Actually, I think the most overused font (though it fits mostly into the plain sans-serif category) is Century Gothic. I'm also just as guilty of overusing this one. But never if it'd become necessary to use its wonky question mark symbol.
Perhaps you need to create a real profile with photos of yourself volunteering, post essays related to your technical expertise, etc. Then with your fake identity, you can post all the pics of your drunken orgies.
Oops! Someone thought they recognized you in that pic of you doing a keg stand. Sure the name was different, but then seeing you in the same outfit building a Habitat for Humanity House posted within a week under your real name kinda killed that denail.
But that can cut both ways. Imagine a rep from the NSA told Olbermann in this example, "Sure, we'll release your file in its entirety, however not solely to you, but on a publicly accessible website where everyone from your ex to Fox News can access it as well. So, want the world to know about your run-ins with the law as a child? How about that stint in rehab? Your current affair with your makeup artist? Imagine the alimony she'd demand once she saw your tax records? . .."
Internet aside, I doubt most courts today would consider breastfeeding your baby equal to posting a photo of breastfeeding your baby. The former is specifically permitted by law as it's a basic necessity of life issue. The latter would not pass that test as it will not adversely affect the health of the mother or infant in restricting the publishing of photos related to breastfeeding her child.
It could be argued as a 1st Amendment issue, but speech cannot be restricted by the government (psch, yeah right!) </cynicism> but private individuals and businesses including Facebook, can restrict what is posted within the realm of their control.
Considering that I've received notices of data nreaches at three current or former employers and from two government agencies all of which "may" have involved personal information including my date of birth, social security number, etc. Meanwhile, there's undoubtedly some organizations which have also lost data yet failed to report that fact, plus the likelihood that others have had breaches yet do not have my current contact information. It seems safe to assume that probably every bit of personal identity information for me is now in the public domain.
While I haven't yet become an identity theft victim, it seems like it's only a matter of time. Some agencies have offered 1-year enrollment in a credit monitoring service, others simply recommend that I should make sure to check my credit reports regularly. Gee thanks!
As infuriating as all of that is, what really gets my goat is all of the advice tossed out by many of these same agencies to be sure to shred bank statements before discarding them. While I agree that one shouldn't be careless with their own financial information: 1) it seems more likely that my personal information will be stolen from the very organizations that give me this advice than some neighborhood dumpster diver, and 2) if these agencies were even half as cautious with my information, these incidents would be a rarity.
Not to sound overly cynical about the whole issue, but I do some contract work for a big box retailer. Folks come in all the time seeking the $50 digital to analog converter boxes. Yet the individual stores typically only receive about a eight units a week and sell out within a few hours! Add to that, the overly complicated process of requesting $40 coupon/rebate certificates to defray most of the cost. Then let's not forget that the typical person seeking these boxes does not read Slashdot, is on a fixed income, and uses 'DTV' and 'HDTV' interchangeably, not really understanding the definition of either.
So why such little supply for such high demand? Why the bureaucracy? Why the readily confused acronyms? Because the push to DTV allows corporate interests to make use of the prime spectrum currently allocated for analog broadcasts while the retailers get taxpayer funded advertising that essentially tells a gullible public that the path of least resistance is to go out and buy a new LCD or plasma television - The stores just happen to have plenty of them, and gee aren't they pretty!
As far as corporate/government corruption is concerned, this is small potatoes compared to many examples seen here on pollution, war profiteering, and eroding civil liberties. However, the callousness I've observed in the push to sell you a bigscreen television--err I mean a converter box, if you really insist; is really going to hit hard in Middle America. I'm wondering if while mobs of social rights activists and anti-war protesters have had minimal effects on Washington, what will happen when a few million pensioners find themselves without access to television?
I'm purely playing devil's advocate here. (and yes, it's appropos as evil as I consider DRM to be) But DRM can be viewed as a way to re-introduce obsolesence into digital media that could otherwise persist indefinitely.
So while you probably didn't bother to re-purchase your LP's of the 1910 Fruitgum Co., your 8-tracks of KC & the Sunshine Band, or your cassettes of Michael Jackson; you may have repurchased Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon in all those different formats, and yet again on CD. However, now that you've presumably either ripped the CD or even purchased/pirated mp3's of the album, you will probably have no need to ever purchase the album again for as long as you live, even if you still chose to listen to it frequently.
Those albums that you no longer cared to own, if not promptly garage saled eventually were removed from your collection within 5-10 years generally by obsolesence. So it could be concluded that 5-10 years is (or was) the expected shelf life of any particular item in your audio library. Therefore, in order to sustain revenue, obsolesence must be maintained via DRM or similar technology. You may not want to repurchase/listen to your Britney Spears album 5 years from now, but if Green Day's American Idiot still belongs in your collection, then you'll need to pony up again at that time.
Anyway, now that I've built a straw man on behalf of the MAFIAA, let me tear it down:
Firstly, the purchasers of the MLB content did not get anywhere near a 5-10 year lifespan on their purchases. Some may not have received a full year's worth. Same could be said for "purchasers" of Microsoft's "Plays For Sure" encoded files and the Microsoft Zune.
Secondly, there are no absolutes on obsolesence. I know people who still have 78's. Granted, I know of no one who personally owns a vintage phonograph, and the 78's still in existance (mandatorily via very careful preservation) are still generally in very poor condition and barely playable, but it is still the consumer's choice. Especially given that many of the recordings on those cylinders are no longer available for purchase in any format.
Lastly, it should be made absolutely clear up front if obsolesence via DRM is to be employed, not buried deep in an EULA with language such as "we assume no liability for losses due to technological improvements, internet inaccessibility,...." and must be uniform for all purchasers. As in "The track you are about to purchase will cease to operate no sooner than [x years from today's date]. You will be required to re-obtain a license after that date if you wish to continue using it." Otherwise, a refund is owed to the consumer.
Yes a class action is defintely warranted in this case, but while I haven't checked, odds are, purchasers also unwittingly agreed to binding arbitration, so forget about forming a class.
But still, the math doesn't work. 3000 miles in ~32 hours is not going to give you an average speed anywhere near being in compliance with US speed limits.
Also, none of the racers (at least those hoping to win) have ever stopped to sleep for the night. Sleep was generally replaced with amphetamines, cocaine, coffee, or FTA Red Bull. That last point showing that these idiots' egos are far more important to them than public safety.
Do you mean spam in the inbox or spam actually received?
My personal domain is so utterly joejobbed that I gave up on all my filters, and instead made a new gmail acct its default address. Only the 250 or so legit email addresses (I use unique email addresses in the form sitename@mydomain.com) did I choose to forward to an unpublished POP acct. It was a lot of work at one time forwarding each address, but ultimately have about a 1:4 ratio as compared to the number of filtering rules previously put in place.
24 hours later, Gmail's inbox had 143 messages, all but 2 were spam. Meanwhile, the spam folder had over 28,000 messages!
The good news at least is that over the same 24 hour period, I've received about three dozen emails to my POP acct. Only 5 of those were spam. That's a ratio I can live with, and I don't have to worry about completely clogging my allocated server space if I don't check my mail twice daily.
I'm not about to remove all my mail filters just to provide percentage stats for challenge-response messages out of all received spam, however prior to intentionally filtering C-R messages, I easily received 50 of them a day.
The point is that you aren't just simply eliminating spam to your inbox. Since it's rare to receive multiple spams with the same return address, you're effectively generating about as much new spam as you've eliminated from your inbox - making the problem twice as bad, even if it is mostly transparent to you.
I am a former user of Boxtrapper and, like you, believed I finally found the magic bullet to solve the scourge known as spam. Then I realized how selfish a 'solution' C-R systems are. I also noticed a few personal contacts ignored the C-R message while browsing through quarantined messages, meaning I still had the manually go through and whitelist people anyway.
Then please do me and a whole bunch of others a huge favor and STOP!
Yes, I'm sure it's great having the spam load reduced to a managable amount. However, in case you haven't noticed, spammers almost never use their own email address. So guess what, you've become a spammer sending out thousands of challenge responses to people who have zero interest in communicating with you.
My domain is used as the return address for a ton of spam. I literally receive backscatter by the thousands to the point where I simply filter at the server (CPanel) to delete (not merely send to a junk folder) all postmaster messages, all challenge response systems, all vacation autorespnders, etc. That cuts the junk for my bayesian filters to sort through down to a couple hundred messages a day.
It doesn't have to be a pitch for a big breasted, penny stock, penile enhancement product to be spam!
Honestly, I think that is the point. If you are a mechanical engineer, you have a solid understanding of stress tolerances, friction, waste heat, MTBF, etc. Ergo, anytime someone proposes a perpetual motion generator, said engineer can probably find a dozen reasons why said system won't work. That said, don't discourage the dreamers!
Sure, there will be all kinds of hare-brained schemes dreamt up by people with nary a clue how the real world operates, and convincing these people otherwise will be difficult, if not impossible. -- Part and parcel of being a dreamer.
OTOH, many an idea with potential merit has been created by dreamers, not engineers. In terms of alternative fuels, a couple examples would be power generation from scrap tire recycling and biomass fuel from livestock waste.
So, in that sense, I can see how a F/OSS approach to alternative energy could be effective. Some folks can bring ideas to the table, experts within a specific scientific discipline can determine the feasibility. Folks from other fields of knowledge may spot "out of the box" solutions to a proposed, but inefficent idea, or conversely, point out potential pitfalls (legal, environmental issues) that weren't readily apparent.
The point being, as long as this community of dreamers, sages, and pragmatists are bound neither to a single idea nor especially to one specific industry's financial interests; it may be the best hope for discovering a viable (as in cost-effective, able to meet demand, and safe) alternative to fossil fuels within the foreseeable future.
I'm not receiving a huge increase in spam directly sent to me either. But I am getting a TON of backscatter as spammers are using random word|gibberish@[mydomain].com to send spam. It's gotten to the point where I have filtered 'postmaster@','ndn',etc. at my server, but still get swamped with verification emails, vacation auto-replys, group join requests, etc.
I'm reasonably knowledgeable about working with CPanel (all I have to work with on a a reseller account. But it feels as though I need to RTFM for SMTP in order to decipher how to use SPF when most my domain's email originates via my home DSL (covad.net) and must be sent via smtpauth.earthlink.net as they filter port 25.
What would be a much better solution all the way around IMHO is if servers were set up only to generate bounce messages to local users, and if people would STOP using challenge-response systems to try and combat spam--they only create more spam for everyone else!
Let's not pin all the blame and contempt on the GOP now. Were the Democrats in the White House, Congress, and SCOTUS, things would almost certainly be every bit as bad. Perhaps in a different direction, but very bad nonetheless.
The expression, "Power Corrupts... " is quite appropos. When one party has control of Government, and crafts its policies to serve the needs of its donors more than to the needs of the public; things go downhill very fast. It was Democratic corruption that brought about Newt Gingrich and the "Contract with America" 12 years ago that slid the balance from mostly left to almost completely right, and yet scandals and corruption still occur. Look at how "Ethics Reform" was soft/back pedaled in the wake of Abramoff and how that term no longer comes up during present-day scandals.
It isn't that Republicans or Democrats are inherently evil or self-serving, no matter what Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken might try to tell you. But when the checks and balances are minimized due to a strong single-party majority, legislation to eliminate any remaining vestiges of those safeguards can never be too far behind.
Bush is largely a figurehead. The executive branch is firmly under the control of a small-cadre of neo-cons some of whom are relatively well-known (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rove, etc) and others who don't generally take centerstage but are extremely influential nonetheless.
So in this context - though history may never fully tell us - Bush was probably not the person chiefly responsible for getting us mired in Iraq, eroding civil liberties, or anything that ordinarily would seriously be considered grounds for impeachment. Tying in to your point, this group has a presence not only in the CIA, but also Congress, the newsmedia, and higher learning institutions. Many of these relationships were forged following the Watergate scandal.
Hitler wouldn't have "achieved" his goals without the help of Goebbels, Göring, or Himmler either. Though history points to Hitler's very strong charisma as being a key reason for the "success" of the Third Reich, GWB may help to disminish the importance of being largely admired by the populace, as long as there's a "greater enemy" or in this instance an "axis of evil" enough people will stick their heads in the sand and toe the line until it is too late.
Slashdot Mirror
Got it. LINK Warning: NSFW!
Maybe a bit pedantic. But I believe the retail price in the mid-80's held quite steady at $139. $90 may have been a Black Friday deal though.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
Actually, I think the most overused font (though it fits mostly into the plain sans-serif category) is Century Gothic. I'm also just as guilty of overusing this one. But never if it'd become necessary to use its wonky question mark symbol.
Perhaps you need to create a real profile with photos of yourself volunteering, post essays related to your technical expertise, etc. Then with your fake identity, you can post all the pics of your drunken orgies.
Oops! Someone thought they recognized you in that pic of you doing a keg stand. Sure the name was different, but then seeing you in the same outfit building a Habitat for Humanity House posted within a week under your real name kinda killed that denail.
But that can cut both ways. Imagine a rep from the NSA told Olbermann in this example, "Sure, we'll release your file in its entirety, however not solely to you, but on a publicly accessible website where everyone from your ex to Fox News can access it as well. So, want the world to know about your run-ins with the law as a child? How about that stint in rehab? Your current affair with your makeup artist? Imagine the alimony she'd demand once she saw your tax records? . . ."
Yes, if you can't hack it in a Bangalore call center, phishing is probably more profitable than begging on the streets.
Internet aside, I doubt most courts today would consider breastfeeding your baby equal to posting a photo of breastfeeding your baby. The former is specifically permitted by law as it's a basic necessity of life issue. The latter would not pass that test as it will not adversely affect the health of the mother or infant in restricting the publishing of photos related to breastfeeding her child.
It could be argued as a 1st Amendment issue, but speech cannot be restricted by the government (psch, yeah right!) </cynicism> but private individuals and businesses including Facebook, can restrict what is posted within the realm of their control.
Considering that I've received notices of data nreaches at three current or former employers and from two government agencies all of which "may" have involved personal information including my date of birth, social security number, etc. Meanwhile, there's undoubtedly some organizations which have also lost data yet failed to report that fact, plus the likelihood that others have had breaches yet do not have my current contact information. It seems safe to assume that probably every bit of personal identity information for me is now in the public domain.
While I haven't yet become an identity theft victim, it seems like it's only a matter of time. Some agencies have offered 1-year enrollment in a credit monitoring service, others simply recommend that I should make sure to check my credit reports regularly. Gee thanks!
As infuriating as all of that is, what really gets my goat is all of the advice tossed out by many of these same agencies to be sure to shred bank statements before discarding them. While I agree that one shouldn't be careless with their own financial information: 1) it seems more likely that my personal information will be stolen from the very organizations that give me this advice than some neighborhood dumpster diver, and 2) if these agencies were even half as cautious with my information, these incidents would be a rarity.
Not to sound overly cynical about the whole issue, but I do some contract work for a big box retailer. Folks come in all the time seeking the $50 digital to analog converter boxes. Yet the individual stores typically only receive about a eight units a week and sell out within a few hours! Add to that, the overly complicated process of requesting $40 coupon/rebate certificates to defray most of the cost. Then let's not forget that the typical person seeking these boxes does not read Slashdot, is on a fixed income, and uses 'DTV' and 'HDTV' interchangeably, not really understanding the definition of either. So why such little supply for such high demand? Why the bureaucracy? Why the readily confused acronyms? Because the push to DTV allows corporate interests to make use of the prime spectrum currently allocated for analog broadcasts while the retailers get taxpayer funded advertising that essentially tells a gullible public that the path of least resistance is to go out and buy a new LCD or plasma television - The stores just happen to have plenty of them, and gee aren't they pretty! As far as corporate/government corruption is concerned, this is small potatoes compared to many examples seen here on pollution, war profiteering, and eroding civil liberties. However, the callousness I've observed in the push to sell you a bigscreen television--err I mean a converter box, if you really insist; is really going to hit hard in Middle America. I'm wondering if while mobs of social rights activists and anti-war protesters have had minimal effects on Washington, what will happen when a few million pensioners find themselves without access to television?
C'mon, don't you think there are already enough 80's cover bands out there?
I'm purely playing devil's advocate here. (and yes, it's appropos as evil as I consider DRM to be) But DRM can be viewed as a way to re-introduce obsolesence into digital media that could otherwise persist indefinitely.
...." and must be uniform for all purchasers. As in "The track you are about to purchase will cease to operate no sooner than [x years from today's date]. You will be required to re-obtain a license after that date if you wish to continue using it." Otherwise, a refund is owed to the consumer.
So while you probably didn't bother to re-purchase your LP's of the 1910 Fruitgum Co., your 8-tracks of KC & the Sunshine Band, or your cassettes of Michael Jackson; you may have repurchased Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon in all those different formats, and yet again on CD. However, now that you've presumably either ripped the CD or even purchased/pirated mp3's of the album, you will probably have no need to ever purchase the album again for as long as you live, even if you still chose to listen to it frequently.
Those albums that you no longer cared to own, if not promptly garage saled eventually were removed from your collection within 5-10 years generally by obsolesence. So it could be concluded that 5-10 years is (or was) the expected shelf life of any particular item in your audio library. Therefore, in order to sustain revenue, obsolesence must be maintained via DRM or similar technology. You may not want to repurchase/listen to your Britney Spears album 5 years from now, but if Green Day's American Idiot still belongs in your collection, then you'll need to pony up again at that time.
Anyway, now that I've built a straw man on behalf of the MAFIAA, let me tear it down:
Firstly, the purchasers of the MLB content did not get anywhere near a 5-10 year lifespan on their purchases. Some may not have received a full year's worth. Same could be said for "purchasers" of Microsoft's "Plays For Sure" encoded files and the Microsoft Zune.
Secondly, there are no absolutes on obsolesence. I know people who still have 78's. Granted, I know of no one who personally owns a vintage phonograph, and the 78's still in existance (mandatorily via very careful preservation) are still generally in very poor condition and barely playable, but it is still the consumer's choice. Especially given that many of the recordings on those cylinders are no longer available for purchase in any format.
Lastly, it should be made absolutely clear up front if obsolesence via DRM is to be employed, not buried deep in an EULA with language such as "we assume no liability for losses due to technological improvements, internet inaccessibility,
Yes a class action is defintely warranted in this case, but while I haven't checked, odds are, purchasers also unwittingly agreed to binding arbitration, so forget about forming a class.
But still, the math doesn't work. 3000 miles in ~32 hours is not going to give you an average speed anywhere near being in compliance with US speed limits.
Also, none of the racers (at least those hoping to win) have ever stopped to sleep for the night. Sleep was generally replaced with amphetamines, cocaine, coffee, or FTA Red Bull. That last point showing that these idiots' egos are far more important to them than public safety.
Do you mean spam in the inbox or spam actually received?
My personal domain is so utterly joejobbed that I gave up on all my filters, and instead made a new gmail acct its default address. Only the 250 or so legit email addresses (I use unique email addresses in the form sitename@mydomain.com) did I choose to forward to an unpublished POP acct. It was a lot of work at one time forwarding each address, but ultimately have about a 1:4 ratio as compared to the number of filtering rules previously put in place.
24 hours later, Gmail's inbox had 143 messages, all but 2 were spam. Meanwhile, the spam folder had over 28,000 messages!
The good news at least is that over the same 24 hour period, I've received about three dozen emails to my POP acct. Only 5 of those were spam. That's a ratio I can live with, and I don't have to worry about completely clogging my allocated server space if I don't check my mail twice daily.
I'm not about to remove all my mail filters just to provide percentage stats for challenge-response messages out of all received spam, however prior to intentionally filtering C-R messages, I easily received 50 of them a day.
The point is that you aren't just simply eliminating spam to your inbox. Since it's rare to receive multiple spams with the same return address, you're effectively generating about as much new spam as you've eliminated from your inbox - making the problem twice as bad, even if it is mostly transparent to you.
I am a former user of Boxtrapper and, like you, believed I finally found the magic bullet to solve the scourge known as spam. Then I realized how selfish a 'solution' C-R systems are. I also noticed a few personal contacts ignored the C-R message while browsing through quarantined messages, meaning I still had the manually go through and whitelist people anyway.
Then please do me and a whole bunch of others a huge favor and STOP!
Yes, I'm sure it's great having the spam load reduced to a managable amount. However, in case you haven't noticed, spammers almost never use their own email address. So guess what, you've become a spammer sending out thousands of challenge responses to people who have zero interest in communicating with you.
My domain is used as the return address for a ton of spam. I literally receive backscatter by the thousands to the point where I simply filter at the server (CPanel) to delete (not merely send to a junk folder) all postmaster messages, all challenge response systems, all vacation autorespnders, etc. That cuts the junk for my bayesian filters to sort through down to a couple hundred messages a day.
It doesn't have to be a pitch for a big breasted, penny stock, penile enhancement product to be spam!
Except when it comes to HP printers. There the law works entirely in reverse:
Every 24 months inkjet cartridge capacity will be halfed, code bloat will double and the cost will increase.
285 ft today, commercial sub orbital space in three years time. That doesn't sound like a deliberate pace, it sounds a bit rushed to me.
Three years was once a considerable amount of time when it came to rocket science.
I totally don't know what that means. But I want it!
Honestly, I think that is the point. If you are a mechanical engineer, you have a solid understanding of stress tolerances, friction, waste heat, MTBF, etc. Ergo, anytime someone proposes a perpetual motion generator, said engineer can probably find a dozen reasons why said system won't work. That said, don't discourage the dreamers!
Sure, there will be all kinds of hare-brained schemes dreamt up by people with nary a clue how the real world operates, and convincing these people otherwise will be difficult, if not impossible. -- Part and parcel of being a dreamer.
OTOH, many an idea with potential merit has been created by dreamers, not engineers. In terms of alternative fuels, a couple examples would be power generation from scrap tire recycling and biomass fuel from livestock waste.
So, in that sense, I can see how a F/OSS approach to alternative energy could be effective. Some folks can bring ideas to the table, experts within a specific scientific discipline can determine the feasibility. Folks from other fields of knowledge may spot "out of the box" solutions to a proposed, but inefficent idea, or conversely, point out potential pitfalls (legal, environmental issues) that weren't readily apparent.
The point being, as long as this community of dreamers, sages, and pragmatists are bound neither to a single idea nor especially to one specific industry's financial interests; it may be the best hope for discovering a viable (as in cost-effective, able to meet demand, and safe) alternative to fossil fuels within the foreseeable future.
Thanks for the link! Maybe they'll add a scale to the images soon?
I'm reasonably knowledgeable about working with CPanel (all I have to work with on a a reseller account. But it feels as though I need to RTFM for SMTP in order to decipher how to use SPF when most my domain's email originates via my home DSL (covad.net) and must be sent via smtpauth.earthlink.net as they filter port 25.
What would be a much better solution all the way around IMHO is if servers were set up only to generate bounce messages to local users, and if people would STOP using challenge-response systems to try and combat spam--they only create more spam for everyone else!
Ford was switching to Linux but Arthur begged him to stick with Windows?
The expression, "Power Corrupts
It isn't that Republicans or Democrats are inherently evil or self-serving, no matter what Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken might try to tell you. But when the checks and balances are minimized due to a strong single-party majority, legislation to eliminate any remaining vestiges of those safeguards can never be too far behind.
So in this context - though history may never fully tell us - Bush was probably not the person chiefly responsible for getting us mired in Iraq, eroding civil liberties, or anything that ordinarily would seriously be considered grounds for impeachment. Tying in to your point, this group has a presence not only in the CIA, but also Congress, the newsmedia, and higher learning institutions. Many of these relationships were forged following the Watergate scandal.
Hitler wouldn't have "achieved" his goals without the help of Goebbels, Göring, or Himmler either. Though history points to Hitler's very strong charisma as being a key reason for the "success" of the Third Reich, GWB may help to disminish the importance of being largely admired by the populace, as long as there's a "greater enemy" or in this instance an "axis of evil" enough people will stick their heads in the sand and toe the line until it is too late.