>>Why have a key to open your front door when you can have an RFID tag implanted in your arm that will do the trick?>>
I can think of a number of reasons.
1. You can give your key to a trusted associate, for example to housesit or run an errand for you. Giving your arm to a trusted associate is computationally intensive, destructive, and irreversible.
2. You can, for the cost of less than one hour's salary, revoke the key tied to a compromised lock, and then issue a new key. If unforseen circumstances should cause the RFID lock to require revoking, well, bad news bears...
3. Key/lock devices are well understood, hardly ever fail due to them having few moving parts which are almost never in operation, and are robust against almost all unforseen environmental conditions (i.e. power outage). Arm/RFID reader interfaces are poorly understood, by necessity have to be polling constantly, and are dependent on several fragile systems to maintain the key requirements that you be let into your house promptly any time you desire and that unauthorized users be rejected 100% of the time.
4. You have designs of ever having a romantic relationship. ("Honey, I know preparations for the wedding have been a bit busy, but we'll have to schedule your surgery sometime this week...")
5. A diligent attacker attempting to compromise your lock/key interface has no reason to attempt to compromise your shoulder/arm interface with a hacksaw.
If they're essentially charging you $21 to replace a five minute phone call twice a day, why don't you outsource this task? Seriously. Go to GetFriday.com or someplace similar and hire a nice young Indian lady to spend 1/5th of an hour a day (split into two chunks, about $3 a day and you would likely get a quantity discount) calling your grandmother at the appropriate times and saying "Hello, Mrs. LearnToSpell. I'm just calling to check up on you. Is everything going alright? That is great. Have you taken your pills yet? No? Oh, it's no problem. Could you take those right now please?"
Granted, I wouldn't use something like this to avoid talking to your grandmother, but that isn't the point of the excercise. The point is to take a simple, repetitive task and perform it simply and cheaply. Your nerves, and your grandmother's health, will thank you for it, and you'll save a few hundred dollars a month.
Particularly if they were savage, bloodythirsty Aztec chihuahuas who I could order off the cart at a moment's notice to devour anyone saying "Aww, wook at the cute puppies".
I had this happen with a university address, lots
on
A $1 Billion Email Gaffe
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· Score: 4, Funny
I was the campus token conservative columnist. He was very flamboyantly gay. Our university email addresses were generated off of initials plus, since we had a catastrophic hash collision, one distinguishing digit which people botched quite frequently. He got my death threats, I got his love letters, and neither of us was very happy with the matter.
We both maintained a pretty good sense of humor about it, though. These were typical, with the vile language excised:
FWD: You fascist... [Ed: I think it is for you]
FWD: I want to... you [Ed: I think this one is for you] RE: FWD: I want to... you [Ed: No, read it more carefully] RE: RE: FWD: I want to... you [Ed: Ah, whoops, my apologies] RE: RE: RE: FWD: I want to... you [Ed: No problem. Hey, FWIW, I think he was out of line]
>> Criminal like hell. Nothing compared to copy some software where both parties know it. >>
This appears to be the Slashdot consensus morality:
Make a perfectly functional copy, upload it to Pirate Bay, charge for advertising: No problem. Make a perfectly functional copy, sell it on a CD-R, charge $1 for it: Very little problem. Make a perfectly functional copy, sell it on a CD which looks real, charge $100 for it: Criminal like hell.
It would appear, on the basis of available evidence, that the Slashdot consensus doesn't give two bits about IP rights as applied to software, but thinks they are really, really important when applied to the distinctive branding on cardboard boxes. I suppose Microsoft should have invested more in Pretty Box Rights Management? It would probably make them more popular around here.
After all, is it any different when IBM or Sun pays the wages of the folks working on httpd or OpenOffice? All they're doing is paying for man hours. Microsoft also pays the innovators... they just pay several orders of magnitude better. (And this is why every OSS Visio-clone will always be an OSS Visio-clone, rather than Microsoft playing catch-up by cloning successful OSS programs.)
...and, freaking crucial difference incoming: nobody is getting the death penalty for saying so.
America has made many contributions to the world, but one is the sort of radical notion that Salt Lake City and San Fransisco can be in the same country and nobody has to die to make it happen. (Although for a few months every four years we do our best to pretend otherwise.)
I don't have a prejudice against translators -- I'm professionally trained as one. This included courses in professional ethics, in which I was taught such hypotheticals as "Opposite party says something outrageously offensive in front of client. What do you do?" The "correct" answer is to translate it, without passing judgement, missing not a single nuance. Lawyers are professionally required to zealously defend guilty people, translators are professionally obligated to maintain a certain distance from the matter at hand.
I am of the opinion that this is bogus, which is why, again, I don't translate professionally. (I also think that what your translator did was both correct and in the best interests of her client. There are agencies which would have made that the last thing she ever did, in an analagous situation.)
Here's a concrete example: I was once dealing with a female American biggywig (not a VP at Microsoft, but that general level of the stratosphere), a senior Japanese politician (think senator -- again, not actually a senator), and their various staffs. One staff member, on being introduced to the VP, said "Hello, nice to meet you. And my, do you have an amazing rack."
I just completely, bald-faced lied about what he had said. What was I going to do, torpedo the negotiations because the assistant to the deputy aide to the undersecretary of bumble is pathologically incapable of being a member of the human race?
Anyhow, I brought this up the next 3 times I went into professional training/ethics seminars/etc, and the answer was unanimous: bad translator. You should have said, in exactly as many words, "You have a nice rack." I cannot accept that that is the right solution to this issue, though I understand the reasoning behind it (the reasoning is that the translator is supposed to be an interchangeable cog, not a party to the discussion in their own right -- nobody asks the stenographer to excercize discretion, either). That is why I am not a translator.
I also don't have any prejudice against Westerners (last time I checked, I was still lily white), and don't harbor any bad feelings about you. I was criticizing a specific current of thought which, sadly, is not uncommon among Westerners (the reverse isn't uncommon among Japanese people, either).
... to use the hardware. Sure, with a complete rewrite entailing several hundred man-years, you could run Random Japanese University's billing system on a Pentium 2 running a whole lot of hand-optimized assembly. (RJU's billing system is one of the projects I'm working on right now. I estimate about 98% of the codebase is Java code that poses no particularly interesting challenges from a "back in my day we implemented our for loops with bitwise arithmatic to save an extra byte of memory" challenges, just the usual engineering ones. The other 2% are fun to dip into once in a while.)
The cost of the server it actually does run on is, in rough terms, about a man month. There is a certain bit of zen-like aesthetic quality in solving this problem in an artistic fashion, but back in the real world there are vendors with invoices and teachers who would greatly appreciate if you could pay them sometime before they retire. In this situation, sure, let the JRE and 10 years of Moore's Law handle it.
It doesn't offer those teachers any extra value to have their paychecks processed ten times faster (I'm a programming rockstar, man! I don't use those slow generalist libraries, I write my own hand-optimized and domain-aware employee ID sorting algorithm! Got to squeeze out those extra 3 microseconds!), because the entire point of the system is that you can replace a process that used to take several clerks three days with one that takes one piece of commodity hardware 10 minutes. And, importantly, deliver the freaking thing to the customer in a usable state.
... have that right? Aside from, "Well, it used to be that I got my media on a physical artifact, and we have always been able to sell physical artifacts."
From an econ view, if you're buying your game on a physical artifact, you're buying both the utility of the product with an implied option to sell. The option to sell costs you money -- this is precisely why a game you can finish in 8 hours on the XBox360/PS3/whatever (provide your favorite example, I don't own either system) costs $70 and a Portal, which is similarly disposable entertainment, costs $20. The imputed value of the option is what allows the publishers/retailers to continue bumping up the prices while allowing the games to provide less and less entertainment value -- resale rights are sort of artificial permanence for good which is being created for quick consumption.
I realize that many games sell the online and physical version at the same price. This is a factor of both a bit of a market failure (retailers use their lock on the sales channel to demand that no game is sold anywhere for less price, on penalty of being excluded from the channel that moves the most sales, for this and all your other games) and that there are a few not-quite-apples comparisons going on in the package value of each. (For me, downloadable versions are clearly superior in every way -- no trip to store, no CD to mislay, no difficulty porting "collection" just to pass CD checks, and no box to have to throw out.)
Microsoft did one thing to advance the state of computing: they made the business case that you could put cheap commodity hardware and a single operating system on EVERY FREAKING DESK in your business, and that this would allow your business to reap incredible productivity gains. And they were right. The manifest proof of how right they are is why you can buy a computer for $200 at Walmart these days -- the hardware business scaled because Microsoft said that the machine is not just for hobbyists or folks with mathematical degrees and Severe Computional Needs but is also a business appliance, like the telephone.
Think for a moment of how fun it would be for your favorite open source operating system if they all had to run on incompatible CPU architectures on closed, proprietary machines which cost $2,000 each, like the Amiga, Acorn Archimedes, Atari ST and so on cost in the 80s. Think of whether you would like to participate on an Internet if every last person on it knew how to reverse a doubly-linked list (and consider, very carefully, the implications of your answer).
Like it or not, you live in the House That Bill Built.
A quick primer in online advertising, for those of you who block it:
At one end of the chain, we have Content Provider A. At the other end of the chain, we have Service Provider Z. Z wants to place advertising on A's site but, importantly, doesn't know how to do it, doesn't generally know specifically who A is, and needs this to scale to potentially thousands of As. This is where participants B, C, D, E, F, Google, H... etc come in. There are advertising aggregators, affiliate networks, affiliates, affiliates of affiliates, affiliates of affilates of networks of affiliates who subdivide the advertising market into smaller and smaller slices before it finally gets on A's site.
Now, somewhere in the chain, let us inject one person who is less than scrupulous. He doesn't work at Snopes -- this would tarnish a brand for a week's worth of income, not a smart play. He probably has a steady stream of relationships with each of the numerous advertising concerns on the Internet, picking up and moving from one after he has collected a check or three and then had the banstick for TOS violations catch up with him. He is the one working for, most probably, affiliate of an affiliate of an affiliate of Zango.
This is the way most malware makes its way onto ad networks and, from there, onto high-trust sites. Volokh Conspiracy, one of my favorite blogs, had a nasty browser hijacker which affected non-US users for months before their advertising network caught wind of it. A few popular MMORPG sites have ended up hosting keyloggers in the same fashion. It is an unintended consequence of a system without central control -- much like the Internet itself, actually. (The system being split up this way does have its advantages, for both endpoints of the chain and for everybody between. Google's business model is based on snapping the chain and replacing it with a big cloud labeled Gooooooogle, but they're not yet the only game in town.)
You can get food your way in Japan. Really, really easily -- one way is to go into any fast food restaraunt. Hold the pickles, add more lettuce, special orders don't upset us because they're in the freaking manual. Seriously, though, there is a wide spectrum of culinary traditions in this country, from "The chef is the master, you are the student, you should be glad you were even allowed to choose to eat dinner at this restaraunt" to "Hum a few bars and I'll get you something in that general direction" to "Did you know there are 745,000 combinations of ingridients possible with this dish? We have 10 named varieties which are our most popular, or you can just pick one of the other 744,990."
There is also a wide spectrum of cooks having egos. (There is a bad habit among a certain type of Westerner to assume that any odd action taken by a Japanese person is because they are Japanese. That is one theory -- another is that the cook just can't be bothered to help you, or is excessively proud, or is just a disagreeable person. All of thsee will be right at least part of the time.) I assure you, if you visit enough hoity-toity restaraunts in NYC, you will fairly quickly find someone who would not be willing to accomodate a simple request that wasn't in their "vision" for the food. ("Where is the ketchup?" "THIS IS A FOI GRAS AND CAVIAR PATTE SERVED IN A LIGHT BALSAMIC VINAGRETTE."* "I like my foi gras with ketchup!"
(Sidenote: I do E->J and J->E translation in Japan as one of my work duties. I am not, however, a professional translator. The difference is that the folks who pay my salary pay me to *resolve* issues like "I just don't want squid" rather than just passively relaying the "Oh, we can't do that" response. I understand that the standard practice among professional translators is that you are supposed to not get in the way of the speaking parties at all -- this is why I am not a professional translator, I just translate for money.
P.S. For those of you considering a job in this general line of work, the pay is a heck of a lot better if you pitch yourself my way. Most clients do not appreciate the value of a beautifully articulated "The waitress says no" nearly as much as they do "OK, so here's what is going on here, and here is what I did to get you your squidless pizza. Aren't you glad you hired me." The same fundamental issue scales straight from "I can't give you pizza w/o squid" to "I can't approve that $1 million deal you are suggesting".)
* Sorry, I only eat at restaraunts that cost more than $15 when the client is paying, and then I'm having what he is having, so I have absolutely no clue whether this is actually a plausible French food combo or not. Bonus points: consultants get to eat at dinner, translators don't.
... because Hollywood doesn't have a massive content source to parasite off of. Pirate Bay parasites off both the content production and the 8 to 9 figure advertising budget that that content brings with it. (People forget that the most popular movies/songs on P2P networks are invariably the ones at the top of the regular charts, which got there because they are mega-promoted to get there!)
Let him tack on defamation or libel charges to the copyright infringement. All he needs to do is convince a likely sympathetic judge that your satire could be read as being a factual account and bam, you have per se libel.
"Per se" is libel which, unlike your garden variety libel, is so obviously damaging that one does not need to prove one has sustained economic damage as a result of the libel to get damages awarded to you. Alleging criminal conduct in the course of one's professional affairs is per-se libel in many American states. This will put your lawyer in an awkward position, as the very best defense against libel, even better than truth (which can be, as a tactical matter, hard to prove), is "Eh, so what, you didn't suffer any damage as a result of the statement". Per se libel means you don't have that defense, and thus the inquiry is going to focus on a) whether you actually said what you said (that won't take a minute to resolve) and then b) exactly how much it is going to cost you, which will range from "lots" to "oh God".
KFC and Taco Bell together? *shudder* They should send the health inspectors to protect the rat from the food, not the other way around.
MySQL forgot the important part of the equation
on
Can Sun Make MySQL Pay?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Free software *which is painful as hell to use*, paid support. If your software is well-documented, configuration is easy, and it isn't effectively broken in important respects... what do you need support for, again?
... but a casual inspection suggests that they come from some "anywhere"s a whole lot more than they come from others (ditto "anyone"s). I suppose next time the breaking news bulletin says that 15 were killed in a suicide bombing it is entirely possible that the perpretrator was a 65 year-old female Buddhist from Toledo but, you know, I'm not going to bet my rent money on it.
They came with a big piece of yellow tape over the power terminal and the LAN cable ports, which said "STOP. Put the CD in first, and follow the instructions on the screen."
The instructions on the screen were, predictably, written so that you could understand them if you were six. One of them was "Pick a username and password". Presto-changeo, no need for a factory default.
I don't remember the makes and models of the routers, though. They're a commodity -- I went into Best Buy and, for the first time in my life, the magically appearing salesman was actually useful. "I need a wireless router." "Size of the house?" "Small." "Here." "Thanks. My, that was easy." Commodity appliances for the win.
... when Amazon Unbox sells videos for about $2 each. (And $15 for the miniseries, which struck me as kind of expensive, but then I compared my salary to my entertainment expenditures and decided it wasn't worth worrying about.)
You could code Micropolis: True Patriot, with the added feature of plane crashes. For that matter, you could add in suicide bombings and school shootings, for extra realism.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Why have a key to open your front door when you can have an RFID tag implanted in your arm that will do the trick?>>
I can think of a number of reasons.
1. You can give your key to a trusted associate, for example to housesit or run an errand for you. Giving your arm to a trusted associate is computationally intensive, destructive, and irreversible.
2. You can, for the cost of less than one hour's salary, revoke the key tied to a compromised lock, and then issue a new key. If unforseen circumstances should cause the RFID lock to require revoking, well, bad news bears...
3. Key/lock devices are well understood, hardly ever fail due to them having few moving parts which are almost never in operation, and are robust against almost all unforseen environmental conditions (i.e. power outage). Arm/RFID reader interfaces are poorly understood, by necessity have to be polling constantly, and are dependent on several fragile systems to maintain the key requirements that you be let into your house promptly any time you desire and that unauthorized users be rejected 100% of the time.
4. You have designs of ever having a romantic relationship. ("Honey, I know preparations for the wedding have been a bit busy, but we'll have to schedule your surgery sometime this week...")
5. A diligent attacker attempting to compromise your lock/key interface has no reason to attempt to compromise your shoulder/arm interface with a hacksaw.
If they're essentially charging you $21 to replace a five minute phone call twice a day, why don't you outsource this task? Seriously. Go to GetFriday.com or someplace similar and hire a nice young Indian lady to spend 1/5th of an hour a day (split into two chunks, about $3 a day and you would likely get a quantity discount) calling your grandmother at the appropriate times and saying "Hello, Mrs. LearnToSpell. I'm just calling to check up on you. Is everything going alright? That is great. Have you taken your pills yet? No? Oh, it's no problem. Could you take those right now please?"
Granted, I wouldn't use something like this to avoid talking to your grandmother, but that isn't the point of the excercise. The point is to take a simple, repetitive task and perform it simply and cheaply. Your nerves, and your grandmother's health, will thank you for it, and you'll save a few hundred dollars a month.
Particularly if they were savage, bloodythirsty Aztec chihuahuas who I could order off the cart at a moment's notice to devour anyone saying "Aww, wook at the cute puppies".
I was the campus token conservative columnist. He was very flamboyantly gay. Our university email addresses were generated off of initials plus, since we had a catastrophic hash collision, one distinguishing digit which people botched quite frequently. He got my death threats, I got his love letters, and neither of us was very happy with the matter.
... [Ed: I think it is for you]
... you [Ed: I think this one is for you] ... you [Ed: No, read it more carefully] ... you [Ed: Ah, whoops, my apologies] ... you [Ed: No problem. Hey, FWIW, I think he was out of line]
We both maintained a pretty good sense of humor about it, though. These were typical, with the vile language excised:
FWD: You fascist
FWD: I want to
RE: FWD: I want to
RE: RE: FWD: I want to
RE: RE: RE: FWD: I want to
>>
Criminal like hell. Nothing compared to copy some software where both parties know it.
>>
This appears to be the Slashdot consensus morality:
Make a perfectly functional copy, upload it to Pirate Bay, charge for advertising: No problem.
Make a perfectly functional copy, sell it on a CD-R, charge $1 for it: Very little problem.
Make a perfectly functional copy, sell it on a CD which looks real, charge $100 for it: Criminal like hell.
It would appear, on the basis of available evidence, that the Slashdot consensus doesn't give two bits about IP rights as applied to software, but thinks they are really, really important when applied to the distinctive branding on cardboard boxes. I suppose Microsoft should have invested more in Pretty Box Rights Management? It would probably make them more popular around here.
After all, is it any different when IBM or Sun pays the wages of the folks working on httpd or OpenOffice? All they're doing is paying for man hours. Microsoft also pays the innovators... they just pay several orders of magnitude better. (And this is why every OSS Visio-clone will always be an OSS Visio-clone, rather than Microsoft playing catch-up by cloning successful OSS programs.)
...and, freaking crucial difference incoming: nobody is getting the death penalty for saying so.
America has made many contributions to the world, but one is the sort of radical notion that Salt Lake City and San Fransisco can be in the same country and nobody has to die to make it happen. (Although for a few months every four years we do our best to pretend otherwise.)
... in *search engines*?!
I don't have a prejudice against translators -- I'm professionally trained as one. This included courses in professional ethics, in which I was taught such hypotheticals as "Opposite party says something outrageously offensive in front of client. What do you do?" The "correct" answer is to translate it, without passing judgement, missing not a single nuance. Lawyers are professionally required to zealously defend guilty people, translators are professionally obligated to maintain a certain distance from the matter at hand.
I am of the opinion that this is bogus, which is why, again, I don't translate professionally. (I also think that what your translator did was both correct and in the best interests of her client. There are agencies which would have made that the last thing she ever did, in an analagous situation.)
Here's a concrete example: I was once dealing with a female American biggywig (not a VP at Microsoft, but that general level of the stratosphere), a senior Japanese politician (think senator -- again, not actually a senator), and their various staffs. One staff member, on being introduced to the VP, said "Hello, nice to meet you. And my, do you have an amazing rack."
I just completely, bald-faced lied about what he had said. What was I going to do, torpedo the negotiations because the assistant to the deputy aide to the undersecretary of bumble is pathologically incapable of being a member of the human race?
Anyhow, I brought this up the next 3 times I went into professional training/ethics seminars/etc, and the answer was unanimous: bad translator. You should have said, in exactly as many words, "You have a nice rack." I cannot accept that that is the right solution to this issue, though I understand the reasoning behind it (the reasoning is that the translator is supposed to be an interchangeable cog, not a party to the discussion in their own right -- nobody asks the stenographer to excercize discretion, either). That is why I am not a translator.
I also don't have any prejudice against Westerners (last time I checked, I was still lily white), and don't harbor any bad feelings about you. I was criticizing a specific current of thought which, sadly, is not uncommon among Westerners (the reverse isn't uncommon among Japanese people, either).
... to use the hardware. Sure, with a complete rewrite entailing several hundred man-years, you could run Random Japanese University's billing system on a Pentium 2 running a whole lot of hand-optimized assembly. (RJU's billing system is one of the projects I'm working on right now. I estimate about 98% of the codebase is Java code that poses no particularly interesting challenges from a "back in my day we implemented our for loops with bitwise arithmatic to save an extra byte of memory" challenges, just the usual engineering ones. The other 2% are fun to dip into once in a while.)
The cost of the server it actually does run on is, in rough terms, about a man month. There is a certain bit of zen-like aesthetic quality in solving this problem in an artistic fashion, but back in the real world there are vendors with invoices and teachers who would greatly appreciate if you could pay them sometime before they retire. In this situation, sure, let the JRE and 10 years of Moore's Law handle it.
It doesn't offer those teachers any extra value to have their paychecks processed ten times faster (I'm a programming rockstar, man! I don't use those slow generalist libraries, I write my own hand-optimized and domain-aware employee ID sorting algorithm! Got to squeeze out those extra 3 microseconds!), because the entire point of the system is that you can replace a process that used to take several clerks three days with one that takes one piece of commodity hardware 10 minutes. And, importantly, deliver the freaking thing to the customer in a usable state.
... have that right? Aside from, "Well, it used to be that I got my media on a physical artifact, and we have always been able to sell physical artifacts."
From an econ view, if you're buying your game on a physical artifact, you're buying both the utility of the product with an implied option to sell. The option to sell costs you money -- this is precisely why a game you can finish in 8 hours on the XBox360/PS3/whatever (provide your favorite example, I don't own either system) costs $70 and a Portal, which is similarly disposable entertainment, costs $20. The imputed value of the option is what allows the publishers/retailers to continue bumping up the prices while allowing the games to provide less and less entertainment value -- resale rights are sort of artificial permanence for good which is being created for quick consumption.
I realize that many games sell the online and physical version at the same price. This is a factor of both a bit of a market failure (retailers use their lock on the sales channel to demand that no game is sold anywhere for less price, on penalty of being excluded from the channel that moves the most sales, for this and all your other games) and that there are a few not-quite-apples comparisons going on in the package value of each. (For me, downloadable versions are clearly superior in every way -- no trip to store, no CD to mislay, no difficulty porting "collection" just to pass CD checks, and no box to have to throw out.)
Microsoft did one thing to advance the state of computing: they made the business case that you could put cheap commodity hardware and a single operating system on EVERY FREAKING DESK in your business, and that this would allow your business to reap incredible productivity gains. And they were right. The manifest proof of how right they are is why you can buy a computer for $200 at Walmart these days -- the hardware business scaled because Microsoft said that the machine is not just for hobbyists or folks with mathematical degrees and Severe Computional Needs but is also a business appliance, like the telephone.
Think for a moment of how fun it would be for your favorite open source operating system if they all had to run on incompatible CPU architectures on closed, proprietary machines which cost $2,000 each, like the Amiga, Acorn Archimedes, Atari ST and so on cost in the 80s. Think of whether you would like to participate on an Internet if every last person on it knew how to reverse a doubly-linked list (and consider, very carefully, the implications of your answer).
Like it or not, you live in the House That Bill Built.
While I won't tell you what you shouldn't be looking at on your computer, I sincerely hope you run anti-virus and AdAware on a regular basis.
... being used for important scientific missions. ... ...
Hah, just kidding.
OK, launch the lawyers. And let them keep the Shuttle while you're at it, it will save us a bundle.
A quick primer in online advertising, for those of you who block it:
At one end of the chain, we have Content Provider A. At the other end of the chain, we have Service Provider Z. Z wants to place advertising on A's site but, importantly, doesn't know how to do it, doesn't generally know specifically who A is, and needs this to scale to potentially thousands of As. This is where participants B, C, D, E, F, Google, H... etc come in. There are advertising aggregators, affiliate networks, affiliates, affiliates of affiliates, affiliates of affilates of networks of affiliates who subdivide the advertising market into smaller and smaller slices before it finally gets on A's site.
Now, somewhere in the chain, let us inject one person who is less than scrupulous. He doesn't work at Snopes -- this would tarnish a brand for a week's worth of income, not a smart play. He probably has a steady stream of relationships with each of the numerous advertising concerns on the Internet, picking up and moving from one after he has collected a check or three and then had the banstick for TOS violations catch up with him. He is the one working for, most probably, affiliate of an affiliate of an affiliate of Zango.
This is the way most malware makes its way onto ad networks and, from there, onto high-trust sites. Volokh Conspiracy, one of my favorite blogs, had a nasty browser hijacker which affected non-US users for months before their advertising network caught wind of it. A few popular MMORPG sites have ended up hosting keyloggers in the same fashion. It is an unintended consequence of a system without central control -- much like the Internet itself, actually. (The system being split up this way does have its advantages, for both endpoints of the chain and for everybody between. Google's business model is based on snapping the chain and replacing it with a big cloud labeled Gooooooogle, but they're not yet the only game in town.)
You can get food your way in Japan. Really, really easily -- one way is to go into any fast food restaraunt. Hold the pickles, add more lettuce, special orders don't upset us because they're in the freaking manual. Seriously, though, there is a wide spectrum of culinary traditions in this country, from "The chef is the master, you are the student, you should be glad you were even allowed to choose to eat dinner at this restaraunt" to "Hum a few bars and I'll get you something in that general direction" to "Did you know there are 745,000 combinations of ingridients possible with this dish? We have 10 named varieties which are our most popular, or you can just pick one of the other 744,990."
There is also a wide spectrum of cooks having egos. (There is a bad habit among a certain type of Westerner to assume that any odd action taken by a Japanese person is because they are Japanese. That is one theory -- another is that the cook just can't be bothered to help you, or is excessively proud, or is just a disagreeable person. All of thsee will be right at least part of the time.) I assure you, if you visit enough hoity-toity restaraunts in NYC, you will fairly quickly find someone who would not be willing to accomodate a simple request that wasn't in their "vision" for the food. ("Where is the ketchup?" "THIS IS A FOI GRAS AND CAVIAR PATTE SERVED IN A LIGHT BALSAMIC VINAGRETTE."* "I like my foi gras with ketchup!"
(Sidenote: I do E->J and J->E translation in Japan as one of my work duties. I am not, however, a professional translator. The difference is that the folks who pay my salary pay me to *resolve* issues like "I just don't want squid" rather than just passively relaying the "Oh, we can't do that" response. I understand that the standard practice among professional translators is that you are supposed to not get in the way of the speaking parties at all -- this is why I am not a professional translator, I just translate for money.
P.S. For those of you considering a job in this general line of work, the pay is a heck of a lot better if you pitch yourself my way. Most clients do not appreciate the value of a beautifully articulated "The waitress says no" nearly as much as they do "OK, so here's what is going on here, and here is what I did to get you your squidless pizza. Aren't you glad you hired me." The same fundamental issue scales straight from "I can't give you pizza w/o squid" to "I can't approve that $1 million deal you are suggesting".)
* Sorry, I only eat at restaraunts that cost more than $15 when the client is paying, and then I'm having what he is having, so I have absolutely no clue whether this is actually a plausible French food combo or not. Bonus points: consultants get to eat at dinner, translators don't.
... because Hollywood doesn't have a massive content source to parasite off of. Pirate Bay parasites off both the content production and the 8 to 9 figure advertising budget that that content brings with it. (People forget that the most popular movies/songs on P2P networks are invariably the ones at the top of the regular charts, which got there because they are mega-promoted to get there!)
Let him tack on defamation or libel charges to the copyright infringement. All he needs to do is convince a likely sympathetic judge that your satire could be read as being a factual account and bam, you have per se libel.
"Per se" is libel which, unlike your garden variety libel, is so obviously damaging that one does not need to prove one has sustained economic damage as a result of the libel to get damages awarded to you. Alleging criminal conduct in the course of one's professional affairs is per-se libel in many American states. This will put your lawyer in an awkward position, as the very best defense against libel, even better than truth (which can be, as a tactical matter, hard to prove), is "Eh, so what, you didn't suffer any damage as a result of the statement". Per se libel means you don't have that defense, and thus the inquiry is going to focus on a) whether you actually said what you said (that won't take a minute to resolve) and then b) exactly how much it is going to cost you, which will range from "lots" to "oh God".
KFC and Taco Bell together? *shudder* They should send the health inspectors to protect the rat from the food, not the other way around.
Free software *which is painful as hell to use*, paid support. If your software is well-documented, configuration is easy, and it isn't effectively broken in important respects... what do you need support for, again?
... but a casual inspection suggests that they come from some "anywhere"s a whole lot more than they come from others (ditto "anyone"s). I suppose next time the breaking news bulletin says that 15 were killed in a suicide bombing it is entirely possible that the perpretrator was a 65 year-old female Buddhist from Toledo but, you know, I'm not going to bet my rent money on it.
Shoot, now I have much more incentive to actually play the game.
They came with a big piece of yellow tape over the power terminal and the LAN cable ports, which said "STOP. Put the CD in first, and follow the instructions on the screen."
The instructions on the screen were, predictably, written so that you could understand them if you were six. One of them was "Pick a username and password". Presto-changeo, no need for a factory default.
I don't remember the makes and models of the routers, though. They're a commodity -- I went into Best Buy and, for the first time in my life, the magically appearing salesman was actually useful. "I need a wireless router." "Size of the house?" "Small." "Here." "Thanks. My, that was easy." Commodity appliances for the win.
... when Amazon Unbox sells videos for about $2 each. (And $15 for the miniseries, which struck me as kind of expensive, but then I compared my salary to my entertainment expenditures and decided it wasn't worth worrying about.)
You could code Micropolis: True Patriot, with the added feature of plane crashes. For that matter, you could add in suicide bombings and school shootings, for extra realism.