Anybody want to explain to me why I (as a user only) should care?
Um, because if stuff like this doesn't get ironed out, then projects like this never get going, and you (the consumer) don't get the product/service. If you don't care about whether it's there as an option, then, right... you shouldn't care.
Caring about it, philosophically/academically isn't the same as having the wherewithal to be a nuts-and-bolts part of resolving the problem. But if you pretend that this stuff doesn't in any way matter, then you're betraying a pretty simplistic understanding of how "free" stuff comes to exist in the first place. No question that many arguments in the F/OSS universe are of the "how many angels can dance on the head of pin" variety. But whether something is, or isn't within the bounds of the licensing model under which much of this entire area is built - well, that actually does matter. One is reminded, sometimes, though, about the old saying about why intra-staff disputes at colleges are so wicked: the drama is so big because the stakes are so small.
interestingly, most of the Nigerian scam email i receive use Yahoo accounts, and Yahoo certainly hasn't done much to police them, so I think your point is kinda silly.
also, having looked at enough email headers from spammers, while they may originate from some of those countries you mentioned, i notice many use accounts like Yahoo and gmail from U.S. servers, which shoots your whole theory down.
But, it's not a theory. I'm talking about what I actually see in logs and message queues, especially on receiving servers that don't have particularly sophisticated spam blocking. Of course a more industrious, dedicated Nigerian-style spammer can get things out using a Yahoo or Gmail account, but he can't send thousands (let along millions) that way - there's no way to do that through their web interfaces. Neither Yahoo nor Gmail will tolerate large-volume floods the way that some open relay or bot army running an outbound SMTP engine will. You see the occasional spam coming from places like Yahoo because some of those scammers are now getting desparate enough to doing them one at a time. That's nothing compared to the ocean of stuff that's getting blocked before you see it. When I review what's being filtered, the huge majority of it is coming from places like Korea, China, and eastern Europe. You're talking about the leftovers.
Sorry but what a terrible analogy. Sound walls don't redirect traffic, they fix the problem of sound affecting nearby homes. You're mixing a traffic metaphor with a sound metaphor in a way that makes so little sense it's worse than bad - it's confusing.
You're working too hard at this. The sound walls are an undesireable but nevertheless somewhat effective treatment for the symptom for a larger problem. The analogy is apt.
What should be happening is bringing pressure to bear against those who have had the address space allocated to them, then moving up the supply chain.
Yes. And the people to DO that are the people using those addresses that find it doesn't really HELP them to have those addresses because the owners/administrators aren't taking care of things. If my ISP wasn't doing anything about crappy fellow users, I'd put financial pressure on them by taking my business elsewhere or (in the case of a state-run provider) take my vote elsewhere. I'm helping those people apply that pressure, right now.
Turning the INTERnet into the HINDERnet your effort will eventually make the Internet useless. You therefore destroy what you're trying to facilitate use of. Not clever.
You're missing the point. When the packets from entire Class B address ranges are, by empirical testing, almost entirely crap, they people who own those addresses have already broken their little corner of the internet. Preserving the non-poisoned portion of the wider network isn't "destroying the village to save it," it's just sort of like putting up those highway sound walls - unpleasant, but necessary.
I would think that the majority of inbound mail those places get from say the US will be "toxic" as well. When legitimate traffic between two regions are scarce (like between places with differing languages and a large geographical seperation), of course the spam will seem overwhelming by proportion.
Yup, good point. Which is why the same thing seems be true to/from, say... Romania, etc. also
Why even bother supporting Microsoft's newer products?
Umm... maybe because this guy's 100% completely lying in his post, and IE7 is actually better than IE6? He's wrong, you aren't forced to install IE7, and he's wrong, the image tag submit works just fine in IE7. That you'd call for a freakin' boycott based on easily-seen-to-be-lies FUD from a whiny blogger is, well, more of the same FUD. No wonder people have a hard time taking a lot of the anti-Microsoft blathering seriously.
You don't think there are hundreds of thousands of zombifiable computers in the United States?
Um, so? That doesn't make it inappropriate to block traffic from places where the overwhelming majority of the packets are toxic. It's a system-by-system, admin-by-admin judgement call, but there's no question that Korea isn't doing nearly enough to stop this problem locally. If the local culture starts to realize that they're isolating themselves from large sections of the internet because they won't do something to prevent 99% of their outbound mail from being spam, then maybe the need to filter will also go away.
And what about people with business connections in China or Korea?
I have a lot of customers with contacts like that. All of them (their Asian contacts) use Yahoo, Gmail, and similar accounts specifically to avoid this problem. Businesses in China and Korea are totally aware that most ISPs in those areas have poisoned outbound SMTP relays and user desktops. Or, they host their western-facing mail servers with providers in the west - I see a lot of that, too, since many of those businesses have two separate messaging platforms for the different international audiences with whom they communicate.
You are an idiot. Seriously. Please kill yourself now and set the universe back into balance.
You're right. I don't know what I was thinking. The U.S. and other western democracies really are exactly the same as North Korea. Silly me! The universe really would be more in balance if that basic truth were made more clear to kids in grade school. Our imperial colony in Japan, which we rule with an iron fist, should stop fretting about its crazy neighbor on the peninsula, since it turns out we're all the same after all. What a relief!
I love how everyone shivers at how terrible and evil communist NK is. Their nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare programs ALL pale in comparison to our own. Our weapons grade corrosive sarin's dad could kick their sarin's dad's ass.
Um, yeah... except that we aren't living in cruel Stalinist dictatorship that's starving its people, running forced labor camps to control population, and threateningly launching missles at and over neighboring countries. The "Dear Leader" is an absolute loon in charge of a vast, starving, standing army. That army is regularly told that it's going to be attacked at any moment (since the Koren War isn't over, really). Much like Iran's regular references to wiping other countries off the map, NK is actively, regularly doing and saying really unsettling. Crazy crap. They counterfeit currency from all of the world and use nationally flagged vessels to carry heroin and other smuggled goods around the world so that the D.L. can buy contraband western niceties from the same western countries that he curses and with whom he makes bogus diplomatic agreements.
It's really not the same as a country, like ours, that regularly changes out its cilivian and military leadership and has tight military relations with more than one other country. NK's got a luke-warm relationship with the very parasitic NK.
I don't think that "altruistic" means what you think it means. People who use a piece of software, or operate in an environmen where people do (or share globally internetworked systems with people who do) have a personal, vested interest in rational, thoughtful disclosure. That's not altruism, that's enlightened self interest. It's selfish, in the correct, useful sense of that word, to do it right. The people you're worried about aren't the opposite of altruistic, they're just basically vandals or someone with an axe to grind.
So could we replace the CIA with the staff from Popular Mechanics?
I agree that if one thought this was actually news, then hearing it from Popular Mechanics might seem a little odd. But this is hardly news. Of course NK has been been doing this stuff for decades. And just like every major intel agency on the planet knew that Saddam was (at various times, in various amounts) hiding stuff, they all know that NK has stuff. Unlike Saddam, NK hasn't yet trotted it out and used it on an ethnic minority at the edge of their country, or decided to try (since the 1950s) to invade south. So we haven't had the disruption of a NATO-ish smackdown (a la post-Kuwait) to slow down their hobby.
But if you think that the CIA (or MI6, etc) is any more precisely aware of the exact state of these programs in NK than they were about what Saddam specifically had still sitting around (or where, and what was shipped off to Syria, or not), then you're mistaken. NK is notoriously difficult to infiltrate, that way. That place is a horror show.
The point is that much of the breathless commentary here is focusing on signing statements as if that were something new, or partisan per se. They're simply not.
Mind you, that was during the Carter administration, for any of you partisan boobs out there.
It's also worth mentioning that Jimmy Carter (like so many presidents from both parties) also issued dozens of the things. As did all of the folks since. Honestly, people are so obsessed with GWB they don't bother to see if the people more on their side of the fence have used exactly the same tools.
Why they printed an article by Bill Gates rather than one of the hundreds of professional robotics researchers in the country.
Because it's Scientific American (with a very wide, cross-discpline, and NON-discpline readership and popular web site), not the Journal Of Extremely Focused Niche Robotics Researchers (which would have the same number of subscribers as it does contributors, because it would be the same people). Bill's name is universally known, and guarantees a certain amount of commentary (such as is happening right here). Plus, he's got umpty-billions to invest, and is investing in this very area, and that really, really matters.
And, of course, the people you're mentioning already publish, all the time. And if you want to seek out their thoughts, you can. This is the sort of material that generates interest among people who might not otherwise really think about it. It's sort of like Pamela Anderson talking about free range chicken farming practices, except less... Pamela-ish. And, of course, Pamela's never farmed a chicken, whereas Bill's actually looked at some code here and there, and already has an army of 'bots.
One United employee appeared emotionally shaken by the sighting and "experienced some religious issues" over it, one co-worker said."
Well, it's possible that the worker in question just couldn't handle the person standing next to him/her saying, out loud, "Jesus F***cking Christ On A Pogo Stick! What the hell is that?"
Or (better yet!) perhaps the religious "issue" in question was the airline worker being somewhat overcome with the emotion of completely losing his/her religion because of seeing something mysterious in the sky that did not have even one feathery angel wing or trumpet, etc.
Assistant in corner: (In a tiny, imperiled voice) Have you thought about putting it on the internet?
Big ad exec: what?
Oh, come on now. Starbucks has a an army of in-house and for-hire media consultants. They publish music, underwrite films (and neatly dovetail promotion of those projects right into every corner of the brainspace they can influence), and nicely leverage the web in their stores. They have a very youthful orientation (in terms of their employees and customers). The scenario probably went more like this:
Exec (in meeting with media survey types): "So, lots of people are seeing this Oxfam thing, huh."
Media Guru: "Yup, but not the get-my-news-from-TV types. It's the YouTube-watching types. That's the venue for a rebuttal."
Exec: "Well, that makes sense. Do that."
The heroic techno-nerd overhearing the conversation and saving the day because, unlike the highly paid media consultants, he's actually heard of YouTube... well, that's just a bad TV episode. It's a notion that appeals to us IT/nerd types, but net-based video and social sites are already well-digested by companies as socially tuned-in as Starbucks. If OxFam had done this via an HBO special, the response would have been different. If they'd done it via Op/Ed pieces in the NY Times, it would have been different still. I know it's fashionable to imagine that every large company is made of only idiots that steal money, but that's a little naive, really.
I don't think any government should interfere in my life any more than strictly necessary for *your* safety.
Out of curiosity, what's your take on my tax or health insurance dollars. Here's my thought: if someone, in the privacy of their own home, ODs on heroin, they're off to the hospital and (depending on little details like brain damage, cardio-vascular trauma, whatever) rack up a six-figure bill. Who's paying for that? As long as anyone can walk into any emergency room and get treatment (which they can, whether they can pay or not), that's worth talking about. Similarly: someone who's all coked up, hops on his Harley without a helmet, and does himself $250,000 in head trauma related hostpital stay and occupational therapy - but has only hurt himself, is only hurting himself? Not if I'm paying for it. That's more than I'll ever pay in health insurance. On one person.
If he runs his bike into a car full of kids, I suspect you'd have no problem making his private habit a matter for the courts (or job loss, etc). But what about when that behavior costs you and me more than it would cost either of us to be cured of lymphoma or than it would cost to treat a mother's breast cancer?
This is just as true, of course, of any reckless behavior (rock climbing without safety gear, drunk driving, or just being an idiot in general). But when certain activities only, by their nature, impair judgement and capacity (to say nothing of filling your lungs up with burning hydrocarbons and organic material), who should foot the bill? And, what about someone who chooses to put money into recreational drug use while also taking public money for food and housing? Do the people footing that bill have any say? Should they?
The notion of "victimless"-ness is frequently tossed around as if there are never any ramifications beyond just being stupid on the couch for the afternoon because of weed. But philosophically, you can't pretend that's not part of the larger spectrum of issues that impact society. And, if I wasn't forced to pay for other people's driving under the influence (of alcohol, weed, crack, whatever), I'd probably care a lot less. Or not at all. But that's not how things are arranged.
I must say, I'm a little curious about your definition of "extreme right," or at least, how it is that you see me fitting into it. Anti-abortion, prayer-in-school types? Cannot abide them. Organized religion in general? I consider it humanity's greatest continuing social plague. "Intelligent design" proponents? Intellectually disengenuos self-destructive fools. Absurd pork spending by congress? Infuriating. Etc. Which "extreme right" are you lumping me in with, exactly?
Getting shivers from the thought of viewing the world as a huge liberal conspiracy?
Um, who sees it that way, exactly? A lot of people loosely holding some of the same loopy opinions about certain subjects doesn't exactly equal a conspiracy. On either end of the spectrum.
Reading a post by the aforementioned guy in which his beliefs dominate what he sees? Priceless.
Let's see... so, you think that it's "extreme right" to be uncomfortable about having, say, someone in IT (with access to your e-mail, your boss's e-mail, your payroll records, etc) exhibiting a clear problem with drug use? Is it "extreme right" to be slightly annoyed by someone who, say, drives a school bus or operates a forklift over your head using a meat computer that's clearly impaired? How do you twist that sort of thing into politics?
And it also depends what drug is being tested for. Is there any evidence that enjoying the occasional herbal treat harms work performance in any material way?
Across the board? Hard to say. Have I met, worked with, or been exposed to obvious stoners that are clearly and continually unfocused, un-energetic, bad on short-term memory, and always looking for free food at meetings? Yes. Should any use of the word "dude" at the workplace result in immediate termination? Double-plus-extra yes.
Picked up a couple bottles of Veuve Clicquot for $33 each this morning...
Yup. In that price range, I'll take that over Moet any time. The VC is a nice, crispy-dry champagne. Having it with some nice marinated, grilled quail and dove breasts served in endives - a most excellent finger-food configuration.
People pay for stupider things. Like "service monitoring"... GET/index.html... 200, yep you are ok. Please pay my invoice!
Yeah. But the way I do it is to get a document that, in order for it to render, has to make database connections, deal with a web service, and report back the time it took perform those tasks... and log the results in a table that is used to drive a performance history, going back months. And, of course, e-mail and text messaging to the folks who need to be pleasantly informed if something's a little sluggish, vs. Completely Freaked Out if something bad (like db connection failure) happens.
Of course, you still can't charge much for all of that... but you can keep your customers around for other services if that's part of what you bring to the table.
I didn't actually realise they were omnivores too though.
Actually, if you look at the list of ingredients on most commercial dog food, meat is not the bulk of it. Grains, vegetbables, etc, make up most of the volume. Dogs need that protein, just like us, but meat and only meat is actually a little hard on them, digestively. At least, for domestic animals... they've had tens of thousands of years of evolving alongside of humans, eating their dinner scraps (all of them!). But wolves do it too... you'll see berry seeds in their droppings, etc. My own dogs pretty much just want whatever it is I'm eating. Especially if it involves sizzling butter.
A vendor like Microsoft has no reason to be nice to a small- to medium-sized company
What are you talking about? Microsoft makes a lot of their money off of smaller operations that use their products. MS utterly relies on third party consultants and expertise to deploy/support solutions for those users, and if that whole channel (including the end users) aren't kept happy and functioning, they'll lose a lot of mindshare.
Well, at least the worms have the courtesy to wait till you're dead before they start eating you.
Well, except tapeworms, hookworms, heartworms, leeches, and numerous other very, very unpleasant things. Of course, "ringworm" is really just a fungus. That's just how clever worms actually are - they've got other forms of life taking the rap for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody want to explain to me why I (as a user only) should care?
Um, because if stuff like this doesn't get ironed out, then projects like this never get going, and you (the consumer) don't get the product/service. If you don't care about whether it's there as an option, then, right... you shouldn't care.
Caring about it, philosophically/academically isn't the same as having the wherewithal to be a nuts-and-bolts part of resolving the problem. But if you pretend that this stuff doesn't in any way matter, then you're betraying a pretty simplistic understanding of how "free" stuff comes to exist in the first place. No question that many arguments in the F/OSS universe are of the "how many angels can dance on the head of pin" variety. But whether something is, or isn't within the bounds of the licensing model under which much of this entire area is built - well, that actually does matter. One is reminded, sometimes, though, about the old saying about why intra-staff disputes at colleges are so wicked: the drama is so big because the stakes are so small.
interestingly, most of the Nigerian scam email i receive use Yahoo accounts, and Yahoo certainly hasn't done much to police them, so I think your point is kinda silly.
also, having looked at enough email headers from spammers, while they may originate from some of those countries you mentioned, i notice many use accounts like Yahoo and gmail from U.S. servers, which shoots your whole theory down.
But, it's not a theory. I'm talking about what I actually see in logs and message queues, especially on receiving servers that don't have particularly sophisticated spam blocking. Of course a more industrious, dedicated Nigerian-style spammer can get things out using a Yahoo or Gmail account, but he can't send thousands (let along millions) that way - there's no way to do that through their web interfaces. Neither Yahoo nor Gmail will tolerate large-volume floods the way that some open relay or bot army running an outbound SMTP engine will. You see the occasional spam coming from places like Yahoo because some of those scammers are now getting desparate enough to doing them one at a time. That's nothing compared to the ocean of stuff that's getting blocked before you see it. When I review what's being filtered, the huge majority of it is coming from places like Korea, China, and eastern Europe. You're talking about the leftovers.
Sorry but what a terrible analogy. Sound walls don't redirect traffic, they fix the problem of sound affecting nearby homes. You're mixing a traffic metaphor with a sound metaphor in a way that makes so little sense it's worse than bad - it's confusing.
You're working too hard at this. The sound walls are an undesireable but nevertheless somewhat effective treatment for the symptom for a larger problem. The analogy is apt.
What should be happening is bringing pressure to bear against those who have had the address space allocated to them, then moving up the supply chain.
Yes. And the people to DO that are the people using those addresses that find it doesn't really HELP them to have those addresses because the owners/administrators aren't taking care of things. If my ISP wasn't doing anything about crappy fellow users, I'd put financial pressure on them by taking my business elsewhere or (in the case of a state-run provider) take my vote elsewhere. I'm helping those people apply that pressure, right now.
Turning the INTERnet into the HINDERnet your effort will eventually make the Internet useless. You therefore destroy what you're trying to facilitate use of. Not clever.
You're missing the point. When the packets from entire Class B address ranges are, by empirical testing, almost entirely crap, they people who own those addresses have already broken their little corner of the internet. Preserving the non-poisoned portion of the wider network isn't "destroying the village to save it," it's just sort of like putting up those highway sound walls - unpleasant, but necessary.
I would think that the majority of inbound mail those places get from say the US will be "toxic" as well. When legitimate traffic between two regions are scarce (like between places with differing languages and a large geographical seperation), of course the spam will seem overwhelming by proportion.
Yup, good point. Which is why the same thing seems be true to/from, say... Romania, etc. also
Why even bother supporting Microsoft's newer products?
Umm... maybe because this guy's 100% completely lying in his post, and IE7 is actually better than IE6? He's wrong, you aren't forced to install IE7, and he's wrong, the image tag submit works just fine in IE7. That you'd call for a freakin' boycott based on easily-seen-to-be-lies FUD from a whiny blogger is, well, more of the same FUD. No wonder people have a hard time taking a lot of the anti-Microsoft blathering seriously.
You don't think there are hundreds of thousands of zombifiable computers in the United States?
Um, so? That doesn't make it inappropriate to block traffic from places where the overwhelming majority of the packets are toxic. It's a system-by-system, admin-by-admin judgement call, but there's no question that Korea isn't doing nearly enough to stop this problem locally. If the local culture starts to realize that they're isolating themselves from large sections of the internet because they won't do something to prevent 99% of their outbound mail from being spam, then maybe the need to filter will also go away.
And what about people with business connections in China or Korea?
I have a lot of customers with contacts like that. All of them (their Asian contacts) use Yahoo, Gmail, and similar accounts specifically to avoid this problem. Businesses in China and Korea are totally aware that most ISPs in those areas have poisoned outbound SMTP relays and user desktops. Or, they host their western-facing mail servers with providers in the west - I see a lot of that, too, since many of those businesses have two separate messaging platforms for the different international audiences with whom they communicate.
You are an idiot. Seriously. Please kill yourself now and set the universe back into balance.
You're right. I don't know what I was thinking. The U.S. and other western democracies really are exactly the same as North Korea. Silly me! The universe really would be more in balance if that basic truth were made more clear to kids in grade school. Our imperial colony in Japan, which we rule with an iron fist, should stop fretting about its crazy neighbor on the peninsula, since it turns out we're all the same after all. What a relief!
I love how everyone shivers at how terrible and evil communist NK is. Their nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare programs ALL pale in comparison to our own. Our weapons grade corrosive sarin's dad could kick their sarin's dad's ass.
Um, yeah... except that we aren't living in cruel Stalinist dictatorship that's starving its people, running forced labor camps to control population, and threateningly launching missles at and over neighboring countries. The "Dear Leader" is an absolute loon in charge of a vast, starving, standing army. That army is regularly told that it's going to be attacked at any moment (since the Koren War isn't over, really). Much like Iran's regular references to wiping other countries off the map, NK is actively, regularly doing and saying really unsettling. Crazy crap. They counterfeit currency from all of the world and use nationally flagged vessels to carry heroin and other smuggled goods around the world so that the D.L. can buy contraband western niceties from the same western countries that he curses and with whom he makes bogus diplomatic agreements.
It's really not the same as a country, like ours, that regularly changes out its cilivian and military leadership and has tight military relations with more than one other country. NK's got a luke-warm relationship with the very parasitic NK.
Somebody got some really good video footage of this thing breaking up in the atmosphere
It was a TV news helicopter crew, actually. They were already up in the air, and had camera gear. The footage is quite cool.
someone else who isn't quite so altruistic
I don't think that "altruistic" means what you think it means. People who use a piece of software, or operate in an environmen where people do (or share globally internetworked systems with people who do) have a personal, vested interest in rational, thoughtful disclosure. That's not altruism, that's enlightened self interest. It's selfish, in the correct, useful sense of that word, to do it right. The people you're worried about aren't the opposite of altruistic, they're just basically vandals or someone with an axe to grind.
So could we replace the CIA with the staff from Popular Mechanics?
I agree that if one thought this was actually news, then hearing it from Popular Mechanics might seem a little odd. But this is hardly news. Of course NK has been been doing this stuff for decades. And just like every major intel agency on the planet knew that Saddam was (at various times, in various amounts) hiding stuff, they all know that NK has stuff. Unlike Saddam, NK hasn't yet trotted it out and used it on an ethnic minority at the edge of their country, or decided to try (since the 1950s) to invade south. So we haven't had the disruption of a NATO-ish smackdown (a la post-Kuwait) to slow down their hobby.
But if you think that the CIA (or MI6, etc) is any more precisely aware of the exact state of these programs in NK than they were about what Saddam specifically had still sitting around (or where, and what was shipped off to Syria, or not), then you're mistaken. NK is notoriously difficult to infiltrate, that way. That place is a horror show.
I care about what ... doing right now
The point is that much of the breathless commentary here is focusing on signing statements as if that were something new, or partisan per se. They're simply not.
Mind you, that was during the Carter administration, for any of you partisan boobs out there.
It's also worth mentioning that Jimmy Carter (like so many presidents from both parties) also issued dozens of the things. As did all of the folks since. Honestly, people are so obsessed with GWB they don't bother to see if the people more on their side of the fence have used exactly the same tools.
Why they printed an article by Bill Gates rather than one of the hundreds of professional robotics researchers in the country.
... Pamela-ish. And, of course, Pamela's never farmed a chicken, whereas Bill's actually looked at some code here and there, and already has an army of 'bots.
Because it's Scientific American (with a very wide, cross-discpline, and NON-discpline readership and popular web site), not the Journal Of Extremely Focused Niche Robotics Researchers (which would have the same number of subscribers as it does contributors, because it would be the same people). Bill's name is universally known, and guarantees a certain amount of commentary (such as is happening right here). Plus, he's got umpty-billions to invest, and is investing in this very area, and that really, really matters.
And, of course, the people you're mentioning already publish, all the time. And if you want to seek out their thoughts, you can. This is the sort of material that generates interest among people who might not otherwise really think about it. It's sort of like Pamela Anderson talking about free range chicken farming practices, except less
One United employee appeared emotionally shaken by the sighting and "experienced some religious issues" over it, one co-worker said."
Well, it's possible that the worker in question just couldn't handle the person standing next to him/her saying, out loud, "Jesus F***cking Christ On A Pogo Stick! What the hell is that?"
Or (better yet!) perhaps the religious "issue" in question was the airline worker being somewhat overcome with the emotion of completely losing his/her religion because of seeing something mysterious in the sky that did not have even one feathery angel wing or trumpet, etc.
Assistant in corner: (In a tiny, imperiled voice) Have you thought about putting it on the internet?
Big ad exec: what?
Oh, come on now. Starbucks has a an army of in-house and for-hire media consultants. They publish music, underwrite films (and neatly dovetail promotion of those projects right into every corner of the brainspace they can influence), and nicely leverage the web in their stores. They have a very youthful orientation (in terms of their employees and customers). The scenario probably went more like this:
Exec (in meeting with media survey types): "So, lots of people are seeing this Oxfam thing, huh."
Media Guru: "Yup, but not the get-my-news-from-TV types. It's the YouTube-watching types. That's the venue for a rebuttal."
Exec: "Well, that makes sense. Do that."
The heroic techno-nerd overhearing the conversation and saving the day because, unlike the highly paid media consultants, he's actually heard of YouTube... well, that's just a bad TV episode. It's a notion that appeals to us IT/nerd types, but net-based video and social sites are already well-digested by companies as socially tuned-in as Starbucks. If OxFam had done this via an HBO special, the response would have been different. If they'd done it via Op/Ed pieces in the NY Times, it would have been different still. I know it's fashionable to imagine that every large company is made of only idiots that steal money, but that's a little naive, really.
I don't think any government should interfere in my life any more than strictly necessary for *your* safety.
Out of curiosity, what's your take on my tax or health insurance dollars. Here's my thought: if someone, in the privacy of their own home, ODs on heroin, they're off to the hospital and (depending on little details like brain damage, cardio-vascular trauma, whatever) rack up a six-figure bill. Who's paying for that? As long as anyone can walk into any emergency room and get treatment (which they can, whether they can pay or not), that's worth talking about. Similarly: someone who's all coked up, hops on his Harley without a helmet, and does himself $250,000 in head trauma related hostpital stay and occupational therapy - but has only hurt himself, is only hurting himself? Not if I'm paying for it. That's more than I'll ever pay in health insurance. On one person.
If he runs his bike into a car full of kids, I suspect you'd have no problem making his private habit a matter for the courts (or job loss, etc). But what about when that behavior costs you and me more than it would cost either of us to be cured of lymphoma or than it would cost to treat a mother's breast cancer?
This is just as true, of course, of any reckless behavior (rock climbing without safety gear, drunk driving, or just being an idiot in general). But when certain activities only, by their nature, impair judgement and capacity (to say nothing of filling your lungs up with burning hydrocarbons and organic material), who should foot the bill? And, what about someone who chooses to put money into recreational drug use while also taking public money for food and housing? Do the people footing that bill have any say? Should they?
The notion of "victimless"-ness is frequently tossed around as if there are never any ramifications beyond just being stupid on the couch for the afternoon because of weed. But philosophically, you can't pretend that's not part of the larger spectrum of issues that impact society. And, if I wasn't forced to pay for other people's driving under the influence (of alcohol, weed, crack, whatever), I'd probably care a lot less. Or not at all. But that's not how things are arranged.
Having extreme right guy marked as foe? Yes
I must say, I'm a little curious about your definition of "extreme right," or at least, how it is that you see me fitting into it. Anti-abortion, prayer-in-school types? Cannot abide them. Organized religion in general? I consider it humanity's greatest continuing social plague. "Intelligent design" proponents? Intellectually disengenuos self-destructive fools. Absurd pork spending by congress? Infuriating. Etc. Which "extreme right" are you lumping me in with, exactly?
Getting shivers from the thought of viewing the world as a huge liberal conspiracy?
Um, who sees it that way, exactly? A lot of people loosely holding some of the same loopy opinions about certain subjects doesn't exactly equal a conspiracy. On either end of the spectrum.
Reading a post by the aforementioned guy in which his beliefs dominate what he sees? Priceless.
Let's see... so, you think that it's "extreme right" to be uncomfortable about having, say, someone in IT (with access to your e-mail, your boss's e-mail, your payroll records, etc) exhibiting a clear problem with drug use? Is it "extreme right" to be slightly annoyed by someone who, say, drives a school bus or operates a forklift over your head using a meat computer that's clearly impaired? How do you twist that sort of thing into politics?
And it also depends what drug is being tested for. Is there any evidence that enjoying the occasional herbal treat harms work performance in any material way?
Across the board? Hard to say. Have I met, worked with, or been exposed to obvious stoners that are clearly and continually unfocused, un-energetic, bad on short-term memory, and always looking for free food at meetings? Yes. Should any use of the word "dude" at the workplace result in immediate termination? Double-plus-extra yes.
Picked up a couple bottles of Veuve Clicquot for $33 each this morning...
Yup. In that price range, I'll take that over Moet any time. The VC is a nice, crispy-dry champagne. Having it with some nice marinated, grilled quail and dove breasts served in endives - a most excellent finger-food configuration.
People pay for stupider things. Like "service monitoring"... GET /index.html... 200, yep you are ok. Please pay my invoice!
Yeah. But the way I do it is to get a document that, in order for it to render, has to make database connections, deal with a web service, and report back the time it took perform those tasks... and log the results in a table that is used to drive a performance history, going back months. And, of course, e-mail and text messaging to the folks who need to be pleasantly informed if something's a little sluggish, vs. Completely Freaked Out if something bad (like db connection failure) happens.
Of course, you still can't charge much for all of that... but you can keep your customers around for other services if that's part of what you bring to the table.
I didn't actually realise they were omnivores too though.
Actually, if you look at the list of ingredients on most commercial dog food, meat is not the bulk of it. Grains, vegetbables, etc, make up most of the volume. Dogs need that protein, just like us, but meat and only meat is actually a little hard on them, digestively. At least, for domestic animals... they've had tens of thousands of years of evolving alongside of humans, eating their dinner scraps (all of them!). But wolves do it too... you'll see berry seeds in their droppings, etc. My own dogs pretty much just want whatever it is I'm eating. Especially if it involves sizzling butter.
A vendor like Microsoft has no reason to be nice to a small- to medium-sized company
What are you talking about? Microsoft makes a lot of their money off of smaller operations that use their products. MS utterly relies on third party consultants and expertise to deploy/support solutions for those users, and if that whole channel (including the end users) aren't kept happy and functioning, they'll lose a lot of mindshare.
Well, at least the worms have the courtesy to wait till you're dead before they start eating you.
Well, except tapeworms, hookworms, heartworms, leeches, and numerous other very, very unpleasant things. Of course, "ringworm" is really just a fungus. That's just how clever worms actually are - they've got other forms of life taking the rap for them.