I pay my telco for my 640k DSL line.
I pay my ISP to service the line I lease from my telco.
They're already charging me for use of their equipment. What's next? Charging me for using LICQ or GAIM instead of making a phone call?
I'm paying them for a high-bandwidth connection and how I use that connection, so long as it is legal, is none of their business. There is no defense for gouging consumers at every possible point and their complaints begging for regulation are rediculous. ---
seumas.com
In the spirit of this regulation, I would also propose a tax on pedestrians who walk on the sidewalk and cross streets -- after all, they are depriving auto-makers of their rightful monies by taking alternate methods to transport themselves to their destinations.
Likewise, auto-makers should be levied an additional tax which would subsidize the horse-breeding and equestrian 'industry' for the loss in revenue that the new technology (automotives) have torn from the hands of the horse-trade, by using the same streets with an alternate vehical as a method of transportation of individuals from one location to another.
It is only fair that new technologies and services be responsible for continuing the financial well-being of the services and past technologies they are making obsolete. ---
seumas.com
I always pimp this book to friends, family and acquaintences -- especially if they are not in the technical field or are generally uninformed about the concerns of privacy invasion by corporations, governments, organizations and online services. It is a great over-view of almost every major concern and the existing reality, with insight into the possible (and likely) potential reality of abuse.
If you know someone who gives their personal information just to get a 'Club Card' at Safeway so they can buy groceries, hands over their personal information to Radio Shack just for the privelage of buying things from them, or sign up for those "Hawaiian Trip Giveaway"'s that are in a lot of stores, restaurants and laundromats (a scheme to get your address, name and age as well as other information) -- give this book to them this holiday. It'll make them think twice about the comfortable little world they think they live in. ---
seumas.com
Happy Thanksgiving, You've Been Slashdotted!
on
Spambot Poisoner
·
· Score: 4
Aw, man. How cruel. Post a link to this (apparently) small-time site on a day when everyone in the country has the day off and is surfing Slashdot, while his ISP is probably minimally (if at all) staffed to respond to problems -- and get him slashdotted.
That's the holiday spirit alright...;) ---
seumas.com
By the article, it sounds like they're not banning the use of somedomain.ch -- but anything that uses chinese characters, regardless of the TLD?
I'm as much for anything that limits the scope and reach of NSI as the next person, but this is a joke. What's next, is England going to forbid any other country from using english words? ---
seumas.com
True, but there are a lot of articles posted on Slashdot for the first time that appeared long ago in the referenced source. Still seems like something a short script could have alerted them to before posting, though.
I mean, who are we to criticize, but it does sort of suck when they only post x number of articles each day -- and one or two of them are often spent on news already reported on Slashdot before. ---
seumas.com
That was almost four months ago. Slashdot has had well over 10,000 articles and everyone expects every member to recall every submission accepted by every other staff member over the last several years, including posts of the same content, but varying categories or titles?
Sure, it's fun to point out when it occurs, but with the load that they deal with (almost 300 submissions last time I checked), it's surprising it doesn't happen more often.
However, I think it would be worthwhile if they coded some sort of check into the system that would see if the exact same URL (not just a domain, but a full url pointing to a specific page) has appeared previously in other articles and provide brief summarizations for the staff person to read through and see if it is dealing with the exact same issue or not so they can make an informed decision without scanning 10,000 posts manually. ---
seumas.com
I won't presume to speak for others, but I would assume there are a lot of people like me who's greatest problem with online is not cheating by others, but outright suckage at the game by our own selves.
It's thrilling just to keep a positive frag-count!;) ---
seumas.com
I own a few domains and I don't particularly like the fact that my real name and some other personal information is made available to the public. I do, however, believe that WHOIS should provide a method of contact via email for the person's who own a domain so that necessary contact can be made and, if volunteered by the owner, a telephone number. ---
seumas.com
I would like to see monkey brains controlling BattleBots. What could be moer entertaining than strapping a monkey brain with some electrodes to a 500lb death machine? ---
seumas.com
I hate unnecessary government regulation as much as anyone. I think that OSHA attacks issues that are very important and should be addressed by companies, but I think that it should be less of a 'government regulation' and more of a "if you don't take care of your employers, we're going to stick it to you" from the insurance company. At least that keeps the government further from it and provides incentive for the employer to take care of their employees (who are, after all, hurting themselves all for the benefit of their employer).
Anyone who is old enough to remember the days prior to OSHA will probably admit that it is better than not having OSHA, though. There was a day when a handful of deaths were expected in a lot of jobs. People who built some of our biggest dams swung from cranes a couple hundred feet over the earth without any tethers and operated dangerous machinery without any protection at all. What are a few lives compared to meeting a deadline?! A company can always hire more people -- but you can only meet a deadline once.
OSHA seems to help in some way to strike a balance wherein someone finally tells employers that they can't neglect their employes simply because addressing the problems directly gained from their daily job will cost a few bucks.
Don't misunderstand me though -- I'm not an OSHA fan, either. I'm just saying that some sort of regulation is obviously needed, because before OSHA, we didn't have ergo-anything and if you couldn't perform your job anymore because you were hurting from your job, you better hope you have a lot of sick-days saved, because as far as your boss was concerned, you were slacking off if you weren't punching the clock. ---
seumas.com
That reminds me of one of my first jobs when I was about high-school age.
I was working for a temp agency who basically stuck me in job after job where my purpose was to sit at whatever flat surface they had in whatever crammed but available spot in their building that they could spare, punching in 10-key as fast as possible, duplicating data from hard-copy files for 9 hours a day until the job was over and I could be assigned to yet another company at yet another crammed but available flat-spot where they could squeeze a monitor and keyboard and stack of hard-copy.
I finally quit one day and told them that if I was going to destroy my hands, wrists and forearms, it was going to be for something a little more brain-grabbing and interesting than punching in social security numbers. ---
seumas.com
I've spent half of my life heavily involved in sports -- wrestling, judo, swimming, boxing, soccer, etc. I've spent most of my childhood doing heavy work around the house and helping build houses with my grandfather (a carpenter).
Let me just say that out of all the injuries I've ever had, including when I was hit by a car a couple years ago and thrown fifty feet through the air into the asphalt, the pain in your forearms and wrists after spending 12 or 18 hours at the keyboard every day for several days or weeks in a row surpasses them all.
I've resorted, at times, to taking those wraps intended for sprained ankles that you buy at the pharmacy, and wrapping them around my wrist and hand and placing my wrist on a folded hand-towel in front of my mouse pad.
Employers might occasionally deny that repetative tasks in a job can cause pain or permenant damage -- but most employers are not in the medical field, have no medical degree and are not involved in the medical and scientific research that has proven that there are extreme stresses on the human body from repetative motions. Take a plastic stick and bend it to and fro repeatedly and it's going to snap. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that repetative lifting or typing or any of a number of other things can cause problems.
My observations have been that employers don't extend themselves for ergonomic concerns but will usually offer to work with an employee who makes some noise. Unfortunately, most of us won't make noise because we don't want to seem like plaintiv nuisances.
Most of the people I know sit in whatever two dollar chair they're given at a desk that was never adjusted specifically for them and type on your standard straight-edge qwerty keyboard with standard everything. In other words, they go home aching.
I mean, to a lot of us it is hard to admit that our wrists are hurting. Most of us type in one way or another for a living -- it isn't like we're digging ditches stocking shelves. So we often keep quiet. I usually do, but it sucks when you can't sleep because your wrists are throbbing and you can't grip a coffee mug until you've relaxed for a day or so.
I wonder how this effects users who tellecommute. How can my employer dictate or be held responsible for my work environment at home? Granted, my eight foot banquet table and cheap OfficeMax chair might not be the best health-wise, but I'm not about to go out and spend hundreds of dollars to egonomize my home office.
Besides, a lot of us are overweight, get no excersize, have failing eyesight and live on pizza and soda. How are we going to get an employer to take us seriously when we then complain because our poor little wrists are achey-wakey?
I'm sure I'll regret the attitude of "I'm embarassed to make noise about it to my employer" that I have -- probably someday when I have arthritis and can't grip a pencil or a cup... but oh well. ---
seumas.com
My main reason for considering charging for actual use of the site was that, being an auction site, people are used to paying for items. And if they'll take the trouble to send a check, money order or other method of payment for a skirt or a book, then they should be willing to send one to the webmaster who keeps the site running. It would really help weed out the troublemakers, I feel -- if $10/year is too much to pay, then you're probably not willing to pay for any auctions you win either. Sort of a litmus test, I suppose. People can feel comfortable knowing that "Hey, this person is a paying user -- so they're probably less likely to screw me over".
Plus, instead of killing an account and having the user create three more in its place, it'll cost them $10 for every account they want to create and have yanked.
I can't think of many other solutions to the concern of fruadulent members... ---
seumas.com
I totally expected to shut my site down after I finished toying with it and learning some Perl, but the first day I realized that the site was actually going to be something, I decided against advertisements for two reasons.
The first is that I don't particularly care for advertisements on sites that I visit and I don't want to inflict them on people who visit mine. I hate the thought of my site looking 'owned' by Proctor & Gamble or Hewlitt Packard or whoever else wants to advertise on it. The other reason is that it is so difficult to find legitimate agencies and I dislike the way webmasters are paid by them as compared to other media. Television and print advertisements are not paid based on how many people buy the products after seeing the advertisements, but on how many eyeballs will see the advertisement x number of times. And a lot of these internet advertisers will only pay-out if the number of people clicking through to their sites are a certain percentage of your total visitors -- or if a certain percentage of those who click through actually buy their product or service. It seems to be more of a straight-jacket than anything else.
A pay-for-service (set monthly or yearly fee per account) seems to be have a greater profit potential and it would probably also help weed-out most of the people who create fake accounts just to cause trouble on the website. Then the problem is how to keep from undercharging or overcharging for the service.
I know that some people who use my site make their entire living from it or have grown their own businesses through it. A lot of people are willing to pay for the service and I've had people over the last few months wanting an address to send donations or offering to help run the site.
The problem with donations is that it would take a lot to keep the site going and I didn't want to take donations until I knew if I would eventually charge for the site anyway. And the problem with having users help run the site is that the code is not yet ready for assistant staff members to perform things and putting 6,000 user's account information in the reach of relatively unknown individuals is too risky at this point.
I've been so busy over this last year that most email can go for a month or two before I have time to read and respond to it. I only have time to resolve problems when they are so huge that everyone is complaining about it and sometimes I don't even visit my own site for months on end. It's amazing that the site practically runs and polices itself -- but it still needs some TLC to really run smoothly.
Thankfully, some friends are my webhosts and they're letting me off with more bandwidth than I'm paying for -- otherwise I would go broke, even with the decent salary I make. For what is mostly an all-text site, I'm eating up more than 400mb of bandwidth per day.
I've had no problems running the site for free as long as the monitary cost to me was not all that large. It's an interesting hobby and I've learned a lot about Perl and handling large groups of users in an internet-based service. But while 95% of my members understand the difficult situation I'm in and that I can't always respond to them immediately (or even at all sometimes), there are the other 5% who say things like "If someone puts up a website, they should be responsible for taking care of it, no matter what!" and who act like I owe them a kidney or something.
In fact, there are enough people with that mode of thinking that, coupled with the other random problems associated with a site like this, that I no longer feel compelled to keep the site running unless it can pay for itself and run itself (or hire staff to do it for me) without sucking up so much of my own time. If it can make a profit -- that would be cool, but that isn't the goal.
Of course, the other thing that has concerned me is that I might be missing out on something huge. All of my friends and business associates over th e last two years have tried to convince me to sell the site or start making money with it. I guess that wouldn't be 'selling-out'. I mean, someone who runs a comic book shop isn't selling out just because they're making money off of something they enjoy doing... The Catch-22 is that if I try to make something profitable out of a site (or at least profitable enough to pay for itself), there's the risk of losing it outright. But if I don't, it might crumble under its own weight. And how many other chances does a guy get to come up with a hit website with potential? This may be my only chance, right?
I'm considering dropping a couple grand on some friends to rewrite my site's code so it's faster (SQL, mod_perl) and more reliable and expandable. Perhaps I'll have them write the staff-administration features I've been meaning to write myself so I can let others run most of the site for me... You have to invest money to make money, right? And I guess if things get bad, all I'll have done is lost a couple thousand bucks and a website...? ---
seumas.com
written stories describing minors engaged in sexual acts, whether or not such stories are real or imagined
This will be a surefire way to assure molestation and child-rape continues on under the blankets of Canada. If you can't even write about it, then it's difficult to make people aware of it. Maybe the next step is to ban the publication of any books which talk about crimes. If people don't know that crimes are committed, they won't occur! ---
seumas.com
Slashdot Mirror
Middle-aged day-trader shoots up an office center.
More than half of marriages do not last.
Decades of enslavement of an entire race in America.
Decades of spousal and child abuse in America.
Blow jobs in the white house by an intern, with a married president.
And it's the VIDEOGAMES that are causing moral panic?! Holy shit . . . Talk about blind.
---
seumas.com
I pay my ISP to service the line I lease from my telco.
They're already charging me for use of their equipment. What's next? Charging me for using LICQ or GAIM instead of making a phone call?
I'm paying them for a high-bandwidth connection and how I use that connection, so long as it is legal, is none of their business. There is no defense for gouging consumers at every possible point and their complaints begging for regulation are rediculous.
---
seumas.com
Likewise, auto-makers should be levied an additional tax which would subsidize the horse-breeding and equestrian 'industry' for the loss in revenue that the new technology (automotives) have torn from the hands of the horse-trade, by using the same streets with an alternate vehical as a method of transportation of individuals from one location to another.
It is only fair that new technologies and services be responsible for continuing the financial well-being of the services and past technologies they are making obsolete.
---
seumas.com
Most of them are agents of Satan. Particularly, NSI.
---
seumas.com
The book was also reviewed on Slashdot some months ago: Database Nation (O'Reilly).
If you know someone who gives their personal information just to get a 'Club Card' at Safeway so they can buy groceries, hands over their personal information to Radio Shack just for the privelage of buying things from them, or sign up for those "Hawaiian Trip Giveaway"'s that are in a lot of stores, restaurants and laundromats (a scheme to get your address, name and age as well as other information) -- give this book to them this holiday. It'll make them think twice about the comfortable little world they think they live in.
---
seumas.com
That's the holiday spirit alright... ;)
---
seumas.com
Silicon Valley is the only place where your cab driver will ask you about a Sun E10k and your views of open source software.
The valley is a good place if you're a high-tech money maker (eg, Venture Capitalist pig, head of Amazon or eBay or CEO of an industry leader).
For those living on meager salaries of $100k or less -- it's a death trap.
---
seumas.com
Lots and lots of penguins.
---
seumas.com
I plan to forbid use of piglatin in domain names. eBay (Be in piglatin), I would like 10% of your profits now. Thank you.
---
seumas.com
I'm as much for anything that limits the scope and reach of NSI as the next person, but this is a joke. What's next, is England going to forbid any other country from using english words?
---
seumas.com
I just hope their voting system will be more reliable than that of the United States Government ... :)
---
seumas.com
I mean, who has time for searching and stuff? It's get up, post, get back under the sheets....!
---
seumas.com
I mean, who are we to criticize, but it does sort of suck when they only post x number of articles each day -- and one or two of them are often spent on news already reported on Slashdot before.
---
seumas.com
Sure, it's fun to point out when it occurs, but with the load that they deal with (almost 300 submissions last time I checked), it's surprising it doesn't happen more often.
However, I think it would be worthwhile if they coded some sort of check into the system that would see if the exact same URL (not just a domain, but a full url pointing to a specific page) has appeared previously in other articles and provide brief summarizations for the staff person to read through and see if it is dealing with the exact same issue or not so they can make an informed decision without scanning 10,000 posts manually.
---
seumas.com
It's thrilling just to keep a positive frag-count! ;)
---
seumas.com
I own a few domains and I don't particularly like the fact that my real name and some other personal information is made available to the public. I do, however, believe that WHOIS should provide a method of contact via email for the person's who own a domain so that necessary contact can be made and, if volunteered by the owner, a telephone number.
---
seumas.com
I would like to see monkey brains controlling BattleBots. What could be moer entertaining than strapping a monkey brain with some electrodes to a 500lb death machine?
---
seumas.com
This is a joke, right?
I mean, there are just so many smart-assed comments one could make about this, but the statement itself is enough...
Internet users are amused by the dancing hamsters and fake nude celebrity pics -- controlling orbiting space stuff is a BAD IDEA.
---
seumas.com
Anyone who is old enough to remember the days prior to OSHA will probably admit that it is better than not having OSHA, though. There was a day when a handful of deaths were expected in a lot of jobs. People who built some of our biggest dams swung from cranes a couple hundred feet over the earth without any tethers and operated dangerous machinery without any protection at all. What are a few lives compared to meeting a deadline?! A company can always hire more people -- but you can only meet a deadline once.
OSHA seems to help in some way to strike a balance wherein someone finally tells employers that they can't neglect their employes simply because addressing the problems directly gained from their daily job will cost a few bucks.
Don't misunderstand me though -- I'm not an OSHA fan, either. I'm just saying that some sort of regulation is obviously needed, because before OSHA, we didn't have ergo-anything and if you couldn't perform your job anymore because you were hurting from your job, you better hope you have a lot of sick-days saved, because as far as your boss was concerned, you were slacking off if you weren't punching the clock.
---
seumas.com
I was working for a temp agency who basically stuck me in job after job where my purpose was to sit at whatever flat surface they had in whatever crammed but available spot in their building that they could spare, punching in 10-key as fast as possible, duplicating data from hard-copy files for 9 hours a day until the job was over and I could be assigned to yet another company at yet another crammed but available flat-spot where they could squeeze a monitor and keyboard and stack of hard-copy.
I finally quit one day and told them that if I was going to destroy my hands, wrists and forearms, it was going to be for something a little more brain-grabbing and interesting than punching in social security numbers.
---
seumas.com
Let me just say that out of all the injuries I've ever had, including when I was hit by a car a couple years ago and thrown fifty feet through the air into the asphalt, the pain in your forearms and wrists after spending 12 or 18 hours at the keyboard every day for several days or weeks in a row surpasses them all.
I've resorted, at times, to taking those wraps intended for sprained ankles that you buy at the pharmacy, and wrapping them around my wrist and hand and placing my wrist on a folded hand-towel in front of my mouse pad.
Employers might occasionally deny that repetative tasks in a job can cause pain or permenant damage -- but most employers are not in the medical field, have no medical degree and are not involved in the medical and scientific research that has proven that there are extreme stresses on the human body from repetative motions. Take a plastic stick and bend it to and fro repeatedly and it's going to snap. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that repetative lifting or typing or any of a number of other things can cause problems.
---
seumas.com
Most of the people I know sit in whatever two dollar chair they're given at a desk that was never adjusted specifically for them and type on your standard straight-edge qwerty keyboard with standard everything. In other words, they go home aching.
I mean, to a lot of us it is hard to admit that our wrists are hurting. Most of us type in one way or another for a living -- it isn't like we're digging ditches stocking shelves. So we often keep quiet. I usually do, but it sucks when you can't sleep because your wrists are throbbing and you can't grip a coffee mug until you've relaxed for a day or so.
I wonder how this effects users who tellecommute. How can my employer dictate or be held responsible for my work environment at home? Granted, my eight foot banquet table and cheap OfficeMax chair might not be the best health-wise, but I'm not about to go out and spend hundreds of dollars to egonomize my home office.
Besides, a lot of us are overweight, get no excersize, have failing eyesight and live on pizza and soda. How are we going to get an employer to take us seriously when we then complain because our poor little wrists are achey-wakey?
I'm sure I'll regret the attitude of "I'm embarassed to make noise about it to my employer" that I have -- probably someday when I have arthritis and can't grip a pencil or a cup... but oh well.
---
seumas.com
Plus, instead of killing an account and having the user create three more in its place, it'll cost them $10 for every account they want to create and have yanked.
I can't think of many other solutions to the concern of fruadulent members...
---
seumas.com
A pay-for-service (set monthly or yearly fee per account) seems to be have a greater profit potential and it would probably also help weed-out most of the people who create fake accounts just to cause trouble on the website. Then the problem is how to keep from undercharging or overcharging for the service.
I know that some people who use my site make their entire living from it or have grown their own businesses through it. A lot of people are willing to pay for the service and I've had people over the last few months wanting an address to send donations or offering to help run the site.
The problem with donations is that it would take a lot to keep the site going and I didn't want to take donations until I knew if I would eventually charge for the site anyway. And the problem with having users help run the site is that the code is not yet ready for assistant staff members to perform things and putting 6,000 user's account information in the reach of relatively unknown individuals is too risky at this point.
I've been so busy over this last year that most email can go for a month or two before I have time to read and respond to it. I only have time to resolve problems when they are so huge that everyone is complaining about it and sometimes I don't even visit my own site for months on end. It's amazing that the site practically runs and polices itself -- but it still needs some TLC to really run smoothly.
Thankfully, some friends are my webhosts and they're letting me off with more bandwidth than I'm paying for -- otherwise I would go broke, even with the decent salary I make. For what is mostly an all-text site, I'm eating up more than 400mb of bandwidth per day.
I've had no problems running the site for free as long as the monitary cost to me was not all that large. It's an interesting hobby and I've learned a lot about Perl and handling large groups of users in an internet-based service. But while 95% of my members understand the difficult situation I'm in and that I can't always respond to them immediately (or even at all sometimes), there are the other 5% who say things like "If someone puts up a website, they should be responsible for taking care of it, no matter what!" and who act like I owe them a kidney or something.
In fact, there are enough people with that mode of thinking that, coupled with the other random problems associated with a site like this, that I no longer feel compelled to keep the site running unless it can pay for itself and run itself (or hire staff to do it for me) without sucking up so much of my own time. If it can make a profit -- that would be cool, but that isn't the goal.
Of course, the other thing that has concerned me is that I might be missing out on something huge. All of my friends and business associates over th e last two years have tried to convince me to sell the site or start making money with it. I guess that wouldn't be 'selling-out'. I mean, someone who runs a comic book shop isn't selling out just because they're making money off of something they enjoy doing... The Catch-22 is that if I try to make something profitable out of a site (or at least profitable enough to pay for itself), there's the risk of losing it outright. But if I don't, it might crumble under its own weight. And how many other chances does a guy get to come up with a hit website with potential? This may be my only chance, right?
I'm considering dropping a couple grand on some friends to rewrite my site's code so it's faster (SQL, mod_perl) and more reliable and expandable. Perhaps I'll have them write the staff-administration features I've been meaning to write myself so I can let others run most of the site for me... You have to invest money to make money, right? And I guess if things get bad, all I'll have done is lost a couple thousand bucks and a website...?
---
seumas.com
This will be a surefire way to assure molestation and child-rape continues on under the blankets of Canada. If you can't even write about it, then it's difficult to make people aware of it. Maybe the next step is to ban the publication of any books which talk about crimes. If people don't know that crimes are committed, they won't occur!
---
seumas.com