Yeah, that Althon box will cost you $4,000 over the next three years.
No, it won't. I've got a 1.3ghz Athlon that's about 2 years old. It cost me about $500 (with a decent 3D card, hard drive, etc.) Still going strong, and still on the original power supply. In fact, the only upgrade I've made to it was bump the memory from 256 to 512MB, which was fairly cheap.
But there's still a year to go. The power supply could fail -- so I'd replace it for $20 or so.
These people want $180 for a Mac G4 power supply! (I hope that they can be purchased cheaper!) (it's also funny that this power supply looks very much like a PC ATX power supply.)
These people want ~ $100 for G3 power supplies.
I'll believe that the average Macintosh power supply is of higher quality than the average PC power supply -- some PC power supplies are really cheap. But the price difference more than makes up for it -- and you can always get higher quality PC power supplies if you wish to pay more (but still less than for a Mac.)
Yes, because as a PC user you've never accounted for the thousands of dollars your poured into your piece of shit fly-by-night crap.
Macintoshes are cheaper, and have been for almost a decade now.
Wow. Quite the little troll, aren't you?
I can get a brand new, pretty decent 2ghz Athlon box for around $400. What can I get from Apple for that price? Perhaps a set of speakers for a G5 Tower?
By the way, I'm sure you'll be happy to know Microsoft is counting you as a windows user as it convinces everyone that they have %90+ market share.
And I'm sure you'll be happy to know that Microsoft has even been known to include Macintoshes in it's 90+% market share estimates.
IE remembers bad addresses. Each time I want to go to google, I have to type www.goo because once I wrote www.gog and that's the first choice when I type www.go so yes, IE has memory of bad addresses.
It doesn't for me.
What seems more likely is that you have Verisign to thank for this -- you typed www.gog while `SiteFinder' was active, and the DNS server returned a valid IP, making IE think this was a valid name, and so it remembered it.
Now that SiteFinder is off, it's not remembering any new `wrong' sites. Try something else, see if you can get it to remember a new wrong site.
I thought it was illegal (federal law) to use an automated dialer and not include all the pertinent info.
It is. Except that even including `all the pertinent info' doesn't make it legal. It's illegal, period, unless you already have a business relationship with them. (It might also be ok for charities, but I'm not sure about that.)
But illegal or not, it's not very actively prosecuted. I used to receive lots of telemarketer calls sent via machines like this. Fortunately, getting on the Texas do not call list caused a very large reduction in the telemarketer calls we received.
I forsee a large increase in caller ID being purchased.
As if it even helps. 95+% of telemarketers block it, and even on the off chance they forget and you get their number, it doesn't help much.
I've been on the Texas no-call list for quite some time. I received a local call from a telemarketer using a machine (no human) asking me to leave my name and number for more information. Caller ID gave me his (local) number.
I filed a complaint as we're supposed to. Two weeks later, I received a form letter saying that my complaint needed to have the business's name -- obviously having their number wasn't good enough. And the recording didn't actually give their name.
Argh!
Somebody suggested calling the number back at 3am and asking to have my number removed from their list (since the call probably came from somebody's house.) Good idea:)
So it's an R/C plane with a camera on board. Nothing new there...
As for the autopilot, these
two
pictures show what looks like an awfully standard transmitter. Perhaps they've created some sort of spiffy autopilot, but they don't appear to be using it here. But even autopilots aren't new -- people have been doing that for years too, from
systems that just automatically right the plane as needed, to full fledged auto-pilots where you just tell the plane what to do on a computer. And here is something in between -- a plane that crossed the Atlantic, where people controlled it directly only for takeoff and landing.
In any event, even the planes themselves look pretty standard. This one looks like your basic flying wing (Zagi makes a very popular model) and this just looks like your basic small electric plane with a V-tail.
Yeah, but when you actually read the website you can kind of see why...
Not from that page I can't. I see a bunch of inflamatory, racist drivel -- but last I checked, even racist speech was protected by the First Amendment here in the US. At least in name, anyways.
someone who steals a candybar is prosecuted with as much vigor as someone who steals a car.
Cute analogy, but false. At least in Texas, `grand theft auto' is a good deal more serious crime than a theft of a candy bar, aka a `class C misdemeanor'. If you're arrested shoplifting something small (under $20 or $50 I think) the cop often (usually?) won't even take you to jail -- he'll let you sit in the car for a while while he writes up a ticket, then lets you go.
And then once you go to court, if your record is clean, they may (usually? always?) offer to let you take a `don't shoplist!' class (very similar to defensive driving) and if you keep out of trouble for 6 months or so, the case is dismissed.
If you steal a car, they're not quite so friendly. (But if you then take it and have it repainted, they'll all forget about you!)
Its been said that lithium batteries can store close to the energy density of gasoline.
Not quite. But it's getting up there...
NiMH batteries appear to have a different failure mode than lithium from overcharging. They just seem to degrade in performance.
Actually, a NiMH or NiCd cell can also short itself out, especially if damaged in some way (like dropped.) This creates a `hot smoker' where the battery will get *very* hot (NiCds have lower internal resistances than NiMHs, so they get even hotter) and can even cause fires. But they don't usually explode...
Assuming that all your constraints are unalterable, you're screwed.
1) if you can't trust your IT department, you're screwed, especially if management thinks they should have access (they're IT -- it's their job.) You could deny IT access, by handling everything yourself, but that's often a political nightmare.
2) without physical security, you have no security. You could encrypt the filesystems, but that has it's own set of problems. It wasn't that long ago that somebody stole an entire mainframe in Australia.
4) if things are encrypted, more than one person needs to know the passcodes. But the more people who have access, the more people that can do bad things...
7) is a big one. If you can only trust some of your engineers, then only the engineers you can trust can have access to the files. But obviously engineers you can't trust need access too... you're screwed.
All planes become very difficult to fly when the center of gravity gets too far back. (On the other hand, if the center of gravity goes too far forward, the plane becomes extremely stable, but loses maneuverability and efficiency. If it goes *too* far forward, you may not be able to even keep the nose up. But as a rule of thumb, too far forward is much better than too far back.)
If the center of gravity goes far back enough, the plane becomes unflyable. Not quite so far back, the plane may be very difficult to fly (requiring that the pilot `stay on top of it', and if it gets into a spin it may not be possible to recover from it.
Aerobatic planes and planes that are trying to make very long trips on limited fuel (like the Spirit of St. Louis) will keep the center of gravity a further back than most -- but not too far. In a trainer, you usually keep it a bit further forward than usual to enhance the stability of the plane.
How is this different than any other plane? They intentionally set the center of gravity too far back, and it flew poorly. They should have anticipated this (and I suspect they did, and this isn't as big a setback as expected.)
Let's hope that the Heinlen award doesn't follow the American Film Institute's (AFI) lead... they awarded the first `Charlton Heston Award' to Charlton Heston himself.
Then it was discovered she couldn't be sharing songs on pirate service Kazaa because she uses an incompatible Apple computer.
Don't
Virtual PC and similar products still exist?
Or maybe somebody brought over a laptop that she `forgot' to mention? Does she use wireless and `forgot' (like ~ 70% of the people out there) to set up WEP?
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to see a monkey wrench thrown in the RIAA's plans, but there's lots of possible ways that the RIAA *didn't* go after the wrong person.
A large number of "spamproofed" email addresses I see have the part to remove in all caps
Yes. But that won't get you 90%. Maybe 40%. It'll also break a number of other addresses, like BIFF@AOL.COM. You really do need to be a bit smarter than that.
including yours.
Actually, I don't obfuscate my email address at all. (If you doubt this, search on Usenet for `dougmc'.) Yes, it gets me lots of spam, but I can filter that. It's a principles thing -- if it's got my name on it, somebody should be able to contact me regarding it, without jumping through hoops to do so.
If you happened to see/. obfuscating my address at some point today, that was because I was looking at it's options for doing so. Before today,/. wasn't displaying my address at all (I found the option when doing some research for another reply of mine in this thread.)
/. doesn't seem to allow you to send a private message or email to a user at all based on a comment, but if they get a story submitted, it almost always gives their email address right there. It's often spam-proofed, but not in any difficult to decipher manner.
Looks like you've got a lot of `all hell' to raise. And I wasn't even looking hard -- I was just going down my bookmarks.
In fact, I can only think of one site that does what you've suggested -- Ebay. They used to give email addresses, but now let you email through their system instead. They may say it was done to cut down on spam, but I'm pretty sure the real reason is to keep track of the emails sent, so they can make sure that people aren't offering to buy stuff outside of the system (depriving Ebay of their commission), `interfering' with auctions (like telling the top bidder that the seller is a crook), stuff like that.
The problem is, the people who harvest these addresses don't bother because they are concerned of quantity, not quality.
Ok, let's assume that you're right (I don't completely agree, but let's assume). So they harvest fooNOSPAM@domain.com. Quantity is far more important than quality, but quality is good too. So what do they do? Easy! They convert this address into two addresses -- fooNOSPAM@domain.com and foo@domain.com. They've increased both their quality (it's now 50% valid rather than 0%) and quantity (two addresses rather than one.)
The less brain they need to use to get stuff to sale, the better.
Of course. But if a little brain (or paying somebody else for use of their brain) increases sales by 30% (or whatever), this will mean more money in the spammer's pocket.
They whip out Visual Basic and make a harvester bot that collects zillions of addresses
De-spamproofing that 90% of the addresses is easier than writing this harvester bot.
Never mind that many might not work - the spammers who buy the addresses spam to those addresses, bill by millions of spamules sent, and they probably don't give any guarantees on delivery to the clients!
I'm sure there's rarely a guarantee. But I'm also sure that `quality' email lists are worth more to spammers than `non quality' email lists, and if 15 minutes of work can make a large improvement in the quality of a list, guess what they're gonna do? It's just a matter of time.
If it was *truly* quantity and not quality, they'd just randomly generate addresses and not harvest at all. (Yes, I know that some spammers do this, but they at least pick a valid domain and check to see if the mail is accepted -- this is not completely random.)
People *say* that spammers don't care about the quality of their email lists. I don't buy it. A few invalid addresses aren't going to bother them, but if they can fix 30% of their list in a few minutes, they're going to do so.
Or, if selling addresses isn't the thing, sell the shoddily constructed address harvester for an outrageous price.
Spammers are also pirates. Even this very article talked about not paying for the software they used.
too bad for them it's legitimately part of the email
Congratulations. You've now put yourself firmly in the remaining 5%.
Actually, not that firmly. The software could easily see that removing NOSPAM leaves you with an obviously invalid address, and therefore leaves it there. NOSPAMfoo@domain.com would be better.
Of course, this address would cause problems with humans... who would remove NOSPAM too, out of habit.
(A good method for avoiding spam, then, is to always type your e-mail address on the Web this way: Arnie at hotmail.com or ArnieREMOVETHIS@hotmail.com. Humans can look at either and figure out what to do; software -- so far -- is helpless.)
Helpless? I don't buy that for a minute.
With perl, in 15 minutes I can make a program that automatically (and correctly) de-spamproofs about 90% of the spamproofed addresses out there. In another hour I can probably get another 5%. The remaining 5% are a lot harder, but they can easily be ignored. (Of course, many humans (think of grandma) have a hard time deciphering much of that remaining 5% as well.)
Spammers are stupid, yes, but when there's money on the line, they can certainly figure out simple things like this, or if not, they can pay somebody else to figure them out for them. True `hackers' may have their scruples, and may hate spam, but if they're out of a job and a spammer offers them $1000 for an hour's work... guess what's gonna happen?
I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet, but just wait -- those who use user@NOSPAMdomain.com are going to find their `spamproofed' addresses getting more and more spam.
Hopefully voters will remember how well the dissenting congressmen "represented" them the next time they go to the polls.
Hopefully people will also realize that voting against this bill is not the same as voting for telemarketing.
(It's unlikely that they will, however. Now these legislators are going to be doing serious damage control, even if their reasons for voting against this bill are completely legitimate and even in everybody's best interests (which seems unlikely, but maybe they know something we don't.))
Perhaps these legislators felt that this really was the domain of the FCC rather than the FTC, that the FCC should be the one managing a `do not call' list?
As for this argument about `look at all the telemarketers this will put out of work!'... does anybody really care? When Barbara Bush said `Just say no!', did anybody think of all the poor drug dealers and manufacturers that this would put out of work?
Slashdot Mirror
But there's still a year to go. The power supply could fail -- so I'd replace it for $20 or so.
These people want $180 for a Mac G4 power supply! (I hope that they can be purchased cheaper!) (it's also funny that this power supply looks very much like a PC ATX power supply.) These people want ~ $100 for G3 power supplies.
I'll believe that the average Macintosh power supply is of higher quality than the average PC power supply -- some PC power supplies are really cheap. But the price difference more than makes up for it -- and you can always get higher quality PC power supplies if you wish to pay more (but still less than for a Mac.)
I can get a brand new, pretty decent 2ghz Athlon box for around $400. What can I get from Apple for that price? Perhaps a set of speakers for a G5 Tower?
And I'm sure you'll be happy to know that Microsoft has even been known to include Macintoshes in it's 90+% market share estimates. Dunno. You tell us.(Remember, space tends to be devoid of air, which is a very popular medium for the propagation of sound ...)
What seems more likely is that you have Verisign to thank for this -- you typed www.gog while `SiteFinder' was active, and the DNS server returned a valid IP, making IE think this was a valid name, and so it remembered it.
Now that SiteFinder is off, it's not remembering any new `wrong' sites. Try something else, see if you can get it to remember a new wrong site.
However, there are some very important differences --
The IE feature only affects web browsing. It doesn't break email, for example. Verisign's change does. This is by far the biggest issue.
The IE feature probably doesn't remember `incorrect' URLs in the browser history
The IE feature can be turned off, either in IE or by not using IE. To turn off Verisign, you need to patch your name server.
But illegal or not, it's not very actively prosecuted. I used to receive lots of telemarketer calls sent via machines like this. Fortunately, getting on the Texas do not call list caused a very large reduction in the telemarketer calls we received.
I've been on the Texas no-call list for quite some time. I received a local call from a telemarketer using a machine (no human) asking me to leave my name and number for more information. Caller ID gave me his (local) number.
I filed a complaint as we're supposed to. Two weeks later, I received a form letter saying that my complaint needed to have the business's name -- obviously having their number wasn't good enough. And the recording didn't actually give their name.
Argh!
Somebody suggested calling the number back at 3am and asking to have my number removed from their list (since the call probably came from somebody's house.) Good idea :)
As for the autopilot, these two pictures show what looks like an awfully standard transmitter. Perhaps they've created some sort of spiffy autopilot, but they don't appear to be using it here. But even autopilots aren't new -- people have been doing that for years too, from systems that just automatically right the plane as needed, to full fledged auto-pilots where you just tell the plane what to do on a computer. And here is something in between -- a plane that crossed the Atlantic, where people controlled it directly only for takeoff and landing.
In any event, even the planes themselves look pretty standard. This one looks like your basic flying wing (Zagi makes a very popular model) and this just looks like your basic small electric plane with a V-tail.
And then once you go to court, if your record is clean, they may (usually? always?) offer to let you take a `don't shoplist!' class (very similar to defensive driving) and if you keep out of trouble for 6 months or so, the case is dismissed.
If you steal a car, they're not quite so friendly. (But if you then take it and have it repainted, they'll all forget about you!)
1) if you can't trust your IT department, you're screwed, especially if management thinks they should have access (they're IT -- it's their job.) You could deny IT access, by handling everything yourself, but that's often a political nightmare.
2) without physical security, you have no security. You could encrypt the filesystems, but that has it's own set of problems. It wasn't that long ago that somebody stole an entire mainframe in Australia.
4) if things are encrypted, more than one person needs to know the passcodes. But the more people who have access, the more people that can do bad things ...
7) is a big one. If you can only trust some of your engineers, then only the engineers you can trust can have access to the files. But obviously engineers you can't trust need access too ... you're screwed.
10) yikes.
If the center of gravity goes far back enough, the plane becomes unflyable. Not quite so far back, the plane may be very difficult to fly (requiring that the pilot `stay on top of it', and if it gets into a spin it may not be possible to recover from it.
Aerobatic planes and planes that are trying to make very long trips on limited fuel (like the Spirit of St. Louis) will keep the center of gravity a further back than most -- but not too far. In a trainer, you usually keep it a bit further forward than usual to enhance the stability of the plane.
How is this different than any other plane? They intentionally set the center of gravity too far back, and it flew poorly. They should have anticipated this (and I suspect they did, and this isn't as big a setback as expected.)
How about the USB light? Pretty mundane, but it still seems pretty whacky ...
Sometimes truth IS stranger than fiction :)
Or maybe somebody brought over a laptop that she `forgot' to mention? Does she use wireless and `forgot' (like ~ 70% of the people out there) to set up WEP?
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to see a monkey wrench thrown in the RIAA's plans, but there's lots of possible ways that the RIAA *didn't* go after the wrong person.
If you happened to see /. obfuscating my address at some point today, that was because I was looking at it's options for doing so. Before today, /. wasn't displaying my address at all (I found the option when doing some research for another reply of mine in this thread.)
Like mailing lists?
Like Kuro5hin ?
Like Fark ?
Like Freshmeat ?
Looks like you've got a lot of `all hell' to raise. And I wasn't even looking hard -- I was just going down my bookmarks.
In fact, I can only think of one site that does what you've suggested -- Ebay. They used to give email addresses, but now let you email through their system instead. They may say it was done to cut down on spam, but I'm pretty sure the real reason is to keep track of the emails sent, so they can make sure that people aren't offering to buy stuff outside of the system (depriving Ebay of their commission), `interfering' with auctions (like telling the top bidder that the seller is a crook), stuff like that.
If it was *truly* quantity and not quality, they'd just randomly generate addresses and not harvest at all. (Yes, I know that some spammers do this, but they at least pick a valid domain and check to see if the mail is accepted -- this is not completely random.)
People *say* that spammers don't care about the quality of their email lists. I don't buy it. A few invalid addresses aren't going to bother them, but if they can fix 30% of their list in a few minutes, they're going to do so.
Spammers are also pirates. Even this very article talked about not paying for the software they used.Actually, not that firmly. The software could easily see that removing NOSPAM leaves you with an obviously invalid address, and therefore leaves it there. NOSPAMfoo@domain.com would be better.
Of course, this address would cause problems with humans ... who would remove NOSPAM too, out of habit.
With perl, in 15 minutes I can make a program that automatically (and correctly) de-spamproofs about 90% of the spamproofed addresses out there. In another hour I can probably get another 5%. The remaining 5% are a lot harder, but they can easily be ignored. (Of course, many humans (think of grandma) have a hard time deciphering much of that remaining 5% as well.)
Spammers are stupid, yes, but when there's money on the line, they can certainly figure out simple things like this, or if not, they can pay somebody else to figure them out for them. True `hackers' may have their scruples, and may hate spam, but if they're out of a job and a spammer offers them $1000 for an hour's work ... guess what's gonna happen?
I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet, but just wait -- those who use user@NOSPAMdomain.com are going to find their `spamproofed' addresses getting more and more spam.
(It's unlikely that they will, however. Now these legislators are going to be doing serious damage control, even if their reasons for voting against this bill are completely legitimate and even in everybody's best interests (which seems unlikely, but maybe they know something we don't.))
Perhaps these legislators felt that this really was the domain of the FCC rather than the FTC, that the FCC should be the one managing a `do not call' list?
As for this argument about `look at all the telemarketers this will put out of work!' ... does anybody really care? When Barbara Bush said `Just say no!', did anybody think of all the poor drug dealers and manufacturers that this would put out of work?
You're probably right. Thanks for catching that.
(and rather than saying `and doing.' I meant to say `and doing so-so, mostly because I wasn't a RPN convert yet :)')