Yeah. They could sell those subdomains for money. You could maybe make a $100K per year, per TLD.
But Qwest is run by dummies, and they don't want that money. And even then, it isn't millions.
And if the money involved is only thousands or small millions, it won't really matter to ICANN -- they'll waste it on trips to Antarctica or other boondoggles.
Per year you'd pay a thou or two? Or just once?
If you read the article, it is like ICANN just discovered this gold mine in the cracks of their sofa. E.g. millions and millions of dollars! A giant pile of money.
But I don't get you A-Z (minus the existing ones) is really worth so much.
For instance, qwest, which has 'q', doesn't use it. They use "qwest" instead.
So would it really be worth IBM to pay a more than a thousand a year for "i.com" -- I just don't think so. I don't think ICANN has found a goldmine in the cracks of their sofa.
I don't get why single letter domain names are so wonderful.
Nor do I see why they had to get held back (mostly -- just check the list) until now.
Does anybody really want the letter 'j'? What does that mean? Is it really worth big bucks?
I would guess that at some point you won't have domains, but some sort of searching facility -- e.g. a bunch of tags. At that point, the name won't really matter, and you probably won't want to remember most of them.
E.g. your microwave will have the IP: 123.223.3.123.43.... But you'll look it up on your keychain device, or do a search for "Me" "microwave" to get the magic number.
And your living rooms light switches address will be... and so on -- everything will have an IP, but you won't be able to name all that stuff anyway.
You have an economic collapse and no food. People start dying. The ones who've got the genetic advantages to survive famine (the types who'd have a slow metabolism and pack on the calories while there was food) are more likely to survive. They'll be skinny, but alive.
The skinny types, who can't pack on weight, will just die. The fat ones, realizing there won't be any food for a long time, try to leave. Some of them got to America.
That's the argument for how America wound up with people who tend to get disgustingly fat.
I'm not sure I buy it.
Here's the relevant quote from the link above with my comments in braces:
"Observers invoked such descriptions of Nelly's birthplace even before 1845, when a mysterious potato blight began to wreak havoc on the meager food supply. By late 1846, Kenmare residents began to succumb to starvation and malnutrition-related diseases. [THAT' THE SKINNY ONES DYING] As conditions continued to deteriorate in early 1847, the death toll multiplied... Tens of thousands fled Ireland in 1847 [TO PLACES LIKE AMERICA]..."
Inactivity and fatness are different phenomenons (but clearly related).
Americans are disgustingly obese (as a group). This isn't true of all the others who live in rich modern societies. E.g. Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria. I don't think Americans are the fattest: rich Africans and Arabs tend to be terribly fat.
Some suspect America has more "fat genes" because the people who left for the New World starved through more famines than the more prosperous folks who stayed in the Old World.
Am I the only one who is surprised that a publisher had the balls to publish this thing?
They must have had lawyers going over the book to make sure their stuff was defensible -- completely defensible.
Or perhaps the 800 lb. gorilla just doesn't care when people publish bad things about it; you'll be buying their stuff anyway.
I'm happy that someone has published this book. I can't imagine anyone bothering to publish, in the 70s, how to live without AT&T -- partly because it wouldn't have been possbile.
Although the article makes fun of the output LEDs/buttons, that isn't such a bad thing; if you could make them do what you want, it would be really neat. Especially for someone who does system administration, who needs to somehow prioritize various distractions.
However, I went to logitech's site and discovered the following:
They don't provide (at least I can't find it) details on how to talk to the mouse to use the buttons/LEDs for input/output. You have to use their "SetPoint" software, which only works under Windows. And maybe it doesn't work the way you want it to.
So the mouse can't be used for other systems, and you can't program the mouse to work the way that you want it to work. Which is too bad.
Even if Logitech provided "open source" software, that wouldn't help folks who want to really use the hardware for neat things -- they need the technical specs that the "SetPoint" authors used to make the software work in the first place.
I hadn't heard that Goldy refused to play by the rules from the Google founders. The rules were typical Google: no backroom deals that favor big institutional investors over smaller investors.
But Goldy wanted to get some easy money, they got caught and shut out of the deal. That makes my night. If you've dealt with bankers (esp. "New York" bankers), you'll know why.
Perhaps this also explains the "Google will fail" articles that appeared before the IPO; the powers-that-be were peeved that Google did the IPO their way, and wanted it to fail.
"Being from Singapore myself I can say that Singapore never has been free - it makes a superficial attempt at looking like a democracy, but thats just to appease outsiders. Things like other political parties aren't legal... and people have been known to disappear if they hold the wrong views..."
Oh -- I guess I can't really call you an anonymous "COWARD" then, can I.
The unclear limits in Singapore would lead a lot of people to kepe their mouth shut and head down, and just hope for the best -- because you never know when you might get in trouble.
As Solszenitsyn mentions in his books on the gulags, the unclear boundaries of what was OK or not OK under the Bolsheviks led to people greatly restricting what they did, lest they get noticed and punished.
The fact that the big hits lose sales due to P2P is bad for some labels, and not for others.
E.g. Sony has a lot of big-name hits. So P2P == evil. Koch Records has a lot of smaller-selling indies. P2P != evil.
However, I have a deep suspicion that RIAA is run by the likes of SONY, and not the ones like Koch.
Also, musicians are keenly aware of the differences: to get on Koch, you pretty much have to have your album finished and mixed. They produce and distribute it, and give you a big percentage. Other ones front tons of money for production and advertising, and give back a smaller percentage -- and they are the ones that stand to lose the most from P2P.
The most interesting thing in all of music these days are mixtapes and mashups. They are both illegal to sell -- no copyrights are cleared, so you'll hear samples, beats and so on from entirely different groups. You can now buy them over the web, or download them from P2P.
It looks like there were some ethical violations -- where the current ethical system means no possibility of coercion (e.g. no eggs from within the team) and no payment for eggs.
Here is something on the ethics of donations (from some free market fans).
One thing seems obvious: if they'd had been able to easily buy eggs, it wouldn't have been a hassle: they'd never have gotten eggs from staff, and the problem would have been solved. The lack of trading in eggs prevented these guys from doing the research and complying with the ethical restrictions.
Here's a nice piece from the sadly discredited NY Times author, Martin Finkel (he lied a story and got fired), talking about a Kidney market in pre-GWII Iraq.
Well, I'd bet that "Kylie Kylie" (if that is her real name -- just kidding) will be moving from Kazaa, very, very soon.
They've just ruined everything; she (or maybe he) will be moving to some other channel before long.
This is one interesting aspect of doing what the RIAA says: they want you to block just about everything (the greatest amount of stuff that might possibly infringe), and when that conflicts with the goals of legit users, they'll leave (along with the bad guys).
That's what I don't get about this settlement; it seems that Kazaa just killed themselves.
So they started out in Europe, and only moved to Australia/Vanuatu because of RIAA pressure. Why don't they just sell the assets to a Vanuatu company and move the whole thing offshore?
Are the new guys, operating out of Australia/Vanuatu, somehow more legit than the guys who ran it before?
I thought the Kazaa guys were the sort to do "anything to win", including fairly Talmudic stuff like what they've already done (splitting the ads from the network itself, so that they can claim that they aren't really able to know about or stop infringing).
Google's selling of the box may open them up to problems they wouldn't otherwise have.
E.g. supposedly the appliance is derived from their main codebase. So if you get a box and figure out some exploits, perhaps you've figured out how to exploit the thousands of machines that Google uses to crawl.
It is a bit like Cisco fiasco recently: they give a smart guy a box, he can find some problems (and get in trouble at Black Hat) -- but if he finds flaws he can exploit thousands of boxes out there.
On the other hand, if Cisco didn't give you your own box to poke and prod, you might never discover the flaws in the boxes out there in the universe (before getting caught) -- it would just take too long, esp. if the bug was timing dependent. Same for Google -- the selling of the appliance, for what little money it brings in, reveals info to bad guys. A risk-averse shop might forgo that income completely.
Cary is right. This stuff was out there, working (in a broken, insecure) way for about 2 years. Windows has been out there, working (in an somewhat insecure way) for longer. The same for sshd and a bunch of other programs.
Where were the security experts who help to protect the millions of windows machines?
Well, at first I was figuring they somehow were asleep at the switch, but then I thought -- OK, if they run OpenBSD, OSX or Linux, perhaps they just didn't notice that there was a giant rootkit running on their machine.
If I was a security researcher who runs windows on my desktop, I'd be thinking, "back to the drawing boards."
And I guess this is a good reason to run some freaky os like Zeta -- the rootkit just isn't going to work, unless you are running some sort of emulation software to emulate a PC.
You think X10 ads are bad? How about those horrific porn banners. Warning: link contains some awful porn banners, with cynical comments like:
Yes! Yes! Porn for the whole goddamn family! Porn for mommy, porn for
daddy, even porn for little Sally and little Billy. The sad thing is,
even this site says you must be over 18 to enter. If it wasn't for
this little bit of false advertising, this would be the greatest porn
ad ever.
This is awful. What kind of inhuman slime continues to have sex with a
girl even after she goes into epileptic shock? Truly one of the more
sickening fetishes I've encountered. If you play music while watching
this banner, her twitching almost seems to be rhythmic.
I love how he's crossing his arms, effectively communicating just how
smug he is over his new endowment. But I somehow doubt that's "100%
Natural". And no girl is going to let me get within 100 feet of her
with that thing. Plus, shopping for pants is hard enough as it is.
Bill must really think videogames are super-important; they keep losing billions, but Microsoft just keeps on going back for more punishment.
It seems so odd that they'd use their monopoly on desktop productivity software to try to build a videogame empire: history says that those get swept away pretty easily as soon as someone out-innovates you and comes out with a super-console. You can't build insurmountable walls (like in productivity software) to hold back your competition indefinitely, because gamers just get rid of their old gear.
Furthermore, there are always new gamers, and they have no loyalty to your old games -- there's always new boys growing up who need a video game. If you can't keep them happy, Sony/Nintendo/Sega will.
Wouldn't MicroSoft get a better return on investment from just making more software that works well with Windows? Even cellphones and IM/email devices would seem to have more in common with their natural advantages in productivity software.
Actually, there are those out there who use something other than Mac/Windows -- and they'd probably need an openly sourced application in order to get anything to work.
Just providing an Apple/MS version is like having protestant/Catholic on a government form, but not Hindu, Satanist, Islam, animist, Buddhist, Ismaili -- due to the difficulty of enumerating what religion a person might claim, you have to provide an "other", otherwise the "other" folks will be peeved.
Re:Robust == Robust flavor? This is incorrect
on
Drink Decaf and Die
·
· Score: 1
NIC CARD!
Exactly -- the kid of dumbass who studies coffee (and its effects on the heart), yet makes the statement that "robusta" has a robust flavor, is the type of dumbass to say "NIC Card".
I actually think hackers are more likely to find these mistakes awful; they correspond to type errors in a programming language -- and you can't have those.
Well, here's their acronym: "Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response" == PHASR,
and the official usage will be something like, "PHASR rifle" -- which makes sense. PHASR performs the role of a goddamned adjective, even though "phaser", in common use, is a noun.
That's so retarded!
Yet the idiots who named it clearly intended for it to be called "PHASR", not "PHASR rifle", or "PHASR sniper rifle."
So that means that if the jarheads use it semantically correct ("PHASR rifle") they'll sound like idiots saying "NIC card" -- but if they just say something like, "I blasted him with my PHASR!", you'll be thinking, "How did you blast him with your 'stimulation response'?" and then, "well, was that a 'PHASR rifle/pistol/dildo that you blasted him with?" PHASR is just an adjective, right?
There's an increasing trend for this sort of retarded name-i-fyin':
"REDOWL"? Why not just call it a "FUCKTARD", and come up with a backronym for that?
Re:Robust == Robust flavor? This is incorrect
on
Drink Decaf and Die
·
· Score: 0
Whoever wrote "So decaffeinated brands usually use a bean that has a more robust flavor," to explain why they use robusta (the cheapest swill, much cheaper than Arabica), probably also says:
"HIV virus"
and my alltime favorite:
"PIN number"
Actually, it is due to the propensity for acronyms (more often, backronyms) to trip up idiots like this guy that I am officially against acronyms.
I thought satellite radio and its fees were egregious too. So I got my partner one. She really loves it; after a few days of that, she entirely stopped listening to normal radio.
The key thing is, no commercials, and perfect audio quality (except when there are dropouts). That and more than a hundred channels (although most listen to only 5 or so).
It makes it an entirely different thing from radio. If you are used to having the satellite version in the car, and for whatever reason you forget it, and use normal radio, you feel like a total idiot, and the normal radio, with its ads and bad reception, drives you nuts.
So if you like radio, it is probably worth it. If you don't really like radio, just wait until the costs come down more.
This sounds a lot like satellite radio, except people will already have the receivers. A big downside with the satellite radios is that you have to buy the receiver. They are now sold at a loss, but you still need to "commit" to a receiver, and, because the receivers are not interchangeable, to a service.
I think that, plus the novel nature of satellite radio, explains why the satellite guys struggle.
I would prefer a service like this to an iPod: if you get satellite radio (or perhaps this new service), you get a lot more variety. I can imagine that if I had an iPod, I'd buy a bunch of songs and then not know what to get. Experimentation would be costly, and disappointment very irritating. Satellite radio has no per-song fee.
Also, with satellite radio, you get things like mixtapes, mashups and other stuff that hasn't been "published" -- no RIAA involved, just BMI, ASCAP, etc. With iPod, you snuggle up close to the RIAA posse.
I can imagine that if the cell company does this right, they could get millions of subscribers, very quickly. Perhaps that will force XM and Sirius to merge, because they will be looking pretty sorry once you can listen to cellular-radio music in your car.
Isn't the company to blame the one that made the rootkit for Sony? It is some OEM stuff.
I can imagine Sony doens't know much about this at all. Sure, they are the ones legally responsible -- but ultimately, they'll just sue the rootkit makers if this ever costs them a dime (unless they indemnified the other guys).
Slashdot Mirror
Gnus takes the approach that your email is like a special UUNET group.
So it is a newsreader that can do your mail too.
Yeah. They could sell those subdomains for money. You could maybe make a $100K per year, per TLD.
But Qwest is run by dummies, and they don't want that money. And even then, it isn't millions.
And if the money involved is only thousands or small millions, it won't really matter to ICANN -- they'll waste it on trips to Antarctica or other boondoggles.
Per year you'd pay a thou or two? Or just once? If you read the article, it is like ICANN just discovered this gold mine in the cracks of their sofa. E.g. millions and millions of dollars! A giant pile of money. But I don't get you A-Z (minus the existing ones) is really worth so much. For instance, qwest, which has 'q', doesn't use it. They use "qwest" instead. So would it really be worth IBM to pay a more than a thousand a year for "i.com" -- I just don't think so. I don't think ICANN has found a goldmine in the cracks of their sofa.
I don't get why single letter domain names are so wonderful.
...
Nor do I see why they had to get held back (mostly -- just check the list) until now.
Does anybody really want the letter 'j'? What does that mean? Is it really worth big bucks?
I would guess that at some point you won't have domains, but some sort of searching facility -- e.g. a bunch of tags. At that point, the name won't really matter, and you probably won't want to remember most of them.
E.g. your microwave will have the IP: 123.223.3.123.43....
But you'll look it up on your keychain device, or do a search for "Me" "microwave" to get the magic number.
And your living rooms light switches address will be
and so on -- everything will have an IP, but you won't be able to name all that stuff anyway.
Here's the basic idea: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/107 .2/ah0202000351.html
..."
You have an economic collapse and no food. People start dying. The ones who've got the genetic advantages to survive famine (the types who'd have a slow metabolism and pack on the calories while there was food) are more likely to survive. They'll be skinny, but alive.
The skinny types, who can't pack on weight, will just die. The fat ones, realizing there won't be any food for a long time, try to leave. Some of them got to America.
That's the argument for how America wound up with people who tend to get disgustingly fat.
I'm not sure I buy it.
Here's the relevant quote from the link above with my comments in braces:
"Observers invoked such descriptions of Nelly's birthplace even before 1845, when a mysterious potato blight began to wreak havoc on the meager food supply. By late 1846, Kenmare residents began to succumb to starvation and malnutrition-related diseases. [THAT' THE SKINNY ONES DYING] As conditions continued to deteriorate in early 1847, the death toll multiplied... Tens of thousands fled Ireland in 1847 [TO PLACES LIKE AMERICA]
Inactivity and fatness are different phenomenons (but clearly related).
Americans are disgustingly obese (as a group). This isn't true of all the others who live in rich modern societies. E.g. Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria. I don't think Americans are the fattest: rich Africans and Arabs tend to be terribly fat.
Some suspect America has more "fat genes" because the people who left for the New World starved through more famines than the more prosperous folks who stayed in the Old World.
Am I the only one who is surprised that a publisher had the balls to publish this thing?
They must have had lawyers going over the book to make sure their stuff was defensible -- completely defensible.
Or perhaps the 800 lb. gorilla just doesn't care when people publish bad things about it; you'll be buying their stuff anyway.
I'm happy that someone has published this book. I can't imagine anyone bothering to publish, in the 70s, how to live without AT&T -- partly because it wouldn't have been possbile.
Here's a similar story of using old hardware with NetBSD:
r e_rescue.html
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2005/05/05/hardwa
Although the article makes fun of the output LEDs/buttons, that isn't such a bad thing; if you could make them do what you want, it would be really neat. Especially for someone who does system administration, who needs to somehow prioritize various distractions.
However, I went to logitech's site and discovered the following:
They don't provide (at least I can't find it) details on how to talk to the mouse to use the buttons/LEDs for input/output. You have to use their "SetPoint" software, which only works under Windows. And maybe it doesn't work the way you want it to.
So the mouse can't be used for other systems, and you can't program the mouse to work the way that you want it to work. Which is too bad.
Even if Logitech provided "open source" software, that wouldn't help folks who want to really use the hardware for neat things -- they need the technical specs that the "SetPoint" authors used to make the software work in the first place.
I hadn't heard that Goldy refused to play by the rules from the Google founders. The rules were typical Google: no backroom deals that favor big institutional investors over smaller investors.
But Goldy wanted to get some easy money, they got caught and shut out of the deal. That makes my night. If you've dealt with bankers (esp. "New York" bankers), you'll know why.
Here's a nice article on this.
Perhaps this also explains the "Google will fail" articles that appeared before the IPO; the powers-that-be were peeved that Google did the IPO their way, and wanted it to fail.
"Being from Singapore myself I can say that Singapore never has been free - it makes a superficial attempt at looking like a democracy, but thats just to appease outsiders. Things like other political parties aren't legal... and people have been known to disappear if they hold the wrong views..."
Oh -- I guess I can't really call you an anonymous "COWARD" then, can I.
The unclear limits in Singapore would lead a lot of people to kepe their mouth shut and head down, and just hope for the best -- because you never know when you might get in trouble.
As Solszenitsyn mentions in his books on the gulags, the unclear boundaries of what was OK or not OK under the Bolsheviks led to people greatly restricting what they did, lest they get noticed and punished.
The fact that the big hits lose sales due to P2P is bad for some labels, and not for others.
E.g. Sony has a lot of big-name hits. So P2P == evil.
Koch Records has a lot of smaller-selling indies. P2P != evil.
However, I have a deep suspicion that RIAA is run by the likes of SONY, and not the ones like Koch.
Also, musicians are keenly aware of the differences: to get on Koch, you pretty much have to have your album finished and mixed. They produce and distribute it, and give you a big percentage. Other ones front tons of money for production and advertising, and give back a smaller percentage -- and they are the ones that stand to lose the most from P2P.
The most interesting thing in all of music these days are mixtapes and mashups. They are both illegal to sell -- no copyrights are cleared, so you'll hear samples, beats and so on from entirely different groups. You can now buy them over the web, or download them from P2P.
It looks like there were some ethical violations -- where the current ethical system means no possibility of coercion (e.g. no eggs from within the team) and no payment for eggs.
Here is something on the ethics of donations (from some free market fans).
One thing seems obvious: if they'd had been able to easily buy eggs, it wouldn't have been a hassle: they'd never have gotten eggs from staff, and the problem would have been solved. The lack of trading in eggs prevented these guys from doing the research and complying with the ethical restrictions.
Here's a nice piece from the sadly discredited NY Times author, Martin Finkel (he lied a story and got fired), talking about a Kidney market in pre-GWII Iraq.
Well, I'd bet that "Kylie Kylie" (if that is her real name -- just kidding) will be moving from Kazaa, very, very soon.
They've just ruined everything; she (or maybe he) will be moving to some other channel before long.
This is one interesting aspect of doing what the RIAA says: they want you to block just about everything (the greatest amount of stuff that might possibly infringe), and when that conflicts with the goals of legit users, they'll leave (along with the bad guys).
That's what I don't get about this settlement; it seems that Kazaa just killed themselves.
So they started out in Europe, and only moved to Australia/Vanuatu because of RIAA pressure. Why don't they just sell the assets to a Vanuatu company and move the whole thing offshore?
Are the new guys, operating out of Australia/Vanuatu, somehow more legit than the guys who ran it before?
I thought the Kazaa guys were the sort to do "anything to win", including fairly Talmudic stuff like what they've already done (splitting the ads from the network itself, so that they can claim that they aren't really able to know about or stop infringing).
Google's selling of the box may open them up to problems they wouldn't otherwise have.
E.g. supposedly the appliance is derived from their main codebase. So if you get a box and figure out some exploits, perhaps you've figured out how to exploit the thousands of machines that Google uses to crawl.
It is a bit like Cisco fiasco recently: they give a smart guy a box, he can find some problems (and get in trouble at Black Hat) -- but if he finds flaws he can exploit thousands of boxes out there.
On the other hand, if Cisco didn't give you your own box to poke and prod, you might never discover the flaws in the boxes out there in the universe (before getting caught) -- it would just take too long, esp. if the bug was timing dependent. Same for Google -- the selling of the appliance, for what little money it brings in, reveals info to bad guys. A risk-averse shop might forgo that income completely.
Cary is right. This stuff was out there, working (in a broken, insecure) way for about 2 years. Windows has been out there, working (in an somewhat insecure way) for longer. The same for sshd and a bunch of other programs.
Where were the security experts who help to protect the millions of windows machines?
Well, at first I was figuring they somehow were asleep at the switch, but then I thought -- OK, if they run OpenBSD, OSX or Linux, perhaps they just didn't notice that there was a giant rootkit running on their machine.
If I was a security researcher who runs windows on my desktop, I'd be thinking, "back to the drawing boards."
And I guess this is a good reason to run some freaky os like Zeta -- the rootkit just isn't going to work, unless you are running some sort of emulation software to emulate a PC.
You think X10 ads are bad? How about those horrific porn banners. Warning: link contains some awful porn banners, with cynical comments like:
Yes! Yes! Porn for the whole goddamn family! Porn for mommy, porn for daddy, even porn for little Sally and little Billy. The sad thing is, even this site says you must be over 18 to enter. If it wasn't for this little bit of false advertising, this would be the greatest porn ad ever.
This is awful. What kind of inhuman slime continues to have sex with a girl even after she goes into epileptic shock? Truly one of the more sickening fetishes I've encountered. If you play music while watching this banner, her twitching almost seems to be rhythmic.
I love how he's crossing his arms, effectively communicating just how smug he is over his new endowment. But I somehow doubt that's "100% Natural". And no girl is going to let me get within 100 feet of her with that thing. Plus, shopping for pants is hard enough as it is.
Bill must really think videogames are super-important; they keep losing billions, but Microsoft just keeps on going back for more punishment.
It seems so odd that they'd use their monopoly on desktop productivity software to try to build a videogame empire: history says that those get swept away pretty easily as soon as someone out-innovates you and comes out with a super-console. You can't build insurmountable walls (like in productivity software) to hold back your competition indefinitely, because gamers just get rid of their old gear.
Furthermore, there are always new gamers, and they have no loyalty to your old games -- there's always new boys growing up who need a video game. If you can't keep them happy, Sony/Nintendo/Sega will.
Wouldn't MicroSoft get a better return on investment from just making more software that works well with Windows? Even cellphones and IM/email devices would seem to have more in common with their natural advantages in productivity software.
Actually, there are those out there who use something other than Mac/Windows -- and they'd probably need an openly sourced application in order to get anything to work.
Just providing an Apple/MS version is like having protestant/Catholic on a government form, but not Hindu, Satanist, Islam, animist, Buddhist, Ismaili -- due to the difficulty of enumerating what religion a person might claim, you have to provide an "other", otherwise the "other" folks will be peeved.
NIC CARD!
f eedId=online-news_rss20
s /2005/10/04/robotic_vacuum_maker_bu_team_up_on_ant isniper_device/
Exactly -- the kid of dumbass who studies coffee (and its effects on the heart), yet makes the statement that "robusta" has a robust flavor, is the type of dumbass to say "NIC Card".
I actually think hackers are more likely to find these mistakes awful; they correspond to type errors in a programming language -- and you can't have those.
The Army just came up with a gun, and they backronymed it into "PHASR" --- you know, like on Star Trek? Get it? Really fucking funny, right? See here: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8275&
Well, here's their acronym:
"Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response" == PHASR,
and the official usage will be something like, "PHASR rifle" -- which makes sense.
PHASR performs the role of a goddamned adjective, even though "phaser", in common use, is a noun.
That's so retarded!
Yet the idiots who named it clearly intended for it to be called "PHASR", not "PHASR rifle", or "PHASR sniper rifle."
So that means that if the jarheads use it semantically correct ("PHASR rifle") they'll sound like idiots saying "NIC card" -- but if they just say something like, "I blasted him with my PHASR!", you'll be thinking, "How did you blast him with your 'stimulation response'?" and then, "well, was that a 'PHASR rifle/pistol/dildo that you blasted him with?" PHASR is just an adjective, right?
There's an increasing trend for this sort of retarded name-i-fyin':
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/article
"REDOWL"? Why not just call it a "FUCKTARD", and come up with a backronym for that?
Whoever wrote "So decaffeinated brands usually use a bean that has a more robust flavor," to explain why they use robusta (the cheapest swill, much cheaper than Arabica), probably also says:
"HIV virus"
and my alltime favorite:
"PIN number"
Actually, it is due to the propensity for acronyms (more often, backronyms) to trip up idiots like this guy that I am officially against acronyms.
I thought satellite radio and its fees were egregious too. So I got my partner one. She really loves it; after a few days of that, she entirely stopped listening to normal radio.
The key thing is, no commercials, and perfect audio quality (except when there are dropouts). That and more than a hundred channels (although most listen to only 5 or so).
It makes it an entirely different thing from radio. If you are used to having the satellite version in the car, and for whatever reason you forget it, and use normal radio, you feel like a total idiot, and the normal radio, with its ads and bad reception, drives you nuts.
So if you like radio, it is probably worth it. If you don't really like radio, just wait until the costs come down more.
This sounds a lot like satellite radio, except people will already have the receivers. A big downside with the satellite radios is that you have to buy the receiver. They are now sold at a loss, but you still need to "commit" to a receiver, and, because the receivers are not interchangeable, to a service.
I think that, plus the novel nature of satellite radio, explains why the satellite guys struggle.
I would prefer a service like this to an iPod: if you get satellite radio (or perhaps this new service), you get a lot more variety. I can imagine that if I had an iPod, I'd buy a bunch of songs and then not know what to get. Experimentation would be costly, and disappointment very irritating. Satellite radio has no per-song fee.
Also, with satellite radio, you get things like mixtapes, mashups and other stuff that hasn't been "published" -- no RIAA involved, just BMI, ASCAP, etc. With iPod, you snuggle up close to the RIAA posse.
I can imagine that if the cell company does this right, they could get millions of subscribers, very quickly. Perhaps that will force XM and Sirius to merge, because they will be looking pretty sorry once you can listen to cellular-radio music in your car.
Isn't the company to blame the one that made the rootkit for Sony? It is some OEM stuff.
I can imagine Sony doens't know much about this at all. Sure, they are the ones legally responsible -- but ultimately, they'll just sue the rootkit makers if this ever costs them a dime (unless they indemnified the other guys).