Although Ernie Hudson didn't appear on the original poster for the movie, I enjoyed the character Winston very much.
Janine Melnitz: "Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis?"
Winston Zeddmore: "Ah, if there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say."
I love the photo of the guy wearing it. Let's put Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis in that get-up and see if it looks familiar. Who you gonna call?
That movie really disappointed me. It had so many of my favorite actors in it, and I used to read comics by the guy who created the characters (that is to say, The Flaming Carrot), and the movie fell flat with the material. I think it was trying too hard to be an Austin Powers film.
The concept behind Mr. Furious was still pretty humorous, though... a guy who's only power is that he's really pissed off. Jumps on the villain's car and furiously attacks the hood ornament... that'll show 'em.
I resolved a dispute like this with my hosting company over the phone.
I had designed a single page for a customer within a regional business district website I'd put together a few years ago. The business was a small, independent children's clothing and toy store with the word "Kiddie" in the name, and some whack job prankster had sent out some kind of inane spam that referenced the page for this store, along with a handful of other innocent pages on the web, advertising it as a child pornography site. Someone forwarded the spam to my hosting company and they locked the directory down without even looking at the page to see what the fuss was about.
It was a stupid, infantile prank some idiot teenager had pulled, and I had to spend at least a half-hour on the phone with my hosting company begging a woman who barely spoke English to change the permissions on the directory. I made it really clear to her how ridiculous is was for them to shut that directory down without at least looking at the page to make sure that it really was what the spam said it was, and that the whole situation was making me seriously rethink my use of the company's services. She seemed to understand, and it hasn't happened since.
It looks to me like there are a few trolls out there who, like John the Bastard in Much Ado About Nothing, delight in spreading the seeds of mistrust and chaos wherever they can. They send out spam email with no purpose other than to embroil innocent website owners in disputes with their host companies. They enjoy the feeling that they get, apparently, from causing hard-working and honest people to have to waste their time getting needless and pointless problems straightened out. They're almost worse than spammers, because at least spammers have personal financial gain as their motivation. These idiot pranksters have as their motivation only the satisfaction of perpetrating evil on others, for whatever that's worth to them. They're like social vandals. They have no statement to make other than, "Ha ha, you're conducting your affairs honestly and I'm not."
I use a program called CodeTek Virtual Desktop for Mac OSX, and the abstract in that application sounds an awful lot like it.
I'm sure there are differences, but is this patent, if it is awarded, going to allow Microsoft to send C&D letters to every company and organization that has been providing virtual desktop software for years, regardless of platform?
Remember the Simpsons episode with the Duff commercial? A couple of rowdy guys spray a group of protesting feminists with beer, and they all instantly transform into bikini-clad beach bimbos, holding signs that say "I'm easy!" and "Get me drunk!"
Your Honor, the prosecution submits to the court Exhibit B, a photograph of the shark in question attacking a man dangling from the helicopter.
And here is Exhibit C, film footage where President Kennedy can clearly be seen saying "Congratulations, how does it feel to be an All-American?" to Forrest Gump.
Get him an external hard drive, preferably one that comes bundled with backup and synchronization software.
If he already has one, get him some blank CDs and/or DVDs, which are always useful, and a case of Jolt, I guess. Do they still make Jolt?
And for all those guys in here who are suggesting that she perform sex acts as a gift, for heavens sake, are you trying to kill the guy? He's a geek... any sex at all and he'll drop over dead... that is The Way of Things.
Yes, there are criminals with false WHOIS records.
And, at the same time, the WHOIS database is a feeding trough for spammers and scammers, encouraging otherwise honest people to put false information into their WHOIS records just to keep those spammers and scammers from getting their names, email addresses, snail mail addresses, phone numbers, fax numbers, mothers' maiden names, and whatever else their registrars ask for.
I could create a brand new, non-obvious email address on one of my domain accounts and put it in as the Admin Contact for a record I own, and use that email address absolutely nowhere else, and I bet that within three months that email address would be getting buckets full of spam.
There's an old saying you still see on bumper stickers, "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." While that idea might be more accurately stated as "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will accidentally shoot their own kids," the original sentiment holds for WHOIS, that is to say, "When falsified WHOIS data is outlawed, only outlaws will falsify their WHOIS data."
If the RIAA and MPAA can't find the fake WHOIS record owners, how is the government going to track down the WHOIS record owners and punish them? Why waste time passing a law that, in the end, only punishes honest people who would rather not give their unlisted home phone numbers out when buying a domain name for their kids?
Somewhere out there the must be a website that collects instances of these kinds of inane questions, I just know it. After a while they could be categorized and the redundant ones would be culled.
Categories like "Don't know where such-and-such key is on the keyboard" (like these people I'd be helping and I'd say "Okay, now hit 'tab' to go to the next field," and they'd look at the keyboard, scanning it with their eyes up and down and left and right, 'tab, tab, tab, where is it, again?"), "Don't know how to start the computer at all," "Don't know to use 'Shut Down' instead of just flipping the switch on the power strip and then panic when ScanDisk comes up on reboot," and so on.
A middle-aged woman I know called up and said her brand-new PC wouldn't turn on at all. She'd hooked everything up and just got this cryptic error message on the screen.
I drove all the way out to her suburban house from my apartment in the city, and when I got there I asked her to turn on her computer.
She pushed the button on her monitor and her monitor turned on, displaying a message that there was no signal.
I asked her to now turn her computer on, and she said, "I just did! This is all it shows! What's wrong with it?"
I work in an art gallery, and there are these fairly old but intact 8x10 transparencies of artwork in the files... I think they could be blown up to wall-sized with little loss of clarity. I don't think that would be possible even with the most expensive digital camera going.
For ten years, now, the media have been saying that any day now chemical photography will just go away. Bloom County, back in the early nineties, had Opus and Milo flushing a 35mm SLR down the toilet lamenting, "Oh, little Nikon, we hardly knew ye." And that was back when you couldn't touch a decent digital camera for under a grand.
And yet people are still buying 35mm film, shooting pics on it, and having it processed. Those single-use cameras (manufacturers bristle at the word "disposable") are still quite popular.
I do see more and more people with digital cameras nowadays, naturally, but rumors of the death of chemical photography are greatly exaggerated. University art departments still teach the old-fashioned methods.
I could go on and on about this forever, but there are other and better posts to read below.
I've said this before, but I'll say it again. I really don't understand why all this even happens.
When I'm going through the webmail access to my spam-bait accounts (the ones that are listed on my websites that I don't bother retrieving with my POP email client anymore because of hundreds of spams a day to each), if I'm fooled into opening one up, most likely because of it having a subject header that might be someone legitimate, the moment I see that the message body says anything spammy I immediately click the Delete button. I imagine everyone else in the world is doing the same thing.
It's gotten to the point where the preoccupation of spamming is just to get past filters, the result of which is that the message is grumblingly deleted by the irritated recipient. Who out there is saying, "Oh, look, this message got past all my spam filters and contains a lot of jumbled, garbled nonsense text alongside a plug for herbal penis enlarging pills. This must be legitimate. Now, where's my credit card,"? Do the spammers think that we're all clones of Dilbert's pointy-haired manager?
Spamming is not only irritating, it's pointless. Who is paying these people to spam us? Are people actually buying penis enlarging pills and patches, herbal viagra, mortgage refinancing, credit repair kits, or any of that stuff? Enough to put millions of dollars a month into the hands of career spammers?
Slashdot Mirror
Although Ernie Hudson didn't appear on the original poster for the movie, I enjoyed the character Winston very much.
Janine Melnitz: "Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis?"
Winston Zeddmore: "Ah, if there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say."
I love the photo of the guy wearing it. Let's put Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis in that get-up and see if it looks familiar. Who you gonna call?
That movie really disappointed me. It had so many of my favorite actors in it, and I used to read comics by the guy who created the characters (that is to say, The Flaming Carrot), and the movie fell flat with the material. I think it was trying too hard to be an Austin Powers film.
The concept behind Mr. Furious was still pretty humorous, though... a guy who's only power is that he's really pissed off. Jumps on the villain's car and furiously attacks the hood ornament... that'll show 'em.
Can't... type... reply... too... much... outrage... head... exploding...
I heard that halfway through Empire Strikes Back, Han rips Leia's dress, exposing her right breast in front of eighty-thousand stormtroopers.
I resolved a dispute like this with my hosting company over the phone.
I had designed a single page for a customer within a regional business district website I'd put together a few years ago. The business was a small, independent children's clothing and toy store with the word "Kiddie" in the name, and some whack job prankster had sent out some kind of inane spam that referenced the page for this store, along with a handful of other innocent pages on the web, advertising it as a child pornography site. Someone forwarded the spam to my hosting company and they locked the directory down without even looking at the page to see what the fuss was about.
It was a stupid, infantile prank some idiot teenager had pulled, and I had to spend at least a half-hour on the phone with my hosting company begging a woman who barely spoke English to change the permissions on the directory. I made it really clear to her how ridiculous is was for them to shut that directory down without at least looking at the page to make sure that it really was what the spam said it was, and that the whole situation was making me seriously rethink my use of the company's services. She seemed to understand, and it hasn't happened since.
It looks to me like there are a few trolls out there who, like John the Bastard in Much Ado About Nothing, delight in spreading the seeds of mistrust and chaos wherever they can. They send out spam email with no purpose other than to embroil innocent website owners in disputes with their host companies. They enjoy the feeling that they get, apparently, from causing hard-working and honest people to have to waste their time getting needless and pointless problems straightened out. They're almost worse than spammers, because at least spammers have personal financial gain as their motivation. These idiot pranksters have as their motivation only the satisfaction of perpetrating evil on others, for whatever that's worth to them. They're like social vandals. They have no statement to make other than, "Ha ha, you're conducting your affairs honestly and I'm not."
A prominent cardinal enters the Pope's chambers with good news and bad news.
The good news, he tells the Pontiff, is that the Vatican has received an email from God himself!
The bad news is that they've traced the IP address to an ISP in Salt Lake City, Utah.
I use a program called CodeTek Virtual Desktop for Mac OSX, and the abstract in that application sounds an awful lot like it.
I'm sure there are differences, but is this patent, if it is awarded, going to allow Microsoft to send C&D letters to every company and organization that has been providing virtual desktop software for years, regardless of platform?
How could such a thing happen?
Yes, just like beer companies.
Remember the Simpsons episode with the Duff commercial? A couple of rowdy guys spray a group of protesting feminists with beer, and they all instantly transform into bikini-clad beach bimbos, holding signs that say "I'm easy!" and "Get me drunk!"
To rework a famous old saying, no-one ever went broke overestimating the impact of appealing to the male ego.
That's brilliant marketing to use a female rep to demo a product to a bunch of men.
A lot of companies would do well to follow that example, I think.
Dammit, ComCast topped my offer of $75 and a ten-pack of Wrigley's Spearmint Gum.
I've been asked by golfers if there's a device that will let them measure the exact distance to the pin (or at least the green).
I've always been at a loss to tell them what they could use, at least when it came to handheld optical devices.
Your Honor, the prosecution submits to the court Exhibit B, a photograph of the shark in question attacking a man dangling from the helicopter.
And here is Exhibit C, film footage where President Kennedy can clearly be seen saying "Congratulations, how does it feel to be an All-American?" to Forrest Gump.
I'd say give him the gift that keeps on giving.
Get him an external hard drive, preferably one that comes bundled with backup and synchronization software.
If he already has one, get him some blank CDs and/or DVDs, which are always useful, and a case of Jolt, I guess. Do they still make Jolt?
And for all those guys in here who are suggesting that she perform sex acts as a gift, for heavens sake, are you trying to kill the guy? He's a geek... any sex at all and he'll drop over dead... that is The Way of Things.
Well, the moderators liked it, so nyah.
I'm not a security expert, but voting on the internet strikes me as being about as secure as locking up your bicycle with twist-ties.
I'm glad they've dropped this idea.
Hey, it was a joke, and I just said "might be more accurately," not "is more accurately."
I covered my buttocks with the semantics of uncertainty.
Yes, there are criminals with false WHOIS records.
And, at the same time, the WHOIS database is a feeding trough for spammers and scammers, encouraging otherwise honest people to put false information into their WHOIS records just to keep those spammers and scammers from getting their names, email addresses, snail mail addresses, phone numbers, fax numbers, mothers' maiden names, and whatever else their registrars ask for.
I could create a brand new, non-obvious email address on one of my domain accounts and put it in as the Admin Contact for a record I own, and use that email address absolutely nowhere else, and I bet that within three months that email address would be getting buckets full of spam.
There's an old saying you still see on bumper stickers, "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." While that idea might be more accurately stated as "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will accidentally shoot their own kids," the original sentiment holds for WHOIS, that is to say, "When falsified WHOIS data is outlawed, only outlaws will falsify their WHOIS data."
If the RIAA and MPAA can't find the fake WHOIS record owners, how is the government going to track down the WHOIS record owners and punish them? Why waste time passing a law that, in the end, only punishes honest people who would rather not give their unlisted home phone numbers out when buying a domain name for their kids?
Somewhere out there the must be a website that collects instances of these kinds of inane questions, I just know it. After a while they could be categorized and the redundant ones would be culled.
Categories like "Don't know where such-and-such key is on the keyboard" (like these people I'd be helping and I'd say "Okay, now hit 'tab' to go to the next field," and they'd look at the keyboard, scanning it with their eyes up and down and left and right, 'tab, tab, tab, where is it, again?"), "Don't know how to start the computer at all," "Don't know to use 'Shut Down' instead of just flipping the switch on the power strip and then panic when ScanDisk comes up on reboot," and so on.
That's the thing... it's stuff like that over and over and over.
I just want to erupt into a Full Metal Jacket drill sergeant rant.
I only have time to tell this funny story...
A middle-aged woman I know called up and said her brand-new PC wouldn't turn on at all. She'd hooked everything up and just got this cryptic error message on the screen.
I drove all the way out to her suburban house from my apartment in the city, and when I got there I asked her to turn on her computer.
She pushed the button on her monitor and her monitor turned on, displaying a message that there was no signal.
I asked her to now turn her computer on, and she said, "I just did! This is all it shows! What's wrong with it?"
I work in an art gallery, and there are these fairly old but intact 8x10 transparencies of artwork in the files... I think they could be blown up to wall-sized with little loss of clarity. I don't think that would be possible even with the most expensive digital camera going.
For ten years, now, the media have been saying that any day now chemical photography will just go away. Bloom County, back in the early nineties, had Opus and Milo flushing a 35mm SLR down the toilet lamenting, "Oh, little Nikon, we hardly knew ye." And that was back when you couldn't touch a decent digital camera for under a grand.
And yet people are still buying 35mm film, shooting pics on it, and having it processed. Those single-use cameras (manufacturers bristle at the word "disposable") are still quite popular.
I do see more and more people with digital cameras nowadays, naturally, but rumors of the death of chemical photography are greatly exaggerated. University art departments still teach the old-fashioned methods.
I could go on and on about this forever, but there are other and better posts to read below.
It's only a matter of time before someone posts the obligatory "I, for one, welcome our miniature robotic overlords."
I've said this before, but I'll say it again. I really don't understand why all this even happens.
When I'm going through the webmail access to my spam-bait accounts (the ones that are listed on my websites that I don't bother retrieving with my POP email client anymore because of hundreds of spams a day to each), if I'm fooled into opening one up, most likely because of it having a subject header that might be someone legitimate, the moment I see that the message body says anything spammy I immediately click the Delete button. I imagine everyone else in the world is doing the same thing.
It's gotten to the point where the preoccupation of spamming is just to get past filters, the result of which is that the message is grumblingly deleted by the irritated recipient. Who out there is saying, "Oh, look, this message got past all my spam filters and contains a lot of jumbled, garbled nonsense text alongside a plug for herbal penis enlarging pills. This must be legitimate. Now, where's my credit card,"? Do the spammers think that we're all clones of Dilbert's pointy-haired manager?
Spamming is not only irritating, it's pointless. Who is paying these people to spam us? Are people actually buying penis enlarging pills and patches, herbal viagra, mortgage refinancing, credit repair kits, or any of that stuff? Enough to put millions of dollars a month into the hands of career spammers?
I'm hopelessly at sea in this matter.