Enron goes bankrupt after California government steps in and negotiates contracts that remove carpet from under enron feet.
Don't be so naive. Enron destroyed itself with foolish business practices, some illegal. Business between California and Enron was not some clash of the titans. Enron collapsed because of its accounting practices and would have collapsed if California never existed. Furthermore, California could have built more power plants to reduce its dependence on energy suppliers. That was an option the CA state legislature dismissed.
To get back on topic though and find common ground with you, Enron is no more. Capitalist markets have that going for them; when a company becomes the Big Suck either because it fails to compete or god forbid cooks the books like Enron, it crumbles and goes away via bankruptcy or restructuring with new ideas and leadership. Governments including California's aren't so quick to reform or fold. We're talking revolution as a means to that end, and nobody wants to see Joe Californian charging up the steps of the capitol in Sacramento with a Glock in each hand and a Venti Latte in the other. Government power has to be limited, and its tax burden on citizens must be limited.
I hope California avails itself of a better solution for its budget shortfall than it did for its energy shortfall.
Excellent point about California's # of U.S. Representatives. It will be interesting now to see if California can siphon off more pork from the federal budget than Massachusetts.
I know you think you're being funny, but California's deficit is almost entirely to blame on the price-fixing during the energy shortage which is in fact the fault of, big business.
This is patently false. The California state legislature voted to cap energy prices for consumers under the guise of deregulation. So you had consumers paying a fixed price for energy despite an energy shortage. And when there's a shortage of anything, prices rise. So there you had Californians paying pennies on every dollar the state of California expended for energy.
California's energy plan was anything but deregulation. You don't get something for nothing, but that's how the California state legislature saw it, and so you have them to blame, not one man in a marble house thousands of miles away.
The Colorado Junk E-Mail Law would require companies to pay an annual fee of up to $500 to access the registry. It would award consumers $10 for each unwanted message that they receive, assuming they are willing to take the spammer to court. If they win the case, their attorney's fees would be reimbursed.
So to summarize. Win your court case: ten spot. Lose: pay out the DMA attorney's $300/hr. fees. Gee, where do I sign up?
I'm not a huge Trekkie, but I think the only point of reference of any interest for Trekkies would be to go to the beginning. How the Federation was begun. First contacts with other galactic civilizations. The discovery of whatever makes warp travel possible. The foundation for the entire Trek universe. Pre-Kirk. Pre-Picard. Pre-Enterprise.
I think we know all too much about standard operating procedure in the 24th century or whenever it is the STNG crew work in. Let's see how we get there from the 21st century.
I'm on this list as well, and I agree. It is great! My phone has been returned to me. Oh, it is beautiful.
I wonder though. Have you gotten more paper junk mail in your snail mail box? It seems I'm fishing out circulars every day hoping I won't miss a bill or regular letter. I wonder if there's a correlation.
I took a college physics course one semester before downshifting a minor in CS and just about had a nervous breakdown after my first exam. I never studied so hard to absorb stuff in my life. I studied with other people, which I usually loathe. After taking the exam, I conferred with my study mates and we tried unsuccessfully to figure out if any of the material on the exam was covered in lectures or in the text.
I got a 32 that scaled to a B+. When we got our grade for that exam, I freaked, went to the Dean of Arts and Sciences and changed my major from Computer Science to English with a minor in CS. There was no way I was going to suffer another two and a half years of that. I was weeded out even though I was somewhat above average.
Why did I do this? I don't need elitist professors in any academic discipline to tell me what I don't know. I went to college to find out what I could learn, not identify what I could not.
I just drove from Cincinnati to Lexington and I didn't see a single snow plow or salt truck. Not one. An entire lane of a three-lane interstate highway was snowed over. Useless. Several cars were off the road. One SUV was flipped. Three inches of snow was already on the ground with more falling. It wouldn't take a gadget to tell somebody at the DOT to uproot somebody's ass and get them out working on the roads today.
Look, the civilized world, the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, and even France, among other equally important, civilized nations have a lot (maybe more, maybe less) at stake when they go to war. If you recall, the U.S. did next to nothing (that we know of at least) after the original WTC bombing, its embassy bombings, and the attack on the U.S. Cole. You can turn the cheek all you want, but it doesn't stop anybody from slapping you.
If you're lucky, sometimes the threat of force is enough to prevent an attack. If not, you do what you have to and you do it decisively. Look, I appreciate your views and however you arrived at them. You have good intentions.
Unfortunately, there are enough fractured souls in this world who will stop at nothing to lash out, often violently, and sometimes catastrophically. There always will be. Blame it on the human condition.
As shitty a deal as it was for those Japanese who suffered the atomic bombs at the tail end of WWII, something important bloomed from it. We understood just how destructive we as humans can be. And so far while ideologies, politics, and cultures have clashed, the civilized world at least has enjoyed a mostly peaceful, prosperous time. It took a while and a bunch of lives in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan to name a few to get where we are now, but right now ain't so bad.
Can you imagine what it would be like if the third world, the Middle East, all of Africa, and some spots across Asia join the fold? I can, I really can, and what a great time that will be. But we'll never get there watching on the sidelines. When the world can rid itself of despot rulers and give people like the Iraqis a future beyond Saddam Hussein's despotic predestination, we'll be closer to preventing war than anyone can imagine.
Troll reminds me of bake sale bumper sticker
on
America's Army on Linux
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Your troll reminds of of a bumper sticker I saw some time ago:
Wouldn't it be nice if money went to schools and the air force had to have a bake sale to buy a bomber?
I wondered if it was Al-Qaeda or the North Koreans that liked pound cake...
Yes, at first glance this appears to be a sysadmin fuck up as much as it is a SQL Server bug. Months have passed since this was reported. Hell, we're way past the point of no return for Code Red and I still get default.ida entries in my Apache logs. Motherfucking unnacceptable.
Who opens their database up for the world to access? I mean who?!
Does anybody get to be a sysadmin? IANASA, but I keep up with this stuff fairly regularly. It ain't hard. New sysadmin candidates should have to stand in line at the DMV to get a license for sys admins. Those already with a sysadmin gig who allow this kind of attack to proliferate should be sacked forthwith.
Yup. They bought Placeware, a competitor to WebX, today. With the dividend tax repeal on the plate, looks like they'd rather go on an acquisition spree rather than give back to stockholders.
I've avoided the spam debates until now, because I haven't had a solution for the problem. But nobody else has offered much of substance either. So here's my humble opinion...
Legislation is not the answer. We know how tech-savvy politicians are. Do laws stop corrupt CEOs from plundering corporate pensions or cooking the books? Do laws solve problems?
Terrorizing spammers is not the answer. Again, this is not solving the problem. Pestering less than intelligent people who exploit less than intelligent methods of mass communication does not solve the problem. It might be a thrill short term, but there are too many people who will spam if the current mail protocols persist.
So what is the problem? Strangers send me e-mail I don't want. What is the solution?
I won't pretend to be an expert. I'm not. However, I'm surprised better men and women have not come up with something, ANYTHING, to solve the spam problem. I am NOT suprised to see 90-100 unsolicited e-mails (from strangers) in my inbox every day. Somebody needs to come up with something. So here goes...
First, classify e-mail accounts. Home/personal accounts should be bulletproof. You only receive messages from people you have on your list of acceptable senders, your "inner circle." Shopping/e-commerce accounts: you can receive messages from merchants who register with some central agency/server. Business/work accounts: I dunno. Ideas? How should we handle mailing list type accounts?
Second, every e-mail sent has something solid identifying it with a sender included. The identification is sent to the recipient. If the recipient has this identification in his list and it matches 100%, then the recipient fetches the message from the sender. So instead of the sender wielding the power, the potential recipient makes the call. Why allow just anybody to send an entire friggin' message to scores of people? Messages go no where until the recipient says so.
Finally, and this is where the law comes into play, if someone manages to fake out your list by saying he is someone he is not, sic the prosecutors on him. That's identity theft, pal. As it is now, e-mail headers are raw schitzophrenia.
So step one, classify e-mail accounts. Different classifications have different list of people you are willing to accept mail from. Step two, the sender sends his identification and maybe a subject header to the recipient. Step three, the recipient accepts the senders request and fetches the message himself, rejects it outright, or adds the sender to his list and fetches the message.
I don't know 90 people whose mugs I'd piss on if they set themselves on fire. Why should any of these rat bastards be able to dump a second or third bit in my inbox?
I work with the full monty of Real products: RealServer, RealProducer, and RealPlayer. The one aspect that keeps my outfit in line with Real is the ability to write scripts that start the encoders at at scheduled times. I.E. a command line interface for RealProducer. The ability to schedule when I want five or six encoders to encode a broadcast is crucial. Without the command line interface, I'm SOL. There's a company called Lariat that produces an scheduling interface, but when I met with them at the Real Conference in May 2000, they were dismissive and incompetent.
I would happily switch to another server/encoder solution if it freed me and my viewership from the shackles of Real. Does anybody know of a scheduling program for RealServer/RealProducer or for other solutions/formats like Windows Media or Quicktime?
Linux is not a monopoly, especially given that scores of distributions are centered around the OS that offer a variety of designs and features. And that is just the point. No one company, person, or hairdresser can limit what you want to integrate with it.
Man you're reaching, but let us say that RedHat were a monopolistic OS maker. I would have no problem with Microsoft taking RedHat to court if RedHat agreed to include Microsoft's.NET implementation then turned around and added their own imitation of.NET.
All this ruling does is require Microsoft to do what they said they would do way back when: include Sun's Java JVM.
That'll be the end of Google if that happens. If it does, buy it if you can get into it early on the first day, sell it in the afternoon and then never touch it again.
You mean buy early on the first day, then sell a half hour later. Why wait until everybody is dumping the stock? Buy early. Sell earlier.
If there was a surplus, why should you be any happier about it? A surplus means the federal government is taking more of your money than it needs. Of course, that's the case in virtually any circumstance, but a surplus puts a flood light on it.
The last part may be easier than you think these days. A lot of software companies have struck camp and left SOHO and small business behind in search of the big fish and fatter contracts. For example, UnityMail used to be developed by a company called MessageMedia. Good company, good support, good product, and fair price. Enter Doubleclick who buys out MessageMedia and assumes control of UnityMail.
You want a one year support license for your installation of UnityMail? $7000. Hey, you or I could write a replacement in three months for free and sell it and support contracts to everybody that Doubleclick left behind for a fraction of that. Think about it. There are a wealth of opportunities like this...
Re:I think it is going to be hard.
on
Shareware and Unix?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
You do not have to be annoying about registration/full purchase to avoid losing customers. Add genuine value to your full, registered version. I submit Doom as an example. You get the game engine and the first part of three series of levels. After playing that first level, we were damn hungry for more.
It's probably easier to do this with a game than it is for some sort of productivity app, but my gut tells me that there's plenty of niches for Unix platforms. Tax preparation software comes to mind, especially in light of recent events. Was it Quicken that tried to coerce folks to upgrade by not provided tax tables?
Every few months someone asks on Slashdot where they can find a good 3D modeller. There's Blender among others. It'd be interesting to see someone could take Blender, build a service or development company around it, and sell a brand of it much like Redhat does with Linux. Redhat is still in business right?
Yes, we Linux, BSD, etc. folks are used to not paying for software. But look at it this way. How many of us Linux nerds have a Windows partition handy for gaming? And we're buying those games (and burning a copy here or there).
Shareware for Unix can be done:
1) Develop a righteous product. Nobody gives a hoot about poorly designed software, free or retail. If what you want to produce and offer isn't good and appealing to folks, if it isn't exciting, don't bother.
2) Perish the thought of nagware. Nothing shaves down your user base like nags.
3) Above all else, empower your user. Sounds stupid, but software companies have walked away from this basic principle. Software is supposed to give users the ability to accomplish something they otherwise could not, not tithe in the name of the shareware gods.
Go for it! Shareware software won't make inroads on Unix platforms unless somebody shows up to do it.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman [house.gov] or senator [senate.gov]. Tell them you value programmers who have the imagination and skills to create entirely new technologies for the manipulation of complex graphics, and who have the cut needed to understand the essentials of good game play.
Wha? Why would you plead such a case before a legislator? The rest of that paragraph reads like you were typing tongue-in-cheek, so I'm going try not to flame. I just want to understand if you were trying to be funny or serious. Where you serious when you typed:
Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on elite computer game programmers.
Are you calling for regulation of the gaming industry? Why and how? I don't see what you're getting at Big Dan...
I have some friends who worked at UPS, and they swore up and down that it was a bitch. Even if it is 3-5 hours, you will work every millisecond. Lifting, scanning, pushing, pulling. The money and benefits are good, but the stress and efforts levels are off the map. Not exactly moonlighting.
I had a 300 baud modem from GE that had a coupler, and I used it to great effect with my C64. I swear there will never be a collection of bits more treasured that the ones that chirped through that cup-n-yarn modem. I didn't rack up a phone bill though, at least not one that I or anyone I knew paid. MCI codes were gold.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be so naive. Enron destroyed itself with foolish business practices, some illegal. Business between California and Enron was not some clash of the titans. Enron collapsed because of its accounting practices and would have collapsed if California never existed. Furthermore, California could have built more power plants to reduce its dependence on energy suppliers. That was an option the CA state legislature dismissed.
To get back on topic though and find common ground with you, Enron is no more. Capitalist markets have that going for them; when a company becomes the Big Suck either because it fails to compete or god forbid cooks the books like Enron, it crumbles and goes away via bankruptcy or restructuring with new ideas and leadership. Governments including California's aren't so quick to reform or fold. We're talking revolution as a means to that end, and nobody wants to see Joe Californian charging up the steps of the capitol in Sacramento with a Glock in each hand and a Venti Latte in the other. Government power has to be limited, and its tax burden on citizens must be limited.
I hope California avails itself of a better solution for its budget shortfall than it did for its energy shortfall.
Excellent point about California's # of U.S. Representatives. It will be interesting now to see if California can siphon off more pork from the federal budget than Massachusetts.
This is patently false. The California state legislature voted to cap energy prices for consumers under the guise of deregulation. So you had consumers paying a fixed price for energy despite an energy shortage. And when there's a shortage of anything, prices rise. So there you had Californians paying pennies on every dollar the state of California expended for energy.
California's energy plan was anything but deregulation. You don't get something for nothing, but that's how the California state legislature saw it, and so you have them to blame, not one man in a marble house thousands of miles away.
So to summarize. Win your court case: ten spot. Lose: pay out the DMA attorney's $300/hr. fees. Gee, where do I sign up?
I think we know all too much about standard operating procedure in the 24th century or whenever it is the STNG crew work in. Let's see how we get there from the 21st century.
I'm all for this. Anybody who's dealt with esound knows that XMAS or anything else would be an improvement.
I wonder though. Have you gotten more paper junk mail in your snail mail box? It seems I'm fishing out circulars every day hoping I won't miss a bill or regular letter. I wonder if there's a correlation.
I got a 32 that scaled to a B+. When we got our grade for that exam, I freaked, went to the Dean of Arts and Sciences and changed my major from Computer Science to English with a minor in CS. There was no way I was going to suffer another two and a half years of that. I was weeded out even though I was somewhat above average.
Why did I do this? I don't need elitist professors in any academic discipline to tell me what I don't know. I went to college to find out what I could learn, not identify what I could not.
I just drove from Cincinnati to Lexington and I didn't see a single snow plow or salt truck. Not one. An entire lane of a three-lane interstate highway was snowed over. Useless. Several cars were off the road. One SUV was flipped. Three inches of snow was already on the ground with more falling. It wouldn't take a gadget to tell somebody at the DOT to uproot somebody's ass and get them out working on the roads today.
If you're lucky, sometimes the threat of force is enough to prevent an attack. If not, you do what you have to and you do it decisively. Look, I appreciate your views and however you arrived at them. You have good intentions.
Unfortunately, there are enough fractured souls in this world who will stop at nothing to lash out, often violently, and sometimes catastrophically. There always will be. Blame it on the human condition.
As shitty a deal as it was for those Japanese who suffered the atomic bombs at the tail end of WWII, something important bloomed from it. We understood just how destructive we as humans can be. And so far while ideologies, politics, and cultures have clashed, the civilized world at least has enjoyed a mostly peaceful, prosperous time. It took a while and a bunch of lives in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan to name a few to get where we are now, but right now ain't so bad.
Can you imagine what it would be like if the third world, the Middle East, all of Africa, and some spots across Asia join the fold? I can, I really can, and what a great time that will be. But we'll never get there watching on the sidelines. When the world can rid itself of despot rulers and give people like the Iraqis a future beyond Saddam Hussein's despotic predestination, we'll be closer to preventing war than anyone can imagine.
Wouldn't it be nice if money went to schools and the air force had to have a bake sale to buy a bomber?
I wondered if it was Al-Qaeda or the North Koreans that liked pound cake...
Can we expect more of these kinds of attacks from Microsoft software in order to coerce^H^H^H^H^Hencourage us to turn on Automatic Updates?
Who opens their database up for the world to access? I mean who?!
Does anybody get to be a sysadmin? IANASA, but I keep up with this stuff fairly regularly. It ain't hard. New sysadmin candidates should have to stand in line at the DMV to get a license for sys admins. Those already with a sysadmin gig who allow this kind of attack to proliferate should be sacked forthwith.
Yup. They bought Placeware, a competitor to WebX, today. With the dividend tax repeal on the plate, looks like they'd rather go on an acquisition spree rather than give back to stockholders.
Legislation is not the answer. We know how tech-savvy politicians are. Do laws stop corrupt CEOs from plundering corporate pensions or cooking the books? Do laws solve problems?
Terrorizing spammers is not the answer. Again, this is not solving the problem. Pestering less than intelligent people who exploit less than intelligent methods of mass communication does not solve the problem. It might be a thrill short term, but there are too many people who will spam if the current mail protocols persist.
So what is the problem? Strangers send me e-mail I don't want. What is the solution?
I won't pretend to be an expert. I'm not. However, I'm surprised better men and women have not come up with something, ANYTHING, to solve the spam problem. I am NOT suprised to see 90-100 unsolicited e-mails (from strangers) in my inbox every day. Somebody needs to come up with something. So here goes...
First, classify e-mail accounts. Home/personal accounts should be bulletproof. You only receive messages from people you have on your list of acceptable senders, your "inner circle." Shopping/e-commerce accounts: you can receive messages from merchants who register with some central agency/server. Business/work accounts: I dunno. Ideas? How should we handle mailing list type accounts? Second, every e-mail sent has something solid identifying it with a sender included. The identification is sent to the recipient. If the recipient has this identification in his list and it matches 100%, then the recipient fetches the message from the sender. So instead of the sender wielding the power, the potential recipient makes the call. Why allow just anybody to send an entire friggin' message to scores of people? Messages go no where until the recipient says so.
Finally, and this is where the law comes into play, if someone manages to fake out your list by saying he is someone he is not, sic the prosecutors on him. That's identity theft, pal. As it is now, e-mail headers are raw schitzophrenia.
So step one, classify e-mail accounts. Different classifications have different list of people you are willing to accept mail from. Step two, the sender sends his identification and maybe a subject header to the recipient. Step three, the recipient accepts the senders request and fetches the message himself, rejects it outright, or adds the sender to his list and fetches the message.
I don't know 90 people whose mugs I'd piss on if they set themselves on fire. Why should any of these rat bastards be able to dump a second or third bit in my inbox?
I would happily switch to another server/encoder solution if it freed me and my viewership from the shackles of Real. Does anybody know of a scheduling program for RealServer/RealProducer or for other solutions/formats like Windows Media or Quicktime?
Man you're reaching, but let us say that RedHat were a monopolistic OS maker. I would have no problem with Microsoft taking RedHat to court if RedHat agreed to include Microsoft's .NET implementation then turned around and added their own imitation of .NET.
All this ruling does is require Microsoft to do what they said they would do way back when: include Sun's Java JVM.
You mean buy early on the first day, then sell a half hour later. Why wait until everybody is dumping the stock? Buy early. Sell earlier.
If there was a surplus, why should you be any happier about it? A surplus means the federal government is taking more of your money than it needs. Of course, that's the case in virtually any circumstance, but a surplus puts a flood light on it.
Dude, we Americans haven't gotten around to invading Iceland yet. Mars is gonna have to wait. Skoal!
You want a one year support license for your installation of UnityMail? $7000. Hey, you or I could write a replacement in three months for free and sell it and support contracts to everybody that Doubleclick left behind for a fraction of that. Think about it. There are a wealth of opportunities like this...
It's probably easier to do this with a game than it is for some sort of productivity app, but my gut tells me that there's plenty of niches for Unix platforms. Tax preparation software comes to mind, especially in light of recent events. Was it Quicken that tried to coerce folks to upgrade by not provided tax tables?
Every few months someone asks on Slashdot where they can find a good 3D modeller. There's Blender among others. It'd be interesting to see someone could take Blender, build a service or development company around it, and sell a brand of it much like Redhat does with Linux. Redhat is still in business right?
Yes, we Linux, BSD, etc. folks are used to not paying for software. But look at it this way. How many of us Linux nerds have a Windows partition handy for gaming? And we're buying those games (and burning a copy here or there).
Shareware for Unix can be done:
1) Develop a righteous product. Nobody gives a hoot about poorly designed software, free or retail. If what you want to produce and offer isn't good and appealing to folks, if it isn't exciting, don't bother.
2) Perish the thought of nagware. Nothing shaves down your user base like nags.
3) Above all else, empower your user. Sounds stupid, but software companies have walked away from this basic principle. Software is supposed to give users the ability to accomplish something they otherwise could not, not tithe in the name of the shareware gods.
Go for it! Shareware software won't make inroads on Unix platforms unless somebody shows up to do it.
Wha? Why would you plead such a case before a legislator? The rest of that paragraph reads like you were typing tongue-in-cheek, so I'm going try not to flame. I just want to understand if you were trying to be funny or serious. Where you serious when you typed:
Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on elite computer game programmers.
Are you calling for regulation of the gaming industry? Why and how? I don't see what you're getting at Big Dan...
I have some friends who worked at UPS, and they swore up and down that it was a bitch. Even if it is 3-5 hours, you will work every millisecond. Lifting, scanning, pushing, pulling. The money and benefits are good, but the stress and efforts levels are off the map. Not exactly moonlighting.
I had a 300 baud modem from GE that had a coupler, and I used it to great effect with my C64. I swear there will never be a collection of bits more treasured that the ones that chirped through that cup-n-yarn modem. I didn't rack up a phone bill though, at least not one that I or anyone I knew paid. MCI codes were gold.