Oh, my god, that PC habitrail reminds me of that underground compound I lived in back in the 1970s.
They would round us up at the age of 30 and make us rotate around this floating thing until our bodies exploded.
Thank God Michael York stood up on the balcony of the arcade with that woman and showed us his clear palm and told us it was all a lie and took us all outside to meet Peter Ustinov!
You can't share the technology with other civilizations!
Imagine what will happen if the Terrans start building Protoss cannons that can strike ground and air targets, or the Zerg start equipping Zerglings with stimpacks! The results would... be...
Wait, was that just a computer game?
Really, like, kill yourself?
on
Death by Coffee?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Well, if drinking a hundred cups of coffee in twenty-four hours doesn't kill you, it'll certainly give you a wicked case of the runs.
Kind of like on the "Bambi" episode of The Young Ones back in the 80s, when Rick tries to kill himself by overdosing on a bottle of pills he's just found in the medicine cabinet.
"Vyv, Vyv, uh, can you, like, really kill yourself with laxative pills?" Neil asks his other housemate, Vyvyan, who replies, "I don't know, Neil, but I'm going to stay and find out."
Wow, the most consensus I've ever seen in a series of/. posts... like some new record.
All these replies underscore a key point... these salespeople are professionals, experts at closing the deal by whatever means necessary, alternating between cajolery and insults. "I can tell you're smart enough to know a good deal when you see one," or "You're not stupid enough to walk away from a deal like this, are you?"
They weave a spell over the prospective buyer, not unlike the way a high-performing car salesman works, but these guys have got even more to work with than a car salesman. A car salesman is selling something that everyone knows is going to go down in value the moment they sign the paperwork, where a timeshare salesman can pitch this magical, albeit non-existant, idea that the purchased product is somehow actually going to increase in value, despite the fact that they're busy building more units than they can sell.
I'd love to go through all the crap these guys heap onto you in the four or five hours they hold your promised prize (the free tickets or whatever) hostage, but I'll just sum it up by describing how you sit there just wishing they'd wrap it up, and let you off the hook somehow, but that moment never comes. They keep you on the hook for as long as it takes to get you to acquiesce to their demand that you buy, buy, BUY, RIGHT NOW! And then they'll give you your pathetic little prize, your discounted theme park tickets or whatever it is you went in there for, and they'll give them to you happily, basking in the fact that they just sold you a nearly worthless piece of crap for ten thousand dollars.
Sometimes you'll find your senses all disjointed by the lines and wires of salesmen, cheats, and liars. --Lowest of the Low
A primo example of the "feeling of obligation" sales pitch that the author mentions is those vacation timeshare sales pitches that promise a free or discounted event ticket.
They're really common in Las Vegas and in the Orlando area. They have booths set up in hotels and in small buildings located in the parking lots of plazas in commercial districts.
They give you a nice little breakfast buffet at a nearby resort, and tell you that they'll only take 90 minutes of your time, and there's no obligation.
Four hours later you're signing one document after another, agreeing to pay thousands and thousands of dollars over the next ten years for something that's not worth jack squat, and then you go and get your stupid theme park tickets.
Stay away from those things, and if you do go to one, don't buy into it. You can buy them second-hand MUCH cheaper from someone else who got suckered. When they start trying to close the deal, you say, "Nope, not signing anything. Give me my discounted park passes now, please." If they hem and haw, and say that the deal they're offering is only good if you sign right there and then, you have to say, "Then I guess that's my loss. I'll take my discounted park passes now, please."
Don't let the mind control kick in.
And if you do sign up, you've got ten days to cancel, at least in Florida. But it's much easier to just not get suckered in the first place.
Selling a $300 US computer with Linux is not "something that smacks of coolness."
The 2nd def. in the dictionary of "smack" is "To have or exhibit indications of the presence of any character or quality."
So by "smacks of coolness" I just mean that it's something that indicates coolness, but that doesn't mean that it is, indeed, cool.
Like when Duncan says to the injured sergeant, "So well thy words become thee, as they wounds; they smack of honor, both." Just gives the appearance, you know?
You joke as if people here do not have that right, but it has already been shown that such free speech is protected here. Not only that, but you can even distribute source code to exploit it.
And, by God, let's pray that it stays that way, brother.
I mentioned this elsewhere... if you haven't seen Peter McWilliams' book Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do, it's a great read, and available to read online for free, in its entirety, at his website. There are chapters upon chapters about gambling, drugs, and other consensual crimes, and how they came to be crimes. I read the book way, way back when it came out in print ten years ago, and I've never been the same since.
Prohibition came into being because the wealthy people wanted it?
Well, of course not all the wealthy people wanted Prohibition, just the ones who were convinced that alcohol was the cause of (and not the solution to, as Homer points out) all of life's problems. I think Henry Ford is a good example.
The late self-help author Peter McWilliams wrote a wonderful book called Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do, and it has a great chapter on the Prohibition movement, which the author posted online in its entirety before he died, along with all of his other books. Check it out... it's a cautionary tale whose lessons we would do well to review in our present age.
I think it is really unfair for moderators to moderate the first four or five replies after the first one as "redundant" just because they all make the same observation. The fact is that people posting in/. aren't seeing real-time posts go up as they're quickly composing their replies.
Heck, I made the observation about my own misreading of the name of the organization in question, and then went on to make a point about the arguments used by that organization, and got modded redundant!
About 10% of my reply was devoted to my misreading of the name of the organization, and I even prefaced it by saying, "that happened to me too," yet my entire reply is redundant? How about reading my entire post before moderating it, okay?
Same thing happened to me! When I first looked at the summary of the post, I thought it said "International Federation of the PORNOgraphic Industry"!
I was like, "Oh, no, they're suing people over sharing porn! What are we going to do?!"
All kidding aside, I'd really like to see chart showing the so-called "decline" in CD sales displayed alongside the trends in other aspects of the young person's financial life, such as increases in college tuition and the price of textbooks, the price of gasoline at the pump, and sales of designer clothes, video games, and other luxury items. I bet there are correlations all over the place.
Remember when Bart Simpson encounters the inventor of Spirograph, who glumly points out that there's a direct correlation between the decline in sales of Spirograph toys and the rise in violent crime in our nation's schools?
I think that the RIAA is using the same kind of logic... CD sales went down as P2P usage went up, therefore P2P usage caused CD sales to go down. I have this cool program on my Mac called "Fallacy Tutorial," which was made by some logic professor, and it lists this type of argument as "Ignoring a Common Cause." The RIAA and its buddies are doing what politicians have been doing for centuries. Go back and look at how Prohibition came into being in 1920, and you'll see how spurious arguments can be used over and over again until a tiny group of overly-influential people (often very wealthy to begin with) get their way.
No, the ball is already rolling, I think, on the re-examination. Lawrence Lockwood will, no doubt, appeal if the patents are invalidated, but it's out of the defense group's hands at this point, I believe.
Maybe now PANIP can stop harassing small business owners and do whatever it is that they did before.
There was no thing that they did before. PanIP LLC was formed, and 30 days later it started suing people. In fact, PanIP was only formed in the first place to shield Lawrence Lockwood, the holder of these patents, from any personal liability for his actions. This whole thing has almost certainly been just this one single guy and his lawyer, and maybe a handful of financial backers.
I'm guessing maybe the backers backed out, and rather than pay $19,000 to the group defense fund and keep fighting, he just settled and gave up.
Lockwood likes to paint his company as this sprawling IP licensing firm, and it's really just one guy working out his ramshackle home. I bet if you went into that home you'd find mountains of cheap porn videos, empty pizza boxes, and Victoria's Secret catalogs.
This isn't some big, menacing company. It's just a guy and his lawyer. I mean, just look at the PanIP website. I've seen teenagers design better sites as school projects. That was a do-it-yourself project, I'm betting. It's better than the old version of the site, probably because LL just bought Dreamweaver MX.
At the risk of sounding like Chandler on Friends, could PanIP be any more ridiculous?
Fruitless? FRUITLESS?!
If the patents get invalidated, I'd hardly call that fruitless.
I'm glad to hear that they don't have any litigation going on. As far as their "additioan patent applications," they can stick 'em where the sun don't shine.
I posted my take on this story four days ago on my journal.
Here's what it says about it:
The message board and all the pages within the site are now gone, and there's only one single page that briefly outlines what happened.
But big fat question marks are all over the place. What happens now? The fifteen or so defendants who banded together to fight are off the hook, at least as far as PanIP is concerned, but what about the dozens of others? Has PanIP dropped all of its suits, or just the ones against the members of that group?
At the bottom of the page is a sort of cryptic quote: "Don't let the things you can't do stop you from doing all that you can," which I take to mean that among the things that couldn't be done was to utterly defeat PanIP and prevent its founder from continuing his campaign of lawsuits against e-commerce companies.
Back in January, the founder of the PanIP Group Defense Fund had placed a warning on the site that PanIP was sending threatening letters out to businesses who had previously been left alone. Were those letters a last-ditch effort by PanIP to generate the capital necessary to continue the fight over its patents? Or was PanIP anticipating settling its way out of paying the $19,000 in legal fees awarded to the defense group following a determination by at least one judge that PanIP's defamation lawsuit against the group was an illegal SLAPP under California law?
Should e-commerce businesses breathe a sigh of relief that PanIP has backed off, or should they be more worried than ever? If PanIP starts up its campaign of lawsuits anew, will the next round of targeted companies similarly band together to fight off the suit?
The former website of the defense group states that both of PanIP's e-commerce patents are facing re-examination by the USPTO. The "automated sales" patent has been under review since August, according to the old version of the site, which never mentioned that the other patent was actually under review. If they are indeed both under review, can PanIP even file any new lawsuits?
I do not mean to denegrate the defense group in any way... standing up to PanIP was, in my opinion, the correct and brave thing to do. And, at the same time, carrying on the fight when an olive branch is offered with few, if any, strings attached would have been foolish. I don't blame the defense group for opting out of a longer, uglier fight, and I salute them for standing tough as long as they did. Just getting the patent office to re-examine both the patents was quite a feat, one that very well might get both patents invalidated and send PanIP packing in the end, after all.
But if the patents are re-affirmed, you can bet that a whole lot of businesses who'd never heard of PanIP or its patents will be hearing all about them real soon.
It's the punchline to an old joke about a Hawaiian king or something that would stuff all these thrones into his grass house until it finally collapsed, and the moral of the story was "people who live in grass houses shouldn't stow thrones."
Hmm... Have you ever considered to STOP FUCKING PIRATING?!
Oh, now stop it, you know what I meant. I meant 'what can we do' about corporations running the government.
The anti-file-sharing bill is just symptomatic of the problem. Lawmakers act without hesitation to protect the interest of corporations, and have to be practically forced to do anything to protect individual citizens.
Corporations have never had this much influence before, probably because they have enough control of the media to stifle serious discussion of the issues.
Slashdot Mirror
I once heard a joke whose punchline was something like your signature. Do you know the entire joke?
If you're referring to "Silly rabbi, kicks are for Trids," just run a Google search and you'll find the full joke.
Oh, my god, that PC habitrail reminds me of that underground compound I lived in back in the 1970s.
They would round us up at the age of 30 and make us rotate around this floating thing until our bodies exploded.
Thank God Michael York stood up on the balcony of the arcade with that woman and showed us his clear palm and told us it was all a lie and took us all outside to meet Peter Ustinov!
Ah-ha, touche, you are correct. I had meant to say "Third year in office," not "third term."
Doesn't make me any more sane, but I stand corrected.
2007?
By that time, we'll have entered President Kerry's third term in office, with Saddam's trial nearly over, and...
Oops, never mind, I'm not really from the future, don't really know what's going to happen... put that gun down...
The Protoss guns ARE already capable of hitting ground-and-air targets...
I meant as opposed to the Terran missle turrets that could only strike air targets.
I should have used another example, like Terrans using the Protoss Mind Control abilities or something.
The tanks should've had machine guns on them for shooting at air targets.
You can't share the technology with other civilizations!
Imagine what will happen if the Terrans start building Protoss cannons that can strike ground and air targets, or the Zerg start equipping Zerglings with stimpacks! The results would... be...
Wait, was that just a computer game?
Well, if drinking a hundred cups of coffee in twenty-four hours doesn't kill you, it'll certainly give you a wicked case of the runs.
Kind of like on the "Bambi" episode of The Young Ones back in the 80s, when Rick tries to kill himself by overdosing on a bottle of pills he's just found in the medicine cabinet.
"Vyv, Vyv, uh, can you, like, really kill yourself with laxative pills?" Neil asks his other housemate, Vyvyan, who replies, "I don't know, Neil, but I'm going to stay and find out."
Wow, the most consensus I've ever seen in a series of /. posts... like some new record.
All these replies underscore a key point... these salespeople are professionals, experts at closing the deal by whatever means necessary, alternating between cajolery and insults. "I can tell you're smart enough to know a good deal when you see one," or "You're not stupid enough to walk away from a deal like this, are you?"
They weave a spell over the prospective buyer, not unlike the way a high-performing car salesman works, but these guys have got even more to work with than a car salesman. A car salesman is selling something that everyone knows is going to go down in value the moment they sign the paperwork, where a timeshare salesman can pitch this magical, albeit non-existant, idea that the purchased product is somehow actually going to increase in value, despite the fact that they're busy building more units than they can sell.
I'd love to go through all the crap these guys heap onto you in the four or five hours they hold your promised prize (the free tickets or whatever) hostage, but I'll just sum it up by describing how you sit there just wishing they'd wrap it up, and let you off the hook somehow, but that moment never comes. They keep you on the hook for as long as it takes to get you to acquiesce to their demand that you buy, buy, BUY, RIGHT NOW! And then they'll give you your pathetic little prize, your discounted theme park tickets or whatever it is you went in there for, and they'll give them to you happily, basking in the fact that they just sold you a nearly worthless piece of crap for ten thousand dollars.
Sometimes you'll find your senses all disjointed by the lines and wires of salesmen, cheats, and liars.
--Lowest of the Low
A primo example of the "feeling of obligation" sales pitch that the author mentions is those vacation timeshare sales pitches that promise a free or discounted event ticket.
They're really common in Las Vegas and in the Orlando area. They have booths set up in hotels and in small buildings located in the parking lots of plazas in commercial districts.
They give you a nice little breakfast buffet at a nearby resort, and tell you that they'll only take 90 minutes of your time, and there's no obligation.
Four hours later you're signing one document after another, agreeing to pay thousands and thousands of dollars over the next ten years for something that's not worth jack squat, and then you go and get your stupid theme park tickets.
Stay away from those things, and if you do go to one, don't buy into it. You can buy them second-hand MUCH cheaper from someone else who got suckered. When they start trying to close the deal, you say, "Nope, not signing anything. Give me my discounted park passes now, please." If they hem and haw, and say that the deal they're offering is only good if you sign right there and then, you have to say, "Then I guess that's my loss. I'll take my discounted park passes now, please."
Don't let the mind control kick in.
And if you do sign up, you've got ten days to cancel, at least in Florida. But it's much easier to just not get suckered in the first place.
Selling a $300 US computer with Linux is not "something that smacks of coolness."
The 2nd def. in the dictionary of "smack" is "To have or exhibit indications of the presence of any character or quality."
So by "smacks of coolness" I just mean that it's something that indicates coolness, but that doesn't mean that it is, indeed, cool.
Like when Duncan says to the injured sergeant, "So well thy words become thee, as they wounds; they smack of honor, both." Just gives the appearance, you know?
No... must... not... shop... at... evil... Wal*Mart... must... stay... away...
It kind of pains me to see this. Why does a store that I hate have to go and do something that smacks of coolness? Why couldn't it be Target or KMart?
And isn't Microtel a motel chain?
I sure am glad I live here in the USA where my right to expose the weaknesses of corporate products is enshrined in our beloved Constitut...
Hold on, there's a SWAT team banging on my door.
I'd better go let them know that they must have the wrong house.
I mentioned this elsewhere... if you haven't seen Peter McWilliams' book Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do, it's a great read, and available to read online for free, in its entirety, at his website. There are chapters upon chapters about gambling, drugs, and other consensual crimes, and how they came to be crimes. I read the book way, way back when it came out in print ten years ago, and I've never been the same since.
Prohibition came into being because the wealthy people wanted it?
Well, of course not all the wealthy people wanted Prohibition, just the ones who were convinced that alcohol was the cause of (and not the solution to, as Homer points out) all of life's problems. I think Henry Ford is a good example.
The late self-help author Peter McWilliams wrote a wonderful book called Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do, and it has a great chapter on the Prohibition movement, which the author posted online in its entirety before he died, along with all of his other books. Check it out... it's a cautionary tale whose lessons we would do well to review in our present age.
This might be offtopic, but I'm annoyed.
/. aren't seeing real-time posts go up as they're quickly composing their replies.
I think it is really unfair for moderators to moderate the first four or five replies after the first one as "redundant" just because they all make the same observation. The fact is that people posting in
Heck, I made the observation about my own misreading of the name of the organization in question, and then went on to make a point about the arguments used by that organization, and got modded redundant!
About 10% of my reply was devoted to my misreading of the name of the organization, and I even prefaced it by saying, "that happened to me too," yet my entire reply is redundant? How about reading my entire post before moderating it, okay?
Same thing happened to me! When I first looked at the summary of the post, I thought it said "International Federation of the PORNOgraphic Industry"!
I was like, "Oh, no, they're suing people over sharing porn! What are we going to do?!"
All kidding aside, I'd really like to see chart showing the so-called "decline" in CD sales displayed alongside the trends in other aspects of the young person's financial life, such as increases in college tuition and the price of textbooks, the price of gasoline at the pump, and sales of designer clothes, video games, and other luxury items. I bet there are correlations all over the place.
Remember when Bart Simpson encounters the inventor of Spirograph, who glumly points out that there's a direct correlation between the decline in sales of Spirograph toys and the rise in violent crime in our nation's schools?
I think that the RIAA is using the same kind of logic... CD sales went down as P2P usage went up, therefore P2P usage caused CD sales to go down. I have this cool program on my Mac called "Fallacy Tutorial," which was made by some logic professor, and it lists this type of argument as "Ignoring a Common Cause." The RIAA and its buddies are doing what politicians have been doing for centuries. Go back and look at how Prohibition came into being in 1920, and you'll see how spurious arguments can be used over and over again until a tiny group of overly-influential people (often very wealthy to begin with) get their way.
This iPod-carrying bon vivant isn't going to hand over his beloved music player without a fight.
I've hacked my iPod to shoot pepper spray! Ha!
No, the ball is already rolling, I think, on the re-examination. Lawrence Lockwood will, no doubt, appeal if the patents are invalidated, but it's out of the defense group's hands at this point, I believe.
I'm guessing maybe the backers backed out, and rather than pay $19,000 to the group defense fund and keep fighting, he just settled and gave up.
Lockwood likes to paint his company as this sprawling IP licensing firm, and it's really just one guy working out his ramshackle home. I bet if you went into that home you'd find mountains of cheap porn videos, empty pizza boxes, and Victoria's Secret catalogs.
This isn't some big, menacing company. It's just a guy and his lawyer. I mean, just look at the PanIP website. I've seen teenagers design better sites as school projects. That was a do-it-yourself project, I'm betting. It's better than the old version of the site, probably because LL just bought Dreamweaver MX.
At the risk of sounding like Chandler on Friends, could PanIP be any more ridiculous?
Fruitless? FRUITLESS?!
If the patents get invalidated, I'd hardly call that fruitless.
I'm glad to hear that they don't have any litigation going on. As far as their "additioan patent applications," they can stick 'em where the sun don't shine.
Hey, I got rejected when I posted the story on March 23.
I made the mistake of not including a link to the previous Slashdot article on the subject, I bet.
I posted my take on this story four days ago on my journal.
Here's what it says about it:
The message board and all the pages within the site are now gone, and there's only one single page that briefly outlines what happened.
But big fat question marks are all over the place. What happens now? The fifteen or so defendants who banded together to fight are off the hook, at least as far as PanIP is concerned, but what about the dozens of others? Has PanIP dropped all of its suits, or just the ones against the members of that group?
At the bottom of the page is a sort of cryptic quote: "Don't let the things you can't do stop you from doing all that you can," which I take to mean that among the things that couldn't be done was to utterly defeat PanIP and prevent its founder from continuing his campaign of lawsuits against e-commerce companies.
Back in January, the founder of the PanIP Group Defense Fund had placed a warning on the site that PanIP was sending threatening letters out to businesses who had previously been left alone. Were those letters a last-ditch effort by PanIP to generate the capital necessary to continue the fight over its patents? Or was PanIP anticipating settling its way out of paying the $19,000 in legal fees awarded to the defense group following a determination by at least one judge that PanIP's defamation lawsuit against the group was an illegal SLAPP under California law?
Should e-commerce businesses breathe a sigh of relief that PanIP has backed off, or should they be more worried than ever? If PanIP starts up its campaign of lawsuits anew, will the next round of targeted companies similarly band together to fight off the suit?
The former website of the defense group states that both of PanIP's e-commerce patents are facing re-examination by the USPTO. The "automated sales" patent has been under review since August, according to the old version of the site, which never mentioned that the other patent was actually under review. If they are indeed both under review, can PanIP even file any new lawsuits?
I do not mean to denegrate the defense group in any way... standing up to PanIP was, in my opinion, the correct and brave thing to do. And, at the same time, carrying on the fight when an olive branch is offered with few, if any, strings attached would have been foolish. I don't blame the defense group for opting out of a longer, uglier fight, and I salute them for standing tough as long as they did. Just getting the patent office to re-examine both the patents was quite a feat, one that very well might get both patents invalidated and send PanIP packing in the end, after all.
But if the patents are re-affirmed, you can bet that a whole lot of businesses who'd never heard of PanIP or its patents will be hearing all about them real soon.
Grass houses?
Yeah, like a hut, you know.
It's the punchline to an old joke about a Hawaiian king or something that would stuff all these thrones into his grass house until it finally collapsed, and the moral of the story was "people who live in grass houses shouldn't stow thrones."
The anti-file-sharing bill is just symptomatic of the problem. Lawmakers act without hesitation to protect the interest of corporations, and have to be practically forced to do anything to protect individual citizens.
Corporations have never had this much influence before, probably because they have enough control of the media to stifle serious discussion of the issues.