It often makes more sense thinging about who I am in the context of family, work, and society.
But then, if society is an illogical, random, unreasonable conglomeration of nonsensical ideologies, beliefs and traditions.... what would that make me?!
Well, that's Steve Jobs can only afford turtle necks and a bi monthly shave, and Ballmer is a baby faced billionare with a veritable clothing departments worth of, slightly sweaty, suits.
Most likely, the provider. Especially if they advertise and sell their service virtually like a retail product, knowing full well that none of their customers read their contracts. If they know this, then they shouldn't be asking people to sign anything.
First, it ignores the possibility of the recipient creating a new account somewhere else.
Any AOL customer that does is essentially an extreme outlier.
Second, it claims an implicit contract which is not present.
That contract is present. Very, very, very much so.
It all goes back to what AOL actually is to the end customer. AOL isn't just their ISP. AOL, quite literally is the internet. For the vast majority of AOL's customers, there is no distinction between the concept of "The internet" and "AOL". To suggest that other ISPs exists, or that other email providers can be used, would be akin to suggesting a third dimension to residents of flatland.
AOL customers get an aol email account. To them, this is email, full stop. There is no other way to get email. What AOL does, is how email works. If AOL charge them $0.25 per email, they will pay and/or email less, as to their minds, there is no other way.
Now you could say; "Well AOL aren't to blame for their customer's being 'clueless lusers'!". But you see, that's where you'd be wrong.
AOL, as an ISP, as a company, has succeeded by promoting this false world view. It has become the number one ISP in America by actively and consciously perpetuating, both in the minds of existing and potential customers, that "AOL is the Internet".
It has engineering its software and systems to reinforce this idea into the heads of its customers, going so far as to provide an AOL browser for its customers to access both websites and email, and of course the AOL IM client. For the AOL user, the entire concept of any electronic communications over IP is inextricably linked to AOL.
And that's why this statement: Third, there's no implicit contract whatsoever with the sender -- and it is the sender who's complaining here, not the recipient.
Is not entirely correct. When you send an email to an aol address, you know, ninty nine times out of one hundred, that the user on the other end is not just using AOL as an ISP. They are using AOL as a kind of internet care worker. They expect AOL to help them where they cannot help themselves, i.e. help them use email and browse the web.
It's rather like the relationship between a senile, invalid senior citizen and their health care workers. Their is a large element of essentially blind trust on the part of the AOL users towards AOL. They implicitly assume your emails will get through because AOL is "good", and will not even question if they do not arrive, and will also hesitate to complain if they suspect treachery for fear of being "cut off".
AOL have consciously and actively brought about this situation. The implicit relationship is real, and so too is the requirement that AOL act in good faith to their online invalids. Hence, the plan to tax email is a breach of good faith, and an clear example of AOL duplicitously taking advantage of people they have actively decieved.
They only give you 100MB of storage space. If you've alrady got hosting that provides PHP, there's little point going to all that trouble just to save 100MB of space, space your current host can provide cheaply anyway.
If you want an example of something they rejected to bring you a duped article, here's one I submitted this morning that some of you may or may not care about:
OK. Firstly, the article isn't a dupe. It's a link to a review of a service mentioned in a previous dupe. Note the subtle difference.
And secondly, you have no grounds for complaint. The Slashdot Random Story Submission Selection System (SRSSSS), is completely unbiased. Not even quality submissions are granted preference!
I may be ignorant on this subject, but considering the speeds of non-overclocked hardware, is there really a human noticable difference when you overclock your hardware compared to if you don't?
You may as well ask if "GoFaster" Stripes increase vehicle speed.
You assume general joe average gives a danm about security when he transmits pictures from mobile to mobile, or presses the buttons on his BT remote control.
Our RF exposure is only marginally greater when close to devices such as WiFi hotspots because of the immense amount of background EMI from TV and Radio broadcasts, satellites, CB and business radios, power transformers and a million other things.
Not least of which is the Sun; Earth's number one source of electromagnetic waves in every frequency. What's important here is that unlike solar radiation, which is largely random noise, man made EM radiation is generally ordered and harmonic. Overwhelmingly, most RF signals come from time harmonic sources.
Our brains and bodies are chaotic systems. Ordered signals are bad for them. Apparently epilepsy is a sudden bought of order in the brain. It's entirely possible that some people, or in deed all people to a degree, are sensitive to any resonances in their body with time harmonic signals.
Engineers sometimes scoff that EM radiation is at such a low level that it cannot harm anyone. But engineers very often make the mistake of not accounting for resonance
My solution to this was a little different -- implement a vertical "tree" pane, like Google Groups. To my mind this is clearly the best forum user interface in existance -- it's so simple and intuitive that frankly, I'm baffled why I don't see it anywhere else.
Because the Google Groups interface sucks. Seriously. It's the worst thing to come out of Google in quite some time. Not even AJAX can save it.
We would all be better off if there was simply a vaccine for viral diseases, instead of drugs which have been proven to stimulate the evolution of resistant strains. Vaccines on the other hand have been proven to not only reduce the incidence of disease, but also virtually completely eradicate them, e.g. smallpox. Vaccines have the advantage of being able to adapt along with the evolving virus. Drugs do not.
I await the day when we get enough strict constructionists on the Supreme Court to reverse their previous bad decisions, sweeping away McCain Fiengold and most other 'Campaign Finance Laws' that aren't limited to mandatory disclosure requirements. And even those have to go eventually...
Seriously, it was a pretty good game that could have used more story and much better graphics
Gods!!! What the hell is wrong with you people?! Is there no satisfying you?!
Fable is probably one of the best looking games on the Xbox. It's artisic design alone gives it significant merit.
It's comments like this that leads to developers throwing away resources at useless graphical improvements when they could be improving the actual game instead of pandering to these impossible demands.
As a fan since the 70s, I never thought about this until one of my elementary students pointed it out - if the eagles could snatch the heroes off the top of Mt. Doom after all this noise, why couldn't they have simply sent the eagles to drop in the ring?
Don't get me wrong, I love the films, but... dwarf tossing? Seriously, dude!
Despite their lack of canonicity, the Pratchett-esque influences were a clever addition to the movie. They also helped move the rather stoic and grim character of Gimli towards the more gregarious dwarven attitude that was seen in The Hobbit.
I have heard rumors that one of the reasons that Vista was not ready, was Microsoft's attempt to use "dot net", basically an virtual-machine based (interpreted) language similar in many aspects to Java, but the resulting code was huge, slow, and simply put - useless. Do these rumors have any basis?
Probably not..NET code is compiled to native code, and any slowdown to addtional language features could just as easily be applied to something like java or perl.
Of course this assumes that the microsoft engineers working on the.NET runtime are competant.
For the love of gods, someone please tell me that Fedora have fixed the long standing disaster that is yum and up2date. Is it so much to ask that the default setup is changed to apt? I'm tired of Yum's idosycracies. It's gotten better, but as of 2.3.2, yum has no local cache search, no download resuming, and still bombs out if it can't contact a respositiory.
Naturally of course, a yum "dist-upgrade" type feature is likely never going to happen, despite the fact that Fedora is now in five CDs.
Then I realise that I'm confused again, and it wasn't Steve Jobs at all...
No! It's wasn't your fault. Jobs deliberately, deceptively, decieved you. All along his goal was to usurp Apple Corps rightful place as master of the recording industry by insidiously starting up a "computer" company, with the sole intention of eventually moving into the music industry.
Clearly the owners of Apple Corps, whose ancestors worked so hard so that they might profit, are long overdue for a modest sum from the duplicitous Jobs & Co. 70% or perhaps only 60% of Apples profits of the last twenty years, adjusted for interest of course, is more than fair for the danamge to reputatation, earnings and the slur on the memories of poor dead John Lennon that the owners of Apple Corps have had to endure.
How is THAT supposed to NOT anti-attract a newbie?
Apparently by forcing the graphics card companies to open source their drivers, much in the same way that the peace protesters prevented the war in Iraq....
Slashdot Mirror
It often makes more sense thinging about who I am in the context of family, work, and society.
But then, if society is an illogical, random, unreasonable conglomeration of nonsensical ideologies, beliefs and traditions.... what would that make me?!
Well, that's Steve Jobs can only afford turtle necks and a bi monthly shave, and Ballmer is a baby faced billionare with a veritable clothing departments worth of, slightly sweaty, suits.
If you didn't read it...whose fault is that?
Most likely, the provider. Especially if they advertise and sell their service virtually like a retail product, knowing full well that none of their customers read their contracts. If they know this, then they shouldn't be asking people to sign anything.
First, it ignores the possibility of the recipient creating a new account somewhere else.
Any AOL customer that does is essentially an extreme outlier.
Second, it claims an implicit contract which is not present.
That contract is present. Very, very, very much so.
It all goes back to what AOL actually is to the end customer. AOL isn't just their ISP. AOL, quite literally is the internet. For the vast majority of AOL's customers, there is no distinction between the concept of "The internet" and "AOL". To suggest that other ISPs exists, or that other email providers can be used, would be akin to suggesting a third dimension to residents of flatland.
AOL customers get an aol email account. To them, this is email, full stop. There is no other way to get email. What AOL does, is how email works. If AOL charge them $0.25 per email, they will pay and/or email less, as to their minds, there is no other way.
Now you could say; "Well AOL aren't to blame for their customer's being 'clueless lusers'!". But you see, that's where you'd be wrong.
AOL, as an ISP, as a company, has succeeded by promoting this false world view. It has become the number one ISP in America by actively and consciously perpetuating, both in the minds of existing and potential customers, that "AOL is the Internet".
It has engineering its software and systems to reinforce this idea into the heads of its customers, going so far as to provide an AOL browser for its customers to access both websites and email, and of course the AOL IM client. For the AOL user, the entire concept of any electronic communications over IP is inextricably linked to AOL.
And that's why this statement:
Third, there's no implicit contract whatsoever with the sender -- and it is the sender who's complaining here, not the recipient.
Is not entirely correct. When you send an email to an aol address, you know, ninty nine times out of one hundred, that the user on the other end is not just using AOL as an ISP. They are using AOL as a kind of internet care worker. They expect AOL to help them where they cannot help themselves, i.e. help them use email and browse the web.
It's rather like the relationship between a senile, invalid senior citizen and their health care workers. Their is a large element of essentially blind trust on the part of the AOL users towards AOL. They implicitly assume your emails will get through because AOL is "good", and will not even question if they do not arrive, and will also hesitate to complain if they suspect treachery for fear of being "cut off".
AOL have consciously and actively brought about this situation. The implicit relationship is real, and so too is the requirement that AOL act in good faith to their online invalids. Hence, the plan to tax email is a breach of good faith, and an clear example of AOL duplicitously taking advantage of people they have actively decieved.
They only give you 100MB of storage space. If you've alrady got hosting that provides PHP, there's little point going to all that trouble just to save 100MB of space, space your current host can provide cheaply anyway.
If you want an example of something they rejected to bring you a duped article, here's one I submitted this morning that some of you may or may not care about:
OK. Firstly, the article isn't a dupe. It's a link to a review of a service mentioned in a previous dupe. Note the subtle difference.
And secondly, you have no grounds for complaint. The Slashdot Random Story Submission Selection System (SRSSSS), is completely unbiased. Not even quality submissions are granted preference!
I may be ignorant on this subject, but considering the speeds of non-overclocked hardware, is there really a human noticable difference when you overclock your hardware compared to if you don't?
You may as well ask if "GoFaster" Stripes increase vehicle speed.
You assume general joe average gives a danm about security when he transmits pictures from mobile to mobile, or presses the buttons on his BT remote control.
HD quality connections, wirelessly. Can't do that with WiFi.
Actually some HD transmissions go as low as 4-5Mbps. But of course, WiFi still won't play that either.
Our RF exposure is only marginally greater when close to devices such as WiFi hotspots because of the immense amount of background EMI from TV and Radio broadcasts, satellites, CB and business radios, power transformers and a million other things.
Not least of which is the Sun; Earth's number one source of electromagnetic waves in every frequency. What's important here is that unlike solar radiation, which is largely random noise, man made EM radiation is generally ordered and harmonic. Overwhelmingly, most RF signals come from time harmonic sources.
Our brains and bodies are chaotic systems. Ordered signals are bad for them. Apparently epilepsy is a sudden bought of order in the brain. It's entirely possible that some people, or in deed all people to a degree, are sensitive to any resonances in their body with time harmonic signals.
Engineers sometimes scoff that EM radiation is at such a low level that it cannot harm anyone. But engineers very often make the mistake of not accounting for resonance
Or maybe we could all get a link to the actual article itself, rather than someones blog linking to the article.
My solution to this was a little different -- implement a vertical "tree" pane, like Google Groups. To my mind this is clearly the best forum user interface in existance -- it's so simple and intuitive that frankly, I'm baffled why I don't see it anywhere else.
Because the Google Groups interface sucks. Seriously. It's the worst thing to come out of Google in quite some time. Not even AJAX can save it.
We would all be better off if there was simply a vaccine for viral diseases, instead of drugs which have been proven to stimulate the evolution of resistant strains. Vaccines on the other hand have been proven to not only reduce the incidence of disease, but also virtually completely eradicate them, e.g. smallpox. Vaccines have the advantage of being able to adapt along with the evolving virus. Drugs do not.
I await the day when we get enough strict constructionists on the Supreme Court to reverse their previous bad decisions, sweeping away McCain Fiengold and most other 'Campaign Finance Laws' that aren't limited to mandatory disclosure requirements. And even those have to go eventually...
They tried that already. It was called facisim.
Seriously, it was a pretty good game that could have used more story and much better graphics
Gods!!! What the hell is wrong with you people?! Is there no satisfying you?!
Fable is probably one of the best looking games on the Xbox. It's artisic design alone gives it significant merit.
It's comments like this that leads to developers throwing away resources at useless graphical improvements when they could be improving the actual game instead of pandering to these impossible demands.
Telnet eh? You lucky bastard. Some of us are still manually completing and checking TCP packets with a 15 second timeout limit. And we like it!
I take it that transferring 17MB folders is strictly off limits then?
As a fan since the 70s, I never thought about this until one of my elementary students pointed it out - if the eagles could snatch the heroes off the top of Mt. Doom after all this noise, why couldn't they have simply sent the eagles to drop in the ring?
Clearly, the eagle was on fire.
Don't get me wrong, I love the films, but... dwarf tossing? Seriously, dude!
Despite their lack of canonicity, the Pratchett-esque influences were a clever addition to the movie. They also helped move the rather stoic and grim character of Gimli towards the more gregarious dwarven attitude that was seen in The Hobbit.
I have heard rumors that one of the reasons that Vista was not ready, was Microsoft's attempt to use "dot net", basically an virtual-machine based (interpreted) language similar in many aspects to Java, but the resulting code was huge, slow, and simply put - useless. Do these rumors have any basis?
.NET code is compiled to native code, and any slowdown to addtional language features could just as easily be applied to something like java or perl.
.NET runtime are competant.
Probably not.
Of course this assumes that the microsoft engineers working on the
they're saying the same thing as yesterday, as far as I can tell.
But now the New York Times is saying it. Time for Slashdot to get the NYTs their monthly online registration quota.
And will World of Warcraft subscribers be compensated for their lost gameplay time? Time they paid good money for?
For the love of gods, someone please tell me that Fedora have fixed the long standing disaster that is yum and up2date. Is it so much to ask that the default setup is changed to apt? I'm tired of Yum's idosycracies. It's gotten better, but as of 2.3.2, yum has no local cache search, no download resuming, and still bombs out if it can't contact a respositiory.
Naturally of course, a yum "dist-upgrade" type feature is likely never going to happen, despite the fact that Fedora is now in five CDs.
Then I realise that I'm confused again, and it wasn't Steve
Jobs at all...
No! It's wasn't your fault. Jobs deliberately, deceptively, decieved you. All along his goal was to usurp Apple Corps rightful place as master of the recording industry by insidiously starting up a "computer" company, with the sole intention of eventually moving into the music industry.
Clearly the owners of Apple Corps, whose ancestors worked so hard so that they might profit, are long overdue for a modest sum from the duplicitous Jobs & Co. 70% or perhaps only 60% of Apples profits of the last twenty years, adjusted for interest of course, is more than fair for the danamge to reputatation, earnings and the slur on the memories of poor dead John Lennon that the owners of Apple Corps have had to endure.
How is THAT supposed to NOT anti-attract a newbie?
Apparently by forcing the graphics card companies to open source their drivers, much in the same way that the peace protesters prevented the war in Iraq....
Oh wait.