This is a new (in the last year or so) "freemium" business model which is turing out to be a very lucrative way for developers to make money in the new App Store mobile gaming world. It is all explained quite well in this blog post:
Most of these games don't require you to make in-app purchases to continue in the game, they just allow you to buy items to proceed in the game faster. Because the games are free, the developers get vastly more distribution of their games than if they were paid, and even though only a small minority pay for in-app purchases, the developers can make a significant amount of money off of them. This ends up being a win-win: developers get paid and get lots of exposure for their hard work and potentially millions of people get quality games for free which is subsidized by a small number of people with more money than time on their hands who want to proceed faster in the games.
Perhaps you are going to bad doctors that aren't doing there job. However, there is one problem with your analogy between doctors and computer technicians. Computers don't sue you when you try to fix them and you accidentally make things worse.
When I worked at Xoom.com (of the "free homepages" fame ala geocities) over 10 years ago, we had several people on staff with the same job. But instead of 'porn cops' we jokingly referred to them as 'porn whackers'. The biggest reason for having people paid to go through this stuff was to remove kiddie porn and report it to the FBI.
I dunno about you, but I do know that my plan is to live forever. Everything is going according to plan so far. -- Do you Gentoo!? [gentoo.org]
I always wondered what type of people run Gentoo. Now it makes sense. I guess if I was planning on living forever I might not mind wasting all that time recompiling every fucking package.:-)
I have read Outliers, but haven't yet read Blink or the Tipping Point, and I have to say that your assumptions of how Outliers is structured are spot on.
As a human, I found many of the anecdotes in the book very interesting and they all seemed to confirm the point that he was trying to make. But as an engineer, I found it unfortunate that he spent almost no time critically evaluating any of his points, even when there were obvious objections or alternative explanations that could be explored and possibly debunked, making his point that much more convincing. Instead, he spent lots of time setting up these somewhat weak arguments and moving onto the next point without playing devil's advocate at all.
I think this lack of vetting ultimately hurts the points he tries to make in his book, but I think overall that the anecdotes are interesting enough to make the book a worthwhile read. If he was a scientist attempting to convince other scientists of his theories, I would say that he failed miserably. However, Gladwell is not a scientist, he's an author trying to write an entertaining non-fiction book through storytelling, and I think he successfully achieves this goal.
Unfortunately their restrictions aren't arbitrary, they are likely contractual. TV has 50+ years of history of complicated content distribution rights. They involve lots of contracts and lawyers who make sure everyone involved in creating a TV show get paid. In general all of these contractual rights get in the way of things like newly emerging technologies, but without these contracts we probably wouldn't have any of the rich content available on TV today.
Content producers make new content. Then they sell the rights to TV networks to broadcast the content over their TV networks in contracts in which all of the writers, actors, crew, etc. get paid every time that show airs. Within the last 5 years or so content producers are also selling Internet broadcasting rights to Hulu and other websites, but the economics are quite different because you can technically watch any show at any time on demand over the Internet. Not to mention the immaturity of Internet video advertising which likely makes the pricing of the ads much different as well.
Now when there is an easy way for an Internet broadcast to show up on someone's TV (like with Boxee), all of a sudden there is somewhat of a gray area as to what contract should be honored and what residuals should be paid. When the contracts were made the content producers were probably thinking, "OK, I get paid X when someone watches my show on TV and Y when someone watches it on a computer." When they found out that people could watch an Internet broadcast easily on their TV in their living room, they probably had their lawyers call Hulu's lawyers so that they could work out the details. Hulu's lawyers probably came up with the idea that the easiest thing to do in the short term was to attempt to disallow the easy way for people to watch Internet broadcast content on their TV. No this isn't very friendly to the viewer, but they are likely more concerned with their contractual obligations with the content providers than they are with pissing off a small set of tech savvy viewers.
I think the OP does understand that there was purposefully no information provided in the commercial, I think he or she was attempting to contrast this fluff Microsoft commercial with the Apple "I'm a Mac" commercials which are both entertaining *and* informational. (OK, not everyone finds the "I'm a Mac" commercials entertaining, but it's hard to argue that they aren't informational)
And under the section labeled "Customize Stories on the Homepage", click on the radio button to the right of "Idle" that is under the NOT sign (red circle with a slash through it) and then click on the Submit button at the bottom.
Then Idle stories will no longer show up on the homepage for you and then you can stop whining about them.
It's all about personal selective filtering rather than system-wide censorship, something that most Slashdot users should be able to understand.
They set up neighborhood drop offs fairly often in different neighborhoods. You load up all of your computer junk in boxes, drive by, stop your car, they swoop in and take all of your junk and you drive off. Takes about 2 minutes.
The CRC also has a couple of permanent locations around the bay area.
You should be able to use Google to find similar organizations in your area.
While I don't agree that a gym is absolutely necessary (small set of free weights, one treadmill/exercise bike/eclipse machine, and doing pushups, situps, etc. is enough for me, I think) I do agree that finding some activity that you enjoy really helps. The real key is being motivated to exercise. Just wanting to be healthy or look good are often not enough to keep you going week after week.
I played sports when I was a kid (soccer, basketball, little league, etc.) but I never stuck with any of them because it turns out I don't really enjoy playing (or even watching) those particular sports. Well into adulthood I started watching ice hockey and really enjoyed the fast-paced non-stop action. That motivated me to go down to my local ice rink and take hockey lessons. Then I joined the adult beginners league after the classes were over and here I am 7 years later and I still look forward to my game every week. And since I'm motivated to improve my abilities, I channel that motivation into working out during the week to keep up my endurance for my games.
If you're not really into competitive sports, there are always other activities out there as well such as martial arts, kayaking, windsurfing, biking, etc. that can be enough fun that you're not even that aware that you are getting exercise. Some of them you can even do by yourself if you really are that much of an introvert. The important thing is to find something you enjoy doing so that you will stick with it, and as you stated a lot of that does require going outside which isn't such a scary place.
I totally agree on watching interesting TV shows while working out. I ride a stationary bike 5 times a week and so I just load my Tivo up with as many one hour shows as I find interesting. It makes the work-out much more bearable and sometimes I even look forward to it. A Tivo HD w/ the DVR Expander (external hard drive) allows you to keep over 600 *hours* of standard def recordings so you can easily keep entire seasons of shows until you get around to watching them.
Unfortunately when the summer rolls around there's less new programming, but the cable networks are trying to take advantage of this and are creating new entertaining shows that only run in the summer. I was running low on shows to watch in the past few weeks, but luckily Burn Notice and Mad Men both ran marathons of their first seasons from last year that I never caught (just before starting their second seasons), so I just recorded them all and now I have enough to watch to last me through August. Alternatively picking up seasons of shows on DVD works well, too, as you mentioned.
No, and that's how I learned I should have done the paypal transaction with my credit card rather than my bank account. Interesting to find out how the chargeback works in the paypal system, thanks for the tip.
At least you finally got your money back. I had a similar issue like that on Ebay/Paypal and ultimately just got the shaft and I'm out $400.
I bought some sold-out concert tickets on Ebay (I know, not a good idea, but I really wanted to go and they were sold out in 2 minutes of course). I won the auction through Buy-it-now and was required to pay all the money up front via Paypal. After about a week after I won the auction there was an announcement that the concert was postponed because the drummer was injured. I contacted the seller and he said I could get a refund or we could wait until the postponed show was announced and if I could still make it then, he would still sell the tickets to me. I decided to wait.
A month or so goes by and they announced that the postponed show will be about 6 weeks after the original one. I contacted the seller and told him that I was still interested in the tickets. I didn't hear back from him and wrote him another email and called the phone number he had given me and left a message. I finally heard back from him about a week later and he said that he was busy because he just had a baby and that he would send me the postponed tickets as soon as he got them. I never heard from him again.
By the day of the concert I know that I got ripped off, so I go to Ebay to complain and try to fill out their fraud form. They helpfully tell me that I can't complain because the auction closed over 45 days prior! So I go to Paypal who transferred my money to this thief and fill out their fraud form and the next day they close it saying it is invalid because it doesn't meet their criteria because I didn't complain in time. The auction had an image at the bottom proclaiming that it was guaranteed by Paypal for up to $200, so I tried to follow up on that detail and was told that in the fine print it says that that only counts for physical goods and not tickets even though the image was clearly listed on a ticket auction by Ebay/Paypal! I tried calling Ebay and Paypal to get a hold of someone who would listen to my complaint but was not able to get a hold of anyone without being a seller.
So yes, Ebay and Paypal (now the same company) really don't care very much about fraud because because of the cost so they make the absolute minimal effort required. I can see how Ebay can get away with "buyer beware" on their auctions, but Paypal is actually involved in the banking transaction and wants to collect the fee without any responsibility for the fraud. I mean, their statute of limitations is like a month and a half. If it takes you that long to realize that you got ripped off they don't even let you *register* your complaint!
While I agree that allowing anyone to monkey with your search results is ripe for abuse, you are assuming that there are no humans manipulating your search results at the current search engines. While Google loves to tout the fact that their search results are completely algorithm-driven, they actually have teams of people who use manual intervention on a daily basis to "improve" search results, which usually is done to stop abuse of their guidelines.
These people can take actions such as setting a site's page rank to zero or removing entire websites or parts of websites from their indexes. Here is a reference of one such publicized case:
The fact that you think there is no manual intervention happening probably means that you don't notice it and believe that Google is doing a good job with the manual changes that they are making, but it doesn't mean that it isn't happening. It also doesn't mean that their changes are never influenced by outside forces, as evidenced in another publicized case:
I actually had a run in with Yahoo a few years ago regarding my Yahoo ID. When they first launched Yahoo Groups way back in 1998 or so (I think it was called Yahoo Clubs at the time), I was explaining the concept to a co-worker over lunch. I said jokingly, "You can create a club for anything you want and invite people to it. So if you are into smoking crack and want to discuss it with other people, you start the Smoking Crack Club and invite your friends." After lunch I went and created the Smoking Crack club on Yahoo Clubs and invited my co-worker as a joke. We had a good laugh over it.
Fast-forward a couple of years. I received an email on my Yahoo account, which I never used, from some random Yahoo user thanking me for starting the Smoking Crack club and that he had met quite a few people in his area to smoke crack with. I thought it had to be some sort of joke, but I checked it out and to my surprise there were over 300 members in the club all sharing stories about smoking crack and looking for people in their area who they could get together to smoke crack with! I was somewhat surprised and shocked that I was accidently responsible for creating this club, but I didn't shut down the club just because real drug users happened to be using it. I figured the crack smoking that they were doing was illegal, but talking about smoking crack isn't illegal, so who cares?
Fast forward another couple of years and I can't login to Yahoo one day. Instead of logging in, I get a message about how my account has been suspended. So I call up Yahoo and get a hold of a person and all they can tell me is that my account has been suspended for a Terms of Service violation in Yahoo Groups. They refuse to tell me any specifics and tell me that there is nothing I can do and my account is permanently suspended.
The real issue I had with this is that I had a Yahoo Credit Card and I needed to log into the Yahoo Points web site with my Yahoo ID to get my Credit Card rewards. You got one Yahoo Point for every dollar charged to your credit card and you could exchange points for electronics and gift certificates. At the time I had at least $200 in points (based on the gift certificate exchange rate) that I could have cashed out but hadn't gotten around to yet. I tried to explain this to the Yahoo customer service person I was talking to, but they didn't even know what Yahoo Points were. I also called my Credit Card company and tried to explain it to them and they said I couldn't change my Yahoo user ID associated with the credit card points and my Yahoo account suspension was between me and Yahoo. So I just canceled the credit card and got a different one that is not associated with a site that can shut down your account with no explanations on false pretenses.
The kicker is that I looked over the Yahoo TOS very carefully and could not find anything that could give them a justification for shutting down my account. The only thing I found that came close was a clause that said something about how you couldn't use your account to "discuss illegal activities". But the kicker is that I never used the Yahoo Group that I had created and never discussed anything on it, illegal or otherwise. I just created the group as a joke many years prior. Somehow just creating a group that people used to discuss illegal activities was justification for suspension in their eyes. So anyway, Yahoo doesn't have a history for being very judicious in shutting down their users.
"It bans false or misleading header information. Your email's "From," "To," and routing information - including the originating domain name and email address - must be accurate and identify the person who initiated the email."
So, if someone were to create a Slashdot.us site, Slashdot would have to file against them. If they didn't, slashdot would become a generic term like aspirin that anyone could use. Yeah, then people everywhere would be saying things like, "Hey, man, don't slashdot me, you just told that same story yesterday."
I'm not an alcoholic! I'm just addicted to using lowball glasses. I'm a lowball glass addict. It's just that my lowball glasses always seem to be filled with bourbon.
Perhaps some people do think that Jobs is lying and really wants some level of DRM to lock in consumers. But I think what other people refer to by "seeing through his argument" is that his argument, while well-stated, sound, and arguably correct, is very self-serving. He's shifting the blame from himself and his company to the record companies instead. And some people might argue that this is a totally reasonable thing to do, but others, like Norway, seem to disagree. Their response is, "I don't care if the big bad record company men forced you into using DRM, it's still illegal here."
I was *this* close to falling into the classic Slashdot comment trap by using an analogy to illustrate the Norwegian response that involved Nazis, but then I thought better of it. And I'm not clever enough to think of another apt analogy that doens't invole Hitler in some way, so I'll just hope that I got my point across without it.
The show you watched is at least a few months old. If you read the article, this incident occurred on Dec 4, 2006, just over 2 weeks ago. And the picture shows the squid actually coming to the surface of the water. It's not some really dark, black and white image of the squid like the one in the show you saw, but a clear-as-day, color snapshot of the thing.
ADAM SAVAGE- We thought testing formulas for skunk removal would be simple. Get sprayed, clean it off. Turned out that just finding a skunk with full juice sacks during mating season was nearly impossible. Who would have thought that?
Come on, guys, everyone and their brother knows off the top of their heads the relative volume of skunk juice sacks in relation to their mating season! Geez!
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/yahoo.htm l
According to wired magazine, Yahoo's profit in the last fiscal year was $542 million as compared to Google's $223 million. So it's more than double the profit for Yahoo than Google on roughly 20% more revenue. Not bad. Click on the thunbnail in the left column with the magnifying glasses to see the pretty graphs.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a new (in the last year or so) "freemium" business model which is turing out to be a very lucrative way for developers to make money in the new App Store mobile gaming world. It is all explained quite well in this blog post:
http://blog.flurry.com/bid/65656/Free-to-play-Revenue-Overtakes-Premium-Revenue-in-the-App-Store
Most of these games don't require you to make in-app purchases to continue in the game, they just allow you to buy items to proceed in the game faster. Because the games are free, the developers get vastly more distribution of their games than if they were paid, and even though only a small minority pay for in-app purchases, the developers can make a significant amount of money off of them. This ends up being a win-win: developers get paid and get lots of exposure for their hard work and potentially millions of people get quality games for free which is subsidized by a small number of people with more money than time on their hands who want to proceed faster in the games.
Psst, 1 GBP = 1.5271 USD. We aren't in 2008 anymore.
Perhaps you are going to bad doctors that aren't doing there job. However, there is one problem with your analogy between doctors and computer technicians. Computers don't sue you when you try to fix them and you accidentally make things worse.
When I worked at Xoom.com (of the "free homepages" fame ala geocities) over 10 years ago, we had several people on staff with the same job. But instead of 'porn cops' we jokingly referred to them as 'porn whackers'. The biggest reason for having people paid to go through this stuff was to remove kiddie porn and report it to the FBI.
I dunno about you, but I do know that my plan is to live forever. Everything is going according to plan so far.
--
Do you Gentoo!? [gentoo.org]
I always wondered what type of people run Gentoo. Now it makes sense. I guess if I was planning on living forever I might not mind wasting all that time recompiling every fucking package. :-)
I have read Outliers, but haven't yet read Blink or the Tipping Point, and I have to say that your assumptions of how Outliers is structured are spot on.
As a human, I found many of the anecdotes in the book very interesting and they all seemed to confirm the point that he was trying to make. But as an engineer, I found it unfortunate that he spent almost no time critically evaluating any of his points, even when there were obvious objections or alternative explanations that could be explored and possibly debunked, making his point that much more convincing. Instead, he spent lots of time setting up these somewhat weak arguments and moving onto the next point without playing devil's advocate at all.
I think this lack of vetting ultimately hurts the points he tries to make in his book, but I think overall that the anecdotes are interesting enough to make the book a worthwhile read. If he was a scientist attempting to convince other scientists of his theories, I would say that he failed miserably. However, Gladwell is not a scientist, he's an author trying to write an entertaining non-fiction book through storytelling, and I think he successfully achieves this goal.
Unfortunately their restrictions aren't arbitrary, they are likely contractual. TV has 50+ years of history of complicated content distribution rights. They involve lots of contracts and lawyers who make sure everyone involved in creating a TV show get paid. In general all of these contractual rights get in the way of things like newly emerging technologies, but without these contracts we probably wouldn't have any of the rich content available on TV today.
Content producers make new content. Then they sell the rights to TV networks to broadcast the content over their TV networks in contracts in which all of the writers, actors, crew, etc. get paid every time that show airs. Within the last 5 years or so content producers are also selling Internet broadcasting rights to Hulu and other websites, but the economics are quite different because you can technically watch any show at any time on demand over the Internet. Not to mention the immaturity of Internet video advertising which likely makes the pricing of the ads much different as well.
Now when there is an easy way for an Internet broadcast to show up on someone's TV (like with Boxee), all of a sudden there is somewhat of a gray area as to what contract should be honored and what residuals should be paid. When the contracts were made the content producers were probably thinking, "OK, I get paid X when someone watches my show on TV and Y when someone watches it on a computer." When they found out that people could watch an Internet broadcast easily on their TV in their living room, they probably had their lawyers call Hulu's lawyers so that they could work out the details. Hulu's lawyers probably came up with the idea that the easiest thing to do in the short term was to attempt to disallow the easy way for people to watch Internet broadcast content on their TV. No this isn't very friendly to the viewer, but they are likely more concerned with their contractual obligations with the content providers than they are with pissing off a small set of tech savvy viewers.
I think the OP does understand that there was purposefully no information provided in the commercial, I think he or she was attempting to contrast this fluff Microsoft commercial with the Apple "I'm a Mac" commercials which are both entertaining *and* informational. (OK, not everyone finds the "I'm a Mac" commercials entertaining, but it's hard to argue that they aren't informational)
Please, just go here:
http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=edithome
And under the section labeled "Customize Stories on the Homepage", click on the radio button to the right of "Idle" that is under the NOT sign (red circle with a slash through it) and then click on the Submit button at the bottom.
Then Idle stories will no longer show up on the homepage for you and then you can stop whining about them.
It's all about personal selective filtering rather than system-wide censorship, something that most Slashdot users should be able to understand.
In San Francisco, I've used both:
http://www.crc.org/ [Computer Recycling Center]
http://zarcnet.com/ [Zarc]
They set up neighborhood drop offs fairly often in different neighborhoods. You load up all of your computer junk in boxes, drive by, stop your car, they swoop in and take all of your junk and you drive off. Takes about 2 minutes.
The CRC also has a couple of permanent locations around the bay area.
You should be able to use Google to find similar organizations in your area.
While I don't agree that a gym is absolutely necessary (small set of free weights, one treadmill/exercise bike/eclipse machine, and doing pushups, situps, etc. is enough for me, I think) I do agree that finding some activity that you enjoy really helps. The real key is being motivated to exercise. Just wanting to be healthy or look good are often not enough to keep you going week after week.
I played sports when I was a kid (soccer, basketball, little league, etc.) but I never stuck with any of them because it turns out I don't really enjoy playing (or even watching) those particular sports. Well into adulthood I started watching ice hockey and really enjoyed the fast-paced non-stop action. That motivated me to go down to my local ice rink and take hockey lessons. Then I joined the adult beginners league after the classes were over and here I am 7 years later and I still look forward to my game every week. And since I'm motivated to improve my abilities, I channel that motivation into working out during the week to keep up my endurance for my games.
If you're not really into competitive sports, there are always other activities out there as well such as martial arts, kayaking, windsurfing, biking, etc. that can be enough fun that you're not even that aware that you are getting exercise. Some of them you can even do by yourself if you really are that much of an introvert. The important thing is to find something you enjoy doing so that you will stick with it, and as you stated a lot of that does require going outside which isn't such a scary place.
I totally agree on watching interesting TV shows while working out. I ride a stationary bike 5 times a week and so I just load my Tivo up with as many one hour shows as I find interesting. It makes the work-out much more bearable and sometimes I even look forward to it. A Tivo HD w/ the DVR Expander (external hard drive) allows you to keep over 600 *hours* of standard def recordings so you can easily keep entire seasons of shows until you get around to watching them.
Unfortunately when the summer rolls around there's less new programming, but the cable networks are trying to take advantage of this and are creating new entertaining shows that only run in the summer. I was running low on shows to watch in the past few weeks, but luckily Burn Notice and Mad Men both ran marathons of their first seasons from last year that I never caught (just before starting their second seasons), so I just recorded them all and now I have enough to watch to last me through August. Alternatively picking up seasons of shows on DVD works well, too, as you mentioned.
No, and that's how I learned I should have done the paypal transaction with my credit card rather than my bank account. Interesting to find out how the chargeback works in the paypal system, thanks for the tip.
At least you finally got your money back. I had a similar issue like that on Ebay/Paypal and ultimately just got the shaft and I'm out $400.
I bought some sold-out concert tickets on Ebay (I know, not a good idea, but I really wanted to go and they were sold out in 2 minutes of course). I won the auction through Buy-it-now and was required to pay all the money up front via Paypal. After about a week after I won the auction there was an announcement that the concert was postponed because the drummer was injured. I contacted the seller and he said I could get a refund or we could wait until the postponed show was announced and if I could still make it then, he would still sell the tickets to me. I decided to wait.
A month or so goes by and they announced that the postponed show will be about 6 weeks after the original one. I contacted the seller and told him that I was still interested in the tickets. I didn't hear back from him and wrote him another email and called the phone number he had given me and left a message. I finally heard back from him about a week later and he said that he was busy because he just had a baby and that he would send me the postponed tickets as soon as he got them. I never heard from him again.
By the day of the concert I know that I got ripped off, so I go to Ebay to complain and try to fill out their fraud form. They helpfully tell me that I can't complain because the auction closed over 45 days prior! So I go to Paypal who transferred my money to this thief and fill out their fraud form and the next day they close it saying it is invalid because it doesn't meet their criteria because I didn't complain in time. The auction had an image at the bottom proclaiming that it was guaranteed by Paypal for up to $200, so I tried to follow up on that detail and was told that in the fine print it says that that only counts for physical goods and not tickets even though the image was clearly listed on a ticket auction by Ebay/Paypal! I tried calling Ebay and Paypal to get a hold of someone who would listen to my complaint but was not able to get a hold of anyone without being a seller.
So yes, Ebay and Paypal (now the same company) really don't care very much about fraud because because of the cost so they make the absolute minimal effort required. I can see how Ebay can get away with "buyer beware" on their auctions, but Paypal is actually involved in the banking transaction and wants to collect the fee without any responsibility for the fraud. I mean, their statute of limitations is like a month and a half. If it takes you that long to realize that you got ripped off they don't even let you *register* your complaint!
While I agree that allowing anyone to monkey with your search results is ripe for abuse, you are assuming that there are no humans manipulating your search results at the current search engines. While Google loves to tout the fact that their search results are completely algorithm-driven, they actually have teams of people who use manual intervention on a daily basis to "improve" search results, which usually is done to stop abuse of their guidelines.
These people can take actions such as setting a site's page rank to zero or removing entire websites or parts of websites from their indexes. Here is a reference of one such publicized case:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4685750.stm
The fact that you think there is no manual intervention happening probably means that you don't notice it and believe that Google is doing a good job with the manual changes that they are making, but it doesn't mean that it isn't happening. It also doesn't mean that their changes are never influenced by outside forces, as evidenced in another publicized case:
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2164661
I actually had a run in with Yahoo a few years ago regarding my Yahoo ID. When they first launched Yahoo Groups way back in 1998 or so (I think it was called Yahoo Clubs at the time), I was explaining the concept to a co-worker over lunch. I said jokingly, "You can create a club for anything you want and invite people to it. So if you are into smoking crack and want to discuss it with other people, you start the Smoking Crack Club and invite your friends." After lunch I went and created the Smoking Crack club on Yahoo Clubs and invited my co-worker as a joke. We had a good laugh over it.
Fast-forward a couple of years. I received an email on my Yahoo account, which I never used, from some random Yahoo user thanking me for starting the Smoking Crack club and that he had met quite a few people in his area to smoke crack with. I thought it had to be some sort of joke, but I checked it out and to my surprise there were over 300 members in the club all sharing stories about smoking crack and looking for people in their area who they could get together to smoke crack with! I was somewhat surprised and shocked that I was accidently responsible for creating this club, but I didn't shut down the club just because real drug users happened to be using it. I figured the crack smoking that they were doing was illegal, but talking about smoking crack isn't illegal, so who cares?
Fast forward another couple of years and I can't login to Yahoo one day. Instead of logging in, I get a message about how my account has been suspended. So I call up Yahoo and get a hold of a person and all they can tell me is that my account has been suspended for a Terms of Service violation in Yahoo Groups. They refuse to tell me any specifics and tell me that there is nothing I can do and my account is permanently suspended.
The real issue I had with this is that I had a Yahoo Credit Card and I needed to log into the Yahoo Points web site with my Yahoo ID to get my Credit Card rewards. You got one Yahoo Point for every dollar charged to your credit card and you could exchange points for electronics and gift certificates. At the time I had at least $200 in points (based on the gift certificate exchange rate) that I could have cashed out but hadn't gotten around to yet. I tried to explain this to the Yahoo customer service person I was talking to, but they didn't even know what Yahoo Points were. I also called my Credit Card company and tried to explain it to them and they said I couldn't change my Yahoo user ID associated with the credit card points and my Yahoo account suspension was between me and Yahoo. So I just canceled the credit card and got a different one that is not associated with a site that can shut down your account with no explanations on false pretenses.
The kicker is that I looked over the Yahoo TOS very carefully and could not find anything that could give them a justification for shutting down my account. The only thing I found that came close was a clause that said something about how you couldn't use your account to "discuss illegal activities". But the kicker is that I never used the Yahoo Group that I had created and never discussed anything on it, illegal or otherwise. I just created the group as a joke many years prior. Somehow just creating a group that people used to discuss illegal activities was justification for suspension in their eyes. So anyway, Yahoo doesn't have a history for being very judicious in shutting down their users.
Whether it is arcane or not is debatable, but the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 specifically prohibits using a false "From" header.
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm
"It bans false or misleading header information. Your email's "From," "To," and routing information - including the originating domain name and email address - must be accurate and identify the person who initiated the email."
Actually wasn't the original Mario Bros. the first Mario game with co-op play? We have finally come full circle.
I'm not an alcoholic! I'm just addicted to using lowball glasses. I'm a lowball glass addict. It's just that my lowball glasses always seem to be filled with bourbon.
Perhaps some people do think that Jobs is lying and really wants some level of DRM to lock in consumers. But I think what other people refer to by "seeing through his argument" is that his argument, while well-stated, sound, and arguably correct, is very self-serving. He's shifting the blame from himself and his company to the record companies instead. And some people might argue that this is a totally reasonable thing to do, but others, like Norway, seem to disagree. Their response is, "I don't care if the big bad record company men forced you into using DRM, it's still illegal here."
I was *this* close to falling into the classic Slashdot comment trap by using an analogy to illustrate the Norwegian response that involved Nazis, but then I thought better of it. And I'm not clever enough to think of another apt analogy that doens't invole Hitler in some way, so I'll just hope that I got my point across without it.
The show you watched is at least a few months old. If you read the article, this incident occurred on Dec 4, 2006, just over 2 weeks ago. And the picture shows the squid actually coming to the surface of the water. It's not some really dark, black and white image of the squid like the one in the show you saw, but a clear-as-day, color snapshot of the thing.
Come on, guys, everyone and their brother knows off the top of their heads the relative volume of skunk juice sacks in relation to their mating season! Geez!
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/yahoo.htm l
The link as a hyperlink.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/yahoo.htm l
According to wired magazine, Yahoo's profit in the last fiscal year was $542 million as compared to Google's $223 million. So it's more than double the profit for Yahoo than Google on roughly 20% more revenue. Not bad. Click on the thunbnail in the left column with the magnifying glasses to see the pretty graphs.