I'm in Canada though I used American references speaking to an American audience who would probably not get a Mulroney reference but would get a Reagan reference, as would everyone in Canada as well. The Digital Divide is a big problem in both Canada and the US and a $50 a month price point is too high for a lot of people. Also, there are a lot of places within an hour's drive of the city where I'm at who are dialup access only - no other choice.
Actually it's not pie in the sky. Go back to your dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged.
Who's child is going to do better in school, the one with home internet or the one who had to wait for terminal time at a public site away from home?
Bringing connectivity to an area increases economic activity in that area. By giving people a tool to communicate like internet access, they can start up everything from community-based discussion forums to small businesses online. They will think up uses for the connectivity no one else thought of first.
There is a big and growing Digital Divide in this country coming from unequal access to high speed networking. The price point for high speed is too high for low income people, low income people tend to live in under-serviced areas, and the whole "Screw-you-I-got-mine" attitude should have died with Reagan but it is still with us today like a carcinoma.
I've worked on a neighborhood wireless project to bring low price high speed connectivity to the poor and it is not easy to do. Hardware issues, stability issues, open source wifi drivers suck ass, NDISwrapper with wifi drivers is less stable than mercury fulminate at high heat but with all that, there are dedicated people working to try and improve the lot of others, something your precious Ayn Rand and her uber-klassen seem to blank on. Isn't there a McCain convention for you to be at?
I believe that spammers should be slowly blowtorched to death on pay-per-view TV. Start with their feet and work up the body. Their homes should be torched and their families set out to sea in a leaky dinghy and shot if they approach land.
The error here is thinking of these leeches as mammals, when a better comparison would be the 1918 flu virus. Just wipe them out.
/1500:1 spam to mail ratio on my primary account. Death to these scumbags.
So some guy who dresses funny and claims to represent an all-powerful invisible being who cannot speak for itself should be the one in charge of human ethics and morals.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
No, seriously, HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
/not my planet, monkey-boy, and this sort of thing is the proof.
What a silly comment. My point was that I could ballpark quantify the damage done to my company by spammers and it is a lot. When this is spread out to the millions of mail servers and all their millions of users then the damage done is huge, more than the murder of any one individual I can handily think of or any single act of property crime. We are not talking about a trivial offense here, we're talking a lot of dollars and a lot of associated misery that goes along with it.
How many contracts have been broken because a key email was filtered in error? The flood of spam means everyone everywhere has to use aggressive filtering. How many projects never got done because the resources needed to run them were tied up fighting yet another spam storm or cleaning up after one? You think this is nothing because you obviously have not had to deal with the back end of a mail system with thousands of users under assault by an ever-growing wave after wave of spam.
Spam has steadily increased on my server to where it is 98%+ of all mail. Virus mail is about 1% so real legitimate email is now less than one per cent of mail. Real mail is just an impurity in the spam stream.
It's crazy and it keeps increasing month after month. It has cost my company thousands of dollars in equipment, tech support and other manpower costs, lost business, and user bad-will for delayed or filtered mail. When you spread that around to all the other mail systems out there, it is clear that spammers have been doing some real damage.
When someone does catch one, they should go medieval on them. In our enlightened times this means mega-fines and long jail terms in the worst prisons that can be found but honestly I would not be bothered by putting their heads on pikes as an example for what happens when you screw over millions of people.
1. After I've bought and paid for a product I hate having to keep proving it's mine, especially since using a cracked version of the product would mean not having to deal with this issue at all.
2. The short time to shutdown and the constant nagging every two minutes until you activate the software are gratuitously harsh and annoying. Guys, I bought the product. Is this any way to talk to your paying customer?
3. Does this really need such a long authentication number? There are only six billion people on Earth.
4. Okay, so I put in the big long number. Why do I have to give to the machine and then the person? Why can't the person read the number I just typed in on their console?
5. Why do I have to talk to the person anyway? What am I going to say to the guy if I were trying to do something underhanded? Hi, I'm trying to pirate your software? No, I'd lie and say my motherboard was defective and got replaced.
6. And what's up with the Western names for heavily accented Indian call center workers? I don't mind if buddy's name is Sanjay or something but it just adds a treacle-thick layer of insincerity right off the mark to hear the guy with the accent calling himself Frederick or Bob or Thomson.
7. All in all, generously not counting false starts where I mistyped the number (my fault for not enunciating clearly enough or hitting the wrong key first), and even not counting the cost of the "free" call it was a twenty minute detour where instead of using my computer I was having to prove I should be allowed to use it to some bored guy in India. This is just plain punishment.
/but hey, some people like punishment. Not me, but YMMV.
I had my Vista drive booted up to update drivers and try out the new video card.
Warning! Warning! You have three days to activate Vista or it will be in reduced functionality mode.
WTF? The video card was the first hardware change in six months. And WTF is with the three day warning when I can run Vista as a non-registered user for weeks??
*Fine* I click on the activation icon and get told my license is already in use so I have to do the telephone activation.
I hate the telephone activation. First you have to phone them up and type in the 46 number sequence (WTF, am I arming an ICBM here?) then they always tell you that you'll have to talk to a representative who asks you for the 46 number sequence again since the last machine just went and chucked out the one you just spent ten minutes reading into the phone. Then you have to type in a different 46 digit ICBM arming code to use the OS you already paid money for. The call cost $5 on my friend's pay-as-you-go cell phone.
Hey, Microsoft! I paid $300 for your POS OS. If I had pirated it I would have none of this bullcrap but no, I had to be an honest customer and this is my reward. Do you wonder people hate you?
And this is caused by driver updating yet. The one thing a Vista user has no choice but to do is update all multimedia drivers every few weeks as new releases come out to fix the previous releases problems with Vista.
Amazing business model there, Lou. You guys think of this by yourselves, did you?
Fine, jackass. You tell me what I could be doing better to run my Vista install. Let's see, I'm an idiot and don't know what I'm doing.
Clean install of Vista Ultimate, not an upgrade? Check
New blank formatted hard drive? 500 GB SATA drive. Check
Sufficient RAM? 4 GB. Check
Fast enough CPU? Dual core 2.4 GHz. Check
Latest chipset drivers for motherboard for Vista? Check
Video card capable of handling Aero? ATI x800 All-In-Wonder 256 MB RAM. Check
Latest video drivers? August release of Catalyst drivers. Check
Latest drivers for Creative Audigy SE sound card? Check
Wow, I guess I'm just some sort of incompetent fool, huh? If only I knew what I was doing I could have the same flawless playback as the rest of you Redmond clowns.
So come on, jackass, tell me what I need to do to get stutter free media playback just like you?
I'm running a Creative Audigy SE for my sound card using Creative's latest drivers (dated from July) and ATI's August Catalyst driver release for video drivers. I don't disagree that drivers for Vista are crap now, what I'm saying is Microsoft has made the writing of multimedia drivers so difficult (for DRM purposes I gather) that nobody can write good ones at this time. And like I said in my post, there is no TV in Vista for my All-In-Wonder video card at all how many months later? Mind, I haven't been watching much TV lately but that's not the point.
If your Vista laptop is giving you no problems, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say you're luckier than any other Vista computer user I have personally seen. I will admit that laptops designed around Vista do better than upgrades do, including upgrades on brand new hardware, with regards to media stuttering but all the Vista boxen I have seen with my own eyes stutter on media playback during start of playback with most stuttering occasionally at different times during playback. When I boot my own computer in XP I can do disk-intensive activities without media playback stuttering. In Vista on the same box I can close all applications including my antivirus (AVG) and not be able to get smooth playback.
So far the only thing I have liked about Vista is the chess game. If my job didn't require me to keep up with tech stuff, I'd never use Vista at all.
I used to play mp3s with no stuttering on a 486-100 using DosAmp. I cannot play mp3s or video without stuttering on Vista with a dual core 2.4 GHz CPU, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB SATA drive. I can put my XP SP2 drive on the same computer and play media flawlessly while (gasp) multitasking. Like the man says, Vista is a turd.
When my old XP HD crashed I was forced to use Vista exclusively for several weeks. It was like my computer was sick and in the hospital. No TV from my ATI x800 All-in-Wonder (though I did get the FM radio working after a week or two), sucky video game frame rates, unstable network card and sound card drivers and crap multimedia playback. P2P kept crashing the network stack.
Some people say that this isn't Microsoft's fault, it's those third party driver writers to blame. I say fuck that, these folks can write good drivers for the exact same computer in several other operating systems. It's Vista's fault.
MS fanboys will all come out and say their systems all work perfectly. Horseshit. I've now had hands on with more than two dozen Vista machines ranging from laptops to upgrades and in every single case, that's 100% MS fanboys, not 99%, not 80%, all of them had stuttering media playback.
There is no excuse for this sort of crap. My goodness it was such a relief to get an XP install back. My computer was perkier and all of a sudden everything worked again.
If Microsoft does not fix this with the mother of all service pack releases rewriting Vista from the core out then my next post-XP os will not be Windows. My best guess is Vista SP1 will be lipstick on a pig rather than the thorough cleaning out that poor excuse for a beta release really needs though.
It's all wonderful except there is no way to set the business location if Google gets it wrong. I've been trying to get my office location showing the right place on Google for three years now. Emailing them doesn't work, registering with them doesn't help, pleading with them doesn't help. Arg!
I write a computer column for the local paper and all Microsoft has ever offered me was a free-to-use article I could claim as my own with a lead on more if I wanted them. As much of a pain coming up with something for deadline is (hello again, deadline), only the lamest of the lame would take them up on that.
Now as it happens I really would like a copy of Vista to play around with for research for future columns but I'm going to have to pony up the $399 and buy a copy when it comes out end of January since my free laptop never showed up.
Oh well. Maybe someday The Man will think I'm worth bribing.
1. Most of this spam is coming from hijacked home computers. ISPs should recognize when one of their users is a spam factory and cut their connectivity till the computer is fixed.
2. Aggressively prosecute spammers, wherever they are. If the law doesn't let you do that, change the law. If there is no way to do that, I'm in favor of killing spammers and destroying their property, preferably at the same time.
Spamming has gone far past annoyance. Lots of people depend on timely reliable email delivery for their living. Spammers aren't just hurting email, they are killing email. They are killing smaller ISPs who cannot afford the more expensive anti-spam solutions.
I say Death to the scum! I'll even pay the first day's rent on the woodchipper.
There's stupid. There's really, really stupid. Then there is mind-buggeringly space-bending stupid, which is what pretty much everything the Bush administration touches, most particularly anything resembling science.
Myself, I can see the new NASA astrology gift store making some coin off the American people.
Any of you who has had to cope with an aging loved one suffering from some form of geriatric psychosis or late late onset schizophrenia probably had the same reaction to this story that I did.
Deep breath. Sigh.
Here's the thing, for those of you fortunate enough to have not yet had the experience.
Your loved one can be totally sane by all measure of the law and medicine, yet their life can be completely taken over by a delusion. My favorite aunt developed late onset schizophrenia which in her case manifested itself as hearing voices from all around her, a cabal of people out to get her. At first the family thought her stories were real - consistent tales about strange neighbours in her apartment complex and their lives - but after a time there was just too much of it and the stories didn't check out. There was no reclusive girl named Cynthia in the next apartment and her upstairs neighbours weren't putting cameras and speakers in the air vents.
Anyway, to make a long story short, my aunt is still in charge of her own affairs, not in a hospital or care setting and by my non-professional lights mad as a hatter. She's moving for the third time in a year because the evil (imaginary) neighbours keep following her from building to building and never turns on lights or makes a sound because the evil neighbours start shrieking at her about it if she does. Her entire existence is one of fear and the only medical solution is some anti-psychotic pills that don't seem to do anything and a monthly geriatric worker visit.
Now if I were to have told this story a different way, focussing on the kookiness rather than the human tragedy, you'd have all laughed. It would have been a comedy bit - the crazy cat lady or Mr Magoo's misinterpretations of his surroundings.
With so many baby boomers getting older and from my personal first hand experience the medical field is pissing in the dark with regard to effective treatments, there are going to be a lot more news stories like this.
The real bitch of it all is, you often cannot easily tell from listening to such a person what is real and what is not. Trip to Mars, delusion. Trip to pharmacy to pick up prescription, real or not?
Amen.
Seriously though the lack of a plausible alternative to the Liberal party is not a good thing in the long run. The Conservatives are never going to get much past the prairies if that far. Bush and his antics have taken the shine off that whole conservative thing for pretty much everyone who can read. (Hint: they're the ones who can spell correctly.)
The lack of tangibles coming out of Jack Layton's partnership with Martin is sure not making the NDP look good to anyone and federally there would have to be some kind of miracle for them to ever form a government. Personally I think that they could handle it after some bumpy learning experiences at the reins of power, but there is a deep seated fear that the wingnut fringe of the party would suddenly cackle with glee at finally having the ability to legislate social change and start going off the deep end with politically correct rubbish.
So, most Canadians don't want to rock the boat and want to steer a course of slightly progressive on social issues and slightly conservative (the old school sensible kind) on economic issues. So long as the Liberals deliver on that without becoming too corrupt to bear, they will stay in power for a long, long time.
Historically that always winds up with the ruling party becoming complacent, ineffective and decadently corrupt. There are some who would argue that this is already the case but the current Bush administration has so radically altered the metrics for this downwards that even with all the crap turned up by Gomery, Martin still looks pretty good in comparison.
I run an ISP and the cost to us is not bandwidth, but tech time to keep anti-spam filters and software updated, tech time to troubleshoot filtering problems, tech time to keep mail filtering servers updated and running, the cost of the mail filtering servers, the tech support costs for answering client complaints and queries about lost or erroneusly blocked or filtered email and the badwill generated each time we filter or block a legitimate piece of client email.
We have to turf about 94% of all incoming email. I personally get more than 1 Mb of spam filtered to my junk folder a day for manual perusal in case any important messages got tagged by mistake.
Twenty years in prison is peanuts for the suffering these monsters have caused. Put me in a room with this poor excuse for a human and a big woodchipper and I'd be entertained for several whole minutes. No need to look in on us.
You know, it's funny, but I really used to like Harlan Ellison. Somewhere along the way I came to the realization that he is not the gifted writer he thinks he is, just another sarcastic wanna-be with a big vocabulary and a few good short stories he wrote when he was young. I think it came to a head when I read after all these long years the other side of the great Starlost debacle. If you do some searching on the Ark model from the series you can find the info. Ellison was an ass, not a put-upon prodigy. In all the time since the seventies he hasn't lived up to his potential but it's always someone else's fault to hear his side. In real life, blame usually goes two ways.
About the whole **AA copyright business, it should now be common knowledge that corporations are functionally the equivalent of psychopathic immortal humans, so quelle surprise when they behave in fixed patterns that act against their own interests if they could only see it. If any of you has had any dealings with geniune psychopaths (and I'm using the medical sense of the word psychopath here), then you'll know that having fixed (and wildly incorrect) ideas is part of the landscape for psychosis.
On the internet, big money is pretty much the same as small money - both can get web space and have equal opportunity to be accessed by everyone. It's not like television where big money buys more airtime and a flashier message. This must really get up the nose of big money and it is no surprise that big money is trying to put controls on it.
They've seen what can be done with oppressive technology in China and they are so wet for that it must be like sitting in a puddle for them.
Whoops, I stand corrected. I'd seen the quote attributed to "George Bush" with no "H.W." in the middle but a quick check shows that you're right. It's funny, I'd figured Bush the Elder to be the more sensible one and not one to get quoted saying something like that while it sounds like exactly the sort of thing the current Bush would say. Just goes to show about making assumptions.
In reply to God Almighty, you make some good points but what is being missed isn't the validity or not of beliefs by people but the notion that truth is something independently verifiable by everyone who is presented with the evidence.
For example, a discouragingly large number of Americans apparently are unaware that the Earth revolves around the sun, if polls can be believed. The fix for this is not to make authoritative statements that it does, but to demonstrate proofs to show it does, to show how anyone can duplicate these proofs for themselves. In other words, to show that the best way to find the truth is the Scientific Method.
One of the baffling contradictions about current America is the wide popularity of shows like C.S.I., which show scientific rationalism in action while on the other hand there is the belief, expressed by several of the replies to this article even, that belief trumps evidence.
Imagine an episode of C.S.I. where Grissom is presented with a murder victim stabbed with a knife, covered in DNA from the attacker. The attacker is found, the DNA confirmed, fingerprints found on the weapon belonging to the attacker and Grissom suddenly states that the perp is really Santa Claus who came down the chimney, faked all the evidence without leaving a trace and buggered off to the North Pole. The proof? Grissom's unquestioning belief that this is what happened.
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I'm in Canada though I used American references speaking to an American audience who would probably not get a Mulroney reference but would get a Reagan reference, as would everyone in Canada as well. The Digital Divide is a big problem in both Canada and the US and a $50 a month price point is too high for a lot of people. Also, there are a lot of places within an hour's drive of the city where I'm at who are dialup access only - no other choice.
Who's child is going to do better in school, the one with home internet or the one who had to wait for terminal time at a public site away from home?
Bringing connectivity to an area increases economic activity in that area. By giving people a tool to communicate like internet access, they can start up everything from community-based discussion forums to small businesses online. They will think up uses for the connectivity no one else thought of first.
There is a big and growing Digital Divide in this country coming from unequal access to high speed networking. The price point for high speed is too high for low income people, low income people tend to live in under-serviced areas, and the whole "Screw-you-I-got-mine" attitude should have died with Reagan but it is still with us today like a carcinoma.
I've worked on a neighborhood wireless project to bring low price high speed connectivity to the poor and it is not easy to do. Hardware issues, stability issues, open source wifi drivers suck ass, NDISwrapper with wifi drivers is less stable than mercury fulminate at high heat but with all that, there are dedicated people working to try and improve the lot of others, something your precious Ayn Rand and her uber-klassen seem to blank on. Isn't there a McCain convention for you to be at?
The error here is thinking of these leeches as mammals, when a better comparison would be the 1918 flu virus. Just wipe them out.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
No, seriously, HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
What a silly comment. My point was that I could ballpark quantify the damage done to my company by spammers and it is a lot. When this is spread out to the millions of mail servers and all their millions of users then the damage done is huge, more than the murder of any one individual I can handily think of or any single act of property crime. We are not talking about a trivial offense here, we're talking a lot of dollars and a lot of associated misery that goes along with it. How many contracts have been broken because a key email was filtered in error? The flood of spam means everyone everywhere has to use aggressive filtering. How many projects never got done because the resources needed to run them were tied up fighting yet another spam storm or cleaning up after one? You think this is nothing because you obviously have not had to deal with the back end of a mail system with thousands of users under assault by an ever-growing wave after wave of spam.
Spam has steadily increased on my server to where it is 98%+ of all mail. Virus mail is about 1% so real legitimate email is now less than one per cent of mail. Real mail is just an impurity in the spam stream.
It's crazy and it keeps increasing month after month. It has cost my company thousands of dollars in equipment, tech support and other manpower costs, lost business, and user bad-will for delayed or filtered mail. When you spread that around to all the other mail systems out there, it is clear that spammers have been doing some real damage.
When someone does catch one, they should go medieval on them. In our enlightened times this means mega-fines and long jail terms in the worst prisons that can be found but honestly I would not be bothered by putting their heads on pikes as an example for what happens when you screw over millions of people.
1. After I've bought and paid for a product I hate having to keep proving it's mine, especially since using a cracked version of the product would mean not having to deal with this issue at all.
2. The short time to shutdown and the constant nagging every two minutes until you activate the software are gratuitously harsh and annoying. Guys, I bought the product. Is this any way to talk to your paying customer?
3. Does this really need such a long authentication number? There are only six billion people on Earth.
4. Okay, so I put in the big long number. Why do I have to give to the machine and then the person? Why can't the person read the number I just typed in on their console?
5. Why do I have to talk to the person anyway? What am I going to say to the guy if I were trying to do something underhanded? Hi, I'm trying to pirate your software? No, I'd lie and say my motherboard was defective and got replaced.
6. And what's up with the Western names for heavily accented Indian call center workers? I don't mind if buddy's name is Sanjay or something but it just adds a treacle-thick layer of insincerity right off the mark to hear the guy with the accent calling himself Frederick or Bob or Thomson.
7. All in all, generously not counting false starts where I mistyped the number (my fault for not enunciating clearly enough or hitting the wrong key first), and even not counting the cost of the "free" call it was a twenty minute detour where instead of using my computer I was having to prove I should be allowed to use it to some bored guy in India. This is just plain punishment.
I work tech support so I have to know Vista to support it.
Warning! Warning! You have three days to activate Vista or it will be in reduced functionality mode.
WTF? The video card was the first hardware change in six months. And WTF is with the three day warning when I can run Vista as a non-registered user for weeks??
*Fine* I click on the activation icon and get told my license is already in use so I have to do the telephone activation.
I hate the telephone activation. First you have to phone them up and type in the 46 number sequence (WTF, am I arming an ICBM here?) then they always tell you that you'll have to talk to a representative who asks you for the 46 number sequence again since the last machine just went and chucked out the one you just spent ten minutes reading into the phone. Then you have to type in a different 46 digit ICBM arming code to use the OS you already paid money for. The call cost $5 on my friend's pay-as-you-go cell phone.
Hey, Microsoft! I paid $300 for your POS OS. If I had pirated it I would have none of this bullcrap but no, I had to be an honest customer and this is my reward. Do you wonder people hate you?
And this is caused by driver updating yet. The one thing a Vista user has no choice but to do is update all multimedia drivers every few weeks as new releases come out to fix the previous releases problems with Vista.
Amazing business model there, Lou. You guys think of this by yourselves, did you?
Clean install of Vista Ultimate, not an upgrade? Check
New blank formatted hard drive? 500 GB SATA drive. Check
Sufficient RAM? 4 GB. Check
Fast enough CPU? Dual core 2.4 GHz. Check
Latest chipset drivers for motherboard for Vista? Check
Video card capable of handling Aero? ATI x800 All-In-Wonder 256 MB RAM. Check
Latest video drivers? August release of Catalyst drivers. Check
Latest drivers for Creative Audigy SE sound card? Check
Wow, I guess I'm just some sort of incompetent fool, huh? If only I knew what I was doing I could have the same flawless playback as the rest of you Redmond clowns.
So come on, jackass, tell me what I need to do to get stutter free media playback just like you?
If your Vista laptop is giving you no problems, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and say you're luckier than any other Vista computer user I have personally seen. I will admit that laptops designed around Vista do better than upgrades do, including upgrades on brand new hardware, with regards to media stuttering but all the Vista boxen I have seen with my own eyes stutter on media playback during start of playback with most stuttering occasionally at different times during playback. When I boot my own computer in XP I can do disk-intensive activities without media playback stuttering. In Vista on the same box I can close all applications including my antivirus (AVG) and not be able to get smooth playback.
So far the only thing I have liked about Vista is the chess game. If my job didn't require me to keep up with tech stuff, I'd never use Vista at all.
When my old XP HD crashed I was forced to use Vista exclusively for several weeks. It was like my computer was sick and in the hospital. No TV from my ATI x800 All-in-Wonder (though I did get the FM radio working after a week or two), sucky video game frame rates, unstable network card and sound card drivers and crap multimedia playback. P2P kept crashing the network stack.
Some people say that this isn't Microsoft's fault, it's those third party driver writers to blame. I say fuck that, these folks can write good drivers for the exact same computer in several other operating systems. It's Vista's fault.
MS fanboys will all come out and say their systems all work perfectly. Horseshit. I've now had hands on with more than two dozen Vista machines ranging from laptops to upgrades and in every single case, that's 100% MS fanboys, not 99%, not 80%, all of them had stuttering media playback.
There is no excuse for this sort of crap. My goodness it was such a relief to get an XP install back. My computer was perkier and all of a sudden everything worked again.
If Microsoft does not fix this with the mother of all service pack releases rewriting Vista from the core out then my next post-XP os will not be Windows. My best guess is Vista SP1 will be lipstick on a pig rather than the thorough cleaning out that poor excuse for a beta release really needs though.
Anyone else have the hots for Dot Matrix? She needs some bikini time in this.
It's all wonderful except there is no way to set the business location if Google gets it wrong. I've been trying to get my office location showing the right place on Google for three years now. Emailing them doesn't work, registering with them doesn't help, pleading with them doesn't help. Arg!
Now as it happens I really would like a copy of Vista to play around with for research for future columns but I'm going to have to pony up the $399 and buy a copy when it comes out end of January since my free laptop never showed up.
Oh well. Maybe someday The Man will think I'm worth bribing.
1. Most of this spam is coming from hijacked home computers. ISPs should recognize when one of their users is a spam factory and cut their connectivity till the computer is fixed.
2. Aggressively prosecute spammers, wherever they are. If the law doesn't let you do that, change the law. If there is no way to do that, I'm in favor of killing spammers and destroying their property, preferably at the same time.
Spamming has gone far past annoyance. Lots of people depend on timely reliable email delivery for their living. Spammers aren't just hurting email, they are killing email. They are killing smaller ISPs who cannot afford the more expensive anti-spam solutions.
I say Death to the scum! I'll even pay the first day's rent on the woodchipper.
Myself, I can see the new NASA astrology gift store making some coin off the American people.
Deep breath. Sigh.
Here's the thing, for those of you fortunate enough to have not yet had the experience.
Your loved one can be totally sane by all measure of the law and medicine, yet their life can be completely taken over by a delusion. My favorite aunt developed late onset schizophrenia which in her case manifested itself as hearing voices from all around her, a cabal of people out to get her. At first the family thought her stories were real - consistent tales about strange neighbours in her apartment complex and their lives - but after a time there was just too much of it and the stories didn't check out. There was no reclusive girl named Cynthia in the next apartment and her upstairs neighbours weren't putting cameras and speakers in the air vents.
Anyway, to make a long story short, my aunt is still in charge of her own affairs, not in a hospital or care setting and by my non-professional lights mad as a hatter. She's moving for the third time in a year because the evil (imaginary) neighbours keep following her from building to building and never turns on lights or makes a sound because the evil neighbours start shrieking at her about it if she does. Her entire existence is one of fear and the only medical solution is some anti-psychotic pills that don't seem to do anything and a monthly geriatric worker visit.
Now if I were to have told this story a different way, focussing on the kookiness rather than the human tragedy, you'd have all laughed. It would have been a comedy bit - the crazy cat lady or Mr Magoo's misinterpretations of his surroundings.
With so many baby boomers getting older and from my personal first hand experience the medical field is pissing in the dark with regard to effective treatments, there are going to be a lot more news stories like this.
The real bitch of it all is, you often cannot easily tell from listening to such a person what is real and what is not. Trip to Mars, delusion. Trip to pharmacy to pick up prescription, real or not?
Amen. Seriously though the lack of a plausible alternative to the Liberal party is not a good thing in the long run. The Conservatives are never going to get much past the prairies if that far. Bush and his antics have taken the shine off that whole conservative thing for pretty much everyone who can read. (Hint: they're the ones who can spell correctly.) The lack of tangibles coming out of Jack Layton's partnership with Martin is sure not making the NDP look good to anyone and federally there would have to be some kind of miracle for them to ever form a government. Personally I think that they could handle it after some bumpy learning experiences at the reins of power, but there is a deep seated fear that the wingnut fringe of the party would suddenly cackle with glee at finally having the ability to legislate social change and start going off the deep end with politically correct rubbish. So, most Canadians don't want to rock the boat and want to steer a course of slightly progressive on social issues and slightly conservative (the old school sensible kind) on economic issues. So long as the Liberals deliver on that without becoming too corrupt to bear, they will stay in power for a long, long time. Historically that always winds up with the ruling party becoming complacent, ineffective and decadently corrupt. There are some who would argue that this is already the case but the current Bush administration has so radically altered the metrics for this downwards that even with all the crap turned up by Gomery, Martin still looks pretty good in comparison.
We have to turf about 94% of all incoming email. I personally get more than 1 Mb of spam filtered to my junk folder a day for manual perusal in case any important messages got tagged by mistake.
Twenty years in prison is peanuts for the suffering these monsters have caused. Put me in a room with this poor excuse for a human and a big woodchipper and I'd be entertained for several whole minutes. No need to look in on us.
About the whole **AA copyright business, it should now be common knowledge that corporations are functionally the equivalent of psychopathic immortal humans, so quelle surprise when they behave in fixed patterns that act against their own interests if they could only see it. If any of you has had any dealings with geniune psychopaths (and I'm using the medical sense of the word psychopath here), then you'll know that having fixed (and wildly incorrect) ideas is part of the landscape for psychosis.
They've seen what can be done with oppressive technology in China and they are so wet for that it must be like sitting in a puddle for them.
WTF?
Yet oddly enough entry requirements have just been relaxed for visitors coming from Saudi Arabia, where 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers came from.
Funny, that.
In reply to God Almighty, you make some good points but what is being missed isn't the validity or not of beliefs by people but the notion that truth is something independently verifiable by everyone who is presented with the evidence.
For example, a discouragingly large number of Americans apparently are unaware that the Earth revolves around the sun, if polls can be believed. The fix for this is not to make authoritative statements that it does, but to demonstrate proofs to show it does, to show how anyone can duplicate these proofs for themselves. In other words, to show that the best way to find the truth is the Scientific Method.
One of the baffling contradictions about current America is the wide popularity of shows like C.S.I., which show scientific rationalism in action while on the other hand there is the belief, expressed by several of the replies to this article even, that belief trumps evidence.
Imagine an episode of C.S.I. where Grissom is presented with a murder victim stabbed with a knife, covered in DNA from the attacker. The attacker is found, the DNA confirmed, fingerprints found on the weapon belonging to the attacker and Grissom suddenly states that the perp is really Santa Claus who came down the chimney, faked all the evidence without leaving a trace and buggered off to the North Pole. The proof? Grissom's unquestioning belief that this is what happened.