Yeah, and backups are also barcoded and hand-tranported by courier to and offsite storage/security vault.
Actually they may well be barcoded, they damn sure ought to be encrypted, and they are indeed hand-transported by courier to the backup location. In fact, several of the articles that I read had BOFA blaming ramp workers for stealing the tapes at some stage. IMO that's a cop-out, any ramp agent is going to be hard pressed to leave an airport with something he didn't bring in.
Bank record transportation is (or at least was, before Check21 went into effect) a major and rather vertical industry. The general chain of command is that a courier service picks up "the goods" (cancelled checks, backup tapes, whatever) from a bank, takes the cargo to the nearest airport, and drops it off in one manner or another. Depending on the bank and the courier, the goods are either dropped at the airport Post Office or taken to an airline's cargo input on the ramp.
From there, the obvious happens. Either the items are transported via USPS to their destination, or they fly as commercial cargo and wind up at the destination airport, where another series of couriers collects and delivers it to the receiving location. The article that I saw claimed that BOFA declined to describe how the process works. Well, this is how the process works.
The thing is, bank records are not exactly labeled "PERSONAL FINANCIAL RECORD BACKUPS, TOTALLY SECRET, PLEASE BE CAREFUL." The people who are working as couriers for banks know what they're picking up, but they also know that they're constantly under scrutiny. Once this stuff hits the ramp, it's just cargo as far as airline employees are concerned. It gets on a plane, flies to a destination, and things reverse; ramp agents unload random cargo as far as they know, and then some courier who knows damn well that he's being watched takes it to the receiving bank.
From all accounts, BOFA seems to be blaming ramp agents. I call bullshit. For one thing, nobody goes on or off a ramp without some sort of security check; I should know, I'm on the ramp almost every day. And most of the "secure" cargo flowing through a given ramp is unmarked and can't readily be recognized. The only time you pick up on something "special" is when Customs imounds a shipment.
As far as the explanations I've heard, I say BOFA are full of shit. This wasn't a ramp worker nabbing a case of backup tapes - he'd never have gotten off the ramp. This is negligence one way or another.
This page [skepdic.com] has more information about this phenomenon, called the clustering illusion.
Thanks for that link. It's a good explanation of something one of my college professors said, which has stuck with me ever since: "A random number generator isn't truly random unless it can potentially generate the same number many times in a row." The idea being that if an RNG was programmed to avoid producing the same number repeatedly, it wasn't really generating random output.
The "clustering illusion" (I never knew there was a name for it) has some interesting applications in real life. Dice in a casino is probably the most obvious example, but things get more interesting as the field gets lower; like, say, 1 and 0. This example applies decently to MMORPGs, where things like whether or not you strike your foe, or whether or not you gain in a skill, are based on your skill times some sort of random number. I was a hardcore addict of Ultima Online for a few years, and one of the common complaints was "I have a skill level of X, but I failed to land a hit on my opponent Y times in a row, something is wrong!"
I guess the next time my UO addiction recurs, I'll have a valid explanation for that phenomenon.
(Would have posted this about 3 hours ago, but Slashdot went down, or something, and I lost my original comment. Had to rewrite from memory.)
Does anybody in N. America check signatures? They hardly seem to look at my cards. I have a friend who wrote "See ID" on the signature strip of their card and it took four months before she had a request.
Someone signed his credit card receipts using all sorts of fake names, he even signed by drawing little pictures on the line. The best part is that he scanned the receipts and stuck them on the web:
To share my own experience, no, I rarely have anyone look at the signature on the receipt much less try to compare it with what's on the back of the card. Cashiers are either lazy or trusting; it's the South, so probably a little of both.
You're telling me that you can take the time to browse their selection, wait in line to check out and sit on the movie anywhere from 14 to 44 days, but you can't find 5 seconds in that time to slip it back in their drop box?
I dunno. The ad that I saw on TV proclaimed "the end of late fees," to the point of unveiling a huge banner, and telling people "no more late fees." The ad featured a huge crowd of people rejoicing over the fact that there were no more late fees. The general idea was, "no more late fees." I don't see how anyone who saw the ad could have thought anything other than "hey, Blockbuster is eliminating late fees, kickass!"
I never saw an ad that said "No more late fees as long as you return your rental within 3 days." I didn't see a commercial that said "Oh by the way, if you don't bring your movie back within a week, we'll charge you the retail price for that title." Nope. It was all about "no more late fees." That's what they advertised, and they aren't delivering.
I'm not sure how the average consumer would see the ads other than the obvious interpretation. What I took from the ad campaign was that I don't have to pay a late fee, even if I can't find 5 seconds to return the video to Blockbuster. The ad campaign said no more late fees.
If they're charging fees anyway, that seems rather gauche, and perhaps illegal. Don't you think?
Maybe it's a good thing that I download instead of rent...
As a Latino, I find it funny that only Anglos gets scorn for racism, but the second a Black or Asian does it, no one says a peep. Want proof? Just look at most Black sitcoms or films, there's almost always a pointed anti-White tone to it all. Jokes that get directed towards Whites would garner instant outrage if the situation were reversed.
It's a double-standard that has existed for a long time. I believe the reason that racism against whites is "tolerated" is because whites are currently in the majority. I'm not saying it makes sense, I'm just saying that in general, it's only called racism if it's directed at a minority, and even then, only when the minority is some other color than white. Where I live, us honkeys are in the minority.
I think there's also a pervasive belief among some minorities that pulling the race card will get them anything they want; I also think that there's some truth to that. After all, nobody wants to be called racist, and certainly not in public. White people will generally bend over backwards to avoid being seen as racists. Rather than get a bad public image, they'll grease the squeaky wheel. In the end, the minority often achieves their goal even though no racism occurred.
For example, there was a group that came through town a couple of weeks ago trying to boycott the Dillard's department store chain, claiming that they don't hire enough black people. They don't offer any proof of this, no one's come forward saying that Dillard's fired them or didn't hire them because they were black. This group just has it in their mind that not enough blacks work at Dillard's (maybe they just aren't applying there?) so they call it racism and stir up a boycott that all of 10 people showed up for. If there's any meat to the story - like, you know, even remotely circumstantial evidence that Dillard's discriminates - the black boycotters and black reporter didn't bother to mention it.
As another example, one of our local school systems is outsourcing the custodial and janitorial positions to a private company. Instead of hiring custodians directly, the school system is going to pay a private company to manage that part of their workforce. This will supposedly save the school system, which is about 80 million in the red, some money. Immediately, the head of the custodial workers' union (yes, there really is one) went on the news and started calling it racism and discrimination because 90% of the janitors are black. Well, I doubt that the private company has located a secret cache of white people who are lining up to be janitors. It's still going to be 90% black once it's privatized, but something is happening that affects black people, so it must be racist.
Then there's one of our esteemed state Senators, John Ford. Over the past month, he's been caught up in four separate scandals. Now he's trying to say that it's all racism.
First off, he's trying to pass legislation that would ease the child support burden on fathers who maintain more than one home - and guess what, he qualifies, seeing as how he has kids with 3 different women and apparently lives with two of them part-time. Next, he's trying to pass legislation that would significantly raise the standard of entry for newcomers into the funeral home business. Guess which business his family has been in for generations? Thirdly, he didn't report a significant chunk of income, as legislators are required by state law to report. Finally, it came out that he used upwards of $20,000 in campaign funds to pay for his daughter's wedding expenses. This isn't just unethical, it's outright illegal.
What's his response? He's saying that the "white media" (his term!) are out to get him. That's right, it's not his fault that he's a philandering, corrupt politician who seems to spend most of his public time trying to legislate new financial benefits for himself and his family. No, of course not. Even though half of the local news anchors and reporters are black, all of this is the "white media's" fault.
He's going for the "get what I want because I'm in the minority and they're all racists" ploy. Unfortunately, it works fairly often around here. It's probably not going to work for Senator Ford, though.
Over the past year, I've made more than $10,000,000 via eBay. That's net, not gross! My strategy is: set a very high "Buy it Now" price, and make that the same as your "Reserve" price. For someone to actually win, they have to capitulate to exactly the amount you were hoping for. If you locate evildoers who are selling similar products at a lower price, just have the Attorney General send a VeRO dispute to eBay. Easy!
The media has criticized me for running what they call "no-bid" auctions, but it's sure been profitable on my end, so what's their problem?
There is particular concern about protecting the 23.6-24 GHz band, which has the unique property of being sensitive to water vapour but not to liquid water.
Dr English said: "There is no other frequency where this occurs. But car 'radars' will now be allowed to broadcast in this frequency band."
What are the car 'radars' that Dr. English speaks of? As far as I know, radar (and laser) detectors don't broadcast anything, they simply detect certain frequencies.
The article is based in the UK. Is there some sort of dashboard radar system showing up there which doesn't exist in the US? Or do the "smart reverse" systems (which someone in the US wanted to make mandatory) use the same frequencies?
There is only one very narrow band that detects water vapor but not liquid water, for example. This frequency has been sold to developers of car radar systems
So now a hit on the Ka band could mean "Cops" or "Killer Avalanche?" And people are complaining? Give me weather alerts on my radar detector any time!
I don't think offering pay as you go would draw as many new people, as it would reduce the number of people paying for a monthly fee.
I agree here. The monthly fee is what pays for the upkeep of MMORPGs. If you think about it, even for a small game, there's cost involved in running it. You need servers, you need developers, you need a marketing department (even if it's just one person), you need to create boxed games if you want to show up in stores, etc.
I look at from the "risk vs reward" paradigm upon which many MMORPGs are based. I spend, say, $10 a month for a game. That's my risk. My reward is playing that game as much as I want over the course of that month. I'll admit that my free time isn't what it used to be a few years ago, back when I was able to make giant comments like this in passing about an MMORPG, but I still think that I get my money's worth out of $10/month.
Think of it this way. Earlier this week, I went to go see Ocean's Twelve. It's the first time I've gone to see a movie in years. I saw Ocean's Eleven on TNT awhile ago, and enjoyed it enough that I decided to pay for the sequel instead of waiting for it to show up on TV. I went alone. The ticket was $8.50. A small popcorn and a medium Dr. Pepper were $6.75. (Aside: I can buy two three-packs, or SIX FULL SERVINGS, of ACT II microwave popcorn for about 4 bucks. Any theater complaining about revenues being in the gutter does NOT have my sympathy.)
Anyway, I spent $15.25 to see Ocean's Twelve. The movie ran just over two hours, if you subtract the 6 commercials and 4 previews. That's $7.63 per hour for entertainment. Suppose I'd smuggled in a chilled can of Dr. Pepper and a bag of Doritos in my jacket pockets, instead of buying the ridiculously priced concessions. An $8.50 ticket to a two hour movie makes $4.25 per hour. That isn't too far under minimum wage!
My point is that I paid - depending upon how you see it - either $4.25/hour or $7.63/hour to be entertained. I have a subscription to the MMORPG Ultima Online which costs me $9.99/month (caveat: I pay 6 months at a time, if you pay monthly, it's $12.99 a month). $9.99, or even $12.99, spread over the number of hours I play in a month, is far more of a value than the price of a movie ticket which only gets me two hours of entertainment.
Your time is what you make of it. I figure ten bucks a month for the ability to play Ultima Online 23 hours a day if I wanted to gives me much more of a reward than paying $4 or even $7 an hour to go to the movie theater.
Someone's DSL or cable connection isn't going to be nearl as effective as the corporate T3 when it comes to searching out file swappers.
I don't agree with this line of thought. My cable connection is more than capable of finding hundreds of people who are sharing $FILE on a given P2P network. Why wouldn't this work for the industry?
Judging by any number of past gaffes - like C&D notices going out for Professor Usher's lecture, OpenOffice tarballs, etc. - it's obvious that nobody at the C&D farms is actually downloading the material to see if it really infringes. They're just doing searches, correlating filenames to IP addresses, and pumping out warnings. DSL or cable is more than sufficient for this.
If RIAA/MPAA aren't doing some of their scanning over consumer broadband lines, they're even more daft than I thought.
from now on, every utterance or post containing the word fuck is violating my intellectual property and a whole lot of fuckwads, fuckheads, fuckups, and fuckturds owe me a fuck of a lot of money.
Google adds stuff to gmail all the time, but whining about it on Slashdot gives little result. Drop them a mail.
I did, back in July. I got a form letter back which explained how to use the spam folder, how to move messages there, and how to get them out if they've been mis-sorted.
In any event, the fact that Gmail calls itself beta is irrelevant to the discussion. Someone posted asking how anyone could say that Gmail sucks, when they're giving away so much space. I answered.
FYI, BearShare abandoned NewDotNet (one of the scuzziest pieces of spyware I can think of) a year or more ago. Things are much better these days. There are two bundled apps now, "WeatherCast" and "SAVE," and they're a cinch to get rid of. After installing BearShare, here are the removal steps:
1) Look for the new temperature icon in your systray (you did say your zipcode was 10101 during installation, right?). Right-click, choose Exit.
2) Bring up the task manager, and end process on Save.exe.
3) Uninstall WeatherCast from Add/Remove Programs.
4) Path to c:\program files\save and run SaveUninst.exe.
That's it. Yes, it takes approximately 90 seconds anytime you upgrade to a new BearShare version, but it's worth it IMO. At least the stuff BearShare bundles now will legitimately and completely uninstall itself when you ask it to. And it doesn't hijack your TCP stack, either.
How does one offer 500 times more space than their closest competitor, and still manage to suck?
I'm not the original poster but I'll give this a shot.
How about not allowing me to mass-delete the 151,095 messages in my Spam folder? I'm sure as hell not going to manually delete them out of Gmail 100 at a time.
How about keeping messages dating back to September in my Trash folder, and messages dating back to October in my Spam folder, despite clearly stating that "Spam messages more than 30 days old will be automatically deleted" and "Trashed messages more than 30 days old will be automatically deleted?" How about when the combined messages in Spam and Trash are using 906 MB (91%) of my Gmail storage?
There's nothing I can do to purge them, unless I want to click through more than 1,500 pages worth of spam listings, waiting for each page of 100 spams to load, hitting Select All, and selecting Permanently Delete. It's not going to happen, and there's no reason anyone should have to do that. AOL's mail interface is more intuitive than this, for god's sake.
At Yahoo Mail, I can empty the entire Bulk folder permanently with one click and the drive space is immediately credited back to me. Sure, I don't get a gig of storage there, but seeing as how I have control over what does and doesn't get stored, I don't need it. Gmail is unusable to me until there is a way to mass-delete the contents of the Spam folder all at once.
I'm sorry, but you specified one too many H's, one too few L's, no A, no B, an extra couple of R's, an extra i, an extra U, and you left out the O. Also, neither S, E, G, or P appear in "Halliburton."
We congratulate you on supplying the correct number of T and N, though; you got that part right, and that's good enough for government work. Would you like a Sweet No-Bid Contract?
our current crop of representatives have no fuckin' idea what the people want
Go ahead, run for your state Senate. I guarantee that someone will literally dig up this Slashdot post you made, in which you claim that politicians don't have a fuckin' idea what the people want. And the (so-called "liberal") media will run with it, calling you a foul-mouthed rebel with no political experience. And you'll have no chance in hell at getting elected.
And that, my friend, is the problem.
If you do run for office, I wish you the best. Personally I fear it's going to be at least a decade before things swing back our way, as it's going to take at least that long before the current crop of septuagenarian whores like Orrin Hatch and octogenarian whores like Fritz Hollings die off, and people with degrees in IT start getting elected to Congress. Keep in mind, many of the people who currently represent "us" in government grew up decades ago, when there was barely such thing as television, let alone the internet.
Hell, I'd run myself, but I'm broke and I have skeletons in my closet. Any deep-pocket lobbyists want to take a gamble and sponsor Motherfucking Shit for Tennessee legislature? Didn't think so.
The panelists all agreed that the government should fund health campaigns to educate the public about the dangers of pornography. The campaign should combat the messages of pornography by putting signs on buses saying sex with children is not OK, said Layden.
I had to RTFA to make sure that this was true. I about threw up when I saw that, indeed, it was an accurate quotation.
What is going on in this great country of ours? People are seriously making the connection that pornography == having sex with children? What the FUCK? And those people think that putting ads on a bus will stop pornography? Or that they'll stop people who are interested in sex with children (which is so tangential to pornography that I can't believe I'm even talking about it)?
This idea is apparently selling quite well, at least well enough for "Moral Values" to be the #1 priority for voters this time around.
I live in the bible belt. As an agnostic, I never really much gave a damn what anyone else's religious beliefs were, as long as they didn't try and impose them upon me. Leave me alone and I'll leave you alone, believe whatever you want but don't try to proselytize to me. It's just like the black / white / hispanic thing that I deal with here. I don't care what you are. You're a fellow human and whatever you want to do is fine with me, just don't go trying to convert me. That worked just fine up until a year or so ago.
Now it seems that suddenly, these people are rabid about imposing their religious beliefs upon the entire nation, out of nowhere and with no warning.
You might want to read Keith Olbermann's take on his supposed involvement in the "lock-down." Not disputing the rest of your post, but the part about Keith being in hot water, well, doesn't hold water.
Between this and Halo2, I'll be lucky if I even come in contact with a female during the next 3 months...
No worries, at least you'll be coming in contact with plenty of terrorists. That alone will get you on the network news, which in turn will get you plenty of chicks! Vive la guerre!
Slashdot Mirror
Bank record transportation is (or at least was, before Check21 went into effect) a major and rather vertical industry. The general chain of command is that a courier service picks up "the goods" (cancelled checks, backup tapes, whatever) from a bank, takes the cargo to the nearest airport, and drops it off in one manner or another. Depending on the bank and the courier, the goods are either dropped at the airport Post Office or taken to an airline's cargo input on the ramp.
From there, the obvious happens. Either the items are transported via USPS to their destination, or they fly as commercial cargo and wind up at the destination airport, where another series of couriers collects and delivers it to the receiving location. The article that I saw claimed that BOFA declined to describe how the process works. Well, this is how the process works.
The thing is, bank records are not exactly labeled "PERSONAL FINANCIAL RECORD BACKUPS, TOTALLY SECRET, PLEASE BE CAREFUL." The people who are working as couriers for banks know what they're picking up, but they also know that they're constantly under scrutiny. Once this stuff hits the ramp, it's just cargo as far as airline employees are concerned. It gets on a plane, flies to a destination, and things reverse; ramp agents unload random cargo as far as they know, and then some courier who knows damn well that he's being watched takes it to the receiving bank.
From all accounts, BOFA seems to be blaming ramp agents. I call bullshit. For one thing, nobody goes on or off a ramp without some sort of security check; I should know, I'm on the ramp almost every day. And most of the "secure" cargo flowing through a given ramp is unmarked and can't readily be recognized. The only time you pick up on something "special" is when Customs imounds a shipment.
As far as the explanations I've heard, I say BOFA are full of shit. This wasn't a ramp worker nabbing a case of backup tapes - he'd never have gotten off the ramp. This is negligence one way or another.
The "clustering illusion" (I never knew there was a name for it) has some interesting applications in real life. Dice in a casino is probably the most obvious example, but things get more interesting as the field gets lower; like, say, 1 and 0. This example applies decently to MMORPGs, where things like whether or not you strike your foe, or whether or not you gain in a skill, are based on your skill times some sort of random number. I was a hardcore addict of Ultima Online for a few years, and one of the common complaints was "I have a skill level of X, but I failed to land a hit on my opponent Y times in a row, something is wrong!"
I guess the next time my UO addiction recurs, I'll have a valid explanation for that phenomenon.
(Would have posted this about 3 hours ago, but Slashdot went down, or something, and I lost my original comment. Had to rewrite from memory.)
Credit Card Prank from Zug.
To share my own experience, no, I rarely have anyone look at the signature on the receipt much less try to compare it with what's on the back of the card. Cashiers are either lazy or trusting; it's the South, so probably a little of both.
I never saw an ad that said "No more late fees as long as you return your rental within 3 days." I didn't see a commercial that said "Oh by the way, if you don't bring your movie back within a week, we'll charge you the retail price for that title." Nope. It was all about "no more late fees." That's what they advertised, and they aren't delivering.
I'm not sure how the average consumer would see the ads other than the obvious interpretation. What I took from the ad campaign was that I don't have to pay a late fee, even if I can't find 5 seconds to return the video to Blockbuster. The ad campaign said no more late fees.
If they're charging fees anyway, that seems rather gauche, and perhaps illegal. Don't you think?
Maybe it's a good thing that I download instead of rent...
I think there's also a pervasive belief among some minorities that pulling the race card will get them anything they want; I also think that there's some truth to that. After all, nobody wants to be called racist, and certainly not in public. White people will generally bend over backwards to avoid being seen as racists. Rather than get a bad public image, they'll grease the squeaky wheel. In the end, the minority often achieves their goal even though no racism occurred.
For example, there was a group that came through town a couple of weeks ago trying to boycott the Dillard's department store chain, claiming that they don't hire enough black people. They don't offer any proof of this, no one's come forward saying that Dillard's fired them or didn't hire them because they were black. This group just has it in their mind that not enough blacks work at Dillard's (maybe they just aren't applying there?) so they call it racism and stir up a boycott that all of 10 people showed up for. If there's any meat to the story - like, you know, even remotely circumstantial evidence that Dillard's discriminates - the black boycotters and black reporter didn't bother to mention it.
As another example, one of our local school systems is outsourcing the custodial and janitorial positions to a private company. Instead of hiring custodians directly, the school system is going to pay a private company to manage that part of their workforce. This will supposedly save the school system, which is about 80 million in the red, some money. Immediately, the head of the custodial workers' union (yes, there really is one) went on the news and started calling it racism and discrimination because 90% of the janitors are black. Well, I doubt that the private company has located a secret cache of white people who are lining up to be janitors. It's still going to be 90% black once it's privatized, but something is happening that affects black people, so it must be racist.
Then there's one of our esteemed state Senators, John Ford. Over the past month, he's been caught up in four separate scandals. Now he's trying to say that it's all racism.
First off, he's trying to pass legislation that would ease the child support burden on fathers who maintain more than one home - and guess what, he qualifies, seeing as how he has kids with 3 different women and apparently lives with two of them part-time. Next, he's trying to pass legislation that would significantly raise the standard of entry for newcomers into the funeral home business. Guess which business his family has been in for generations? Thirdly, he didn't report a significant chunk of income, as legislators are required by state law to report. Finally, it came out that he used upwards of $20,000 in campaign funds to pay for his daughter's wedding expenses. This isn't just unethical, it's outright illegal.
What's his response? He's saying that the "white media" (his term!) are out to get him. That's right, it's not his fault that he's a philandering, corrupt politician who seems to spend most of his public time trying to legislate new financial benefits for himself and his family. No, of course not. Even though half of the local news anchors and reporters are black, all of this is the "white media's" fault.
He's going for the "get what I want because I'm in the minority and they're all racists" ploy. Unfortunately, it works fairly often around here. It's probably not going to work for Senator Ford, though.
Over the past year, I've made more than $10,000,000 via eBay. That's net, not gross! My strategy is: set a very high "Buy it Now" price, and make that the same as your "Reserve" price. For someone to actually win, they have to capitulate to exactly the amount you were hoping for. If you locate evildoers who are selling similar products at a lower price, just have the Attorney General send a VeRO dispute to eBay. Easy!
The media has criticized me for running what they call "no-bid" auctions, but it's sure been profitable on my end, so what's their problem?
Regards,
R. Cheney
HalliBay, Inc.
What are the car 'radars' that Dr. English speaks of? As far as I know, radar (and laser) detectors don't broadcast anything, they simply detect certain frequencies.
The article is based in the UK. Is there some sort of dashboard radar system showing up there which doesn't exist in the US? Or do the "smart reverse" systems (which someone in the US wanted to make mandatory) use the same frequencies?
I look at from the "risk vs reward" paradigm upon which many MMORPGs are based. I spend, say, $10 a month for a game. That's my risk. My reward is playing that game as much as I want over the course of that month. I'll admit that my free time isn't what it used to be a few years ago, back when I was able to make giant comments like this in passing about an MMORPG, but I still think that I get my money's worth out of $10/month.
Think of it this way. Earlier this week, I went to go see Ocean's Twelve. It's the first time I've gone to see a movie in years. I saw Ocean's Eleven on TNT awhile ago, and enjoyed it enough that I decided to pay for the sequel instead of waiting for it to show up on TV. I went alone. The ticket was $8.50. A small popcorn and a medium Dr. Pepper were $6.75. (Aside: I can buy two three-packs, or SIX FULL SERVINGS, of ACT II microwave popcorn for about 4 bucks. Any theater complaining about revenues being in the gutter does NOT have my sympathy.)
Anyway, I spent $15.25 to see Ocean's Twelve. The movie ran just over two hours, if you subtract the 6 commercials and 4 previews. That's $7.63 per hour for entertainment. Suppose I'd smuggled in a chilled can of Dr. Pepper and a bag of Doritos in my jacket pockets, instead of buying the ridiculously priced concessions. An $8.50 ticket to a two hour movie makes $4.25 per hour. That isn't too far under minimum wage!
My point is that I paid - depending upon how you see it - either $4.25/hour or $7.63/hour to be entertained. I have a subscription to the MMORPG Ultima Online which costs me $9.99/month (caveat: I pay 6 months at a time, if you pay monthly, it's $12.99 a month). $9.99, or even $12.99, spread over the number of hours I play in a month, is far more of a value than the price of a movie ticket which only gets me two hours of entertainment.
Your time is what you make of it. I figure ten bucks a month for the ability to play Ultima Online 23 hours a day if I wanted to gives me much more of a reward than paying $4 or even $7 an hour to go to the movie theater.
YMMV.
Judging by any number of past gaffes - like C&D notices going out for Professor Usher's lecture, OpenOffice tarballs, etc. - it's obvious that nobody at the C&D farms is actually downloading the material to see if it really infringes. They're just doing searches, correlating filenames to IP addresses, and pumping out warnings. DSL or cable is more than sufficient for this.
If RIAA/MPAA aren't doing some of their scanning over consumer broadband lines, they're even more daft than I thought.
In any event, the fact that Gmail calls itself beta is irrelevant to the discussion. Someone posted asking how anyone could say that Gmail sucks, when they're giving away so much space. I answered.
FYI, BearShare abandoned NewDotNet (one of the scuzziest pieces of spyware I can think of) a year or more ago. Things are much better these days. There are two bundled apps now, "WeatherCast" and "SAVE," and they're a cinch to get rid of. After installing BearShare, here are the removal steps:
1) Look for the new temperature icon in your systray (you did say your zipcode was 10101 during installation, right?). Right-click, choose Exit.
2) Bring up the task manager, and end process on Save.exe.
3) Uninstall WeatherCast from Add/Remove Programs.
4) Path to c:\program files\save and run SaveUninst.exe.
That's it. Yes, it takes approximately 90 seconds anytime you upgrade to a new BearShare version, but it's worth it IMO. At least the stuff BearShare bundles now will legitimately and completely uninstall itself when you ask it to. And it doesn't hijack your TCP stack, either.
How about not allowing me to mass-delete the 151,095 messages in my Spam folder? I'm sure as hell not going to manually delete them out of Gmail 100 at a time.
How about keeping messages dating back to September in my Trash folder, and messages dating back to October in my Spam folder, despite clearly stating that "Spam messages more than 30 days old will be automatically deleted" and "Trashed messages more than 30 days old will be automatically deleted?" How about when the combined messages in Spam and Trash are using 906 MB (91%) of my Gmail storage?
There's nothing I can do to purge them, unless I want to click through more than 1,500 pages worth of spam listings, waiting for each page of 100 spams to load, hitting Select All, and selecting Permanently Delete. It's not going to happen, and there's no reason anyone should have to do that. AOL's mail interface is more intuitive than this, for god's sake.
At Yahoo Mail, I can empty the entire Bulk folder permanently with one click and the drive space is immediately credited back to me. Sure, I don't get a gig of storage there, but seeing as how I have control over what does and doesn't get stored, I don't need it. Gmail is unusable to me until there is a way to mass-delete the contents of the Spam folder all at once.
We congratulate you on supplying the correct number of T and N, though; you got that part right, and that's good enough for government work. Would you like a Sweet No-Bid Contract?
And that, my friend, is the problem.
If you do run for office, I wish you the best. Personally I fear it's going to be at least a decade before things swing back our way, as it's going to take at least that long before the current crop of septuagenarian whores like Orrin Hatch and octogenarian whores like Fritz Hollings die off, and people with degrees in IT start getting elected to Congress. Keep in mind, many of the people who currently represent "us" in government grew up decades ago, when there was barely such thing as television, let alone the internet.
Hell, I'd run myself, but I'm broke and I have skeletons in my closet. Any deep-pocket lobbyists want to take a gamble and sponsor Motherfucking Shit for Tennessee legislature? Didn't think so.
What is going on in this great country of ours? People are seriously making the connection that pornography == having sex with children? What the FUCK? And those people think that putting ads on a bus will stop pornography? Or that they'll stop people who are interested in sex with children (which is so tangential to pornography that I can't believe I'm even talking about it)?
This idea is apparently selling quite well, at least well enough for "Moral Values" to be the #1 priority for voters this time around.
I live in the bible belt. As an agnostic, I never really much gave a damn what anyone else's religious beliefs were, as long as they didn't try and impose them upon me. Leave me alone and I'll leave you alone, believe whatever you want but don't try to proselytize to me. It's just like the black / white / hispanic thing that I deal with here. I don't care what you are. You're a fellow human and whatever you want to do is fine with me, just don't go trying to convert me. That worked just fine up until a year or so ago.
Now it seems that suddenly, these people are rabid about imposing their religious beliefs upon the entire nation, out of nowhere and with no warning.
And they're winning!
What the fuck is going on?
You might want to read Keith Olbermann's take on his supposed involvement in the "lock-down." Not disputing the rest of your post, but the part about Keith being in hot water, well, doesn't hold water.