...it's mostly my own doing. When gmail was a beta "invitation only" service, I spent $20 on ebay for two such invites.
In return, I scored "mylastname@gmail.com" email address and "myfirstinitiallastname@gmail.com"
My last name is not that common in the US (howmanyofme says about 18000 others share it). The same site shows 10 people in the US with my first/last name combo.
Why I didn't think about the consequences a little more and choose the less-easy-for-spammers-to-guess and less-likely-for-other-users-garble "firstnamelastnme@gmail.com" option is another question.
But: in the central European country my grandfather emigrated from (and two countries that border it), my last name is common. Real common. The fifth most common in that country and its neighbors.
So: I get a LOT of foreign language spam and the occaissional mispitched personal email in the last name only account. I try to identify obvious items of importance that have arrived by mistake and notify the sender (because I'd hope somebody would to the same for me).
The other account (firstinitiallastname) gets a LOT of mistaken emails. Sometimes I'll end up on the mailing list for churches/schools in other states (they are very responsive to "not me please stop" requests. Estimates for home repairs, pictures of family members, etc etc have all arrived over the years. Sometimes what are obviously important medical or professional emails (job interviews!) arrive and I let the sender know. This spring I started getting tuition payment notices from guys film school college in L.A....they are from a "do not reply/not monitored" account, so tough darts for him. Hopefully he knows his tuition is due.
The worst was a repeated, multi-year series of mistaken emails belonging to a very wealthy VC capitalist lady a few years younger and several tax brackets higher than me. She lived in gated community near San Diego (her giant house was literally next the polo club). She had very expensive tastes in wine, food and leisure activities (including both VC and non-profit fundraising events). She and her husband were shopping for second homes in Utah and New Mexico. Her husband frequently upgraded his vehicles (always high end BMW and Mercedes) and often then modified his wheels. One of his comments to his tire/wheel guy about a new rim selection was: "I like the shiny". I received pictures of her friends at a bachelorotte party for a second marriage that included lots of done up ladies in revealing evening attire. I know all this, because for all of her money, she NEVER once had the courtesy to respond to than me for the 10 to 20 times I told her that I had her stuff in my inbox again, and she needed to correct the contact info she was giving her peeps...so I accumulated unwanted knowledge about her life over a four year period before the spigot got turned off.
Trump being baffled by Google search results is a symptom of the same lack of insight into now-ubiquitous technology that led Orrin Hatch to ask this stupid fucking question:
Amen. In the exurban semi-rural (and decidedly non-diverse) county where I live, nearly 80% of the employed adults travel to their jobs in locations outside of the county by car.
Our local government (a 5-member board of commissioners with no executive) has as one of their guiding principles of the counts is that there shall be NO establishment of mass transit services that connect to out-of-county transit services (we're talking buses...rail would be totally out the question without state or federal assistance, and that ain't happening).
Why? Because the poor people from the closest urban area would just use those mass transit vehicles to come out here, steal our stuff, and then carry all the stuff they stole back into the city on those same mass transit conveyances.
Off course, the lack of public transit doesn't stop our drug users from getting into the city to by heroin...
I first became aware of humans in space when I saw a Time magazine with a picture of John Glenn in Time magazine cover in hour house. While I was too young to appreciate the functional evolution of the US space program (suborbital to orbital flight, single-seat to multi-seat capsules, increasing task complexity --including EVAs--, docking with other craft), I did realize the goal of the Apollo program was to carry astronauts to the moon.
I didn't understand the baby steps needed to get there. As a kid, I'd imagine mission control with a surprise announcement to the crew: "Good news; we're moving up the schedule and sending you guys TODAY instead of evolving and learning for two more years".
The coverage of the Apollo 1 disaster that I remember focused on the explosion resulting from the choice of 100% oxygen for the capsule environment.
Sometime during the frenzy of the Gemini/Apollo era, some the elementary schools where we lived then were named after astronauts. To my surprise, these schools (in Old Bridge, NJ) still carry these names 50 years later: Carpenter, Copper, Grissom, McDivitt. Schirra, Shephard.
A few years ago, I took one of the tours of Kennedy that includes access to the historic Mercury and Apollo launch sites, including the pad where the Apollo 1 crew had died. Very sobering.
Here's your bottom line up front: Amazon doesn't care about the quality of reviews. Period. Amazon cares about control of the process.
Here's how I know this:
I have been an amazon Vine member since 2009. At the time I was invited to start receiving "free" (no longer are they free: for the last two years, every item is assigned a "fair market value" (FMV) for tax purposes that results in an an annual 1099 for the IRS; generally the FMV is about 1/3 of the sticker price) items, I had written less than 20 reviews of things bought from amazon since 1997.
From 2012 until early last month, I also accepted and reviewed items provided directly to me through amazon vendors. Some where shipped directly to me, and some where provided through amazon via a vendor-supplied claim code that would result in an "amazon verified purchase badge. At the "high water mark" of my reviewing activity, I was ranked in the low two digits of amazon's "Top Reviewer Ranking" list.
The above represents three categories of reviews: (1) Amazon supplied through Vine (which carries a giant green "Vine Customer Review of Free Product" banner) (2) Vendor-supplied direct (and therefore, no "verified purchase" label) (3) Vendor-supplied via claim code (and therefore labeled as "verified purchase" (4) Things I bought from amazon with my own money (the "true" amazon verified purchases) (5) Things I bought someplace else and reviewed on amazon.
For (1): Amazon generates the disclaimer. For (2) and (3): I provided the disclaimer at the end of the review. I didn't make a rhetorical attempt to convince you that I had provided an "honest evaluation...blah blah blah..".I simply stated that fact of receiving the item for reviewing, in order to comply with both Amazon and an FTC requirement.
I had no incentive to inflate the ratings on any of these products categories.
The stream of Vine items was not dependent on me offering a high rating, and I have 1-starred many big ticket items. Since 2009, the Vine program has sent me over 300 items..from Post-It notes and advance reviewer copies of books to high-end A/V equipment carrying 4-figure price tags; overall average value is about $65 for ALL products...but there is nearly a $1600 range between the most and least expensive items). I'll tell you more about why the scoring or strength of content was irrelevant to amazon in a second.
For vendor-provided items, the majority of these were Chinese-manufactured smalls (Bluetooth speakers, LED flashlights, Lightning cables, USB cables, kitchen items, RC vehicles, dashcams, GoPro knockoffs... although a few others popped into the "shiny" zone, and came from brand names you would recognize immediately), but I also had no incentive to inflate the scoring of these products either. Typically, the vendors had not read any of my reviews, they simply had my email address (and there is clearly an active network of vendors exchanging big lists of such email addresses). Before accepting an item I told each vendor that I would be disclosing the receipt of the item, and that the rating and review would be based directly on my user experience. The email associated with my amazon account received an average of about 35 such offers every day. Since amazon ended "incentived" reviews. I still get 15-20 offers daily, even though they are deleted without reading.
And for stuff I bought myself (on Amazon or elsewhere: just as with Vine and vendor-provided products: I reported my user experience. My overall average product rating was slightly above 4 for over 1600 reviews written since 2009..
In order, here's what amazon has done since October: -Told ALL reviewers that they could no longer review items received for free from vendors. -Deleted the entire contents of reviewers that amazon's magical systems decided were engaging in manipulative behavior. Sometimes this removed the reviews of obvious shill or dishonest reviewers...and sometimes this threw out the baby with the bathwater as honest
Longtime Jeaopardy! watchers know what he's doing is certainly within the rules. So, he's a strong player.
All the Jeoapardy! staff has to do is place some of the daily doubles in the first row of clues (on his most recent show, I'm pretty sure I remember one on the second row). The daily doubles are typically not placed here. Doing so will force him to the top of the board. This addresses the daily double searching.
As for the reach down into the higher value clues; even if you find it annoying (which I do), it's certainly allowed, so it's up to his opponents to be smart and fast enough to turn the tables and deny him those clues.
This is what I do for mail that is obviously important (job interviews, requests about the health of relatives, etc): send a short note back saying "nobody here with that name, you have the wrong address...."
OTOH, for many years I have been receiving the emails intended for a very wealthy Orange County lady venture capitalist (who lives in big old McMansion in a gated community..next to the the polo field) who is into expensive wine tasting, fundraisers for the arts, who is shopping for a second home in Idaho and whose husband is into major wheel upgrades on his BWW. Apparently being rich doesn't make you smart about what email address you give to your friends. I used to let them know. Now I just see what their lastest extravagance is and move on. They can figure out themselves why their correspondents think they are non-responsive.
Next to Vegas, Disney is the most efficient "money from wallet" enterprise I've ever visited. When I was there a few years ago, I scored about two dozen of the "wait-time measurement passes". I kept forgetting to turn them in at the end of the queue. I wonder what the attrition rate is on those things??
Been using this for 2 years...holds lots, decent ergonomics, great for consolidating a DSLR, laptop and all the accompanying stuff: Lowepro CompuTrekker Plus AW Camera Backpack ($165 on amazon)
I bought an early gmail invite on ebay and scored my last name. It's it's not common...unless you're in Hungary, where it's the equivalent of "Smith".
All the spam: deleted.
All the stuff from "no reply" accounts where somebody with the same last name thought my email address was theirs: deleted.
The occasional item that looks like no kidding news of importance something somebody really should know about (over the years it has included deaths in the family, suicidal relatives, travel plans, job offers, real estate contracts and tax returns): i shoot a note to the sender and invite them to double check.
For the longest time I was in on the wine-tastings, car-customizing, antique-buying, charitable fund raising and investment meetings of some very wealthy people in southern California. Loved looking at the houses whose addresses where listed on Google maps. Big damned places...one of them next to a fucking polo field. The very rich are different indeed...
I never thought a "giant boulder" was a solution...but understand why somebody might asked that question given the lack of effort by BP and the US government in explaining the "how it's done" of both normal oil drilling from deep sites or the response to the Deepwater Horizon site.
Collectively, neither the federal government nor the three commercial interests involved in this massive CF have done a good job of explaining the the "normal" process of deepwater drilling or the resulting problems in this case.
And they are now unlikely to. As lawyers and congresscritters circle and drool, all we get from BP, Transocean and Halliburton (and to a lesser extent, MMS bureaucrats) pointing at each other as they try to protect their bottom lines.
And while the live video feed of the leak that Congress delivered is terrifying: there is no scaling, and precious little perspective provided to help us understand exactly what we are looking at.
Which leads to comments like I heard on CSPAN yesterday: "Can't they just drop a giant boulder on it?"
At first I thought it was a stupid question. And then I looked at the video feed...and got it.
I'm lucky: I got to enjoy the gulf before it turned into a petrol wasteland. Right now, I'm pessimistic that my kid will get to do the same.
...of course this came from the LA Times, where they like the shiny things most of all.
Sometimes, real science...and real work...includes stretches of time without sound or pictures. In space operations, there are times when lack of obvious activity is a desired state.
I usually build my own or work with a local shop when I need a new PC. Early last year, the motherboard failed on my main desktop, I was leaving town on business, and needed to make sure I could get back to work immediately when I returned. I turned to an online purchase from Dell, and had them customize an XPS420. My first --and many times repeated-- requirement: "I need a video card that has a dual DVI output". "Oh, yes, sir, it's got that". Of course, it arrived with a DVI/VGA output. To their credit, when I complained, they shipped me an upgrade card at no cost. Worked out OK for me...would not have for somebody not willing or able to install their own. Sales staff lying to customers...shocking!
...next time I send you a $50 or $100 gift (in memoriam, or in response to some workplace challenge, or just because I'm feeling tender about the thing you accept donations for in week moment):
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't spend five times that over the next five years asking for MORE.
Many charitable/non-profits are guilty of this, but it seems to me the USO in particular would have a lot more money to help troops and families with if they didn't spend so much trying to get the once altruistic to repeat their acts.
All their stuff (and the stuff from Special Olympics and the American Cancer Society...just for starters) now goes direct from the mailbox to the trash.
Slashdot Mirror
Not ready for cryptocurrency. Or any science at all.
...it's mostly my own doing.
When gmail was a beta "invitation only" service, I spent $20 on ebay for two such invites.
In return, I scored "mylastname@gmail.com" email address and "myfirstinitiallastname@gmail.com"
My last name is not that common in the US (howmanyofme says about 18000 others share it). The same site shows 10 people in the US with my first/last name combo.
Why I didn't think about the consequences a little more and choose the less-easy-for-spammers-to-guess and less-likely-for-other-users-garble "firstnamelastnme@gmail.com" option is another question.
But: in the central European country my grandfather emigrated from (and two countries that border it), my last name is common. Real common. The fifth most common in that country and its neighbors.
So: I get a LOT of foreign language spam and the occaissional mispitched personal email in the last name only account. I try to identify obvious items of importance that have arrived by mistake and notify the sender (because I'd hope somebody would to the same for me).
The other account (firstinitiallastname) gets a LOT of mistaken emails. Sometimes I'll end up on the mailing list for churches/schools in other states (they are very responsive to "not me please stop" requests. Estimates for home repairs, pictures of family members, etc etc have all arrived over the years. Sometimes what are obviously important medical or professional emails (job interviews!) arrive and I let the sender know. This spring I started getting tuition payment notices from guys film school college in L.A....they are from a "do not reply/not monitored" account, so tough darts for him. Hopefully he knows his tuition is due.
The worst was a repeated, multi-year series of mistaken emails belonging to a very wealthy VC capitalist lady a few years younger and several tax brackets higher than me. She lived in gated community near San Diego (her giant house was literally next the polo club). She had very expensive tastes in wine, food and leisure activities (including both VC and non-profit fundraising events). She and her husband were shopping for second homes in Utah and New Mexico. Her husband frequently upgraded his vehicles (always high end BMW and Mercedes) and often then modified his wheels. One of his comments to his tire/wheel guy about a new rim selection was: "I like the shiny". I received pictures of her friends at a bachelorotte party for a second marriage that included lots of done up ladies in revealing evening attire. I know all this, because for all of her money, she NEVER once had the courtesy to respond to than me for the 10 to 20 times I told her that I had her stuff in my inbox again, and she needed to correct the contact info she was giving her peeps...so I accumulated unwanted knowledge about her life over a four year period before the spigot got turned off.
Trump being baffled by Google search results is a symptom of the same lack of insight into now-ubiquitous technology that led Orrin Hatch to ask this stupid fucking question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's the same reason he retweets himself...too stupid to understand how to pin a tweet.
He's an idiot who should take tutoring from Barron, who he claims already has mastered "the cyber".
Unfortunately, his finger is also poised over Americal's nuclear triad. We could be doomed, and just not know it yetl
Amen. In the exurban semi-rural (and decidedly non-diverse) county where I live, nearly 80% of the employed adults travel to their jobs in locations outside of the county by car.
Our local government (a 5-member board of commissioners with no executive) has as one of their guiding principles of the counts is that there shall be NO establishment of mass transit services that connect to out-of-county transit services (we're talking buses...rail would be totally out the question without state or federal assistance, and that ain't happening).
Why? Because the poor people from the closest urban area would just use those mass transit vehicles to come out here, steal our stuff, and then carry all the stuff they stole back into the city on those same mass transit conveyances.
Off course, the lack of public transit doesn't stop our drug users from getting into the city to by heroin...
I first became aware of humans in space when I saw a Time magazine with a picture of John Glenn in Time magazine cover in hour house. While I was too young to appreciate the functional evolution of the US space program (suborbital to orbital flight, single-seat to multi-seat capsules, increasing task complexity --including EVAs--, docking with other craft), I did realize the goal of the Apollo program was to carry astronauts to the moon.
I didn't understand the baby steps needed to get there. As a kid, I'd imagine mission control with a surprise announcement to the crew: "Good news; we're moving up the schedule and sending you guys TODAY instead of evolving and learning for two more years".
The coverage of the Apollo 1 disaster that I remember focused on the explosion resulting from the choice of 100% oxygen for the capsule environment.
Sometime during the frenzy of the Gemini/Apollo era, some the elementary schools where we lived then were named after astronauts. To my surprise, these schools (in Old Bridge, NJ) still carry these names 50 years later: Carpenter, Copper, Grissom, McDivitt. Schirra, Shephard.
A few years ago, I took one of the tours of Kennedy that includes access to the historic Mercury and Apollo launch sites, including the pad where the Apollo 1 crew had died. Very sobering.
...is that the US is about to enjoy the greatest job producing president the world has ever known.
So nobody has to worry.
Here's your bottom line up front: Amazon doesn't care about the quality of reviews. Period. Amazon cares about control of the process.
Here's how I know this:
I have been an amazon Vine member since 2009. At the time I was invited to start receiving "free" (no longer are they free: for the last two years, every item is assigned a "fair market value" (FMV) for tax purposes that results in an an annual 1099 for the IRS; generally the FMV is about 1/3 of the sticker price) items, I had written less than 20 reviews of things bought from amazon since 1997.
From 2012 until early last month, I also accepted and reviewed items provided directly to me through amazon vendors. Some where shipped directly to me, and some where provided through amazon via a vendor-supplied claim code that would result in an "amazon verified purchase badge. At the "high water mark" of my reviewing activity, I was ranked in the low two digits of amazon's "Top Reviewer Ranking" list.
The above represents three categories of reviews:
(1) Amazon supplied through Vine (which carries a giant green "Vine Customer Review of Free Product" banner)
(2) Vendor-supplied direct (and therefore, no "verified purchase" label)
(3) Vendor-supplied via claim code (and therefore labeled as "verified purchase"
(4) Things I bought from amazon with my own money (the "true" amazon verified purchases)
(5) Things I bought someplace else and reviewed on amazon.
For (1): Amazon generates the disclaimer. .I simply stated that fact of receiving the item for reviewing, in order to comply with both Amazon and an FTC requirement.
For (2) and (3): I provided the disclaimer at the end of the review. I didn't make a rhetorical attempt to convince you that I had provided an "honest evaluation...blah blah blah.."
I had no incentive to inflate the ratings on any of these products categories.
The stream of Vine items was not dependent on me offering a high rating, and I have 1-starred many big ticket items. Since 2009, the Vine program has sent me over 300 items..from Post-It notes and advance reviewer copies of books to high-end A/V equipment carrying 4-figure price tags; overall average value is about $65 for ALL products...but there is nearly a $1600 range between the most and least expensive items). I'll tell you more about why the scoring or strength of content was irrelevant to amazon in a second.
For vendor-provided items, the majority of these were Chinese-manufactured smalls (Bluetooth speakers, LED flashlights, Lightning cables, USB cables, kitchen items, RC vehicles, dashcams, GoPro knockoffs... although a few others popped into the "shiny" zone, and came from brand names you would recognize immediately), but I also had no incentive to inflate the scoring of these products either. Typically, the vendors had not read any of my reviews, they simply had my email address (and there is clearly an active network of vendors exchanging big lists of such email addresses). Before accepting an item I told each vendor that I would be disclosing the receipt of the item, and that the rating and review would be based directly on my user experience. The email associated with my amazon account received an average of about 35 such offers every day. Since amazon ended "incentived" reviews. I still get 15-20 offers daily, even though they are deleted without reading.
And for stuff I bought myself (on Amazon or elsewhere: just as with Vine and vendor-provided products: I reported my user experience. My overall average product rating was slightly above 4 for over 1600 reviews written since 2009..
In order, here's what amazon has done since October:
-Told ALL reviewers that they could no longer review items received for free from vendors.
-Deleted the entire contents of reviewers that amazon's magical systems decided were engaging in manipulative behavior. Sometimes this removed the reviews of obvious shill or dishonest reviewers...and sometimes this threw out the baby with the bathwater as honest
Longtime Jeaopardy! watchers know what he's doing is certainly within the rules. So, he's a strong player.
All the Jeoapardy! staff has to do is place some of the daily doubles in the first row of clues (on his most recent show, I'm pretty sure I remember one on the second row). The daily doubles are typically not placed here. Doing so will force him to the top of the board. This addresses the daily double searching.
As for the reach down into the higher value clues; even if you find it annoying (which I do), it's certainly allowed, so it's up to his opponents to be smart and fast enough to turn the tables and deny him those clues.
This is what I do for mail that is obviously important (job interviews, requests about the health of relatives, etc): send a short note back saying "nobody here with that name, you have the wrong address...."
OTOH, for many years I have been receiving the emails intended for a very wealthy Orange County lady venture capitalist (who lives in big old McMansion in a gated community..next to the the polo field) who is into expensive wine tasting, fundraisers for the arts, who is shopping for a second home in Idaho and whose husband is into major wheel upgrades on his BWW. Apparently being rich doesn't make you smart about what email address you give to your friends. I used to let them know. Now I just see what their lastest extravagance is and move on. They can figure out themselves why their correspondents think they are non-responsive.
Next to Vegas, Disney is the most efficient "money from wallet" enterprise I've ever visited. When I was there a few years ago, I scored about two dozen of the "wait-time measurement passes". I kept forgetting to turn them in at the end of the queue. I wonder what the attrition rate is on those things??
...a $5 cable for which he can pay $45.
And for peace of mind, he can add an extended warranty for just $17 more....
Been using this for 2 years...holds lots, decent ergonomics, great for consolidating a DSLR, laptop and all the accompanying stuff:
Lowepro CompuTrekker Plus AW Camera Backpack
($165 on amazon)
...it's the 60% rate of increase that drove my decision to cancel today.
I wouldn't accept this from any other provider of a completely optional part of my budget. Not accepting it from Netflix either...
I bought an early gmail invite on ebay and scored my last name. It's it's not common...unless you're in Hungary, where it's the equivalent of "Smith".
All the spam: deleted.
All the stuff from "no reply" accounts where somebody with the same last name thought my email address was theirs: deleted.
The occasional item that looks like no kidding news of importance something somebody really should know about (over the years it has included deaths in the family, suicidal relatives, travel plans, job offers, real estate contracts and tax returns): i shoot a note to the sender and invite them to double check.
For the longest time I was in on the wine-tastings, car-customizing, antique-buying, charitable fund raising and investment meetings of some very wealthy people in southern California. Loved looking at the houses whose addresses where listed on Google maps. Big damned places...one of them next to a fucking polo field. The very rich are different indeed...
I never thought a "giant boulder" was a solution...but understand why somebody might asked that question given the lack of effort by BP and the US government in explaining the "how it's done" of both normal oil drilling from deep sites or the response to the Deepwater Horizon site.
Collectively, neither the federal government nor the three commercial interests involved in this massive CF have done a good job of explaining the the "normal" process of deepwater drilling or the resulting problems in this case.
And they are now unlikely to. As lawyers and congresscritters circle and drool, all we get from BP, Transocean and Halliburton (and to a lesser extent, MMS bureaucrats) pointing at each other as they try to protect their bottom lines.
And while the live video feed of the leak that Congress delivered is terrifying: there is no scaling, and precious little perspective provided to help us understand exactly what we are looking at.
Which leads to comments like I heard on CSPAN yesterday:
"Can't they just drop a giant boulder on it?"
At first I thought it was a stupid question. And then I looked at the video feed...and got it.
I'm lucky: I got to enjoy the gulf before it turned into a petrol wasteland. Right now, I'm pessimistic that my kid will get to do the same.
The risk analysis summary was probably rendered poorly in PowerPoint. Now Edward Tufte can write another book.
woo hoo. zoom zoom.
..CTU already has the skies over Manhattan filled with drones...they said so during hours 1 and 2...
...of course this came from the LA Times, where they like the shiny things most of all.
Sometimes, real science...and real work...includes stretches of time without sound or pictures. In space operations, there are times when lack of obvious activity is a desired state.
shhhh.
don't forget the first rule of "flight club"......
...can share his cell with the Blue Hippo
I usually build my own or work with a local shop when I need a new PC. Early last year, the motherboard failed on my main desktop, I was leaving town on business, and needed to make sure I could get back to work immediately when I returned. I turned to an online purchase from Dell, and had them customize an XPS420. My first --and many times repeated-- requirement: "I need a video card that has a dual DVI output".
"Oh, yes, sir, it's got that".
Of course, it arrived with a DVI/VGA output.
To their credit, when I complained, they shipped me an upgrade card at no cost. Worked out OK for me...would not have for somebody not willing or able to install their own.
Sales staff lying to customers...shocking!
...next time I send you a $50 or $100 gift (in memoriam, or in response to some workplace challenge, or just because I'm feeling tender about the thing you accept donations for in week moment):
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don't spend five times that over the next five years asking for MORE.
Many charitable/non-profits are guilty of this, but it seems to me the USO in particular would have a lot more money to help troops and families with if they didn't spend so much trying to get the once altruistic to repeat their acts.
All their stuff (and the stuff from Special Olympics and the American Cancer Society...just for starters) now goes direct from the mailbox to the trash.
...not sure how it performs with formulas/coding, but with text and narrative content, "Writeboard" works great:
http://www.writeboard.com/