This makes me think part of Gmail's success in blocking spam is application of their search technology to the problem, when a new trick comes along it takes an hour or two for their stuff to "learn" it. Think of a very large Bayesian system, helped along by millions of users clicking on "Report Spam".
The trouble with relying on millions of users to click on "Report Spam" is that inevitably you get some idiots who sign up for some newsletter or something, then later decide that they don't want it. Instead of unsubscribing, they just report it as spam, thus leading to false positives for people who actually do want these things. Relying on users to make decisions that affect everybody else simply doesn't work.
Yahoo has always been and continues to be totally fsking useless at blocking spam. But then my Yahoo mail email addresses are only used as spam magnets.
The trouble I usually have with Yahoo is getting too many false positives. I never used to use my Yahoo account for much, until recently. It used to be that what little legitemate mail I had got through the filters just fine, but all the spam got blocked. Now however, I've started to get a lot more mail, and unfortunately the number of false positives I got was just too much. In the end I disabled my Yahoo spam filter, and I now rely on Thunderbird's far superior one.
Mmm, it's true... people keep saying that piracy is killing the game industry. No... just no... Piracy isn't killing the game industry, EA is.
Re:Flash as an application development platform
on
The Future of Flash
·
· Score: 1
Oh please, don't be willfully dense. There are good reasons people distribute 'obfuscated' videos on the internet, and they all center around making it difficult for people to copy them.
Who's being willfully dense? Yes, there are good reasons people distribute obfuscated videos. I think the point the GP was trying to make is that none of them work, especially not Flash.
The thing is, I shuold be able to record my phone conversations. Why not? You cannot safely assume that what you say to me on the phone is lost forever. I could be writing it down, or maybe just remembering it (I know people who are exceptional at that). Either way when you talk to me you've got to assume that I could be recording, in one fasion or another, what you say. If you trust me to keep that confidence is up to you.
That is a very good point. Why should recordings require the consent of both parties? If it is legal for me to write everything that is said in a conversation, why should it be illegal to get a tape recorder to do the same job? The law should not be meddling in common sense issues like this.
Oh, I'm sure it is being taken seriously. I think what the GP was getting at is that the RIAA's statement is inherently contradictory. It won't help Limewire at all in this case, but the point is that as usual the RIAA is talking complete bullshit.
The design has changed for a *wider* appeal, eh? Can we expect this to *expand* Slashdot's userbase? All this pink sure is *broadening* our horizons. In fact you could almost say that it's *stretching* our imaginations. Who knew?
Well, that might be true at the moment, but is it likely to stay that way forever? More and more these days we find tech-savvy people will install Firefox for their less able family and friends, saying that it's "more secure". If this trend continues then it seems likely that eventually there will be a significant fraction of Firefox's users who will need the security that Firefox provides. I think it's excellent to see that Firefox is continuing to advance in matters of security.
Software patents are already (technically) not permitted here, and yet crazy inconsistencies and loopholes are allowing people to patent whatever they want. Including software and other things that are explicitly not allowed to be patented. It is good that some people are finally starting to look at this from a sensible point of view. Maybe now some progress can be made on making the patent laws sane.
Actually, the goatse.ca mirror is incomplete. It lacks a great deal of content that goatse.cx (and goat.cx) had. The most complete goatse mirror you are likely to find is goatse.ragingfist.net
"That's irrevelant as most if not all bits of hardware come with driver disks, regardless of what OS you're installing on them. It's very rare to buy a new OS-less PC/pile-o-bits and not have any drivers with it..."
Yes, most hardware these days does come with driver disks... but in my experience these drivers are often out of date, meaning that you will see a noticeable reduction in performance, and if you're really unlucky, a lot of BSODs. Of course if you're really really unlucky, the drivers will all be on floppy disks, and if your system doesn't have a floppy drive, well then searching out the correct drivers from the manufacturers website is your only option.
I was laughing for ages when I first read it. A perfect copy of the BBC news website. I was really quite amused and disturbed at the lengths some people will go to just so that they can insult paladins. Alas, the layout is gone (stands to reason, given that it was entirely ripped off from the BBC), but the text is still there for all to read. It still makes me chuckle, just thinking of the lengths some people will go to for the purposes of humour and/or trolling.
Dismal and dreary? I absolutely love playing Horde precisely because they're not dreary! Well, except for the Undead. I can't stand the Forsaken territories, and I absolutely avoid them whenever I can. But apart from the Undead, the rest of the Horde lands are amazing, IMHO. The endless green grasslands of Mulgore, or the beating sun and the endless expanses of the Barrens. I could never get enough of those places, and I often go back to the Barrens just to look.
I guess the reason I've never really liked the Night Elf lands is because I found it to be... maybe too pretty. All the shadowy greenness, and the funny glowing things that are everywhere. I just found it to be a bit too much really. Ah well, each to their own, and whatever.
And you know what, men want to play cute things too! After all, MMORPG == Many Men Online RolePlay Girls.
On a slightly less silly note, a friend of mine explained it as "If I'm going to spend 12 hours a day watching some computer generated rear end, I might as well pick the cutest rear end of the lot." Really makes you wonder, sometimes...
Heh, yes, but the parent does have a point. As amusing as Chen was in WC3, I don't really think that Pandaren would be suitable as a playable race in WoW. There'd be far too many noobs playing Pandaren just for the "zomgpandas!" factor. Not that I mean to imply that the grandparent is a noob, far from it, there are plenty of legitemate reasons for wanting to play Pandaren. I just don't believe that Pandaren are a suitable player race, and I believe that they'd make an even less suitable Alliance race. I think Blizzard have stated that the new Alliance race is definitely not Pandaren, so I don't think there's really anything to worry about. But it will be interesting to see what the new race will be. Draenei is certainly a possibility, and a strong one at that, but I reckon this is all just speculation.
Ah, that's a classic one. Brilliantly simple. We had a server go down when somebody accidentally typed it into the wrong terminal while trying to test the ulimits on their local machine. Oh, we all had a jolly good laugh about it afterwards of course.
Yes. I imagine that this will quickly degenerate into a flamefest of epic proportions. Don your fire retardant suits now!
On a more serious note, I've always used KDE in the past, and I've never really seen anything that was interesting or innovative enough to make me want to switch. On the other hand, I'd be quite open to trying Gnome or something, but I've just never been able muster up the effort.
Re:What about the chimes in the commercials?
on
'Intel Inside' No More
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Class? Good grief, that jingle was awful. I couldn't stand it, thought it was utterly atrocious. Maybe it's just me, but every time I heard that sound it just made me want to cringe.
Personally I can't stand earbuds. They always irritated my ears, and I couldn't stand the way they feel, so I've just completely stopped using them now. Ah, it's wonderful the way a set of real headphones fit right over the ears. Nicely blocks out all the background noise as well. I certainly don't intend to go back to using any nasty earbuds again.
You are correct that branding and marketing are the hardest part of gaining public acceptance. But the rest of your post screams to me that you have completely missed the parent's point. Allow me to reverse the example that you provided. What about Granny Smith apples? What if there were someone who had never before heard of Granny Smith apples? Would a person who had never before heard of Granny Smith immediately associate this with apples? No, they would not. The name 'Granny Smith' does not even remotely hint at any apples in any way. But will this hinder the enjoyment of the apple? Given the millions of people who buy Granny Smith apples every year, I'm inclined to say that it will not. And after a while, the name Granny Smith becomes intrinsically associated with apples.
Well, a 'kill switch' kinda implies the ability to take down the entire network at once, whereas this is just local jamming. If they want to jam the signal is a small area, then I don't see why they shouldn't be able to, so long as they make sure they only do it in places that they can afford to piss people off. And anyway, we can always trust them to make careful and judicious use of this jamming, naturally... right?
It's true that they can't *make* you show your driver's license, but by that same token, they are free to not offer you this discount card if you don't. It sucks, but that's just how it is, and unless more people start making it clear to these companies that this kind of thing isn't right, they're just gonna keep on doing it. And you know what, most people aren't going to start complaining about these things, because your average person is a lemon.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but is he? I know TFA states he's 16, but my newspaper says 19, and a cursory search of google news has multiple sources reporting 18.
Because malice implies a certain level of intelligence... If these people had any intelligence then they wouldn't be spammers.
The trouble with relying on millions of users to click on "Report Spam" is that inevitably you get some idiots who sign up for some newsletter or something, then later decide that they don't want it. Instead of unsubscribing, they just report it as spam, thus leading to false positives for people who actually do want these things. Relying on users to make decisions that affect everybody else simply doesn't work.
The trouble I usually have with Yahoo is getting too many false positives. I never used to use my Yahoo account for much, until recently. It used to be that what little legitemate mail I had got through the filters just fine, but all the spam got blocked. Now however, I've started to get a lot more mail, and unfortunately the number of false positives I got was just too much. In the end I disabled my Yahoo spam filter, and I now rely on Thunderbird's far superior one.
Mmm, it's true... people keep saying that piracy is killing the game industry. No... just no... Piracy isn't killing the game industry, EA is.
Who's being willfully dense? Yes, there are good reasons people distribute obfuscated videos. I think the point the GP was trying to make is that none of them work, especially not Flash.
That is a very good point. Why should recordings require the consent of both parties? If it is legal for me to write everything that is said in a conversation, why should it be illegal to get a tape recorder to do the same job? The law should not be meddling in common sense issues like this.
Oh, I'm sure it is being taken seriously. I think what the GP was getting at is that the RIAA's statement is inherently contradictory. It won't help Limewire at all in this case, but the point is that as usual the RIAA is talking complete bullshit.
The design has changed for a *wider* appeal, eh? Can we expect this to *expand* Slashdot's userbase? All this pink sure is *broadening* our horizons. In fact you could almost say that it's *stretching* our imaginations. Who knew?
Well, that might be true at the moment, but is it likely to stay that way forever? More and more these days we find tech-savvy people will install Firefox for their less able family and friends, saying that it's "more secure". If this trend continues then it seems likely that eventually there will be a significant fraction of Firefox's users who will need the security that Firefox provides. I think it's excellent to see that Firefox is continuing to advance in matters of security.
I've also seen Gnomeregan shortened to just Gnome, and Maraudon to Mara.
Software patents are already (technically) not permitted here, and yet crazy inconsistencies and loopholes are allowing people to patent whatever they want. Including software and other things that are explicitly not allowed to be patented. It is good that some people are finally starting to look at this from a sensible point of view. Maybe now some progress can be made on making the patent laws sane.
Actually, the goatse.ca mirror is incomplete. It lacks a great deal of content that goatse.cx (and goat.cx) had. The most complete goatse mirror you are likely to find is goatse.ragingfist.net
Yes, most hardware these days does come with driver disks... but in my experience these drivers are often out of date, meaning that you will see a noticeable reduction in performance, and if you're really unlucky, a lot of BSODs. Of course if you're really really unlucky, the drivers will all be on floppy disks, and if your system doesn't have a floppy drive, well then searching out the correct drivers from the manufacturers website is your only option.
I was laughing for ages when I first read it. A perfect copy of the BBC news website. I was really quite amused and disturbed at the lengths some people will go to just so that they can insult paladins. Alas, the layout is gone (stands to reason, given that it was entirely ripped off from the BBC), but the text is still there for all to read. It still makes me chuckle, just thinking of the lengths some people will go to for the purposes of humour and/or trolling.
I guess the reason I've never really liked the Night Elf lands is because I found it to be... maybe too pretty. All the shadowy greenness, and the funny glowing things that are everywhere. I just found it to be a bit too much really. Ah well, each to their own, and whatever.
On a slightly less silly note, a friend of mine explained it as "If I'm going to spend 12 hours a day watching some computer generated rear end, I might as well pick the cutest rear end of the lot." Really makes you wonder, sometimes...
Heh, yes, but the parent does have a point. As amusing as Chen was in WC3, I don't really think that Pandaren would be suitable as a playable race in WoW. There'd be far too many noobs playing Pandaren just for the "zomgpandas!" factor. Not that I mean to imply that the grandparent is a noob, far from it, there are plenty of legitemate reasons for wanting to play Pandaren. I just don't believe that Pandaren are a suitable player race, and I believe that they'd make an even less suitable Alliance race. I think Blizzard have stated that the new Alliance race is definitely not Pandaren, so I don't think there's really anything to worry about. But it will be interesting to see what the new race will be. Draenei is certainly a possibility, and a strong one at that, but I reckon this is all just speculation.
Ah, that's a classic one. Brilliantly simple. We had a server go down when somebody accidentally typed it into the wrong terminal while trying to test the ulimits on their local machine. Oh, we all had a jolly good laugh about it afterwards of course.
Yes. I imagine that this will quickly degenerate into a flamefest of epic proportions. Don your fire retardant suits now! On a more serious note, I've always used KDE in the past, and I've never really seen anything that was interesting or innovative enough to make me want to switch. On the other hand, I'd be quite open to trying Gnome or something, but I've just never been able muster up the effort.
Class? Good grief, that jingle was awful. I couldn't stand it, thought it was utterly atrocious. Maybe it's just me, but every time I heard that sound it just made me want to cringe.
Story also on Yahoo news, and the Register.
You are correct that branding and marketing are the hardest part of gaining public acceptance. But the rest of your post screams to me that you have completely missed the parent's point. Allow me to reverse the example that you provided. What about Granny Smith apples? What if there were someone who had never before heard of Granny Smith apples? Would a person who had never before heard of Granny Smith immediately associate this with apples? No, they would not. The name 'Granny Smith' does not even remotely hint at any apples in any way. But will this hinder the enjoyment of the apple? Given the millions of people who buy Granny Smith apples every year, I'm inclined to say that it will not. And after a while, the name Granny Smith becomes intrinsically associated with apples.
Well, a 'kill switch' kinda implies the ability to take down the entire network at once, whereas this is just local jamming. If they want to jam the signal is a small area, then I don't see why they shouldn't be able to, so long as they make sure they only do it in places that they can afford to piss people off. And anyway, we can always trust them to make careful and judicious use of this jamming, naturally... right?
It's true that they can't *make* you show your driver's license, but by that same token, they are free to not offer you this discount card if you don't. It sucks, but that's just how it is, and unless more people start making it clear to these companies that this kind of thing isn't right, they're just gonna keep on doing it. And you know what, most people aren't going to start complaining about these things, because your average person is a lemon.
You forgot about GM crops, mutant rabbits, and evil grey goo that's trying to take over the world.