My wife and I have been using Netflix since Nov. 2004, and we have experienced a marked decline in service over that time. Having just learned about the "throttling", we sent them the following letter:
I have just been alerted to your new changes in the "Terms of Service" regarding heavy users. Personally, I am appalled by the intent and also the wording of this recent change.
Perhaps you have serious abusers of your system, but my husband and I are teachers who work 12 hour days. Watching movies is one of our only luxuries. We have seen our level of service go down significantly since we signed on with Netflix. Now we understand why.
After reading some enlightening articles about Netflix and its practices, we will be seriously considering whether or not to keep our relationship with you.
Most importantly, we will no longer be suggesting your service to family and friends, which we have done many times in the past. Instead, we will be sending copies of the articles concerning your business practices to family and friends who already have the service so that they might be aware of what's going on.
For what it's worth: We would have been happy to pay a reasonable surcharge in months when we rented more DVDs. What your company has chosen to do instead is offensive and insulting.
Here are some eye-opening parts of their terms of use:
We make no guaranty as to the shipping and delivery of DVDs and may, in our sole and absolute discretion, change our business practice regarding allocation, delivery and shipping, without notice. We may from time to time revise these Terms of Use but we will not necessarily provide you notice of the revisions. It is up to you to review the Terms of Use frequently to determine if there have been changes.
They send us emails about everything else...but they can't bother letting us know when the terms of use have changed? Something smells bad here...
If you're really really quiet, you might just hear the sound of a seriously powerful/persisent meme being (re)born. If the original article is from 1998, and it's hitting slashdot only now, that means it's been sitting dormant for quite a long while. But somehow I suspect that the slashdot release will result in a widespread, high-speed, persistent reinfection. I will be pleasantly unsurprised when I hear your/my grandkids bring this one up (with requisite exaggerations and other temporally-proportional distortions) around the flux-capacitor-entertainment-immersion-tank:
~~~blur screen and flash forward into ze pHuture~~~~~~
"Gramps, is it true that some kid...?"
"Why, yes, K-bob-Alpha3, not only is it true, I was there when the story was rescued from oblivion. If it hadn't been for slashdot..."
"Wow, the slashdot, Gramps? You knew the original slashdot?!"
"Well, I guess you could put it that way K-bob. I was one of the first billion non-anonymous cowards.... Ya see, back then, we didn't have all this security circuitry embedded in our butto..."
"Uh,... ok, thanks Gramps, but we gotta go. You know, like, the flux-capacitor is, like, waiting?"
"Oh, oh, yes, I'm sorry. Here I am nattering on again about the kick-ass old days...never mind me...I'll be fine...you run along now!..."
"What a punk! No way a dumbass like gramps was one of the first billion slashdotters! No stinkin' way!"
~~~blur screen & return to menial cubicle job~~~~
SPaM: Seriously Persistent/Powerful Meme
Remember: dumb, unsolicited mass commercial email is only one subset of the true SPaM.
Where did the "A" go? I don't know; I didn't lose it! You find it!
Memeherds of the new electric prarie, throw down your keyboards and dance!
(Now if I could just find myself a good cyberdog...I'd have these pesky memes under control in no time!)
A meme a day keeps the brainrot at bay!
Ok, sorry, no more stupid meme babble. Schleeeep, I must schleeeeep!
____________________( /////#\)
Now w/ Freq'ly Requested Feature: KarmaBooster(sm)
on
The Social Web
·
· Score: 1
Privacy statement: All data presented was gathered from publicly accessible sources. If you would like to have yourself excluded from our study, please email us.
Loneliness statement: Those who feel they have been unfairly excluded from the social web, electronic, flesh, or otherwise, can request to have their status artificially boosted temporarily and, of course, secretly. We cannot guarantee that such a brief increase in your SocialKarma will actually improve things for you, but it has been known to work for others, including, but not limited to, books on the best-seller list. We cannot be responsible for any negative consequences of falsely-acquired sudden fame. We reserve the right to track the impact of your KarmaBooster(sm), 'cause hey, if it works for you, it might just work for us! If you would like us to review your KarmaBooster(sm) application, please submit it to KarmaBooster@socWeb.stanford.edu. Good luck!
I have read a story like this. It was in a paperback SciFi "Best Of" or "Annual" anthology. Of course I can't remember what year, what publisher, or anything vital like that. I do remember that it was anthology #4 (whoo! now that's helpful!).
I'm not too sure I understand all of what you're getting at, so I'm not sure the story is actually relevent. It went something like this:
Folks fiddling around in a computer research lab working on quantum physics/chaos/computations stuff (oh, you know...;). They talk about spooky action at a distance, weird interlinks between representations of the universe (equations) and the universe (causal links I mean). Anyway, some dude is testing out the head professor's ideas, and suddenly the head prof notices that the weather has changed dramatically. Something about noticing how hot it has gotten in her lab. She looks out the window and realizes that the sun is a lot brighter than it should be. She also notices smoke in the distance. (!) Neat stuff. Maybe someone out there has read this and has some bibliographic info to supply? Hint hint.
Wooha, a little "business logic" aikido...you want my personal habits data? Well, sirs and madams, *here* you have it!
This reminds me of an amusing story I ran across in the NYTimes: "Cultural Sabotage Waged in Cyberspace"...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mr. DeGraff is hoping that his investment will be used
for projects like making "anti-souvenirs," aimed at various social
injustices and offered to tourists, or purchasing recorded books by
conservative pundits so leftist speeches can be recorded over the original
material and the tapes can be put back onto sales racks in book stores.
Clearly, this is no typical investment firm. RTMark (its name derives from
"registered trademark" but is pronounced "art mark") describes itself as a
brokerage that "supports the sabotage of corporate products." Its
projects have included switching voice boxes in Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls
and creating Gatt.org, a look-alike Web site that lampooned the World
Trade Organization.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hmm...has anyone ever fiddled with their NYTimes cookies? I wonder what changing some of the numbers and letters would do to their tracking databases? Hmm...;)..
Anyway, thanks for your wonderful suggestion!
I knew about "arroba", but I was curious to know whether "nuestr@s" is pronounced differently from "nuestras" or "nuestros". My guess is that probably not, but...how do you pronounce it in your head when you read it? How do you say it to someone when you say, "hey, you should check out the site 'blah blah nuestr@s blah blah.com'"?
I think this is a fascinating phenomenon from a cultural studies/linguistics point of view.
As I wrote to someone else above, if you have a moment, please check out the question in my other main post...about how one would go about trying to answer the question "what is the @ symbol called?".
thanks for the interesting and funny story. if you have a moment, please look at my other post on this page and give me/us your thoughts on: how to search for "the name of @".
That's really cool. What a great idea. Too bad English can't use it that way; the "s/he" and "his/hers" constructions suck. So, does the "@" have a pronunciation yet? Where have you seen this in Latin America? (You don't list an email, please email me.) I am in rural Latin America for the moment, so I'm not exposed to this kind of thing regularly.
[Scroll to bottom to jump to my question/challenge to you the reader.]
Many thanks to alienmole for finding this! (Can't find his/her email to send a personal thanks.)
My Failed Attempts to Find the Name of @
Cy Guy, I also searched unsuccessfuly for the answer to this question. First, with a phone call (in the early 90s) to my undergrad "reference hotline" people...the folks who supposedly would answer any question or get back to you on it once they found the answer. I don't remember where the question came from, but these "reference" people were a sad case: they got angry at me for not accepting the fact that it is called "at"...no matter how hard I tried to explain that "the & is called 'ampersand', not 'and', even though it is the 'and' symbol."
Well, after that the question lay dormant for many years until this year. I embarked upon a more serious search that still proved unfruitful:
I searched a passle of typography sites with no luck and finally found www.symbols.com. Their "word index" doesn't even have the word "at" in it! Can you imagine. In this day and age? Nor did I get anywhere searching with their "symbol description terms". As far as I could tell, they simply don't have the @ in their symbol database. Sheesh. I sent an email to their only feedback link, but no reply.
Last stop after that was asking a 'net/tech reporter who knows his stuff. Never heard back from him on this one.
My Question:
So, Cy Guy, and alienmole, and everyone else...now that the "answer" has been found, I want to know how to ask the question correctly:
Let's say that a few years/months/days/etc from now, someone wants to find out what the @ symbol is called. How should that person search for the answer? What is the correct approach? How did Cy Guy search for it? alienmole? (I am guessing that alienmole stumbled upon it while browsing the discovery.com site...but I could be wrong.) You certainly can't search for the '@' itself or you'll get every email archived on the web. Or maybe enough people have linked to the discovery article that google would turn it up? (Nope, not yet: searching for "@ symbol" turns up lots of junk.) Where would you search in usenet? Typography groups? If you don't feel like adding your thoughts here, please do email me!
The problem with all these wonderful solutions is that they are overkill for the simple problem of putting content in a consistent presentation.
Yup, that's for sure. Here are a few lighter-weight (positively-speaking) python html generating utilities. Maybe they will have some useful ideas/components for you:
This one sounds the most like what you want/already have (?)
Abstract:
Generate HTML files from a formatted input template description files.
Details:
makepage.py takes a specially formatted input file and a HTML format file and generates a HTML file from them. It also generates labels and a contents line for all sections of a file at the top of each page to jump directly to a section without scrolling through the file. The default layout file (html_format.py) can be ``overwritten'' partially or completely by a layout file supplied by you.
This one is probably too lightweight for your purposes, but I don't really know...
Abstract:
Is very similar to Active Server Pages or PHP3/4 and allows you to include Python code into your HTML pages.
Details:
If you don't need an application server like ZOPE than PMZ should be your choice. In general this is a technology preview. For performance issues it might be necessary to rewrite the code into an Apache web server module for best performance. This piece of software is not thought to be used on a high performance web server with much traffic. However it might be useful in some situations when you need some Python functionalities in your environment.
This one is probably the heaviest-duty of the ones listed here. May be too much for what you need?...
WHAT'S IT FOR?
HTMLgen is a class library for the generation of HTML documents with Python scripts. It's used when you want to create HTML pages containing information which changes from time to time. For example, you might want to have a page which provides an overall system summary of data collected nightly. Or maybe you have a catalog of data and images that you would like formed into a spiffy set of web pages for the world to browse. Python is a great scripting language for these tasks and with HTMLgen it's very straightforward to construct objects which are rendered out into consistently structured web pages. Of course, CGI scripts written in Python can take advantage of these classes as well.
Yup, I was incredibly surprised by the same phenomenon when I wanted to really erase some of my audio tapes before recording on them again. I was getting sick and tired of hearing U2 come through my new Coltrane recordings (!). I have always been very cautious about letting my tapes/disks/etc get anywhere near anything magnetic, so when I wanted to get rid of that U2, I figured this weakness could be put to good use. I laid a ceveral cm speaker magnet on top of the rewound spool of the casette and left it overnight. The next day, I was quite surprised to find Bono still singing at full volume. Hmm. After some experimentation, I found that the only way to "erase" anything with the magnet was to have the magnet actually touch the tape ribbon. The next problem was: how was I going to get the entire length of the tape ribbon to rub up against this magnet; I sure didn't want to wind the whole thing by hand. I ended up taking out the motors/circuit board from my 8 (?) yr old sony walkman, laying the tape on the board sideways...so that one of the spoolers fit into one of the spools and exposed the tape ribbon, and pushed the magnet up against the tape where the read head normally goes. What a fun and amusing hassle! My friends thought I was nuts. And you know what....I can still here Bono coming through sometimes. Good grief! ______________________( /////#\)
This is the first time I have read anything by Dr. Kurzweil, and it seems like a perfectly pleasant piece of futurology (typed with slight hint of sarcasm). I enjoyed skimming through it, thinking, hmm...nothing seems really new here, until I hit something that really annoyed me:
What does it mean to evolve? Evolution moves toward greater complexity, elegance, intelligence, beauty, creativity and love.
...preceeded by...
Evolution, in my view, is the purpose of life, meaning that the purpose of life-and of our lives-is to evolve.
Both of these comments seem to show an egregious misunderstanding of evolution; the first being worse than the second since it is stated as fact. I am surprised that no one here has commented on these yet. I'm sure that some of you have read The Blind Watchmaker. Where are all you evolution-hawks when we need you?!
<Disclaimer> I A Not An Evolutionary Biologist (but I (think I) know enough biology to make the following claims) </Disclaimer>
Evolution doesn't go anywhere. It is the name we give to the phenomenon that inevitably occurs over time when mutably-reproducing entities live in a changing environment. Those that were able to survive passed on their genes. Sometimes more complexity is favored, sometimes less.
Evolution can't be the purpose of anything. Though I won't argue with Kurzweil on what he thinks is the purpose of life -- we're all entitled to some sort of theory about this (I may happen to think that life has no purpose, you live it or you don't) -- but I do think that it is incorrect to claim that evolution can be the purpose of anything. It happens; it is an end result; it goes one way or another, but to claim that an inevitable consequence of the existence of life is its purpose seems like a logical flaw, maybe even "begging the question" (? any logicians out there?).
</rant>
P.S. Note to creationists: I accept that you think differently, and I think that you have the right to do so. My comments here are not directed at you; I'm not trying to change your mind, so please don't get "offended" at/by me; furthermore, you are not going to change mine, so please don't waste your time. My comments assume an acceptance of the existence of evolution/natural selection, etc.. To those who do not share these assumptions, the comments are irrelevant; ignore them. So, please don't start an "evolution vs. creationism" thread here. There are other, more appropriate places for that. ______________________( /////#\)
You'll probably think that I'm crazy, but ever since getting used to the "nipple" mouse in my toshiba notebook keyboard, I find all other mice a serious pain in the...um... hand. Having the mouse in the freakin' middle of the keyboard, but not in the way, means that I don't have to move my hands at all when I want to mouse something. The buttons are a little ways "below" the space bar. When I use a desktop, or a notebook with a rollerball/track pad, I find it's much slower. Granted, it isn't great for super-detailed work, but with a desktop, you could always have a "real" mouse on the side for that special, mouse-intensive work that requires it; get the best of both.
So, my question to you all: is there a desktop keyboard out there that has a "nipple" mouse embedded in it? If there is, that would be my vote for best.
I think junk email distribution patterns would make an interesting area of study for Information Theorists:)
Yes, absolutely! In fact, I had assumed, given that this is so obviously interesting, that someone would have worked on this already and made an email distribution-tracking web site. Certainly such a thing exists. Please, someone out there in slashdot land tell us where to find it!
Right now I'm interested in the whole Mahir Cagri "I Kiss You" website craze that was entirely fueled by email. Salon has followed this pretty closely, but, unfortunately, unlike some of their other decent writing, this thread of theirs doesn't provide much depth. I want to know why this silly website became popular and how (i.e, who started passing the url around?). The AP had a much more in depth article on the matter (weeks after the story broke, of course). Here's that link (you may have to tell the AP you're coming from one or another newspaper before they'll let you get to the article, but the link should work. For some reason, old NYTimes links to AP articles no longer work, they used to. Argh.)
According to the AP story:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Then, a month and a half ago, hackers invaded and embellished his site, spicing up the text with ``I like sex!'' and adding that Mahir enjoys taking photos of ``nice nude models.'' The hackers also moved it to a new location, and quickly spread the word about the site.
Cagri soon became a most unlikely cyber-celebrity.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Yeah, it's a meagre excuse for an explanation, but it does more than the salon article, if I recall correctly. Ok, so I can understand stage 1: hackers [sic] mess up the site in fun ways. This is fun and amusing (though illegal, I assume). What I don't understand is stage 2-3: friend of hacker and friend of friend of hacker receive e-mail saying "hey check out this goofy site." Ok, I can see them checking out the site, but why oh why would they think it was funny enough to pass on to x of their friends (who obviously thought it was funny enough to do the same thing)? This really baffles me.
It's amazing to see what has happened to this guy since his site got cracked. He's become an instomatic celebrity. The AP article says that Turkish tourism authorities are hoping that this will boost tourism. Whoa!
So, someone needs to set up a where's george? type site where people can log on and track the flow of email explosions. Who passed what to whom? Trace it back.
yup, it's small. i just downloaded a 1999-12-21 win32 binary. it was 4.6 megs. compare that to the high teens - low twenties of megs for the recent ns and ie browser/communicator/kitchen sink packages.
For a while I've felt that it would be useful for me/somebody to make a web site outlining the reasons that people might have for hating the U.S.. Not to condone/criticize these views, but simply to list them (and then have discussion forums for people to back and forth about them). Why? Well, lots of people around the world do hate the U.S., and until U.S. citizens (and politicians!) understand the reasons for this, a lot of what happens in the world isn't going to make sense to them. Every time I read a Tom Clancy novel, the desire to make such a web site becomes almost overpowering. Maybe such a web site exists already. Let us know if it does. Again, the purpose of such a site would be to improve communication and understanding among global citizens. Naïve? Probably.
Meaningless? Are you sure? That's a pretty strong blanket statement. The way I see it is that the run-of-the-mill search engine (i.e., not google) returns 100s if not Ks of links to most of our queries. You say that you "usually try a lot of links." Yeah, I understand, I do to. But I don't try 100s, and I suspect that you don't either. Let's say you try 30 out of 100; that's a lot, but even so, you've winnowed out a huge amount of trash. Right away I see this as way more useful than simple keyword counting. Add to that the impact of other searchers coming along and further narrowing down among your searches, and we might be getting somewhere.
A slightly more invasive approach could yield a lot, I suspect:
user searches for keywords
lots of links are returned
user checks out 10% of the links (thereby registering votes for those links)
when user clicks on a link, a small window pops up, created by the search site, and sits on top of the destination site. The window has a set of two radio buttons allowing the user to vote: relevant or not-relevant. These votes would count a lot more than the mere clicked-on votes.
Sure, pop-up windows and voting are a pain in the ass. This approach would have to be done on an opt-in basis. But I suspect that the benefit of increasing the signal/noise ratio by orders of magnitude would make it seem worthwhile.
So, I have to disagree with you that this approach is "meaningless." In fact, it might be one of the easier ways to add meaning without a major restructuring of the searching process.
The frequency of misspellings in searches is large part of this amusing (old) article on the magellan voyeur...
"A mere half-hour's perusal of the Voyeur turned up one sad goof after another:
super modles sex weied streaptease sesamie street necked asain women wallsreet journals
and my favorite --
christian boardcasting network"
I suspect that the percentage of sex-related searches is correlated to time of day and day of week. The low percentage I witnessed probably had something to due with the fact that I was checking mid-day Tuesday. I bet it goes up a lot on Fri & Sat, especially at night.
One thing that might possibly improve search engines is a new layer of link-relevance ranking. Most search engines rank links based on how many of your keywords appear in the text associated with that link. Google has added a nice new wrinkle with their "how many sites link to this site" ranking. It seems that an other layer of ranking would be possible and useful, one based on the behavior of other link searchers: how many times a given link was chosen by someone else who looked for the same (or similar) keywords as you did. This won't work, of course, if most search queries are unique, but maybe most aren't, I don't really know. Regardlesss, it sure is amusing watching what people are searching for at search-voyeur sites.
An aside about the changing nature of the web-wandering public:
Wow, I've just come back from checking out the unfiltered (i.e. allows porn-associated searches to appear) metaspy voyeur site. Folks, I think the internet public may be changing. When I first checked this out for several weeks ~1 yr ago, most of the searches were porn related. This time, out of about ~100 search queries, I saw only a few of sex-related ones. Are things changing? That would be nice.
Slashdot Mirror
~~~blur screen and flash forward into ze pHuture~~~~~~
"Gramps, is it true that some kid...?"
"Why, yes, K-bob-Alpha3, not only is it true, I was there when the story was rescued from oblivion. If it hadn't been for slashdot..."
"Wow, the slashdot, Gramps? You knew the original slashdot?!"
"Well, I guess you could put it that way K-bob. I was one of the first billion non-anonymous cowards. ... Ya see, back then, we didn't have all this security circuitry embedded in our butto..."
"Uh,... ok, thanks Gramps, but we gotta go. You know, like, the flux-capacitor is, like, waiting?"
"Oh, oh, yes, I'm sorry. Here I am nattering on again about the kick-ass old days...never mind me...I'll be fine...you run along now!..."
"What a punk! No way a dumbass like gramps was one of the first billion slashdotters! No stinkin' way!"
~~~blur screen & return to menial cubicle job~~~~
SPaM: Seriously Persistent/Powerful Meme
Remember: dumb, unsolicited mass commercial email is only one subset of the true SPaM.
Where did the "A" go? I don't know; I didn't lose it! You find it!
Memeherds of the new electric prarie, throw down your keyboards and dance!
(Now if I could just find myself a good cyberdog...I'd have these pesky memes under control in no time!)
A meme a day keeps the brainrot at bay!
Ok, sorry, no more stupid meme babble. Schleeeep, I must schleeeeep!
____________________(
Loneliness statement: Those who feel they have been unfairly excluded from the social web, electronic, flesh, or otherwise, can request to have their status artificially boosted temporarily and, of course, secretly. We cannot guarantee that such a brief increase in your SocialKarma will actually improve things for you, but it has been known to work for others, including, but not limited to, books on the best-seller list. We cannot be responsible for any negative consequences of falsely-acquired sudden fame. We reserve the right to track the impact of your KarmaBooster(sm), 'cause hey, if it works for you, it might just work for us! If you would like us to review your KarmaBooster(sm) application, please submit it to KarmaBooster@socWeb.stanford.edu. Good luck!
____________________(
I'm not too sure I understand all of what you're getting at, so I'm not sure the story is actually relevent. It went something like this:
Folks fiddling around in a computer research lab working on quantum physics/chaos/computations stuff (oh, you know...;). They talk about spooky action at a distance, weird interlinks between representations of the universe (equations) and the universe (causal links I mean). Anyway, some dude is testing out the head professor's ideas, and suddenly the head prof notices that the weather has changed dramatically. Something about noticing how hot it has gotten in her lab. She looks out the window and realizes that the sun is a lot brighter than it should be. She also notices smoke in the distance. (!) Neat stuff. Maybe someone out there has read this and has some bibliographic info to supply? Hint hint.
____________________(
Wooha, a little "business logic" aikido...you want my personal habits data? Well, sirs and madams, *here* you have it!
This reminds me of an amusing story I ran across in the NYTimes: "Cultural Sabotage Waged in Cyberspace"...
;)..
// ///#\)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mr. DeGraff is hoping that his investment will be used for projects like making "anti-souvenirs," aimed at various social injustices and offered to tourists, or purchasing recorded books by conservative pundits so leftist speeches can be recorded over the original material and the tapes can be put back onto sales racks in book stores.
Clearly, this is no typical investment firm. RTMark (its name derives from "registered trademark" but is pronounced "art mark") describes itself as a brokerage that "supports the sabotage of corporate products." Its projects have included switching voice boxes in Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls and creating Gatt.org, a look-alike Web site that lampooned the World Trade Organization.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hmm...has anyone ever fiddled with their NYTimes cookies? I wonder what changing some of the numbers and letters would do to their tracking databases? Hmm...
Anyway, thanks for your wonderful suggestion!
______________________(
I knew about "arroba", but I was curious to know whether "nuestr@s" is pronounced differently from "nuestras" or "nuestros". My guess is that probably not, but...how do you pronounce it in your head when you read it? How do you say it to someone when you say, "hey, you should check out the site 'blah blah nuestr@s blah blah.com'"?
I think this is a fascinating phenomenon from a cultural studies/linguistics point of view.
As I wrote to someone else above, if you have a moment, please check out the question in my other main post...about how one would go about trying to answer the question "what is the @ symbol called?".
Thanks again!
______________________(
thanks for the interesting and funny story. if you have a moment, please look at my other post on this page and give me/us your thoughts on: how to search for "the name of @".
______________________(
______________________(
Many thanks to alienmole for finding this! (Can't find his/her email to send a personal thanks.)
My Failed Attempts to Find the Name of @
Cy Guy, I also searched unsuccessfuly for the answer to this question. First, with a phone call (in the early 90s) to my undergrad "reference hotline" people...the folks who supposedly would answer any question or get back to you on it once they found the answer. I don't remember where the question came from, but these "reference" people were a sad case: they got angry at me for not accepting the fact that it is called "at"...no matter how hard I tried to explain that "the & is called 'ampersand', not 'and', even though it is the 'and' symbol."
Well, after that the question lay dormant for many years until this year. I embarked upon a more serious search that still proved unfruitful:
I searched a passle of typography sites with no luck and finally found www.symbols.com. Their "word index" doesn't even have the word "at" in it! Can you imagine. In this day and age? Nor did I get anywhere searching with their "symbol description terms". As far as I could tell, they simply don't have the @ in their symbol database. Sheesh. I sent an email to their only feedback link, but no reply.
Last stop after that was asking a 'net/tech reporter who knows his stuff. Never heard back from him on this one.
My Question:
So, Cy Guy, and alienmole, and everyone else...now that the "answer" has been found, I want to know how to ask the question correctly:
Let's say that a few years/months/days/etc from now, someone wants to find out what the @ symbol is called. How should that person search for the answer? What is the correct approach? How did Cy Guy search for it? alienmole? (I am guessing that alienmole stumbled upon it while browsing the discovery.com site...but I could be wrong.) You certainly can't search for the '@' itself or you'll get every email archived on the web. Or maybe enough people have linked to the discovery article that google would turn it up? (Nope, not yet: searching for "@ symbol" turns up lots of junk.) Where would you search in usenet? Typography groups? If you don't feel like adding your thoughts here, please do email me!
______________________(
______________________(
Yup, that's for sure. Here are a few lighter-weight (positively-speaking) python html generating utilities. Maybe they will have some useful ideas/components for you:
This one sounds the most like what you want/already have (?)
This one is probably too lightweight for your purposes, but I don't really know...
This one is probably the heaviest-duty of the ones listed here. May be too much for what you need?...
______________________(
______________________(
______________________(
Yup, I was incredibly surprised by the same phenomenon when I wanted to really erase some of my audio tapes before recording on them again. I was getting sick and tired of hearing U2 come through my new Coltrane recordings (!). I have always been very cautious about letting my tapes/disks/etc get anywhere near anything magnetic, so when I wanted to get rid of that U2, I figured this weakness could be put to good use. I laid a ceveral cm speaker magnet on top of the rewound spool of the casette and left it overnight. The next day, I was quite surprised to find Bono still singing at full volume. Hmm. After some experimentation, I found that the only way to "erase" anything with the magnet was to have the magnet actually touch the tape ribbon. The next problem was: how was I going to get the entire length of the tape ribbon to rub up against this magnet; I sure didn't want to wind the whole thing by hand. I ended up taking out the motors/circuit board from my 8 (?) yr old sony walkman, laying the tape on the board sideways...so that one of the spoolers fit into one of the spools and exposed the tape ribbon, and pushed the magnet up against the tape where the read head normally goes. What a fun and amusing hassle! My friends thought I was nuts. And you know what....I can still here Bono coming through sometimes. Good grief!
// ///#\)
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This is the first time I have read anything by Dr. Kurzweil, and it seems like a perfectly pleasant piece of futurology (typed with slight hint of sarcasm). I enjoyed skimming through it, thinking, hmm...nothing seems really new here, until I hit something that really annoyed me:
What does it mean to evolve? Evolution moves toward greater complexity, elegance, intelligence, beauty, creativity and love.
Evolution, in my view, is the purpose of life, meaning that the purpose of life-and of our lives-is to evolve.
Both of these comments seem to show an egregious misunderstanding of evolution; the first being worse than the second since it is stated as fact. I am surprised that no one here has commented on these yet. I'm sure that some of you have read The Blind Watchmaker. Where are all you evolution-hawks when we need you?!
<Disclaimer> I A Not An Evolutionary Biologist (but I (think I) know enough biology to make the following claims) </Disclaimer>
</rant>
P.S. Note to creationists: I accept that you think differently, and I think that you have the right to do so. My comments here are not directed at you; I'm not trying to change your mind, so please don't get "offended" at/by me; furthermore, you are not going to change mine, so please don't waste your time. My comments assume an acceptance of the existence of evolution/natural selection, etc.. To those who do not share these assumptions, the comments are irrelevant; ignore them. So, please don't start an "evolution vs. creationism" thread here. There are other, more appropriate places for that.
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Thank you all for the advice and links!
Wow, $165 for a keyboard. That is pretty amazing. Though it does come in "stealth black". Ooooweee.
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So, my question to you all: is there a desktop keyboard out there that has a "nipple" mouse embedded in it? If there is, that would be my vote for best.
tia
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Yes, absolutely! In fact, I had assumed, given that this is so obviously interesting, that someone would have worked on this already and made an email distribution-tracking web site. Certainly such a thing exists. Please, someone out there in slashdot land tell us where to find it!
Right now I'm interested in the whole Mahir Cagri "I Kiss You" website craze that was entirely fueled by email. Salon has followed this pretty closely, but, unfortunately, unlike some of their other decent writing, this thread of theirs doesn't provide much depth. I want to know why this silly website became popular and how (i.e, who started passing the url around?). The AP had a much more in depth article on the matter (weeks after the story broke, of course). Here's that link (you may have to tell the AP you're coming from one or another newspaper before they'll let you get to the article, but the link should work. For some reason, old NYTimes links to AP articles no longer work, they used to. Argh.)
According to the AP story:
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Then, a month and a half ago, hackers invaded and embellished his site, spicing up the text with ``I like sex!'' and adding that Mahir enjoys taking photos of ``nice nude models.'' The hackers also moved it to a new location, and quickly spread the word about the site.
Cagri soon became a most unlikely cyber-celebrity.
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Yeah, it's a meagre excuse for an explanation, but it does more than the salon article, if I recall correctly. Ok, so I can understand stage 1: hackers [sic] mess up the site in fun ways. This is fun and amusing (though illegal, I assume). What I don't understand is stage 2-3: friend of hacker and friend of friend of hacker receive e-mail saying "hey check out this goofy site." Ok, I can see them checking out the site, but why oh why would they think it was funny enough to pass on to x of their friends (who obviously thought it was funny enough to do the same thing)? This really baffles me.
It's amazing to see what has happened to this guy since his site got cracked. He's become an instomatic celebrity. The AP article says that Turkish tourism authorities are hoping that this will boost tourism. Whoa!
So, someone needs to set up a where's george? type site where people can log on and track the flow of email explosions. Who passed what to whom? Trace it back.
Ok, rant over.
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peace
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A slightly more invasive approach could yield a lot, I suspect:
Sure, pop-up windows and voting are a pain in the ass. This approach would have to be done on an opt-in basis. But I suspect that the benefit of increasing the signal/noise ratio by orders of magnitude would make it seem worthwhile.
So, I have to disagree with you that this approach is "meaningless." In fact, it might be one of the easier ways to add meaning without a major restructuring of the searching process.
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"A mere half-hour's perusal of the Voyeur turned up one sad goof after another:
super modles
sex weied
streaptease
sesamie street
necked asain women
wallsreet journals
and my favorite --
christian boardcasting network"
I suspect that the percentage of sex-related searches is correlated to time of day and day of week. The low percentage I witnessed probably had something to due with the fact that I was checking mid-day Tuesday. I bet it goes up a lot on Fri & Sat, especially at night.
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An aside about the changing nature of the web-wandering public:
Wow, I've just come back from checking out the unfiltered (i.e. allows porn-associated searches to appear) metaspy voyeur site. Folks, I think the internet public may be changing. When I first checked this out for several weeks ~1 yr ago, most of the searches were porn related. This time, out of about ~100 search queries, I saw only a few of sex-related ones. Are things changing? That would be nice.
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