OK...what's a good way to find an accountant? Just opening the phonebook at taking a random guess gives me the heebie jeebies....
Ask people that you know who have complicated tax issues. For professional services, word of mouth is generally the best thing going. There are also accountant recommendation services at the chamber of commerce and other areas, which usually recommend their own members.
The East Bay Express has a good article written by someone that just explored the Sims Online for a few weeks, basically on assignment. She details some of the scams that are floating around and the problems in the game from a newbie perspective. It's a good read.
CNN expects the war will cost $30 nillion to prepare for, according to the Orange County Register. The Washington Times reports that CNN will lose $10 million on the first day and $6 million thereafter for every single day commercial free. CNN can't afford to be cheap, as Rupert Murdoch has agreed to fund Fox News as much as possible in order to decimate CNN.
I think the intention of the original poster's question was related to bandwidth used rather than absolute content size. I'm not surprised by the 1.5% quoted in the article. However, the 1.5% figure offers no insight into the popularity of porn sites vs. other content.
While I don't have actual values for the Web (which would be hard to get), here are some statistics from an ISP that runs a newsgroup server. It's a bit skewed because they don't carry the high bandwidth stuff like movies, warez, or even mp3s, but it's worth a shot.
Of course, the major Usenet providers, like EasyNews, Giganews, and RemarQ would never publish these statistics, because they would expose themselves for what they are, and why people pay for them. It certainly isn't for the text files or the discussion, that's for sure.
Here's an article from ZDNet that answers this question. It dates from 1999, but is still likely to be accurate, as the commercial web has grown leaps and bounds (along with the porn industry) since then.
Of course, this still doesn't include Usenet, P2P (which in 1999 was basically Napster), or anything like that. Usenet should be easy to calculate through file sizes and headers if you have access to an NNTP server, and I would guess that the majority of traffic on Usenet (by volume) consists of movies, CD images, and TV shows, not porn.
According to a study conducted by Dr. Steve Lawrence and Dr. C. Lee Giles for the NEC Research Institute, the Web contains about 800 million pages encompassing about 15 terabytes of data and about 180 million images. Contrary to popular opinion that the Web's a haven for porn, though, the study found that only 1.5 percent of Web sites contain pornographic content.
While the binary Usenet certainly is mostly porn and warez, I would venture that the rest of the net isn't warez, in the sense of copyright-infringing distribution of software. Unless you count copyright-infringing music warez, of course.
There's a lot of money to be made in the IM to SMS arena. Companies like Verizon Wireless make tons of money off SMS. At 10 cents per text message, and 2 cents per incoming message, money can go down the drain very quickly. Also, since the average IM message is much shorter than the average SMS message, the amount of money that come in increases. If AOL can promote the use of its servers as means of passing SMS's through between carriers (as inter-carrier SMS is still not ready for prime time in my area), and use it as a means of communication to the home, they can rake in the money. But first they need to negotiate for a cut of the money first. I doubt they are getting a cut of the money from the wireless providers now, simply because the providers are treating AIM messages the same as SMS. But when the AOL domination of the SMS to computer IM market takes hold, I wouldn't be surprised to see them lobby for a cut of the proceeds.
Blame the California state legislature of 2000, then. (That is, if you lived in California.)
In order to save their political butts, the redistricting process ensures single party rule in most districts until the election of 2012. Thus, most elections for state assembly, senate, and US Congress are already decided by March, when the primary rolls around. This can't possibly be good for democracy.
Rep. Berman May Not Revive Internet Piracy Bill By Jon Healey, Times Staff Writer
Rep. Howard L. Berman said he may abandon his controversial proposal to help Hollywood battle Internet piracy, in part because of complaints from an unexpected source: Hollywood.
Berman (D-Van Nuys) introduced a bill in July to give movie studios, record companies and other copyright holders limited immunity from lawsuits if they used technology to block piracy on file-sharing networks such as Kazaa or Gnutella. The immunity would not have applied to tactics that damaged users' computers or legitimate file-sharing activities.
The measure, which died when Congress adjourned last year, drew heavy flak from consumer advocates who said it would encourage copyright owners to become network-snarling vigilantes. Nevertheless, Berman was widely expected to try again this year with a revised version of the bill.
This week, however, Berman said he may not revive the measure. For one thing, copyright holders may not need extra protection to combat file-sharing piracy, he said. And though Berman wasn't deterred by complaints from consumer advocates, the concerns voiced by Hollywood studios -- among the biggest beneficiaries of the bill, given their active anti-piracy efforts online -- suggested that Berman was climbing out on a limb by himself.
In particular, Hollywood's enthusiasm for the bill was dimmed by Berman's insistence on imposing new liabilities on copyright holders that go too far in attacking pirates. "And if they're not for it," Berman asked, "where am I going?"
His comments came in an interview at a conference on copyrights and consumer rights at Intel Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif. "It still may be worth doing," Berman said of the proposal, "but realistically, a bill like this isn't going to zip through Congress."
Rich Taylor, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Assn. of America, said "the essence of the legislation makes all the sense in the world." However, some MPAA members were concerned about the new liabilities, and some doubted the need for the bill, he said.
"There were no self-help actions being taken in violation of state or federal laws," Taylor said.
There is a system at NextBus that has real time transit information, including java apps of buses and trains on a map, that show where and when the next bus or train will show up.
Umm, in most states, convicted felons lose the right to vote permanently.
Umm, that's not true. While most states restrict the right of the vote to those in prison or on parole, few states restrict voting rights to convicted felons. Here's a list from the National Council of State Legislatures. Only Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wyoming have the restrictive voting rules that prohibit felons from voting without some sort of pardon from the governor or parole body.
This was filed on the AP wire (and shown on the Washington Post's web site) just 32 minutes before the shuttle came down. Kind of eerie when you look at what David Brown said.
--
Columbia Streaks Toward Florida Landing
By Marcia Dunn
AP Aerospace Writer
Saturday, February 1, 2003; 8:28 AM
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- With security tighter than usual, space shuttle Columbia streaked toward a Florida touchdown Saturday to end a successful 16-day scientific research mission that included the first Israeli astronaut.
The early morning fog burned off as the sun rose, and Mission Control gave the seven astronauts the go-ahead to come home on time. "I guess you've been wondering, but you are 'go' for the deorbit burn," Mission Control radioed at practically the last minute.
Ilan Ramon, a colonel in Israel's air force and former fighter pilot, became the first man from his country to fly in space, and his presence resulted in an increase in security, not only for Columbia's Jan. 16 launch, but also for its landing. Space agency officials feared his presence might make the shuttle more of a terrorist target.
"We've taken all reasonable measures, and all of our landings so far since 9- 11 have gone perfectly," said Lt. Col. Michael Rein, an Air Force spokesman.
Columbia's crew - Ramon and six Americans - completed all of their 80-plus experiments in orbit. They studied ant, bee and spider behavior in weightlessness as well as changes in flames and flower scents, and took measurements of atmospheric dust with a pair of Israeli cameras.
The 13 lab rats on board - part of a brain and heart study - had to face the guillotine following the flight so researchers could see up-close the effects of so much time in weightlessness. The insects and other animals had a brighter, longer future: the student experimenters were going to get them back and many of the youngsters planned to keep them, almost like pets.
All of the scientific objectives were accomplished during the round-the-clock laboratory mission, and some of the work may be continued aboard the international space station, researchers said. The only problem of note was a pair of malfunctioning dehumidifiers, which temporarily raised temperatures inside the laboratory to the low 80s, 10 degrees higher than desired.
Some of Columbia's crew members didn't want their time in space to end.
"Do we really have to come back?" astronaut David Brown jokingly asked Mission Control before the ride home.
NASA's next shuttle flight, a space station construction mission, is scheduled for March. The next time Columbia flies will be in November, when it carries into orbit educator-astronaut Barbara Morgan, who was the backup for Challenger crew member Christa McAuliffe in 1986.
They said on CNN that ejector seats were built for the original shuttles, where the astronauts would just punch through the Shuttle. They were only for the two co-pilots, though, and with seven people, that raises obvious fairness issues.
In Usenet more then most other places, the ability to close down only infringing uses seems evident by requiring news services to not carry specified groups. Curious, wouldn't you say?
That is interesting. Some, like the ALS groups, have been shut down, and the MPAA does use DMCA to try to get news providers to shut down posters of movies in the movies groups. The main issue is that there are non-infringing posts in each newsgroup, and that the newsgroups themselves do not designate that infringing material is present. Also, it doesn't seem like some folks, like the ones at Playboy, seem to care about the content in the newsgroups with their names. I don't know why.
Usenet is distributed and has non-infringing uses. Indeed, the vast majority of newsgroups are non-infringing. Sure, there was the ALS Scan vs. RemarQ case, but that was relatively minor, and the MP3 newsgroups do have non-infringing material, such as bootlegs from bands that have designating that their live performances can be shared. This is substantially more material on a percentage basis than on Kazaa.
Here's a better column about the whole debate from the San Francisco Chronicle. Basically, you have a bunch of uptight people over there, over a technology that hasn't even been used by the public yet. Fortunately, other cities, like Sacramento, are waiting to see whether there are any problems caused first, before acting.
All assignments must reflect an individual effort, and must be completed "from scratch." It is a violation of the Honor Code to copy or derive solutions from text books, internet resources, or previous instances of this course unless specifically instructed to do so in assignment directions. When instructed to do so, all material not created by you and its source must be clearly identified. Copying solutions from other students, including those who previous took the course, is prohibited. A good guideline is that you must be able to explain and/or reproduce anything that you submit for any assignment.
Also take the following into consideration
Academic misconduct is taken very seriously in this class. We will analyze what you turn in against other students in the current semester as well as previous semesters. You are required to do your own work without looking at other students code no matter what the source is. You are also expected and required to report any incidents of academic misconduct to the course instructor or to the Dean of Students responsible for Academic Misconduct. Failure to do so is in itself Academic Misconduct.
You are responsible for turning in assignments on time. This includes allowing for unforeseen circumstances. You are also responsible for insuring that what you turned in is
what you meant to turn in. WebWork includes a getback feature: This allows you to retrieve exactly what you submitted and insure that it works.
Tests and examinations must be taken at the scheduled date and time. Please do not ask for special treatment because you (or your parents) have purchased non-refundable
airline tickets. The safe time to travel is after finals week. The finals schedule published at the beginning of the semester is TENTATIVE. The official schedule gets published very late in the semester.
If you have any personal problems (family/illness/etc.) please go to the Dean of Student's (Gail DiSabatino) office located in the Student Services Building (Flag Building)
next to the Student Center. She is equipped and authorized to verify the problems and she will issue a note to all your instructors making them aware of the problem and requesting whatever extension, etc. is necessary.
The.announce newsgroup should be read every day. Official announcements about course matters will be posted there. The general course newsgroup is for posting
technical questions about assignments, tests etc. Complaints, questions about your personal problems, etc. should be discussed with your instructor in person or via email.
See the newsgroup ucb.net.discussion for more information and some discussion about the situation from people in the know. I think they just don't want to bore you with the ugly details.
Indeed, only 51%, as of the end of 2000, had payphones, according to Gartner Dataquest, and of those, only 40% used them regularly.
Does not honor X-No-Archive outside of header
on
Google Acquires Deja
·
· Score: 1
Well, apparently Google never processed the X-No-Archive outside of the header, for those newbies and/or clueless who never bothered with adding headers INSIDE the header portion of the message. Go to here and scroll down. Some people on news.groups want to sue them for violating the DMCA. At least there's a nice distributed way for distributing DeCSS.
Slashdot Mirror
OK...what's a good way to find an accountant? Just opening the phonebook at taking a random guess gives me the heebie jeebies....
Ask people that you know who have complicated tax issues. For professional services, word of mouth is generally the best thing going. There are also accountant recommendation services at the chamber of commerce and other areas, which usually recommend their own members.
The East Bay Express has a good article written by someone that just explored the Sims Online for a few weeks, basically on assignment. She details some of the scams that are floating around and the problems in the game from a newbie perspective. It's a good read.
CNN expects the war will cost $30 nillion to prepare for, according to the Orange County Register. The Washington Times reports that CNN will lose $10 million on the first day and $6 million thereafter for every single day commercial free. CNN can't afford to be cheap, as Rupert Murdoch has agreed to fund Fox News as much as possible in order to decimate CNN.
Well, no. I have 168 hours a week. Your mileage may vary.
Considering that these are allegedly "key influence" bloggers, I have serious doubts for the future of society.
While I don't have actual values for the Web (which would be hard to get), here are some statistics from an ISP that runs a newsgroup server. It's a bit skewed because they don't carry the high bandwidth stuff like movies, warez, or even mp3s, but it's worth a shot.
Of course, the major Usenet providers, like EasyNews, Giganews, and RemarQ would never publish these statistics, because they would expose themselves for what they are, and why people pay for them. It certainly isn't for the text files or the discussion, that's for sure.
Here's an article from ZDNet that answers this question. It dates from 1999, but is still likely to be accurate, as the commercial web has grown leaps and bounds (along with the porn industry) since then.
Of course, this still doesn't include Usenet, P2P (which in 1999 was basically Napster), or anything like that. Usenet should be easy to calculate through file sizes and headers if you have access to an NNTP server, and I would guess that the majority of traffic on Usenet (by volume) consists of movies, CD images, and TV shows, not porn.
According to a study conducted by Dr. Steve Lawrence and Dr. C. Lee Giles for the NEC Research Institute, the Web contains about 800 million pages encompassing about 15 terabytes of data and about 180 million images. Contrary to popular opinion that the Web's a haven for porn, though, the study found that only 1.5 percent of Web sites contain pornographic content.
While the binary Usenet certainly is mostly porn and warez, I would venture that the rest of the net isn't warez, in the sense of copyright-infringing distribution of software. Unless you count copyright-infringing music warez, of course.
There's a lot of money to be made in the IM to SMS arena. Companies like Verizon Wireless make tons of money off SMS. At 10 cents per text message, and 2 cents per incoming message, money can go down the drain very quickly. Also, since the average IM message is much shorter than the average SMS message, the amount of money that come in increases. If AOL can promote the use of its servers as means of passing SMS's through between carriers (as inter-carrier SMS is still not ready for prime time in my area), and use it as a means of communication to the home, they can rake in the money. But first they need to negotiate for a cut of the money first. I doubt they are getting a cut of the money from the wireless providers now, simply because the providers are treating AIM messages the same as SMS. But when the AOL domination of the SMS to computer IM market takes hold, I wouldn't be surprised to see them lobby for a cut of the proceeds.
Yeah, well, Michael Savage is BS. Just look at some of the racist and absolutely stupid things he's said in the past.
Blame the California state legislature of 2000, then. (That is, if you lived in California.)
In order to save their political butts, the redistricting process ensures single party rule in most districts until the election of 2012. Thus, most elections for state assembly, senate, and US Congress are already decided by March, when the primary rolls around. This can't possibly be good for democracy.
Username/password laexaminer/laexaminer.
Or I could just post the whole thing.
Rep. Berman May Not Revive Internet Piracy Bill
By Jon Healey, Times Staff Writer
Rep. Howard L. Berman said he may abandon his controversial proposal to help Hollywood battle Internet piracy, in part because of complaints from an unexpected source: Hollywood.
Berman (D-Van Nuys) introduced a bill in July to give movie studios, record companies and other copyright holders limited immunity from lawsuits if they used technology to block piracy on file-sharing networks such as Kazaa or Gnutella. The immunity would not have applied to tactics that damaged users' computers or legitimate file-sharing activities.
The measure, which died when Congress adjourned last year, drew heavy flak from consumer advocates who said it would encourage copyright owners to become network-snarling vigilantes. Nevertheless, Berman was widely expected to try again this year with a revised version of the bill.
This week, however, Berman said he may not revive the measure. For one thing, copyright holders may not need extra protection to combat file-sharing piracy, he said. And though Berman wasn't deterred by complaints from consumer advocates, the concerns voiced by Hollywood studios -- among the biggest beneficiaries of the bill, given their active anti-piracy efforts online -- suggested that Berman was climbing out on a limb by himself.
In particular, Hollywood's enthusiasm for the bill was dimmed by Berman's insistence on imposing new liabilities on copyright holders that go too far in attacking pirates. "And if they're not for it," Berman asked, "where am I going?"
His comments came in an interview at a conference on copyrights and consumer rights at Intel Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif. "It still may be worth doing," Berman said of the proposal, "but realistically, a bill like this isn't going to zip through Congress."
Rich Taylor, a spokesman for the Motion Picture Assn. of America, said "the essence of the legislation makes all the sense in the world." However, some MPAA members were concerned about the new liabilities, and some doubted the need for the bill, he said.
"There were no self-help actions being taken in violation of state or federal laws," Taylor said.
For profit institutions already have .edu domains. Just look at DeVry and ITT Tech.
There is a system at NextBus that has real time transit information, including java apps of buses and trains on a map, that show where and when the next bus or train will show up.
Umm, that's not true. While most states restrict the right of the vote to those in prison or on parole, few states restrict voting rights to convicted felons. Here's a list from the National Council of State Legislatures. Only Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wyoming have the restrictive voting rules that prohibit felons from voting without some sort of pardon from the governor or parole body.
This was filed on the AP wire (and shown on the Washington Post's web site) just 32 minutes before the shuttle came down. Kind of eerie when you look at what David Brown said. -- Columbia Streaks Toward Florida Landing By Marcia Dunn AP Aerospace Writer Saturday, February 1, 2003; 8:28 AM CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- With security tighter than usual, space shuttle Columbia streaked toward a Florida touchdown Saturday to end a successful 16-day scientific research mission that included the first Israeli astronaut. The early morning fog burned off as the sun rose, and Mission Control gave the seven astronauts the go-ahead to come home on time. "I guess you've been wondering, but you are 'go' for the deorbit burn," Mission Control radioed at practically the last minute. Ilan Ramon, a colonel in Israel's air force and former fighter pilot, became the first man from his country to fly in space, and his presence resulted in an increase in security, not only for Columbia's Jan. 16 launch, but also for its landing. Space agency officials feared his presence might make the shuttle more of a terrorist target. "We've taken all reasonable measures, and all of our landings so far since 9- 11 have gone perfectly," said Lt. Col. Michael Rein, an Air Force spokesman. Columbia's crew - Ramon and six Americans - completed all of their 80-plus experiments in orbit. They studied ant, bee and spider behavior in weightlessness as well as changes in flames and flower scents, and took measurements of atmospheric dust with a pair of Israeli cameras. The 13 lab rats on board - part of a brain and heart study - had to face the guillotine following the flight so researchers could see up-close the effects of so much time in weightlessness. The insects and other animals had a brighter, longer future: the student experimenters were going to get them back and many of the youngsters planned to keep them, almost like pets. All of the scientific objectives were accomplished during the round-the-clock laboratory mission, and some of the work may be continued aboard the international space station, researchers said. The only problem of note was a pair of malfunctioning dehumidifiers, which temporarily raised temperatures inside the laboratory to the low 80s, 10 degrees higher than desired. Some of Columbia's crew members didn't want their time in space to end. "Do we really have to come back?" astronaut David Brown jokingly asked Mission Control before the ride home. NASA's next shuttle flight, a space station construction mission, is scheduled for March. The next time Columbia flies will be in November, when it carries into orbit educator-astronaut Barbara Morgan, who was the backup for Challenger crew member Christa McAuliffe in 1986.
They said on CNN that ejector seats were built for the original shuttles, where the astronauts would just punch through the Shuttle. They were only for the two co-pilots, though, and with seven people, that raises obvious fairness issues.
That is interesting. Some, like the ALS groups, have been shut down, and the MPAA does use DMCA to try to get news providers to shut down posters of movies in the movies groups. The main issue is that there are non-infringing posts in each newsgroup, and that the newsgroups themselves do not designate that infringing material is present. Also, it doesn't seem like some folks, like the ones at Playboy, seem to care about the content in the newsgroups with their names. I don't know why.
Usenet is distributed and has non-infringing uses. Indeed, the vast majority of newsgroups are non-infringing. Sure, there was the ALS Scan vs. RemarQ case, but that was relatively minor, and the MP3 newsgroups do have non-infringing material, such as bootlegs from bands that have designating that their live performances can be shared. This is substantially more material on a percentage basis than on Kazaa.
Here's a better column about the whole debate from the San Francisco Chronicle. Basically, you have a bunch of uptight people over there, over a technology that hasn't even been used by the public yet. Fortunately, other cities, like Sacramento, are waiting to see whether there are any problems caused first, before acting.
Honor Code
All assignments must reflect an individual effort, and must be completed "from scratch." It is a violation of the Honor Code to copy or derive solutions from text books, internet resources, or previous instances of this course unless specifically instructed to do so in assignment directions. When instructed to do so, all material not created by you and its source must be clearly identified. Copying solutions from other students, including those who previous took the course, is prohibited. A good guideline is that you must be able to explain and/or reproduce anything that you submit for any assignment.
Also take the following into consideration
Academic misconduct is taken very seriously in this class. We will analyze what you turn in against other students in the current semester as well as previous semesters. You are required to do your own work without looking at other students code no matter what the source is. You are also expected and required to report any incidents of academic misconduct to the course instructor or to the Dean of Students responsible for Academic Misconduct. Failure to do so is in itself Academic Misconduct.
You are responsible for turning in assignments on time. This includes allowing for unforeseen circumstances. You are also responsible for insuring that what you turned in is what you meant to turn in. WebWork includes a getback feature: This allows you to retrieve exactly what you submitted and insure that it works.
Tests and examinations must be taken at the scheduled date and time. Please do not ask for special treatment because you (or your parents) have purchased non-refundable airline tickets. The safe time to travel is after finals week. The finals schedule published at the beginning of the semester is TENTATIVE. The official schedule gets published very late in the semester.
If you have any personal problems (family/illness/etc.) please go to the Dean of Student's (Gail DiSabatino) office located in the Student Services Building (Flag Building) next to the Student Center. She is equipped and authorized to verify the problems and she will issue a note to all your instructors making them aware of the problem and requesting whatever extension, etc. is necessary.
The .announce newsgroup should be read every day. Official announcements about course matters will be posted there. The general course newsgroup is for posting
technical questions about assignments, tests etc. Complaints, questions about your personal problems, etc. should be discussed with your instructor in person or via email.
See the newsgroup ucb.net.discussion for more information and some discussion about the situation from people in the know. I think they just don't want to bore you with the ugly details.
Indeed, only 51%, as of the end of 2000, had payphones, according to Gartner Dataquest, and of those, only 40% used them regularly.
Well, apparently Google never processed the X-No-Archive outside of the header, for those newbies and/or clueless who never bothered with adding headers INSIDE the header portion of the message. Go to here and scroll down. Some people on news.groups want to sue them for violating the DMCA. At least there's a nice distributed way for distributing DeCSS.
Here is some information about the technology they are using, from Carnegie Mellon University. (Sorry for not linking properly.)