Don't most people already do this? I have yet to receive spam at my main account, but my decoy account get ~50 spam messages a week, which are fairly effectively filtered by yahoo.
Winner: short term thinking, loser: long term planning.
Winner: idiots with money, loser: people who actually do work.
Winner: people in Europe whose governments tend to protect voters from loss of standard of living, loser: people in the US whose government is leading the race to the bottom.
The solution is to outsource the whole company. No cultural or time difference issues. Considering the quality of American managers outsourced ones can't do too much damage. Why do all these people think they can outsource the people who do the work, but they will be exempt from the process?
And the original Wal-Mart workers move down a notch to homelessness. Wal-Mart can afford a race to the bottom because poor Americans can't afford to shop elsewhere. The poorer Americans get the more customers Wal-Mart has. They are happy to see the standard of living drop hard and fast.
The really key point in the article was the comment on standards of living. The standard of living in America is expected to drop by a lot. The standard of living in China and India is not expected to rise, as outsourced jobs don't pay much. Production of cheap goods is high and getting higher. Who is going to buy the goods? Especially when many of these goods, eg cell phones, are worthless after a season, or a trend and just pile up in warehouses until they can be bundled in a package below cost of production.
I guess this is true crony capitalism. Competence is meaningless, production is unimportant, as it is done cheap in some backwater, only having money to invest counts. It already shows in some ways, for instance Microsoft makes huge money stamping their name on keyboards and mice, while the company they contracted to put the things together lost money on the deal and was considering bankruptcy last time I looked. Marketing has value, doing work and making stuff does not. Who cares about substance anyway?
IT people are being outsourced first because HR does not know how to hire them, and managers don't know how to manage them. Eventually everyone except the VPs, marketers, and salespeople will go. When garment industry jobs that Americans will not do get outsourced that doesn't hurt many people. When manufacturing jobs go, it's painful. When jobs requiring college degrees get outsourced it means a return to the middle ages, with a rich, talentless aristocracy, and a sea of poverty.
The only people you can't outsource are the ones who have to talk to the client directly and the ones who make the decsions as to who to outsource.
If I were starting up a new software company I would go to India or China or Eastern Europe and hire people away from the big outsourcers. Get experienced people pre-trained. Eventually with competition wages may get to 50% of American levels, which is what some people I know (good people, too) are currently accepting.
It's easy to be cavalier about jobs when you are a venture capitalist, a VP, or a journalist; only the journalist can be outsourced, and not easily. It's not so easy once you think that literally everything else can go, leaving American workers working at Wal-Mart.
Yeah, Clinton was bought, too. Bush I was the last pres to think of the country before he thought of lobby groups, and he lost an election for it (and Clinton got credit for the balanced budget and surging economy, see, raising taxes is GOOD). Clinton passed some bad laws, but he didn't sink anywhere near as low as Bush II (who hit bottom long ago, and started excavating).
I like Michael Moore, he forces people to think about stuff they would rather sweep under the rug. You have to take some of what he says with a grain of salt (I'm Candian, Canadians lock their doors, and even buy alarm systems).
Point is gerrmandering has been a bad problem for a long time, and it just got much worse and infinitely more partisan.
The most important point is that HR in most companies sucks. They hire the techies who lie most on their CVs, and the hirees get their friends to lie even more and join them. If HR ever realizes the people are useless they raise the requirements and get even more dishonest applicants. Coders do the same, but coders who don't produce get booted. Admins who don't produce justify themselves in meetings.
As an admin I often see other admins like this (and they are the guys contracted from other companies making $80/hr, not the peons). Consultants brought in to do specifics can be worse (though I've seen good and bad). Any admin who does not work with the developers when there are problems, and at least understand dev tools and third party software used in the company, is in the wrong role.
It is worthwhile having specialized admins (and testers, and support people, and developers) to make sure someone has responsibility for each area. I've seen enough companies where developers administer the systems, and there are always problems. The developers know what to do, but they want to develop, not administer, so the administration is done badly by a lot of people who don't know what other people are doing. Lots of "who setup X" or "who changed/deleted partition X" emails.
My last job was from a company made up of developers who thought they didn't need an admin. They got by for a few months, went live, and hired me. I spent my first two months just fixing stuff that was broken. On the other hand I've had stuff handed off from people who claim to be sysadmins that was almost as bad.
Gerrymandering has been common for a number of years (as stated in the article). The big difference is that both parties agreed to gerrymander to favor incumbents, leaving few (less than 10%) of the races competitive. This made for swing state issues, like guns and abortion, to dominate politics.
Bush has run roughshod over bipartisan sleaze, which would be good if he didn't make it even worse by replacing it with partisan sleaze. Republican gerrymandering has been obscenely blatant, and obscenely successful.
If the democrats ever gain any power they will do the same, but it will be difficult, considering how thoroughly the scale has been tilted. Then again, Bush has done a lot of really bad and really dumb things, and it's possible that eventually some of his supporters will notice.
Blocking breeding is fairly relevant. Testing is key. Gene engineering is trial and error, as no one knows what effect the gene modifications will have. A notable failure was a toxic potato that made it pretty close to the grocery store. No one expected it to be toxic, they'd just modified the thing...
Here in Canada 88% of people want genetically modified food labelled, but it isn't. Many people in the US think that genetically modified food is labelled, and that they have not eaten it, but they are wrong on the first point and almost certainly wrong on the second. Genetically modified foods are very common, and definitely unlabeled.
The republicans have moved way out to the far right and the democrats have followed them. This is not due to hotelling, but to swing state issues and massive gerrymandering (formerly pro-incumbent, now partisan, very slimy either way).
In politics the more propaganda the more you are believed. If one party says something extreme and the other tells the truth most people believe something in the middle. If one party goes way off into fantasyland they pull the center with them.
I doubt voting machine problems can skew results more than dishonesty and media incompetence (no one checks facts anymore, or almost no one) already have.
My mother got me a digital video camera before the birth of my daughter. I have a ridiculous number of mpegs and jpegs of her on the site, and my mother enjoys them. No memory sticks, just tapes that don't play on anything commonly available.
I'll have to check out GNU transcode again. Last time I checked it did not support digital video, but it claims to now. I've been using a Windows product that forces me to manually select digital video files to convert them to mpeg. With transcode most of the process (all except actually getting the stuff on the computer which I need to watch anyway) will be scripted. I'd password protect the site, but I can't imagine anyone outside the family could possibly care. Maybe when she hits high school...
I won't give the URL because:
No one would care
I don't have the bandwidth to deal with a slashdotting from the obsessive link followers.
I'd be really worried about the sort of people who would actually look at the site.
Cowboy Neal might make fun of my lack of web skills.
The web is good for small things that only a few people care about as well as stuff that lots of people want to see.
If the sequels had come out independently, no relation to the first film, they would have been OK Hollywood movies. The Matrix was not a brilliant film because of the philosophy, or because of the plot, it was successful because a lot of great actors put in a lot of really good performances, and, after 5 years of storyboarding, the filmmakers shot some amazing and affecting scenes.
The two later movies are thrown together by
comparison. More actors with less talent basically do less. The background actors in the first movie stayed in the background and looked cool. The background actors in the sequels have to do stuff so the video game makes sense even though it detracts from the movie.
More to the point Laurence Fishburne is an amazing actor with great presence and delivery, and he made the first movie great. He was not allowed to make the sequels great, and Keanu, though good at looking lost and out of place, does not have the presence to play lead (Ted yes, pre-One Neo, yes, The ONE, no).
I don't think that there can be enough emphasis on how much the 5 years of feuding with the studios improved the original. The Wachowskis had to explain every scene dozens of times, get them drawn on paper, re-edit... They just weren't forced to make the same effort for the sequels. Limitations, like Keanu's injuries (limited the fight scenes), the cast's lack of martial art training (ditto), studio antipathy (forced them to work), and delays (gave them time to get it right) contributed to the greatness of the first film. Too much money, too much fame, too much power, too little thought, too much hubris dragged down the sequels.
Again, without the first movies the sequels would have been OK Hollywood movies, they just look real bad by comparison. I can watch scenes from the first movie over and over because they work, they have emotional impact, they look cool. I have no desire to see the other movies again because even the fight scenes are dull and go on too long. The first movie would probably have had long, limp fight scenes too, if Keanu had been healthy, and if Moss, Fishburne, Reeves et al really knew Kung fu. Limitations and suffering, not freedom and happiness, make art.
Judging from the last Quebec referendum, quite a lot. Volunteers counted the ballots, and most of them were honest, but the few of them who were not exclueded ballots differently depending on the vote.
Hmmm, there is an obvious X on the no side, but it is 0.01 degrees out of center, so the ballot is spoiled. Ahhh, there is no X but there is a faint mark on the yes side, obviously we must allow the intent of the voter to rule, it's a YES.
Then you have Germany in the 1930s. OK, it wasn't really a democracy, the political parties all had private armies/street gangs intimidating voters, but they followed some of the forms. Hitler lost the first election, but his brownshirts used invisible ink to identify people who voted against him. After much intimidation Hitler did much better in subsequent elections, and voter turnout was much lower.
Of course there is still a question as to whether electronic voting will solve or exacerbate the above problems.
Hannah:...the Acting Returning Officer, Mr Edmund Blackadder, and we're all very grateful indeed that he stepped in at the last moment when the previous Returning Officer accidentally brutally stabbed himself in the stomach while shaving.
Blackadder: I took over from the previous electorate when he very sadly accidentally brutally cut his head off while combing his hair.
Trusting Maxtor drives to work long-term because of some marketed MTBF is insane. I don't know what it is but Maxtor drives always seem to flake out on me. I returned three of them this year after they toasted to unreadability (seems to be one of those things, people always get failures with one brand or another... I've never had a non-Maxtor fail in a PC (a few Seagates in Sun boxes but they were 10+ years old)). There is a reason Maxtor led the rush to one year warranties. I miss the days when 5 or even 3 year warranties were standard.
You can share and distribute hardware on VMWare, so you could take a part of everyone's setup and make a Beowolf cluster of odds and ends. If everyone contributes a little RAM, disk, and bandwidth you could get a fair cluster.
Hmmm how about a SETI-at-home type screen saver that joins a cluster instead of asking for stuff to process? A fluctuating cluster of all unused systems, limited during the day, but powerful at night.
I agree that your posts are overrated, but I think the troll label is a bit much. I think people are using "troll" to identify people they disagree with. I got a "troll" recently for saying spamming and political contributions are not free speech, and should not be protected.
I really liked the thirteenth floor, a film that had another layer of reality. A few other films have done the same thing, and in some cases done it well.
The original Matrix really worked as a movie. It is probably the ultimate Hollywood production, in formula and coolness. The Thirteenth Floor was not as cool, but it was really well written and had some great scenes and lines (why would he try to tell ME about the limits of the simulation?).
The Wachowskis could probably have come up with a better ending if they had had more time, more opposition (especially critical opposition), less access to effects, and less money. Too much money kills way faster than too little.
Good points, actually. I wonder why you were modded to 0?
You're right, I am out of date. I created a Yahoo account to decoy spam, I use it for anything that will be posted or submitted, and I really don't get spam. I've stopped thinking about it. OK, I occasionally look at the spam folder on my decoy account, and I still get viruses, but it does not bother me enough to check tactics. Which does not mean that I would not like to see spammers sued into commercial oblivion.
The first movie was vastly improved by the difficulties the Wachowski brothers had making it. They had to explain it and storyboard it over and over, revisit every scene, reread all the dialogue, and generally tighten everything up before they shot it.
The Wachowskis wanted more action and more effects in the first movie, but they had trouble getting some effects, and were limited by budget. The second movie had longer, more involved fight scenes that were much less interesting and had much less impact. The limitations on the first movie (including Keanus injuries) made it much better.
The actors worked in the original. Pretty much everyone, Fishburne, Moss, Pantoliano, Weaving, and Foster were fantastic. Keanu just had to look cool and lost, which he does really well. The minor charactors, like Apoc and Switch looked cool and stayed in the background. Lots of familiar people through the movie, good acting in spite of varying dialogue, and really good background, outfits, and scenes. The sequel was a mess of minor characters and long meaningless fight scenes (did anyone else get bored watching the fight scene as they left the Merovingian's place?).
Lawrence Fishburne made the first movie. Where was he in the sequels? He's WAY down the cast list.
I've seen the original lots of times now, but the big scenes still have an emotional impact if I check them out when it's on TV for the nth time, with the swearing (what little there is) pathetically censored. The sequels just don't have it. You can see the thought and effort put into every scene of the original, and you can visualize the scripting of the sequels (long fight scene (work out details later), emotional moment, love scene between mains (please, god, let there be chemistry)...) unfortunately.
Maybe the Wachowskis should take 10 years, look over the scripts, get the storyboards done, cut the meaningless stuff, rewrite 5 times, and do a couple of apology movies.
Do it on a sliding scale. First hundred emails a day are free. Second hundred at $0.001 each. Once you get into the hundreds of thousands a buck each. Rebates if you can prove people were actually happy to receive your mail.
Problem is there are some companies that send lots of email you may actually want to hear from. Real virus and security warnings, maybe.
What it takes to stop spam is for judges to show a little common sense, and decide that spam, like bribes to politicians and their parties, is not free speech. Tracking down spammers and suing away their scam-gotten mansions would be fun.
Remember when France and Britain threatened to invade Czechoslovakia themselves if the Czechs did not surrender to Hitler? Surrender rough, defensible territory he would not have been able to take himself?
A lot of places will reboot servers with long uptime during maintenance windows just to check. I worked in a large environment where we would reboot systems that were over 100 days on principle. No hardware failures resulted (Sun, HP, and linux systems), but occasional software/rc issues came up.
Most of the systems would consistently make it to 100 days. We had some hardware and software issues or upgrades, but most of the systems, especially old, overused, systems that we did not do software upgrades on would make it consistently.
No uptimes over 120 days, but some systems went 6 consecutive reboots without issues. On the other hand there was a power failure that ran down the UPS at some point.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't most people already do this? I have yet to receive spam at my main account, but my decoy account get ~50 spam messages a week, which are fairly effectively filtered by yahoo.
Winner: short term thinking, loser: long term planning.
Winner: idiots with money, loser: people who actually do work.
Winner: people in Europe whose governments tend to protect voters from loss of standard of living, loser: people in the US whose government is leading the race to the bottom.
The solution is to outsource the whole company. No cultural or time difference issues. Considering the quality of American managers outsourced ones can't do too much damage. Why do all these people think they can outsource the people who do the work, but they will be exempt from the process?
And the original Wal-Mart workers move down a notch to homelessness. Wal-Mart can afford a race to the bottom because poor Americans can't afford to shop elsewhere. The poorer Americans get the more customers Wal-Mart has. They are happy to see the standard of living drop hard and fast.
The really key point in the article was the comment on standards of living. The standard of living in America is expected to drop by a lot. The standard of living in China and India is not expected to rise, as outsourced jobs don't pay much. Production of cheap goods is high and getting higher. Who is going to buy the goods? Especially when many of these goods, eg cell phones, are worthless after a season, or a trend and just pile up in warehouses until they can be bundled in a package below cost of production.
I guess this is true crony capitalism. Competence is meaningless, production is unimportant, as it is done cheap in some backwater, only having money to invest counts. It already shows in some ways, for instance Microsoft makes huge money stamping their name on keyboards and mice, while the company they contracted to put the things together lost money on the deal and was considering bankruptcy last time I looked. Marketing has value, doing work and making stuff does not. Who cares about substance anyway?
IT people are being outsourced first because HR does not know how to hire them, and managers don't know how to manage them. Eventually everyone except the VPs, marketers, and salespeople will go. When garment industry jobs that Americans will not do get outsourced that doesn't hurt many people. When manufacturing jobs go, it's painful. When jobs requiring college degrees get outsourced it means a return to the middle ages, with a rich, talentless aristocracy, and a sea of poverty.
The only people you can't outsource are the ones who have to talk to the client directly and the ones who make the decsions as to who to outsource.
If I were starting up a new software company I would go to India or China or Eastern Europe and hire people away from the big outsourcers. Get experienced people pre-trained. Eventually with competition wages may get to 50% of American levels, which is what some people I know (good people, too) are currently accepting.
It's easy to be cavalier about jobs when you are a venture capitalist, a VP, or a journalist; only the journalist can be outsourced, and not easily. It's not so easy once you think that literally everything else can go, leaving American workers working at Wal-Mart.
Yeah, Clinton was bought, too. Bush I was the last pres to think of the country before he thought of lobby groups, and he lost an election for it (and Clinton got credit for the balanced budget and surging economy, see, raising taxes is GOOD). Clinton passed some bad laws, but he didn't sink anywhere near as low as Bush II (who hit bottom long ago, and started excavating).
I like Michael Moore, he forces people to think about stuff they would rather sweep under the rug. You have to take some of what he says with a grain of salt (I'm Candian, Canadians lock their doors, and even buy alarm systems).
Point is gerrmandering has been a bad problem for a long time, and it just got much worse and infinitely more partisan.
The most important point is that HR in most companies sucks. They hire the techies who lie most on their CVs, and the hirees get their friends to lie even more and join them. If HR ever realizes the people are useless they raise the requirements and get even more dishonest applicants. Coders do the same, but coders who don't produce get booted. Admins who don't produce justify themselves in meetings.
As an admin I often see other admins like this (and they are the guys contracted from other companies making $80/hr, not the peons). Consultants brought in to do specifics can be worse (though I've seen good and bad). Any admin who does not work with the developers when there are problems, and at least understand dev tools and third party software used in the company, is in the wrong role.
It is worthwhile having specialized admins (and testers, and support people, and developers) to make sure someone has responsibility for each area. I've seen enough companies where developers administer the systems, and there are always problems. The developers know what to do, but they want to develop, not administer, so the administration is done badly by a lot of people who don't know what other people are doing. Lots of "who setup X" or "who changed/deleted partition X" emails.
My last job was from a company made up of developers who thought they didn't need an admin. They got by for a few months, went live, and hired me. I spent my first two months just fixing stuff that was broken. On the other hand I've had stuff handed off from people who claim to be sysadmins that was almost as bad.
Gerrymandering has been common for a number of years (as stated in the article). The big difference is that both parties agreed to gerrymander to favor incumbents, leaving few (less than 10%) of the races competitive. This made for swing state issues, like guns and abortion, to dominate politics.
Bush has run roughshod over bipartisan sleaze, which would be good if he didn't make it even worse by replacing it with partisan sleaze. Republican gerrymandering has been obscenely blatant, and obscenely successful.
If the democrats ever gain any power they will do the same, but it will be difficult, considering how thoroughly the scale has been tilted. Then again, Bush has done a lot of really bad and really dumb things, and it's possible that eventually some of his supporters will notice.
Blocking breeding is fairly relevant. Testing is key. Gene engineering is trial and error, as no one knows what effect the gene modifications will have. A notable failure was a toxic potato that made it pretty close to the grocery store. No one expected it to be toxic, they'd just modified the thing...
Here in Canada 88% of people want genetically modified food labelled, but it isn't. Many people in the US think that genetically modified food is labelled, and that they have not eaten it, but they are wrong on the first point and almost certainly wrong on the second. Genetically modified foods are very common, and definitely unlabeled.
The republicans have moved way out to the far right and the democrats have followed them. This is not due to hotelling, but to swing state issues and massive gerrymandering (formerly pro-incumbent, now partisan, very slimy either way).
In politics the more propaganda the more you are believed. If one party says something extreme and the other tells the truth most people believe something in the middle. If one party goes way off into fantasyland they pull the center with them.
I doubt voting machine problems can skew results more than dishonesty and media incompetence (no one checks facts anymore, or almost no one) already have.
I'll have to check out GNU transcode again. Last time I checked it did not support digital video, but it claims to now. I've been using a Windows product that forces me to manually select digital video files to convert them to mpeg. With transcode most of the process (all except actually getting the stuff on the computer which I need to watch anyway) will be scripted. I'd password protect the site, but I can't imagine anyone outside the family could possibly care. Maybe when she hits high school...
I won't give the URL because:
The web is good for small things that only a few people care about as well as stuff that lots of people want to see.
If the sequels had come out independently, no relation to the first film, they would have been OK Hollywood movies. The Matrix was not a brilliant film because of the philosophy, or because of the plot, it was successful because a lot of great actors put in a lot of really good performances, and, after 5 years of storyboarding, the filmmakers shot some amazing and affecting scenes.
The two later movies are thrown together by comparison. More actors with less talent basically do less. The background actors in the first movie stayed in the background and looked cool. The background actors in the sequels have to do stuff so the video game makes sense even though it detracts from the movie.
More to the point Laurence Fishburne is an amazing actor with great presence and delivery, and he made the first movie great. He was not allowed to make the sequels great, and Keanu, though good at looking lost and out of place, does not have the presence to play lead (Ted yes, pre-One Neo, yes, The ONE, no).
I don't think that there can be enough emphasis on how much the 5 years of feuding with the studios improved the original. The Wachowskis had to explain every scene dozens of times, get them drawn on paper, re-edit... They just weren't forced to make the same effort for the sequels. Limitations, like Keanu's injuries (limited the fight scenes), the cast's lack of martial art training (ditto), studio antipathy (forced them to work), and delays (gave them time to get it right) contributed to the greatness of the first film. Too much money, too much fame, too much power, too little thought, too much hubris dragged down the sequels.
Again, without the first movies the sequels would have been OK Hollywood movies, they just look real bad by comparison. I can watch scenes from the first movie over and over because they work, they have emotional impact, they look cool. I have no desire to see the other movies again because even the fight scenes are dull and go on too long. The first movie would probably have had long, limp fight scenes too, if Keanu had been healthy, and if Moss, Fishburne, Reeves et al really knew Kung fu. Limitations and suffering, not freedom and happiness, make art.
Judging from the last Quebec referendum, quite a lot. Volunteers counted the ballots, and most of them were honest, but the few of them who were not exclueded ballots differently depending on the vote.
Hmmm, there is an obvious X on the no side, but it is 0.01 degrees out of center, so the ballot is spoiled. Ahhh, there is no X but there is a faint mark on the yes side, obviously we must allow the intent of the voter to rule, it's a YES.
Then you have Germany in the 1930s. OK, it wasn't really a democracy, the political parties all had private armies/street gangs intimidating voters, but they followed some of the forms. Hitler lost the first election, but his brownshirts used invisible ink to identify people who voted against him. After much intimidation Hitler did much better in subsequent elections, and voter turnout was much lower.
Of course there is still a question as to whether electronic voting will solve or exacerbate the above problems.
Hannah:...the Acting Returning Officer, Mr Edmund Blackadder, and we're all very grateful indeed that he stepped in at the last moment when the previous Returning Officer accidentally brutally stabbed himself in the stomach while shaving. Blackadder: I took over from the previous electorate when he very sadly accidentally brutally cut his head off while combing his hair.
Trusting Maxtor drives to work long-term because of some marketed MTBF is insane. I don't know what it is but Maxtor drives always seem to flake out on me. I returned three of them this year after they toasted to unreadability (seems to be one of those things, people always get failures with one brand or another... I've never had a non-Maxtor fail in a PC (a few Seagates in Sun boxes but they were 10+ years old)). There is a reason Maxtor led the rush to one year warranties. I miss the days when 5 or even 3 year warranties were standard.
You can share and distribute hardware on VMWare, so you could take a part of everyone's setup and make a Beowolf cluster of odds and ends. If everyone contributes a little RAM, disk, and bandwidth you could get a fair cluster.
Hmmm how about a SETI-at-home type screen saver that joins a cluster instead of asking for stuff to process? A fluctuating cluster of all unused systems, limited during the day, but powerful at night.
Divx was horrible, but I don't think its death could be so described. The death of Divx was a good thing.
I agree that your posts are overrated, but I think the troll label is a bit much. I think people are using "troll" to identify people they disagree with. I got a "troll" recently for saying spamming and political contributions are not free speech, and should not be protected.
I really liked the thirteenth floor, a film that had another layer of reality. A few other films have done the same thing, and in some cases done it well.
The original Matrix really worked as a movie. It is probably the ultimate Hollywood production, in formula and coolness. The Thirteenth Floor was not as cool, but it was really well written and had some great scenes and lines (why would he try to tell ME about the limits of the simulation?).
The Wachowskis could probably have come up with a better ending if they had had more time, more opposition (especially critical opposition), less access to effects, and less money. Too much money kills way faster than too little.
Good points, actually. I wonder why you were modded to 0?
You're right, I am out of date. I created a Yahoo account to decoy spam, I use it for anything that will be posted or submitted, and I really don't get spam. I've stopped thinking about it. OK, I occasionally look at the spam folder on my decoy account, and I still get viruses, but it does not bother me enough to check tactics. Which does not mean that I would not like to see spammers sued into commercial oblivion.
The first movie was vastly improved by the difficulties the Wachowski brothers had making it. They had to explain it and storyboard it over and over, revisit every scene, reread all the dialogue, and generally tighten everything up before they shot it.
The Wachowskis wanted more action and more effects in the first movie, but they had trouble getting some effects, and were limited by budget. The second movie had longer, more involved fight scenes that were much less interesting and had much less impact. The limitations on the first movie (including Keanus injuries) made it much better.
The actors worked in the original. Pretty much everyone, Fishburne, Moss, Pantoliano, Weaving, and Foster were fantastic. Keanu just had to look cool and lost, which he does really well. The minor charactors, like Apoc and Switch looked cool and stayed in the background. Lots of familiar people through the movie, good acting in spite of varying dialogue, and really good background, outfits, and scenes. The sequel was a mess of minor characters and long meaningless fight scenes (did anyone else get bored watching the fight scene as they left the Merovingian's place?).
Lawrence Fishburne made the first movie. Where was he in the sequels? He's WAY down the cast list.
I've seen the original lots of times now, but the big scenes still have an emotional impact if I check them out when it's on TV for the nth time, with the swearing (what little there is) pathetically censored. The sequels just don't have it. You can see the thought and effort put into every scene of the original, and you can visualize the scripting of the sequels (long fight scene (work out details later), emotional moment, love scene between mains (please, god, let there be chemistry)...) unfortunately.
Maybe the Wachowskis should take 10 years, look over the scripts, get the storyboards done, cut the meaningless stuff, rewrite 5 times, and do a couple of apology movies.
Yeah, the filter checks out all spam sites nicely inflating their hit counters. Good idea.
Will it also run executables to check for viruses?
Do it on a sliding scale. First hundred emails a day are free. Second hundred at $0.001 each. Once you get into the hundreds of thousands a buck each. Rebates if you can prove people were actually happy to receive your mail. Problem is there are some companies that send lots of email you may actually want to hear from. Real virus and security warnings, maybe. What it takes to stop spam is for judges to show a little common sense, and decide that spam, like bribes to politicians and their parties, is not free speech. Tracking down spammers and suing away their scam-gotten mansions would be fun.
Remember when France and Britain threatened to invade Czechoslovakia themselves if the Czechs did not surrender to Hitler? Surrender rough, defensible territory he would not have been able to take himself?
A lot of places will reboot servers with long uptime during maintenance windows just to check. I worked in a large environment where we would reboot systems that were over 100 days on principle. No hardware failures resulted (Sun, HP, and linux systems), but occasional software/rc issues came up. Most of the systems would consistently make it to 100 days. We had some hardware and software issues or upgrades, but most of the systems, especially old, overused, systems that we did not do software upgrades on would make it consistently. No uptimes over 120 days, but some systems went 6 consecutive reboots without issues. On the other hand there was a power failure that ran down the UPS at some point.