at every doorway (including the toilet). So very very annoying.
I used to keep a stash of one or more of these things and the stash used to get raided on a regular basis. Especially after hours. I could understand the jokes about lacing stashes with laxatives although I never did that. I always thought that kind of revenge would backfire.
anyway the contractors would quite happily eat the toffees too.
My experience of contractors and being seen as a contractor (even though I was always a permanent employee of a company), was that as a newbie permanent in an office I was always thought unable to do the job, but as a contractor, they just handed it over and expected me to get on with it. Whether or not I had the knowledge required was irrelevant, and if I was a contractor and asked a question it was seen as "getting familiar with the system" but if I was permanent and asked the same kind of question it was seen as "ignorance".
And I've worked with brilliant contractors and absolutely hopeless ones, at all levels of the action, from coders to management.
I guess that means my age is showing. Anyway the hopeless ones survived by a combination at being better bullshit spinners combined with blowing their own trumpet, something generally frowned upon in Australia, but seems to work when combined with a bit of brown nosing.
We got confronted with this option, mostly because the owner wanted to sack another person, and the manager didn't want to. So we all went 4 day week and 4 day pay.
but somebody got the sack anyway, and we didn't get to go back to 5 day week/pay.
The owner of this company regularily every november/december sacked about 1/3 the work force (averaging around 60 people, down from 140 when I started with them), and rehired new or the same people again in March.
Christmas was always a slow period with lots of unprofitable public holidays so the owner saved much in salary and on costs. But in the meantime most of the rest of us couldn't give a stuff about doing the job well or at all.
Eventually all the people who knew anything about anything had quit and found jobs elsewhere. Even the headhunters wouldn't see 6 - 8 months at this particular company as a downside. I think the head hunters loved it.
The owner failed to see that it was costing him in lost expertise and skill about twice as much as he saved in salary costs. Ie the new people would take twice as long to get anything done as the experienced people. And as soon as the new people had figured out how to get things done, it would be Christmas again, and they'd be laid off.