For $1200 in the Dominican republic, you could arrange for the domain to become free again quite easily - dead men don't need domains.
But seriously -register a new domain and move on - your old domain will be on blacklists and won't be accessible from NetNannied systems.
How about just creating a subdomain under your school's domain - if the school is skuul.k12.ar.us, create paper.skuul.k12.ar.us and use that. That way, you save a domain fee, and you will only lose the domain if your school does something incredibly stupid.
A snooty audiophile sneers at any form of digitization - "You aren't getting all of the music - Yes, I know you are sampling a 1GHz, 64 bits per sample, but you aren't getting all the music! Only analog gets all the music! I don't care that what you are missing wouldn't amount to the width of a hydrogen atom on my beloved LP - YOU AREN'T GETTING ALL THE MUSIC"
There's a running joke where I work that it is not officially Thursday until the Microsoft exploit of the week is released (of late this seems to happen on Thursday).
So, why not make it official - I propose
Operation: So Happy It's Thursday
What I recommend is that everybody who finds an exploit in Windows release it on Thursday.
NOTE: be fair - a bug in a Windows APP that is not a part of Windows doesn't count - so the bug in Winamp doesn't count, but the bug in the Windows shell does.
Remember - most modern CD players use a 1 bit DAC to play the sound - the trick is to get the sample rate up high enough that the quantization noise can be filtered out (i.e. a 1 bit DAC running at 2.048 Megasamples/sec with proper filtering is equal to or better than a 16 bit DAC running at 44.1 kilosamples/sec).
But to think that a 1 MHz Z80 could drive it well enough....
Defense command - it actually played sounds out the cassette port ("PREPARE TO DIE, HUMAN").
SpaceWar - ran in 4K total memory.
Paddle Pinball - Not only was this a fairly cool little game, but I have a fond memory of playing it with a couple of friends. Bit was ahead, Darren was behind, but catching up. In the heat of the game, Darren says:
I'm coming up on your ass.
Bit, for once not being a bastard, decides to let him have a second chance
Excuse me?
Darren repeats his mistake:
I'm coming up on your ass!
Bit reverted to normal form:
I know, and it's getting sticky
By some strange co-incidence, Darren lost the ball shortly thereafter....
An AMPS phone may be limited to 600 mW in the systems in Australia, but the actual limit on a Power Class 1 Phone is 5 watts. That is one of the reasons that replacing the AMPS system with (CDMA|TDMA) systems in the US has been very slow - a Class 1 phone can contact a base station many tens of miles away, which is IMPORTANT in much of the US - when you are in western Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Utah... you get the point.
That was part of why the old phones where so large - a 5 watt 100% duty cycle power amp isn't tiny. (the other reason was that since AMPS requires the phone to transmit and receive at the same time, the phone had to have an RF duplexer in it - not a small item, even at 800MHz. TDMA phones don't transmit and receive at the same time, hence they don't need the duplexer).
That's one of the reasons I tell people to look for the old phones at garage sales - get the phone and you have a dandy 911 phone - you WILL get a connection!
The backbone providers will not terminate spammers nor will they sue them - the backbone providers make entirely too much money off spammers.
The only way to pursuade the backbone providers would be for AOL the tell them "Kick the spammers and spamhausen off your networks, or we/dev/null route you at our gateways."
However, it is unlikely that AOL will do this. Consider - Exodus is pretty spammer friendly, but were AOL to block all Exodus IPs then nobody on AOL could access/.
Advertising is not marketing - that is why ads are annoying.
Advertising is making people aware of your product or services. You do that by normal ads, by being listed in the appropriate indexes (search engines, the Yellow Pages, trade journals), and by physical presense at appropriate shows. If somebody needs your product or service, they will find you, compare your product to others, and make a decision.
Marketing is making people want your product, even if they didn't before the interaction started. I've heard a quote of a marketing exec that "If you go to the store, and you only buy what you set out to buy, then I've failed." Marketing is about making you decide you really DO need that fur sink, the electric dog polisher, and the hulagirl lamp.
Advertising works best when it is unobtrusive - when I need to find a vendor of VPN solutions, I go to Google and look for one. The only advantage overt advertising gives me is that I will have the names I've seen in passing embedded in my brain, and will likely go to Cisco et. al. as part of the process.
Marketing is best when it is annoying as hell - that way you will remember the name of the company involve. Marketers count on you forgetting WHY you remember their name.
Unfortunately, most web pages hard-wire the width of the content column, normally to about 400 pixels. Increasing your monitor resolution and font size won't give you a page of text like this with a small ad.
It will give you a page like this.
I know - I am running 2624x1200 right now (Xinerama ROCKS) and my browser window is 1496x1143. I have to go into my user_content.css file and override the settings for most sites in order to get a reasonable usage of my screen.
Unfortunately, since CSS doesn't let you specify a range of sizes (you cannot say "all TABLES that are between 400 and 600 pixels wide"), I have to identify each site of interest, examine the code to determine the size they are using, add it to my user_content.css file, and restart Mozilla.
I don't mean "You cannot afford to buy a disk", or "You are unwilling to budget the money to buy a disk", I mean "I have money, but no-one is selling the disk I want"?
Consider this: I got into The KLF some years after they were hot. While you can fairly easily purchase The White Room, Doctoring The Tardis, and Chill Out, you cannot find any of the older KLF albums new. Period. The KLF burned all their older albums as a result of some copyright problems.
OK, so how can I buy that which no longer exists? Now, while I would happily purchase the albums if I could, now I would pretty much be reduced to getting them via a file sharing service (the true irony here would be if The KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front) objected to being traded over a file sharing network.).
Or consider "Song of the South" - You will NEVER see that movie again, because The Mouse is so Politically Correct that they would never air that movie (and I don't see why not - Uncle Remus's tales were NOT racist!) Since there is no profit in keeping the movie preserved, it will in all probability rot away in a vault next to Walt.
Sorry, but I begin to think that copyright should have a clause forcing it to expire if the material is not distributed in a reasonable and non-discriminatory fashion.
Just a little thought-grenade I thought I'd lob into the conversation.
And if you are that desperate to get free service that you are willing to have the IP over DNS package installed on your machine at home, and are willing to take the massive throughput hit, more power to you. You represent such a tiny fraction of the universe that you are not even worth worrying about.
Not quite - do remember, your card would have to have the same MAC as his, or the AP could drop your packets.
And if you have the same MAC, then you and he get the same packets, and neither of you can surf.
Your scheme would only work to get his info after he's left, to use the remaining minutes he bought - sort of like parking in somebody's spot after they leave, but before the meter runs out.
And as for the other poster's point about trust - that is why you make sure you use HTTPS, rather than HTTP. Then, the evil h@><0r would have to have a valid cert that the browser recognized - making it somewhat easier to track him down.
The other way to make this work would be for sell advertising - ever N minutes you are forced to sit through an ad...
Actually, you can (and should) go one step furthur:
Step 1: Analyst talks to customer, develops a list of needs. These needs are NOT in terms of implementation, but in the terms of the customer. In other words, not "I need a 1600x1200 display", but "I need to be able to see my whole picture".
This document is written up, and the analyst and the customer sign off on it. This is called a Customer Requirements Document.
Step 2: The analyst and the systems architect go over the CRD, and determine what implementation features will be needed to meet the needs. This is in tech lingo - "OK, the customer needs to see his whole picture at once. Since the picture is at 300 dpi, and is 4 by 3 inches, that means at least a 1200 by 900 screen. Let's go to 1600x1200 for some headroom."
When this document is done, the analyst and the architect sign off on it. This is the Design requirements document.
Step 3: The architect creates the design for the system. This may be done via extreme programming, waterfall model, whatever.
Step 4: During the design and implementation, each feature of the DRD is checked off against the design.
Now, this does NOT guarantee that the customer will be happy. But it gives you a traceable path, so each group can know whether they did their job.
If a feature of the DRD is missing, the design team is at fault.
If a feature of the CRD is missing, the analyst and architect are at fault.
If the customer doesn't like the result, the either the customer or the analyst are at fault.
1) Your laptop/PDA/whatever requests an IP address via DHCP. 2) Access point hands out IP address, makes a note against that IP address that "has not paid yet" 3) At this point, all that you can do is access HTTP and DNS. 4) You point your browser at any web site - let's say http://slashdot.org for grins. 5) DNS succeeds. 6) Your computer does an HTTP GET. 7) Access device sees you've not paid yet. Sends HTTP REDIRECT to https://fork.it.over.to.me 8) Your laptop looks that up. Gets an IP address. 9) Your laptop requests page. 10) Page comes up - input credit card here. 11) You do so. Access device marks you has "paid for 1 Hour". Ports open up. 12) You again try/., and it goes through.
I MEAN, COME ON, POSTING TECHNICAL SPECS IN ALL CAPS? AND THAT BACKGROUND CHOICE?
Also, the problem with "decentralized news" is the same problem with posts to/. - people.
Do you really want your news be mostly "First Post", penis bird, goatse.cx, Beowulf clusters of grits, and NPN&P?
Until you have a means of creating a real trust metric, so that I can insure those I get my news from are marginally competent, the distribution method is meaningless.
My condolences to the Gates family - what does Bill have? Cancer? Alzheimers? AIDS? ALS? CJD?
Whatever he has, my condolences. I know what it is like to hear your loved one only has about a year left. The next few months will be hard, but know that you will get through it, and while it never gets better, it gets easier. </humor>
Because the only way Microsoft will start selling software for Linux is over Bill Gates' cold, dead body. So the only way you can say that MS will be selling Linux software in 2004 is to say that Bill is not long for this world.
I'm glad that Real is releasing server tools, but what about spending some time getting the Unix client tools working worth a damn.
Specifically, getting the RealOne player for Linux to not say "You don't have permission to update" whenever you try to play a file with a new codec, getting a Mozilla plug-in for RealOne so that you can use its Flash player (having a Flash player is useless without having a plugin), and making the RealOne main page have a link for the *nix community, rather than being Windows only.
In order to contact Real about these matters, first you have to find the discussion forums for the "Community Supported Player for *nix" - these seems to be hidden in a disused lavatory in the basement behind a sign saying "Beware of the Leopard" - I defy you to give me a series of links from www.real.com that gets to the forum (that does not involve a search engine).
Then, you have to post a message - one forum is down, and the others don't seem to be visited by anybody from Real.
Then, on those blessed times when a Real employee deigns to visit the forum, the ususal posting is something like "download foo at this URL". However, no mention is made of when foo was updated - usually about a year ago.
Then, should you download the player, and install it, and get the new codec packages they say will fix the problem, you find out the problem still persists.
Add to this the fact that the client gets screwed up if you are not running a 75dpi display (with a larger DPI setting the fonts are WAY too big for the space allocated for the text), and the fact that it doesn't play any new files, and the fact that the Flash player only plays local files, and the fact that the Flash player doesn't play the sound....
It seems to me that Real is simply trying to keep the server market from abandoning them for Microsoft or Icecast - hence the support for *nix in the server arena. For the clients - "If you ain't Windows, you ain't shit!" (corollary left as an exercise to the reader).
Over the course of this weekend, my personal email account has received 7 spams.
Over the course of this weekend, my work email will have received over 50.
A quick googling shows my personal email address showing up twice as often as my work address.
Why, then, do I get so much less spam at home than work? Because the ISP I use is very aggressive about filtering spam, while the IT department at work is deeply fearful that "We might accidently filter a million dollar order" (yah, like anybody ordering a million bucks of stuff will do it SOLELY through email).
True, the above is nothing but a datum, not refutation, but still, the idea that "work gets less spam than home" is not ALWAYS true.
First: Netflix BAD! Netflix SPAMS! NO USE NETFLIX!
Netflix has a history of spamming, and when contacted about the spamming does the spammy thing of listwashing the complainer. Obviously, you need to make your own choice, and if you choose to support a known spammer that is your right, but I strongly suggest that nobody use Netflix.
Second: Mplayer.
First of all, their site uses Mystery Meat Navigation - You don't know what the buttons do until you mouse over them (at least, you don't if you don't have Javascript on). I would have hoped for better from a FOSS project.
Second of all, unless I am mistaken (which I could very well be) MPlayer uses Microsoft DLL's and Wine to play WMAs. Thus the answer to "Why don't the major distro's include MPlayer" - doing so would involve distributing Microsoft copyrighted material, and would therefor make the distro Non-Free (as well as getting the distro vender targeted for termination by the Microsoft lawyer-drones).
While I am a contributor to SETI@home, I have to wonder about the following question:
"Given the rules they place on a signal, would SETI@Home have detected the past attempts we've made to contact other stars?"
Consider the past efforts at Arecibo to send a message to other stars. We focused on one star for a couple of hours, and sent a message. Perhaps we repeated it over the course of a few days.
Now, let us suppose that a civilization with a similar technology to ours was located on a planet around Proxima Centauri, and let us suppose they did exactly as we did in our transmissions at Arecibo. Would that signal have been found by SETI@Home?
Given how the SETI receivers might not have been looking in the right places at the right times to see more than one transmission, might that signal have been discarded because we did not see more than one instance of it?
Slashdot Mirror
For $1200 in the Dominican republic, you could arrange for the domain to become free again quite easily - dead men don't need domains.
But seriously -register a new domain and move on - your old domain will be on blacklists and won't be accessible from NetNannied systems.
How about just creating a subdomain under your school's domain - if the school is skuul.k12.ar.us, create paper.skuul.k12.ar.us and use that. That way, you save a domain fee, and you will only lose the domain if your school does something incredibly stupid.
Snooty audiophiles won't like FLAC, either.
A snooty audiophile sneers at any form of digitization - "You aren't getting all of the music - Yes, I know you are sampling a 1GHz, 64 bits per sample, but you aren't getting all the music! Only analog gets all the music! I don't care that what you are missing wouldn't amount to the width of a hydrogen atom on my beloved LP - YOU AREN'T GETTING ALL THE MUSIC"
That's what a snooty audiophile would say.
There's a running joke where I work that it is not officially Thursday until the Microsoft exploit of the week is released (of late this seems to happen on Thursday).
So, why not make it official - I propose
Operation: So Happy It's Thursday
What I recommend is that everybody who finds an exploit in Windows release it on Thursday.
NOTE: be fair - a bug in a Windows APP that is not a part of Windows doesn't count - so the bug in Winamp doesn't count, but the bug in the Windows shell does.
Remember - most modern CD players use a 1 bit DAC to play the sound - the trick is to get the sample rate up high enough that the quantization noise can be filtered out (i.e. a 1 bit DAC running at 2.048 Megasamples/sec with proper filtering is equal to or better than a 16 bit DAC running at 44.1 kilosamples/sec).
But to think that a 1 MHz Z80 could drive it well enough....
Defense command - it actually played sounds out the cassette port ("PREPARE TO DIE, HUMAN").
SpaceWar - ran in 4K total memory.
Paddle Pinball - Not only was this a fairly cool little game, but I have a fond memory of playing it with a couple of friends. Bit was ahead, Darren was behind, but catching up. In the heat of the game, Darren says:
I'm coming up on your ass.
Bit, for once not being a bastard, decides to let him have a second chance
Excuse me?
Darren repeats his mistake:
I'm coming up on your ass!
Bit reverted to normal form:
I know, and it's getting sticky
By some strange co-incidence, Darren lost the ball shortly thereafter....
An AMPS phone may be limited to 600 mW in the systems in Australia, but the actual limit on a Power Class 1 Phone is 5 watts. That is one of the reasons that replacing the AMPS system with (CDMA|TDMA) systems in the US has been very slow - a Class 1 phone can contact a base station many tens of miles away, which is IMPORTANT in much of the US - when you are in western Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Utah ... you get the point.
That was part of why the old phones where so large - a 5 watt 100% duty cycle power amp isn't tiny. (the other reason was that since AMPS requires the phone to transmit and receive at the same time, the phone had to have an RF duplexer in it - not a small item, even at 800MHz. TDMA phones don't transmit and receive at the same time, hence they don't need the duplexer).
That's one of the reasons I tell people to look for the old phones at garage sales - get the phone and you have a dandy 911 phone - you WILL get a connection!
The backbone providers will not terminate spammers nor will they sue them - the backbone providers make entirely too much money off spammers.
/dev/null route you at our gateways."
/.
The only way to pursuade the backbone providers would be for AOL the tell them "Kick the spammers and spamhausen off your networks, or we
However, it is unlikely that AOL will do this. Consider - Exodus is pretty spammer friendly, but were AOL to block all Exodus IPs then nobody on AOL could access
Considering that /. listed the lawyer's address as well, what is happening to the lawyer and the law firm?
I have Googled and came up empty.
Perhaps you could post a link into my journal?
Advertising is not marketing - that is why ads are annoying.
Advertising is making people aware of your product or services. You do that by normal ads, by being listed in the appropriate indexes (search engines, the Yellow Pages, trade journals), and by physical presense at appropriate shows. If somebody needs your product or service, they will find you, compare your product to others, and make a decision.
Marketing is making people want your product, even if they didn't before the interaction started. I've heard a quote of a marketing exec that "If you go to the store, and you only buy what you set out to buy, then I've failed." Marketing is about making you decide you really DO need that fur sink, the electric dog polisher, and the hulagirl lamp.
Advertising works best when it is unobtrusive - when I need to find a vendor of VPN solutions, I go to Google and look for one. The only advantage overt advertising gives me is that I will have the names I've seen in passing embedded in my brain, and will likely go to Cisco et. al. as part of the process.
Marketing is best when it is annoying as hell - that way you will remember the name of the company involve. Marketers count on you forgetting WHY you remember their name.
Unfortunately, most web pages hard-wire the width of the content column, normally to about 400 pixels. Increasing your monitor resolution and font size won't give you a page of text like this with a small ad.
It
will
give
you
a page
like
this.
I know - I am running 2624x1200 right now (Xinerama ROCKS) and my browser window is 1496x1143. I have to go into my user_content.css file and override the settings for most sites in order to get a reasonable usage of my screen.
Unfortunately, since CSS doesn't let you specify a range of sizes (you cannot say "all TABLES that are between 400 and 600 pixels wide"), I have to identify each site of interest, examine the code to determine the size they are using, add it to my user_content.css file, and restart Mozilla.
What if you cannot buy a disk?
I don't mean "You cannot afford to buy a disk", or "You are unwilling to budget the money to buy a disk", I mean "I have money, but no-one is selling the disk I want"?
Consider this: I got into The KLF some years after they were hot. While you can fairly easily purchase The White Room, Doctoring The Tardis, and Chill Out, you cannot find any of the older KLF albums new. Period. The KLF burned all their older albums as a result of some copyright problems.
OK, so how can I buy that which no longer exists? Now, while I would happily purchase the albums if I could, now I would pretty much be reduced to getting them via a file sharing service (the true irony here would be if The KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front) objected to being traded over a file sharing network.).
Or consider "Song of the South" - You will NEVER see that movie again, because The Mouse is so Politically Correct that they would never air that movie (and I don't see why not - Uncle Remus's tales were NOT racist!) Since there is no profit in keeping the movie preserved, it will in all probability rot away in a vault next to Walt.
Sorry, but I begin to think that copyright should have a clause forcing it to expire if the material is not distributed in a reasonable and non-discriminatory fashion.
Just a little thought-grenade I thought I'd lob into the conversation.
And if you are that desperate to get free service that you are willing to have the IP over DNS package installed on your machine at home, and are willing to take the massive throughput hit, more power to you. You represent such a tiny fraction of the universe that you are not even worth worrying about.
Not quite - do remember, your card would have to have the same MAC as his, or the AP could drop your packets.
And if you have the same MAC, then you and he get the same packets, and neither of you can surf.
Your scheme would only work to get his info after he's left, to use the remaining minutes he bought - sort of like parking in somebody's spot after they leave, but before the meter runs out.
And as for the other poster's point about trust - that is why you make sure you use HTTPS, rather than HTTP. Then, the evil h@><0r would have to have a valid cert that the browser recognized - making it somewhat easier to track him down.
The other way to make this work would be for sell advertising - ever N minutes you are forced to sit through an ad...
<shudder>
Actually, you can (and should) go one step furthur:
Step 1: Analyst talks to customer, develops a list of needs. These needs are NOT in terms of implementation, but in the terms of the customer. In other words, not "I need a 1600x1200 display", but "I need to be able to see my whole picture".
This document is written up, and the analyst and the customer sign off on it. This is called a Customer Requirements Document.
Step 2: The analyst and the systems architect go over the CRD, and determine what implementation features will be needed to meet the needs. This is in tech lingo - "OK, the customer needs to see his whole picture at once. Since the picture is at 300 dpi, and is 4 by 3 inches, that means at least a 1200 by 900 screen. Let's go to 1600x1200 for some headroom."
When this document is done, the analyst and the architect sign off on it. This is the Design requirements document.
Step 3: The architect creates the design for the system. This may be done via extreme programming, waterfall model, whatever.
Step 4: During the design and implementation, each feature of the DRD is checked off against the design.
Now, this does NOT guarantee that the customer will be happy. But it gives you a traceable path, so each group can know whether they did their job.
If a feature of the DRD is missing, the design team is at fault.
If a feature of the CRD is missing, the analyst and architect are at fault.
If the customer doesn't like the result, the either the customer or the analyst are at fault.
Easy:
/., and it goes through.
1) Your laptop/PDA/whatever requests an IP address via DHCP.
2) Access point hands out IP address, makes a note against that IP address that "has not paid yet"
3) At this point, all that you can do is access HTTP and DNS.
4) You point your browser at any web site - let's say http://slashdot.org for grins.
5) DNS succeeds.
6) Your computer does an HTTP GET.
7) Access device sees you've not paid yet. Sends HTTP REDIRECT to https://fork.it.over.to.me
8) Your laptop looks that up. Gets an IP address.
9) Your laptop requests page.
10) Page comes up - input credit card here.
11) You do so. Access device marks you has "paid for 1 Hour". Ports open up.
12) You again try
Ah, yes, but look at what the very first moderation to my post was:
-1 Troll.
Also, look at how high you have your threshold set - mine is set to 3, just to cut the crap factor down to a reasonable level.
I MEAN, COME ON, POSTING TECHNICAL SPECS IN ALL CAPS? AND THAT BACKGROUND CHOICE?
/. - people .
Also, the problem with "decentralized news" is the same problem with posts to
Do you really want your news be mostly "First Post", penis bird, goatse.cx, Beowulf clusters of grits, and NPN&P?
Until you have a means of creating a real trust metric, so that I can insure those I get my news from are marginally competent, the distribution method is meaningless.
And please, don't suggest M1 and M2 for news....
My condolences to the Gates family - what does Bill have? Cancer? Alzheimers? AIDS? ALS? CJD?
Whatever he has, my condolences. I know what it is like to hear your loved one only has about a year left. The next few months will be hard, but know that you will get through it, and while it never gets better, it gets easier.
</humor>
Because the only way Microsoft will start selling software for Linux is over Bill Gates' cold, dead body. So the only way you can say that MS will be selling Linux software in 2004 is to say that Bill is not long for this world.
And somehow I doubt Bill is even sick.
I'm glad that Real is releasing server tools, but what about spending some time getting the Unix client tools working worth a damn.
Specifically, getting the RealOne player for Linux to not say "You don't have permission to update" whenever you try to play a file with a new codec, getting a Mozilla plug-in for RealOne so that you can use its Flash player (having a Flash player is useless without having a plugin), and making the RealOne main page have a link for the *nix community, rather than being Windows only.
In order to contact Real about these matters, first you have to find the discussion forums for the "Community Supported Player for *nix" - these seems to be hidden in a disused lavatory in the basement behind a sign saying "Beware of the Leopard" - I defy you to give me a series of links from www.real.com that gets to the forum (that does not involve a search engine).
Then, you have to post a message - one forum is down, and the others don't seem to be visited by anybody from Real.
Then, on those blessed times when a Real employee deigns to visit the forum, the ususal posting is something like "download foo at this URL". However, no mention is made of when foo was updated - usually about a year ago.
Then, should you download the player, and install it, and get the new codec packages they say will fix the problem, you find out the problem still persists.
Add to this the fact that the client gets screwed up if you are not running a 75dpi display (with a larger DPI setting the fonts are WAY too big for the space allocated for the text), and the fact that it doesn't play any new files, and the fact that the Flash player only plays local files, and the fact that the Flash player doesn't play the sound....
It seems to me that Real is simply trying to keep the server market from abandoning them for Microsoft or Icecast - hence the support for *nix in the server arena. For the clients - "If you ain't Windows, you ain't shit!" (corollary left as an exercise to the reader).
Over the course of this weekend, my personal email account has received 7 spams.
Over the course of this weekend, my work email will have received over 50.
A quick googling shows my personal email address showing up twice as often as my work address.
Why, then, do I get so much less spam at home than work? Because the ISP I use is very aggressive about filtering spam, while the IT department at work is deeply fearful that "We might accidently filter a million dollar order" (yah, like anybody ordering a million bucks of stuff will do it SOLELY through email).
True, the above is nothing but a datum, not refutation, but still, the idea that "work gets less spam than home" is not ALWAYS true.
(first, a note to story submitters - when possible, link to the printable link version of the story. It is SO much nicer to read.)
Ouchie! Man, I wonder if Trident will EVER let these guys review ANYTHING again!
I hope, for the sake of the engineers at Trident, that there was some major D'OH! in the code, and that this isn't where their product really falls.
First: Netflix BAD! Netflix SPAMS! NO USE NETFLIX!
Netflix has a history of spamming, and when contacted about the spamming does the spammy thing of listwashing the complainer. Obviously, you need to make your own choice, and if you choose to support a known spammer that is your right, but I strongly suggest that nobody use Netflix.
Second: Mplayer.
First of all, their site uses Mystery Meat Navigation - You don't know what the buttons do until you mouse over them (at least, you don't if you don't have Javascript on). I would have hoped for better from a FOSS project.
Second of all, unless I am mistaken (which I could very well be) MPlayer uses Microsoft DLL's and Wine to play WMAs. Thus the answer to "Why don't the major distro's include MPlayer" - doing so would involve distributing Microsoft copyrighted material, and would therefor make the distro Non-Free (as well as getting the distro vender targeted for termination by the Microsoft lawyer-drones).
Consider the past efforts at Arecibo to send a message to other stars. We focused on one star for a couple of hours, and sent a message. Perhaps we repeated it over the course of a few days.
Now, let us suppose that a civilization with a similar technology to ours was located on a planet around Proxima Centauri, and let us suppose they did exactly as we did in our transmissions at Arecibo. Would that signal have been found by SETI@Home?
Given how the SETI receivers might not have been looking in the right places at the right times to see more than one transmission, might that signal have been discarded because we did not see more than one instance of it?