This is another example of how corporations and not people are the important ones in USA.
Not to mention that their ISP couldn't cut their pipe fast enough after Exxon complained. No due process here, just cut it off.... Only in America.... So take the power back then. Name and shame the ISP, and vote with your wallet.
Actually, it's a win-win. With all that water, your "friends" know that it won't be long before you have to drain the lizard, so they can disappear while you're in the bathroom, head off to another bar and actually have a fun night out, without your sorry "I drink water in a bar" ass. But of course, you still get the free drink.
I am becoming increasingly conscious of my on-line footprint, the sheer scale of collection of data about me in real life, and the ways it is being used to my disadvantage. Some of those are sinister, but most are simply businesses or government departments using their greater resources to screw me out of things. If you don't mind me asking... how is that not sinister?
The last one was killed after Steve Ballmer threw a chair at it and swore "I'm going to f***ing kill the giant penguins" Actually, recent archaeological evidence suggests an alternate extinction theory, involving the catastrophic collision of Natalie Portman and a big bucket of hot grits...
So, your anti-snob tactic is to be a superior snob? How's that working for you? I also bark at dogs and baytalk at babies. It's going great! Thanks for asking:) Better hope you don't bump into any suicide bombers in the street then...
Re:Wrong - Not the "first" ATM.
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ATM Turns 40
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Yes, the first ATM was invented during medieval times, when they had a midget in a box dispensing gold coins when presented with a certificate of ownership. This was short lived due the midgets dieing frequently... ...and it wasn't until 1935 that Schrodinger worked out why, paving the way for Shepherd-Barron...
But the RIAA can hardly claim they lack the resources to prosecute the President's daughter when they are going after John Doe's, who for all they know, are dead broke. Is it just me, or is the final word in that sentence superfluous?
Online games should let players filter for age, gender, orientation or any number of criteria. Why? It's a public server. In fact, every other public space in the western world has government legislation to prevent exactly this sort of discrimination. Yes, everyone (even you) is allowed to be yourself in public.
He was on a public server and the kid was doing him a favour to boot. He just didn't like the fact that the kid was capable of handing his ass back to him on a platter.
If you want to play with the kids, go ahead and hook up your virtual swingset and have it, but sometimes, you just want to be with your own kind. Then get the hell off the public servers, you bigot, and set up & admin your own server for you and your "kind".
On the main topic, though - why does it matter if it's an 11-year-old kid, a 42-year-old mother of three, a college drop out, or an IT worker on the other end of that mage? If he or she is courteous, skilled, and knowledgeable then s/he deserves respect regardless of any other factor. As you hint at, it struck me immediately that the only problem here is the submitter's pride. He thinks Voice Chat killed the mood; what killed the mood was him realizing he was having his ass handed to him on a golded platter for hours straight over and over by an 11 year old. He didn't like feeling like a noob. Pure pwnage on the 11 year old's part. Exactly. Voice chat is not responsible for killing the mood, his own prejudice is.
I was in a similar situation years ago - playing online in a clan for 5+ years before we started using voice comms together. Turns out our clan leader had a really high squeaky voice. Funny for all of about 5 minutes, but then we all got over it and got on with gaming, and he continued to lead the clan for years after. In no way did it diminish his leadership, our collective pwnage or my enjoyment of the game.
Learn to respect diversity and life gets a whole lot better.
I did, and it was mostly about laptops.. you might have found the only, or one of the only paragraphs that even mention desktops. So maybe he didn't use the word "desktop" on every line, so what? That paragraph was one of the most important in TFA as it was the conclusion the author (stupidly) jumped to.
If this wasn't Slashdot I'd complain about your reading comprehension skills at this point, but... well at least you read TFA which is better than most here, even if you missed one of the most important points...
Title should be "Puncturing the 'PC Laptops Are Cheaper Than Mac Laptops' Myth", at any rate. Not if you actually bothered to RTFA:
Bottom line: When you configure low-end and midrange notebooks and desktops, you'll find that except at the very bottom of the heap, Windows machines are roughly comparable in price to Macs. There are fewer Mac models, so if your needs vary from what Apple has decided on, you may find a Windows model that costs less for you. But Apple's choices make a lot of sense for most people, and when you do the point-by-point comparison, Apple is actually a better value for some needs.
it's just no longer the case that PCs are cheaper than Macs ...the last line of the summary. To me, that says they are extrapolating their conclusions to all PCs, not just notebooks. and in fact of you bothered to RTFA (I know that's asking a lot), you'd see this is the case. From TFA:
Bottom line: When you configure low-end and midrange notebooks and desktops, you'll find that except at the very bottom of the heap, Windows machines are roughly comparable in price to Macs. There are fewer Mac models, so if your needs vary from what Apple has decided on, you may find a Windows model that costs less for you. But Apple's choices make a lot of sense for most people, and when you do the point-by-point comparison, Apple is actually a better value for some needs. Back in your glass house, now...
I suggest that he should get a good bunch of artifical spam mails everyday while only one of it contains the code for the daily meals. Thus he would experience what it's like to get V1AG|)_A and 03M Software offers every day;) Better yet, filter out all the viagra, cialis and penis enlargement spams and sent them to his cellmate Bubba. "Better watch out you don't drop those packets in the showere there, Bob..."
Here we've settled on putting them on "hold" and seeing how long they'll stay on the line until they hjust hang up... and by "hold" I mean we physically attach the phone receiver to some headphones with Barbara Streisand and Lionel Ritchie mp3s on high rotation.
However I believe that spamming should not be a crime. In the grand scheme of things... robbing someone is much worse. You had my mod points coming your way, right up until that last sentence. His actions have no doubt cost countless people around the world significant amounts of time, money and resources (bandwidth bills, cost of wages paid to clean up infected machines, additional infrastructure to cope with increased mail volume, etc. etc.). The only real difference is that he is "robbing" many people instead of one... OK he's not committing physical assault, but he is effectively trespassing electronically.
Bad analogy time (hey, this is Slashdot, after all...) - he's not breaking into your house and stealing all the electrical goods to sell at the local pawn shop. Instead, he's breaking into every single house in the whole neighbourhood while the owners are away at work, and using all the bedrooms to run his own private brothel, and then leaving the owners to clean up the mess.
Maybe his actions sit somewhere between robbery and fraud, but either way they are still most definitely criminal IMHO. Simply spamming (in the literal meaning of the word - "sending unsolicited email") should be a misdemeanor depending entirely on the volume of spam sent, and whether any of the email headers are fraudulent. Bot-farming, however, should be a felony.
Aha! You made the same mistake the MS press-monkey made when reading the original memo from Bill... "1.000.000" is not in fact the Eurpoean number format for "one million", but rather the US number format for "one"... Bill himself.
Even Steve got an iPod instead, although he won't admit to it.
Email is dead, Netcraft confirms it. As dead as the late Prince Namuga Abacha, may God rest his soul, whose inheritance I will soon be acting as an intermediary on as soon as the legals have been cleared, which seem to be costing a bit of money. Now where did I put my checkbook?
You seem to be missing the point. With this proposed revenue stream, it may cost them five grand in man-hours and other resources to squeeze two grand out of me (assuming that it's even possible for me to legitimately have such a large bill under this proposed new tax scheme). That's a net loss for them. And heavily magnified when you now apply the same principle across half the population. No government would sustain a policy like that on a large scale and expect to remain solvent. When the cost of colllecting the tax exceeds the value of the tax there is no point collecting it. Bring in jail time and it becomes a double whammy, especially if it used on a large scale - not only are those inside no longer contributing to the national economy, but it also costs the state huge amounts just to keep them there.
Now apply it to the big fish - say it costs the IRS a hundred grand in man-hours and resources to squeeze five hundred grand out of one single large tax evader. That's a net profit, and that's how they'll make their money. And society at large is not going to feel any major economic impact if a few dozen major spammers got jailed.
But how will we be able to exploit these populations for profit if we don't get them addicted to expensive electronic gadgets? Forcing them to make Nikes for 17 cents per month seems to be working so far...
What it means is that the company who profited by your computer's infection is committing tax fraud/evasion. The IRS will then mercilessly hunt down the company who infected your PC, and the company paying for the "advertising service," and instead of getting a slap on the wrist, involved parties get a nice cell in a Federal prison.
Or they'll say it's your machine, so it's your job to prove it wasn't you sending all of that. If you convince a court that it wasn't you, then they'll go to all the extra effort to get the money/jail time from whoever actually did it. Rubbish. Neither the IRS nor the government are interested in throwing half the population in jail or shaking them down for pennies. That actually costs them money. I'm sure they would much rather go after a few big fish with more money, and try to make a profit out of this new potential revenue stream.
Hell I'd happily pay a trivial amount per email as long as the policy was applied to all. With the right tax rate you won't even notice it for daily use, but a spammer sending millions of emails faces either a huge bill or being hunted down by the IRS for tax evasion. And remember, these are the guys who brought down Al Capone...
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention that their ISP couldn't cut their pipe fast enough after Exxon complained. No due process here, just cut it off.... Only in America.... So take the power back then. Name and shame the ISP, and vote with your wallet.
Actually, it's a win-win. With all that water, your "friends" know that it won't be long before you have to drain the lizard, so they can disappear while you're in the bathroom, head off to another bar and actually have a fun night out, without your sorry "I drink water in a bar" ass. But of course, you still get the free drink.
It's going great! Thanks for asking
Cue the appearance of dodgy police videos on Youtube... with the Simpsons "Bad Cops, Bad Cops" soundtrack...
He was on a public server and the kid was doing him a favour to boot. He just didn't like the fact that the kid was capable of handing his ass back to him on a platter. If you want to play with the kids, go ahead and hook up your virtual swingset and have it, but sometimes, you just want to be with your own kind. Then get the hell off the public servers, you bigot, and set up & admin your own server for you and your "kind".
I was in a similar situation years ago - playing online in a clan for 5+ years before we started using voice comms together. Turns out our clan leader had a really high squeaky voice. Funny for all of about 5 minutes, but then we all got over it and got on with gaming, and he continued to lead the clan for years after. In no way did it diminish his leadership, our collective pwnage or my enjoyment of the game.
Learn to respect diversity and life gets a whole lot better.
Actually I'd say this is great PR for Microsoft.
Personally I thought it'd be much worse than just "twice" as bad. Maybe I've been buried under too much anti-MS FUD from reading Slashdot...
If this wasn't Slashdot I'd complain about your reading comprehension skills at this point, but... well at least you read TFA which is better than most here, even if you missed one of the most important points...
Here we've settled on putting them on "hold" and seeing how long they'll stay on the line until they hjust hang up... and by "hold" I mean we physically attach the phone receiver to some headphones with Barbara Streisand and Lionel Ritchie mp3s on high rotation.
So kinda like the airhorn then.
Bad analogy time (hey, this is Slashdot, after all...) - he's not breaking into your house and stealing all the electrical goods to sell at the local pawn shop. Instead, he's breaking into every single house in the whole neighbourhood while the owners are away at work, and using all the bedrooms to run his own private brothel, and then leaving the owners to clean up the mess.
Maybe his actions sit somewhere between robbery and fraud, but either way they are still most definitely criminal IMHO. Simply spamming (in the literal meaning of the word - "sending unsolicited email") should be a misdemeanor depending entirely on the volume of spam sent, and whether any of the email headers are fraudulent. Bot-farming, however, should be a felony.
Aha! You made the same mistake the MS press-monkey made when reading the original memo from Bill... "1.000.000" is not in fact the Eurpoean number format for "one million", but rather the US number format for "one"... Bill himself.
Even Steve got an iPod instead, although he won't admit to it.
You seem to be missing the point. With this proposed revenue stream, it may cost them five grand in man-hours and other resources to squeeze two grand out of me (assuming that it's even possible for me to legitimately have such a large bill under this proposed new tax scheme). That's a net loss for them. And heavily magnified when you now apply the same principle across half the population. No government would sustain a policy like that on a large scale and expect to remain solvent. When the cost of colllecting the tax exceeds the value of the tax there is no point collecting it. Bring in jail time and it becomes a double whammy, especially if it used on a large scale - not only are those inside no longer contributing to the national economy, but it also costs the state huge amounts just to keep them there.
Now apply it to the big fish - say it costs the IRS a hundred grand in man-hours and resources to squeeze five hundred grand out of one single large tax evader. That's a net profit, and that's how they'll make their money. And society at large is not going to feel any major economic impact if a few dozen major spammers got jailed.
Or they'll say it's your machine, so it's your job to prove it wasn't you sending all of that. If you convince a court that it wasn't you, then they'll go to all the extra effort to get the money/jail time from whoever actually did it. Rubbish. Neither the IRS nor the government are interested in throwing half the population in jail or shaking them down for pennies. That actually costs them money. I'm sure they would much rather go after a few big fish with more money, and try to make a profit out of this new potential revenue stream.
Hell I'd happily pay a trivial amount per email as long as the policy was applied to all. With the right tax rate you won't even notice it for daily use, but a spammer sending millions of emails faces either a huge bill or being hunted down by the IRS for tax evasion. And remember, these are the guys who brought down Al Capone...
Bring it on!