Forgive me because I have never used Napster, but are they only RIAA music, or do they have music from independent labels as well?
I do not imagine that stuff from John Zorn's Tzadik label is especially popular among the kids, but I may be going back to college soon, and if this were available, and they had the obscure music I like to listen to, this might be nice to sign up with.
But if they only stuff I can get is Britney Spears and U2 then no thank you.
(I will now await getting flamed by U2 fans.) (Sounds like a spyplane.)
'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice. And when justive is gone, there's always force. And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi Mom! So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. In your automatic arms. Your electronic arms. In your arms. So hold me, Mom, in your long arms. Your petrochemical arms. Your military arms. In your electronic arms.
You got a lot of good advice so far, but I might as well add two cents, or at least sum up some of the good points.
Personally, I feel life is what you are doing when you are not at work. But that rule doesn't apply if you love your job so much you would do it even if you were not being paid.
The more practical questions I would be asking is about the stability of the two companies. Number one priority is you don't want to get laid off or have your company die on you.
The less practical question would be where do you want to live? Do you like the place you currently live? Have you visited the new town, and could you see yourself living there and enjoying it for several years to the rest of your life?
If you do opt for the higher-paying job, you must take advantage of the extra disposable income and invest it. Read the other comment I made in this thread for details. If you can manage it what you want is to get to the point where you can live entirely off your investments, and don't have to work at a job unless you want to. That way if you get fed up with the company for whatever reason a few years down the line (say there is a change in management or whatever) then you won't have any problem if you want to quit.
You could even quit and pursue your degree without your next job even being a major concern. You can learn for the love of learning, code for the love of coding. Gods that sounds corney, but ask yourself if this is what you really want in life.
Most people also don't understand that the one of the main tricks to building real wealth is investing in such a way that you decrease the percentage of taxable income. When you have a mortgage for a rental property, you write off the interest, which in the early years is most of it. You have to have some disposable income at all to do investing, but when you make the jump from 60k to 180k that is a lot of disposable income, half of which would have been going to uncle scam anyway. (To say nothing about all expenses, improvements, and the general trend for most property to appreciate in value.)
But I've had co-workers, smart people too, who wouldn't even invest in a 401k, even after explaining to them that you don't really miss much money since half of it would have been taxed anyway, and not getting one is like turning down a 3% raise. (At least in the company I worked for at the time.)
They fly on Airplanes too. I was a little confused myself when I first saw this but then I found out about different rules, and that it is mostly for their personal lives or something.
These, and a GPS device for geocaching. Find what you're looking for with the GPS and log it after finding a wireless signal with the WiFi Detector.
How about combining geocaching and WiFi detectors?
Someone burries a WiFi device (um... this isn't sounding as geeky as I thought it would) in the sand somewhere, and then other people try to find it. When someone finds it they take it to a new location and bury it again.
Just picture that same obese guy with two days beard growth wearing a sailor moon outfit. (insert random musing about republicans/bush here...boy golly that georgie boy looks handsome in a suit!)
Great! now I can't get the image of George W Bush dressed up like Sailor Moon. or wait, is that what you were implying?
This is what I get for metamoderating. I should just go back to sleep now.
If he's not, it checks to see if the mail's encrypted to my personal GPG key. If it's not, the mail gets rejected (At the MTA, so I don't have to send a bounce message.) I can always eliminate the second step if the spammers ever figure out how to deal with that. I'll be changing the GPG key on a regular basis to keep the target moving.
Interesting.
I think most of us would be in favor of encrypting email in general. What if it was also a solution for stopping spam?
And if it is used as a tool for stopping spam the politicians can't as easily say "If regular people are encrypting their email then the terrorists have already won!" or something.
It would be a lot more difficult for spammers to spam if they had to combine email addresses with a key. They wouldn't be able to use brute force anymore. Humans can easily lookup a key on a website if they know to do that.
Not to mention if everyone were already doing this they everyone could also use a digital signature.
Is the gob'ment still cracking down on people who want to produce a free open source email client with encryption and digital signatures built in?
if sending unsolicited e-mail... cost a small micro-payment, it would quickly offset any profits to be made from spamming on the scale described in the article
There is an easier way to do this.
Visit their website
At least when they have a website to visit.
If everyone who received spam and didn't like it would visit the person's website it would cost them money for bandwidth.
There are the micropayments, and we don't even have to change the email protocals.
Also, if they have forms for comments, fill them out. If they are a mortgage referal scam artist, put in fake names and addresses. Make life difficult for them.
If they have an 800 number, call them up, say hello. (Do it from a payphone or you might wind up being the "contact" sent out in their next spam.)
Maybe instead of threatening them with the clamps, they should just send windows messages trying to sell their dirty socks.
(Or would that be even worse.)
Or maybe just send messages saying "Your Wifi network is insecure. Do something about it. Not all hackers are as nice as us."
When I get a job again though, I'm probably going to settup a wifi network even if I don't use it, just to see who connects to it. (With a separate firewall blocking spam etc.) I might even configure it to send them to a web page on my intranet that just says Hi, with an option for them to send me a random message for fun.
That annoyance is usually the fault of the annoyed because he or she is frustrated because they don't understand.
Usually either that or Reaction Formation: The things that we find at fault with ourselves (even, or especially if only subconciously) we will find most annoying in other people.
Enron was way past the point of Shredders : they worked with shrinters
Not secure enough. If your shredder, or shrinter doesn't do cross cutting then what is the point?
Me? I shred EVERTHING, including all junk mail with a cross cutting shredder, I mix up the shreddings really good, and then I burn* them!
Naturally, I'm on homeland security's watch list because of this.
* (actually, I just mix it up with my garbage. I don't actually think anyone is going through my garbage, but it would be funny if the police or feds were putting together the little shreds of paper mixed with rotting vegetables just to reveal my junk mail and utility bills.)
I agree in theory, but in practice a vote libertarian is a vote for Bush. Just ask anybody who voted for Nader in 2000.
No no no no no, a vote for the Libertarian is supposidly taking votes away from the Republicans (because Libertarians are conservative.) thats why when I voted for Nader, even though I'm a conservative, the vote really counted for Bush.
Now, at least in Florida, a vote for Gore counted for Buchanan I don't understand this but I didn't make up this logic.
What I don't understand is if a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush, and a vote for Browne (in 2000) is a vote for Gore, than who do you vote for if you actually want your vote to count for Nader?
If a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush, does that mean a vote for Bush is a vote for Nader?
No, that' makes no sense.
I guess you have to vote for the other reform canidate if you actually want to vote for Nader. But no one remembers his name.
Maybe if we get even more 3rd party canidates there will actually be an enemy of my enemy to vote for so that you can actually vote 3rd party without your vote counting for a Republicrat.
But I've heard rumours that the Democrats are playing dirty tricks with Nader this year, and if that's true it really pisses me off. Could that backfire?
one percentage point is simply not statistically significant
This might be redundant, but hey, this article is 3 days old and almost no one seems to mod comments over 3 hours old, let alone 3 days. (And I did skim through this thread and didn't see this)
Also, this is only part of a pet peeve of mine about how most statistics quoted in the media are useless because they only tell you the mean (and refer to it as "average").
Statistical Significance is not determined by the mean alone!!!!!
(Let's see, five bangs, that might get me modded as troll or flamebait. Only time will tell.)
Or, now that I think about it, what Statistical Signicance means is the probability that there is (or is not) an error variance in your statistics. Of course this is refering to determining if a sample is representative of the entire population. I would imagine in the article refered to they have a very big sample size, and as such a high probability that their statistics are significant.
Some quotes from my Research Design textbook:
If a given result is not likely to have arisen by chance, the result is said to be statistically significant. This is just another way of saying that the results are probably due to the effect of the independent variable rather than to error variance. Another way of putting it is that the result is probably reliable.
Alpha Level The probability that an observed difference between means occured because of sampling error (chance). By convention, the maximum acceptable alpha level is 0.05.
F-ratio The test statistic computed when using an analysis of variance. It is the ratio of the between-groups variance to within-groups variance.
Mean The arithemetic average of the scores in a distribution. The most frequently reported measure of central tendency.
Median The middle score in an ordered distribution.
Mode The most frequent score in a distribution. The least informative measure of centeral endency.
Normal distribution A specific type of frequency distribution in which most scores fall around the middle category. Scores become less frequent as you move from the middle category. Also refered to as a bell-shaped curve.
Null hypothesis In inferential statistics, the hypothesis that population values do not differ (most often applied to population means).
p-value In a statistical test, the probability, estimated from the data, that an observed difference in sample values arose through sampling error. p must be less than or equal to the chosen alpha level for the difference to be statistically significant.
Standard deviation The most frequently reported measure of variability. The square root of the variance.
t-test An inferential statistic used to evaluate the reliability of a difference between two means. Versions exist for between-subjects and within-subjects designs, and for evaluating a difference between a sample mean and a population mean.
Variance A measure of variability. The averaged square deviation from the mean.
Note that this is only the very basics of statistics after I quickly looked up stuff in a book from a class I took years ago. Most statistics quoted in the media do not include the standard deviation, let alone the p-value. Why do we accept this? OK, because most people out in the real world don't know the first thing about real statistics, and don't care either. Ironic that they seem quite willing to quote them nonetheless.
Thus, broadcasters in the US will have MORE rights over content than even the original copyright holder did!
Reminds me of this article in which IP Justice says that WIPO's proposed regulations would Give broadcasting corporations greater rights than artists are granted over their own performances.
It's about time for everybody to stand up to those fuckheads at the FCC.
The FCC is supposed to represent the people. Unfortunately, like politicians, they seem to be more responsive to the biggest corporations, which is why they are doing this.
However they do listen.
Two FCC Commissioners recently held a townhall meeting in Portland, Oregon to hear what real people want from the FCC. Note that these two (out of five I think) were opposed to the proposal to even further deregulate the mainstream media's ability to consolidate and tighten the media monopoly.
When Janet's nipple was shown on TV Focus on the Family got something like 40,000 letters written to the FCC to complain.
We can do better than that. Write to them and tell them you don't care about nipples or the seven words George Carlin supposidly can't say on television. What you want is control over your own electronic devices, and more diversity in the media.
Or whatever it is that you want from them. They are supposed to serve us, not dictate to us.
As opposed to the US government who gives China Most Favored Nation Status.
And it could be worse. They are not "disappearing" people within the US, at least not on a large scale, yet.
However, our government has supported numerous nations that do for decades, including China.
Oh, what was shown on camera durring the Tiananmen Square massacre was only the tip of the iceburg. The students who took part in the pro-democracy demonstrations were arrested and "re-educated." The peasants who supported them were mass-murdered behind the scenes.
There is a huge difference between Club Fed and a real prison.
Well, he sort of has a point. Maybe you should have been more specific and said Name two people who are actually doing time in "rape me in the ass prison" for defrauding investors.
Or perhaps a better question would be why are some of our prisons so awful, and isn't it counter-productive that they turn petty criminals into violent criminals? To say nothing about why do we joke about prison rape.
Federal Prisons are a lot "nicer" than the alternative, but loss of liberty is still devistating.
I think the Anonymous Coward made some better points about the amount of time they are doing, and how lenient the judicial system was to them.
It is quite clear that even if you are guilty, having a good lawyer makes a world of difference in not only if you are convicted or not, but how much and what kind of time you will do if you are.
Slashdot Mirror
Forgive me because I have never used Napster, but are they only RIAA music, or do they have music from independent labels as well?
I do not imagine that stuff from John Zorn's Tzadik label is especially popular among the kids, but I may be going back to college soon, and if this were available, and they had the obscure music I like to listen to, this might be nice to sign up with.
But if they only stuff I can get is Britney Spears and U2 then no thank you.
(I will now await getting flamed by U2 fans.)
(Sounds like a spyplane.)
You got a lot of good advice so far, but I might as well add two cents, or at least sum up some of the good points.
Personally, I feel life is what you are doing when you are not at work. But that rule doesn't apply if you love your job so much you would do it even if you were not being paid.
The more practical questions I would be asking is about the stability of the two companies. Number one priority is you don't want to get laid off or have your company die on you.
The less practical question would be where do you want to live? Do you like the place you currently live? Have you visited the new town, and could you see yourself living there and enjoying it for several years to the rest of your life?
If you do opt for the higher-paying job, you must take advantage of the extra disposable income and invest it. Read the other comment I made in this thread for details. If you can manage it what you want is to get to the point where you can live entirely off your investments, and don't have to work at a job unless you want to. That way if you get fed up with the company for whatever reason a few years down the line (say there is a change in management or whatever) then you won't have any problem if you want to quit.
You could even quit and pursue your degree without your next job even being a major concern. You can learn for the love of learning, code for the love of coding. Gods that sounds corney, but ask yourself if this is what you really want in life.
Most people also don't understand that the one of the main tricks to building real wealth is investing in such a way that you decrease the percentage of taxable income. When you have a mortgage for a rental property, you write off the interest, which in the early years is most of it. You have to have some disposable income at all to do investing, but when you make the jump from 60k to 180k that is a lot of disposable income, half of which would have been going to uncle scam anyway. (To say nothing about all expenses, improvements, and the general trend for most property to appreciate in value.)
But I've had co-workers, smart people too, who wouldn't even invest in a 401k, even after explaining to them that you don't really miss much money since half of it would have been taxed anyway, and not getting one is like turning down a 3% raise. (At least in the company I worked for at the time.)
Wow, I'm pretty sure I spelled theatures really badly.
Is anyone else just completely bored by Star Wars now?
I still have to see it in a theature out of obligation, but I think I'll wait until it is in the cheap ones.
Or maybe to theature hopping?
I don't even care about spelling anymore.
A lot of us chose to use Netscape when we realized that IE was a piece of crap.
Personally, I started using Netscape when someone told me that there was something better than Mosaic.
I never did use lynx much, but I did use Gopher.
I miss Gopher.
They fly on Airplanes too.
I was a little confused myself when I first saw this but then I found out about different rules, and that it is mostly for their personal lives or something.
Personally, I find Acronym Finder to be most effective for looking up acronyms.
These, and a GPS device for geocaching. Find what you're looking for with the GPS and log it after finding a wireless signal with the WiFi Detector.
How about combining geocaching and WiFi detectors?
Someone burries a WiFi device (um... this isn't sounding as geeky as I thought it would) in the sand somewhere, and then other people try to find it. When someone finds it they take it to a new location and bury it again.
Just picture that same obese guy with two days beard growth wearing a sailor moon outfit.
(insert random musing about republicans/bush here...boy golly that georgie boy looks handsome in a suit!)
Great! now I can't get the image of George W Bush dressed up like Sailor Moon.
or wait, is that what you were implying?
This is what I get for metamoderating.
I should just go back to sleep now.
If he's not, it checks to see if the mail's encrypted to my personal GPG key. If it's not, the mail gets rejected (At the MTA, so I don't have to send a bounce message.) I can always eliminate the second step if the spammers ever figure out how to deal with that. I'll be changing the GPG key on a regular basis to keep the target moving.
Interesting.
I think most of us would be in favor of encrypting email in general. What if it was also a solution for stopping spam?
And if it is used as a tool for stopping spam the politicians can't as easily say "If regular people are encrypting their email then the terrorists have already won!" or something.
It would be a lot more difficult for spammers to spam if they had to combine email addresses with a key. They wouldn't be able to use brute force anymore. Humans can easily lookup a key on a website if they know to do that.
Not to mention if everyone were already doing this they everyone could also use a digital signature.
Is the gob'ment still cracking down on people who want to produce a free open source email client with encryption and digital signatures built in?
if sending unsolicited e-mail... cost a small micro-payment, it would quickly offset any profits to be made from spamming on the scale described in the article
There is an easier way to do this.
Visit their website
At least when they have a website to visit.
If everyone who received spam and didn't like it would visit the person's website it would cost them money for bandwidth.
There are the micropayments, and we don't even have to change the email protocals.
Also, if they have forms for comments, fill them out. If they are a mortgage referal scam artist, put in fake names and addresses. Make life difficult for them.
If they have an 800 number, call them up, say hello. (Do it from a payphone or you might wind up being the "contact" sent out in their next spam.)
Maybe instead of threatening them with the clamps, they should just send windows messages trying to sell their dirty socks.
(Or would that be even worse.)
Or maybe just send messages saying "Your Wifi network is insecure. Do something about it. Not all hackers are as nice as us."
When I get a job again though, I'm probably going to settup a wifi network even if I don't use it, just to see who connects to it. (With a separate firewall blocking spam etc.) I might even configure it to send them to a web page on my intranet that just says Hi, with an option for them to send me a random message for fun.
Or would this get old after a couple weeks?
Sanrio makes PCs right?
They make just about everthing else.
Unfortunately, I don't think they make them in such quantities to compete with Disney.
But if any parents are out there reading this, boycott Disney, support Sanrio!
So, are you saing it takes a village to get a gold medal?
(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
What was wrong with Coneheads?
They are a rip off of Zippy the Pinhead.
I prefer the zen surrealism of ZTP.
Is that how you spell zany?
Are we having fun yet?
My vote goes to Manos the Hands of Fate.
However The Day After Tomorrow is in my top ten.
That annoyance is usually the fault of the annoyed because he or she is frustrated because they don't understand.
Usually either that or Reaction Formation:
The things that we find at fault with ourselves (even, or especially if only subconciously) we will find most annoying in other people.
Enron was way past the point of Shredders : they worked with shrinters
Not secure enough.
If your shredder, or shrinter doesn't do cross cutting then what is the point?
Me? I shred EVERTHING, including all junk mail with a cross cutting shredder, I mix up the shreddings really good, and then I burn* them!
Naturally, I'm on homeland security's watch list because of this.
* (actually, I just mix it up with my garbage. I don't actually think anyone is going through my garbage, but it would be funny if the police or feds were putting together the little shreds of paper mixed with rotting vegetables just to reveal my junk mail and utility bills.)
I agree in theory, but in practice a vote libertarian is a vote for Bush. Just ask anybody who voted for Nader in 2000.
No no no no no, a vote for the Libertarian is supposidly taking votes away from the Republicans (because Libertarians are conservative.) thats why when I voted for Nader, even though I'm a conservative, the vote really counted for Bush.
Now, at least in Florida, a vote for Gore counted for Buchanan I don't understand this but I didn't make up this logic.
What I don't understand is if a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush, and a vote for Browne (in 2000) is a vote for Gore, than who do you vote for if you actually want your vote to count for Nader?
If a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush, does that mean a vote for Bush is a vote for Nader?
No, that' makes no sense.
I guess you have to vote for the other reform canidate if you actually want to vote for Nader. But no one remembers his name.
Maybe if we get even more 3rd party canidates there will actually be an enemy of my enemy to vote for so that you can actually vote 3rd party without your vote counting for a Republicrat.
But I've heard rumours that the Democrats are playing dirty tricks with Nader this year, and if that's true it really pisses me off. Could that backfire?
This might be redundant, but hey, this article is 3 days old and almost no one seems to mod comments over 3 hours old, let alone 3 days. (And I did skim through this thread and didn't see this)
Also, this is only part of a pet peeve of mine about how most statistics quoted in the media are useless because they only tell you the mean (and refer to it as "average").
Statistical Significance is not determined by the mean alone!!!!!
(Let's see, five bangs, that might get me modded as troll or flamebait. Only time will tell.)
Or, now that I think about it, what Statistical Signicance means is the probability that there is (or is not) an error variance in your statistics. Of course this is refering to determining if a sample is representative of the entire population. I would imagine in the article refered to they have a very big sample size, and as such a high probability that their statistics are significant.
Some quotes from my Research Design textbook: Note that this is only the very basics of statistics after I quickly looked up stuff in a book from a class I took years ago. Most statistics quoted in the media do not include the standard deviation, let alone the p-value. Why do we accept this? OK, because most people out in the real world don't know the first thing about real statistics, and don't care either. Ironic that they seem quite willing to quote them nonetheless.
How can you not like Planet of the Daleks.
I mean it has a volcano, but it's an Ice Volcano.
I mean, what is kewler than an Ice Volcano.
um.... and that quick sequence that was used when the Pet Shop Boys sing "And you don't like rock."
um.... yea.
OK, I like Death to the Daleks better but I was mostly joking.
Destiny of the Daleks is probably my favorite, for among other reasons, having the single greatest one liner in television history: "Oh look! Rocks!"
Thus, broadcasters in the US will have MORE rights over content than even the original copyright holder did!
Reminds me of this article in which IP Justice says that WIPO's proposed regulations would Give broadcasting corporations greater rights than artists are granted over their own performances.
It's about time for everybody to stand up to those fuckheads at the FCC.
The FCC is supposed to represent the people. Unfortunately, like politicians, they seem to be more responsive to the biggest corporations, which is why they are doing this.
However they do listen.
Two FCC Commissioners recently held a townhall meeting in Portland, Oregon to hear what real people want from the FCC. Note that these two (out of five I think) were opposed to the proposal to even further deregulate the mainstream media's ability to consolidate and tighten the media monopoly.
When Janet's nipple was shown on TV Focus on the Family got something like 40,000 letters written to the FCC to complain.
We can do better than that. Write to them and tell them you don't care about nipples or the seven words George Carlin supposidly can't say on television. What you want is control over your own electronic devices, and more diversity in the media.
Or whatever it is that you want from them. They are supposed to serve us, not dictate to us.
I think you are missing the most important one:
As opposed to the US government who gives China Most Favored Nation Status.
And it could be worse. They are not "disappearing" people within the US, at least not on a large scale, yet.
However, our government has supported numerous nations that do for decades, including China.
Oh, what was shown on camera durring the Tiananmen Square massacre was only the tip of the iceburg. The students who took part in the pro-democracy demonstrations were arrested and "re-educated." The peasants who supported them were mass-murdered behind the scenes.
There is a huge difference between Club Fed and a real prison.
Well, he sort of has a point. Maybe you should have been more specific and said Name two people who are actually doing time in "rape me in the ass prison" for defrauding investors.
Or perhaps a better question would be why are some of our prisons so awful, and isn't it counter-productive that they turn petty criminals into violent criminals? To say nothing about why do we joke about prison rape.
Federal Prisons are a lot "nicer" than the alternative, but loss of liberty is still devistating.
I think the Anonymous Coward made some better points about the amount of time they are doing, and how lenient the judicial system was to them.
It is quite clear that even if you are guilty, having a good lawyer makes a world of difference in not only if you are convicted or not, but how much and what kind of time you will do if you are.