But that's only PART of the problem. Imagine how much energy is also used by viruses running these computers nonstop to send out that spam.
Why, if only there was some company that could supply both an anti-virus AND a spam-filter. That way, we would only need one program, and safe further energy... somehow.
What's that? McAfee can cover not one, but BOTH of those objectives? Why, what a happy coincidence that the company sponsoring this study can help us in so very many ways!
Of course! All of those completely unwanted emails can just be replied to with something along the lines of "remove" in the subject line.
It completely works, and won't fulfill the sole purpose of confirming that your email address is valid and active.
I've been doing this with every spam message I receive. On a completely unrelated note, I think spam is getting worse nowadays. But no worries, I set up an auto-reply to send a kind response to each one of them, requesting my removal. But I'd swear, I think spam volume is going up exponentially since I started doing that. Strange...
Well this is a good PR move on the part of Amazon as far as I'm concerned. Cancels out their "censorship" glitch from the other day and puts them back in a healthy credit again.
If all it takes is a single incident... neither of which is overly 'good' or 'bad'... to sway your opinion of a company up and down like a yo-yo, then maybe you should look into being less of a sheep.
only a small subset of the electorate are capable of verifying this
Not that I'm taking the side of voting machines or anything... but one could say the same for a pencil vote, or a 'punch a hole' vote. All you need is a vote counter to count it as whatever party they want to win, regardless of what's on the paper.
It annoys me that it's not more prevailant. Maybe I'm the exception to the rule, but I LOVE spectating games... oftentimes more than playing them. For any old games I'm familiar with (and sometimes ones I've never heard of before), I very much enjoy watching speed runs of it from speed demos archive, and have about 1/4 of my hard drive currently filled with said video files.
I would honestly PAY in order to see streaming video of live online play for say... Starcraft, WOW, or most anything. Well, except sports games... strangely those bore the shit out of me... much like most sports in general.
But yeah... if I had the option, I'd definitely be watching live streaming gaming. At least on the Wii, Super Smash Bros. Melee has online Spectator mode:}
I as well have a cellphone (albeit not an iphone... I hate them, personally) and am on the Rogers network. However, I just bought my phone outright from Wireless Wave (I'm sure anywhere that sells cellphones, you can get it non-contract), popped in my SIM card from my old POS nonworking phone, and off I went. I don't use it much, so I'm putting $15 a month on it tops. Helluva lot cheaper than any plan. Downside is I don't have voicemail and maybe some of the other extras, but I can text, send, and receive calls, so it's plenty good enough for my phone usage.
Screw plans if you don't use your phone a great amount.
Except of course for the fact that the band sees virtually zero (~ $0) of that cd-sale money. The band is making their money playing live and charging $50 or whatever per ticket.
And how do I know if it sucks if I'm incapable of listening to it before buying what will quickly become a $20 coaster?
Here's what actually happens (highly simplified obviously, but it gets the point across): 1. Band creates song 2. Song put on CD by RIAA 3. Song becomes mp3 format, and is listened to by many 4. Assuming it's not shit, song and thus band become popular 5. Band comes to town - makes killing by selling out tickets
The whole mess is happening at #3. Previously, #3 was only radio and word of mouth. If neither of those were there, there would be no sales because people (generally) don't spend money on 100% unknown music. When the internet happened along, suddenly word of mouth and radio combined to become mp3. The popularity of good bands skyrocketted. After all... prior to the internet, personal experience has shown me that very, VERY few bands from other countries came here. Thus... bands that may have had a poor following in their specific area may be popular elsewhere. Instead of rolling over and dying in obscurity, said band keeps going and stays alive.
So now we have the RIAA saying "no more mp3". We will be stuck with radio, and word of mouth again. Radio of course is basically owned by people who want to push specific bands/music, regardless of their quality, regardless of what people want (and honestly, every single radio station here sucks in my opinion, since none of it is of the genres I prefer to listen to... damn bible-belt). Goodbye wide variety of music, and experiencing any music from any other culture.
I can honestly say I've bought a decent number of CD's for bands I previously had no clue existed due to mp3 downloads. That's something the RIAA actually, physically sees money for (not so much the band... but if they come to town, count me in). Without the random downloading, they would not have seen one thin dime of my money.
That's kinda the point of the speed limit. The speed limit isn't MEANT to be something that people "know" they can go 10km/h over.
In my opinion, North America should adopt a new system... increase all speed limits by 5/10/whatever is normally travelled on that road, and make you get an insanely expensive speeding ticket for even driving 0.5km/h over it. Drive 5-10 under the limit, all fine and good. But then there's no room for interpretation. The limit needs to be the goddamn LIMIT!
The problem there is that jets aren't flying 10 feet from eachother, and aren't controlled by road-raging madmen swerving around traffic dangerously to attempt to save 30 seconds from their trip.
Long story short, it will never happen on the ground. Even if spontaneously every single car in the country (or even world) were changed at the same time to all be as automatic as jet (and hell, for the sake of it, we'll say even antique or older cars were also changed to be automatic somehow), you WILL have tons of people who will find a way to change it manual again so that they can CONTINUE driving like madmen even moreso now, because all the OTHER cars on the road are so predictable now.
Or failing that, why does it always fall on the "quirky, socially-inept programmer" to be the "bad" person in the office?
I mean, has anyone ever SEEN some of the office politics that take place in most companies? Holy jesus hell, I've worked in places where I would have KILLED to be socially-inept and ignored by everyone!
It's like Quebec and the referendum they try to push through every so often. Basically, it sucks for everyone except the person trying to push their agenda through.
They can try to push through their agenda a hundred times. All it takes is a single ONE of those to go through, and everything is fucked forever. Because once it goes through, there's no way it will ever go back again.
I see it as akin to brute-forcing a password or something. Keep trying over and over again, and eventually you'll get through. And once you do, it can't be undone.
Yeah, I wouldn't be worried one way or the other. Even if you didn't bother to remove any watermarking from the theater, AND if for some reason your digital camera marks it as well... or hell, let's say even if you had a tape-based video recorder, and then converted that to digital, and any kind of watermarking STILL survived somehow... it's still useless to anyone. They know it came from "X" camera. Good luck finding that camera. Unless the person taking the video is completely stupid. I'm sure if the feds were to dig hard enough, AND if the trail even existed, they might be able to trace back to the actual sale in the actual store and find what credit card/debit card paid for it.
Personally, if I were planning to illegally record and upload videos of movies, I'd be damn sure to buy said recorder with cash. Or get it from a garage sale or somewhere else used. Theoretical trail broken, bye bye police, unless you're actually caught and arrested physically at the time of recording red-handed... and that threat has always existed regardless.
Sadly, a lot of parents cave into their child's slightest whims every single time. I've seen brats in the mall that I would have loved to hit with my car for the way they were acting, and the mother is actually APPOLOGIZING to the brat for not buying him the crap sooner.
It would be the children of THOSE parents (although it applies to situations not quite that extreme as well, I suppose) that all the advertisements you're thinking of are for.
Although this also goes in the opposite direction for some. It mentions that houses with children may see ads targetted towards games and the like.
So if you have a baby, are you going to be stripped of watching the "funny" advertisements... usually for more adult things like beer, and whatnot... and be forced to sit through baby-food and diaper commercials? I know they're far and few between, but some commercials are actually fun to watch. Why should being in a specific demographic strip you of that fun?
Probably not. To me it seems like the "coupon-defending" crowd is leaving heavily on the notion of "it's impossible to get enough warning information from a radio". It's been explained time and again that the radio has sufficed for this purpose in the past, and it will suffice in the future.
I know that when the power goes out here, I don't dick around with the frickin' TV trying to get it power. I pop a 9-volt into my radio and tune it to the usual AM news stations for info. Some people just refuse to comprehend that THE RADIO WORKS!
I was just checking Wikipedia (I know, I know, just roll with it, I'm sure it's at least partially correct for this part) on this trial, and saw the following:
The hearings ended on March 3 and the verdict will be announced at 11:00 AM on Friday 17 April.
Why in the world is it taking them over a month to announce the verdict? The fact that they're give it a specific time, down to the minute, would imply that all things are already decided. Why not just... say the results, instead of waiting a month and a half?
So if they made a little finger-glove that just goes over the tip of your finger that's magnetic, or even if they eventually develop something that's basically a magnetic version of a false fingernail, would you not consider THAT touch screen? For your definition, does it HAVE to require actual skin-to-screen contact?
For my money, I'd rather NOT directly touch and smear up a screen. You'll have a sharper, more accurate touching point using anything other than the rounded, soft surface of a fingertip as well.
And finally, if something can sense a finger touching it, odds are it'll be set off by just about anything touching it. If they can make it so that it's ONLY activated by the previously mentioned fingertip cover, I'd consider that WAY better.
Do you have any advice, or specific webpages I should go to in order to get info on self-publishing? By blind coincidence, I was giong to be emailing/phoning around to various publishers to see what's involved with getting a book I'm writing published. If I can do a little extra elbow-work and avoid the publishers, but still manage to get the book into book stores/amazon, I'd be all for that.
Say you just paid oh... $500 for a plane trip to a vacation spot. Some prick officer asks you to open a file. You have the following options. Keep in mind I'm cynical at the best of times however:
(a) Plead the 5th. You're held and/or brought in for questioning. You miss the plane, thus losing your vacation, $500, and god help you if you had business there, because you just lost it. Congratulations, your life may be fucked, depending on how important the flight is.
(b) Open the file. Which leads to: - 1) They find nothing, you go on your merry way. - 2) They find nothing, but take forever searching computer. See (a). - 3) They find something (and no matter how clean you are, if they're a prick enough, they WILL find something to tag you with). See (a), except now add a criminal record.
You can hope and pray that you get b1, and statistically that may well be the one you'll get (I'm guessing, since I have no clue how often people are held past the plane's departure for searchings, or how often searchings happen)... but if you get any other option, your losses can be anywhere from minor to unrecoverable and life-changing.
So virtually all people will not plead the 5th right off the bat, unless you have no concern for money or time or annoyance... and the number of people who think that are slim to nil.
Personally, if I were to fly anywhere, I'd just not take a computer. If for some bizarre reason I absolutely HAD to take some data with me that I couldn't just upload somewhere temporarily, I'd have a micro-SD card hidden in my watch enclosure or something. At least last I was at the airport, they haven't been scanning the spare change/etc you put in that little bin yet.
Because (keep in mind this primarily isn't the mindset of the Slashdot crowd, but of the general society as a whole) girls aren't nerds. Girls play with girly things and do girly stuff in a girly way. If a girl is seen anywhere non-girly, said general society will think "silly girl, that's for boys".
God knows I've had coworkers in tech support that had to deal with that mindset every friggin' day. She ended up just telling them to call back and disconnecting the call if they absolutely refused to have a *gasp* girl help them with a computer problem.
I think you may have hit the head on the nail with that one. These days, it's irrelevant what the public thinks or wants, but about organizations protecting themselves.
I realize this is highly generalized, but it's the view I have of society as a whole lately.
Slashdot Mirror
But that's only PART of the problem. Imagine how much energy is also used by viruses running these computers nonstop to send out that spam.
Why, if only there was some company that could supply both an anti-virus AND a spam-filter. That way, we would only need one program, and safe further energy... somehow.
What's that? McAfee can cover not one, but BOTH of those objectives? Why, what a happy coincidence that the company sponsoring this study can help us in so very many ways!
Of course! All of those completely unwanted emails can just be replied to with something along the lines of "remove" in the subject line.
It completely works, and won't fulfill the sole purpose of confirming that your email address is valid and active.
I've been doing this with every spam message I receive. On a completely unrelated note, I think spam is getting worse nowadays. But no worries, I set up an auto-reply to send a kind response to each one of them, requesting my removal. But I'd swear, I think spam volume is going up exponentially since I started doing that. Strange...
Well this is a good PR move on the part of Amazon as far as I'm concerned. Cancels out their "censorship" glitch from the other day and puts them back in a healthy credit again.
If all it takes is a single incident... neither of which is overly 'good' or 'bad'... to sway your opinion of a company up and down like a yo-yo, then maybe you should look into being less of a sheep.
Maybe Microsoft is just afraid that the employees will overshoot the Ballmer Peak.
only a small subset of the electorate are capable of verifying this
Not that I'm taking the side of voting machines or anything... but one could say the same for a pencil vote, or a 'punch a hole' vote. All you need is a vote counter to count it as whatever party they want to win, regardless of what's on the paper.
It annoys me that it's not more prevailant. Maybe I'm the exception to the rule, but I LOVE spectating games... oftentimes more than playing them. For any old games I'm familiar with (and sometimes ones I've never heard of before), I very much enjoy watching speed runs of it from speed demos archive, and have about 1/4 of my hard drive currently filled with said video files.
I would honestly PAY in order to see streaming video of live online play for say... Starcraft, WOW, or most anything. Well, except sports games... strangely those bore the shit out of me... much like most sports in general.
But yeah... if I had the option, I'd definitely be watching live streaming gaming. At least on the Wii, Super Smash Bros. Melee has online Spectator mode :}
Pay as you go, my friend... pay as you go.
I as well have a cellphone (albeit not an iphone... I hate them, personally) and am on the Rogers network. However, I just bought my phone outright from Wireless Wave (I'm sure anywhere that sells cellphones, you can get it non-contract), popped in my SIM card from my old POS nonworking phone, and off I went. I don't use it much, so I'm putting $15 a month on it tops. Helluva lot cheaper than any plan. Downside is I don't have voicemail and maybe some of the other extras, but I can text, send, and receive calls, so it's plenty good enough for my phone usage.
Screw plans if you don't use your phone a great amount.
Except of course for the fact that the band sees virtually zero (~ $0) of that cd-sale money. The band is making their money playing live and charging $50 or whatever per ticket.
And how do I know if it sucks if I'm incapable of listening to it before buying what will quickly become a $20 coaster?
Here's what actually happens (highly simplified obviously, but it gets the point across):
1. Band creates song
2. Song put on CD by RIAA
3. Song becomes mp3 format, and is listened to by many
4. Assuming it's not shit, song and thus band become popular
5. Band comes to town - makes killing by selling out tickets
The whole mess is happening at #3. Previously, #3 was only radio and word of mouth. If neither of those were there, there would be no sales because people (generally) don't spend money on 100% unknown music. When the internet happened along, suddenly word of mouth and radio combined to become mp3. The popularity of good bands skyrocketted. After all... prior to the internet, personal experience has shown me that very, VERY few bands from other countries came here. Thus... bands that may have had a poor following in their specific area may be popular elsewhere. Instead of rolling over and dying in obscurity, said band keeps going and stays alive.
So now we have the RIAA saying "no more mp3". We will be stuck with radio, and word of mouth again. Radio of course is basically owned by people who want to push specific bands/music, regardless of their quality, regardless of what people want (and honestly, every single radio station here sucks in my opinion, since none of it is of the genres I prefer to listen to... damn bible-belt). Goodbye wide variety of music, and experiencing any music from any other culture.
I can honestly say I've bought a decent number of CD's for bands I previously had no clue existed due to mp3 downloads. That's something the RIAA actually, physically sees money for (not so much the band... but if they come to town, count me in). Without the random downloading, they would not have seen one thin dime of my money.
Simple reason they ban liquids at security.
So you're forced to buy drinks on the plane, or from the snack bar past security.
It's all about the $.
behind someone who is just doing the speed limit
That's kinda the point of the speed limit. The speed limit isn't MEANT to be something that people "know" they can go 10km/h over.
In my opinion, North America should adopt a new system... increase all speed limits by 5/10/whatever is normally travelled on that road, and make you get an insanely expensive speeding ticket for even driving 0.5km/h over it. Drive 5-10 under the limit, all fine and good. But then there's no room for interpretation. The limit needs to be the goddamn LIMIT!
The problem there is that jets aren't flying 10 feet from eachother, and aren't controlled by road-raging madmen swerving around traffic dangerously to attempt to save 30 seconds from their trip.
Long story short, it will never happen on the ground. Even if spontaneously every single car in the country (or even world) were changed at the same time to all be as automatic as jet (and hell, for the sake of it, we'll say even antique or older cars were also changed to be automatic somehow), you WILL have tons of people who will find a way to change it manual again so that they can CONTINUE driving like madmen even moreso now, because all the OTHER cars on the road are so predictable now.
Or failing that, why does it always fall on the "quirky, socially-inept programmer" to be the "bad" person in the office?
I mean, has anyone ever SEEN some of the office politics that take place in most companies? Holy jesus hell, I've worked in places where I would have KILLED to be socially-inept and ignored by everyone!
It's like Quebec and the referendum they try to push through every so often. Basically, it sucks for everyone except the person trying to push their agenda through.
They can try to push through their agenda a hundred times. All it takes is a single ONE of those to go through, and everything is fucked forever. Because once it goes through, there's no way it will ever go back again.
I see it as akin to brute-forcing a password or something. Keep trying over and over again, and eventually you'll get through. And once you do, it can't be undone.
Methinks I'm going to watch the movie "Pi" by Darren Aronofsky :D.
Yeah, I wouldn't be worried one way or the other. Even if you didn't bother to remove any watermarking from the theater, AND if for some reason your digital camera marks it as well... or hell, let's say even if you had a tape-based video recorder, and then converted that to digital, and any kind of watermarking STILL survived somehow... it's still useless to anyone. They know it came from "X" camera. Good luck finding that camera. Unless the person taking the video is completely stupid. I'm sure if the feds were to dig hard enough, AND if the trail even existed, they might be able to trace back to the actual sale in the actual store and find what credit card/debit card paid for it.
Personally, if I were planning to illegally record and upload videos of movies, I'd be damn sure to buy said recorder with cash. Or get it from a garage sale or somewhere else used. Theoretical trail broken, bye bye police, unless you're actually caught and arrested physically at the time of recording red-handed... and that threat has always existed regardless.
Sadly, a lot of parents cave into their child's slightest whims every single time. I've seen brats in the mall that I would have loved to hit with my car for the way they were acting, and the mother is actually APPOLOGIZING to the brat for not buying him the crap sooner.
It would be the children of THOSE parents (although it applies to situations not quite that extreme as well, I suppose) that all the advertisements you're thinking of are for.
Although this also goes in the opposite direction for some. It mentions that houses with children may see ads targetted towards games and the like.
So if you have a baby, are you going to be stripped of watching the "funny" advertisements... usually for more adult things like beer, and whatnot... and be forced to sit through baby-food and diaper commercials? I know they're far and few between, but some commercials are actually fun to watch. Why should being in a specific demographic strip you of that fun?
Probably not. To me it seems like the "coupon-defending" crowd is leaving heavily on the notion of "it's impossible to get enough warning information from a radio". It's been explained time and again that the radio has sufficed for this purpose in the past, and it will suffice in the future.
I know that when the power goes out here, I don't dick around with the frickin' TV trying to get it power. I pop a 9-volt into my radio and tune it to the usual AM news stations for info. Some people just refuse to comprehend that THE RADIO WORKS!
Hmm, that makes a surprising amount of sense. Giving a limit to how long a case can go on is actually a damn good idea.
I was just checking Wikipedia (I know, I know, just roll with it, I'm sure it's at least partially correct for this part) on this trial, and saw the following:
The hearings ended on March 3 and the verdict will be announced at 11:00 AM on Friday 17 April.
Why in the world is it taking them over a month to announce the verdict? The fact that they're give it a specific time, down to the minute, would imply that all things are already decided. Why not just... say the results, instead of waiting a month and a half?
So if they made a little finger-glove that just goes over the tip of your finger that's magnetic, or even if they eventually develop something that's basically a magnetic version of a false fingernail, would you not consider THAT touch screen? For your definition, does it HAVE to require actual skin-to-screen contact?
For my money, I'd rather NOT directly touch and smear up a screen. You'll have a sharper, more accurate touching point using anything other than the rounded, soft surface of a fingertip as well.
And finally, if something can sense a finger touching it, odds are it'll be set off by just about anything touching it. If they can make it so that it's ONLY activated by the previously mentioned fingertip cover, I'd consider that WAY better.
Do you have any advice, or specific webpages I should go to in order to get info on self-publishing? By blind coincidence, I was giong to be emailing/phoning around to various publishers to see what's involved with getting a book I'm writing published. If I can do a little extra elbow-work and avoid the publishers, but still manage to get the book into book stores/amazon, I'd be all for that.
Minor problem with that:
Say you just paid oh... $500 for a plane trip to a vacation spot. Some prick officer asks you to open a file. You have the following options. Keep in mind I'm cynical at the best of times however:
(a) Plead the 5th. You're held and/or brought in for questioning. You miss the plane, thus losing your vacation, $500, and god help you if you had business there, because you just lost it. Congratulations, your life may be fucked, depending on how important the flight is.
(b) Open the file. Which leads to:
- 1) They find nothing, you go on your merry way.
- 2) They find nothing, but take forever searching computer. See (a).
- 3) They find something (and no matter how clean you are, if they're a prick enough, they WILL find something to tag you with). See (a), except now add a criminal record.
You can hope and pray that you get b1, and statistically that may well be the one you'll get (I'm guessing, since I have no clue how often people are held past the plane's departure for searchings, or how often searchings happen)... but if you get any other option, your losses can be anywhere from minor to unrecoverable and life-changing.
So virtually all people will not plead the 5th right off the bat, unless you have no concern for money or time or annoyance... and the number of people who think that are slim to nil.
Personally, if I were to fly anywhere, I'd just not take a computer. If for some bizarre reason I absolutely HAD to take some data with me that I couldn't just upload somewhere temporarily, I'd have a micro-SD card hidden in my watch enclosure or something. At least last I was at the airport, they haven't been scanning the spare change/etc you put in that little bin yet.
Because (keep in mind this primarily isn't the mindset of the Slashdot crowd, but of the general society as a whole) girls aren't nerds. Girls play with girly things and do girly stuff in a girly way. If a girl is seen anywhere non-girly, said general society will think "silly girl, that's for boys".
God knows I've had coworkers in tech support that had to deal with that mindset every friggin' day. She ended up just telling them to call back and disconnecting the call if they absolutely refused to have a *gasp* girl help them with a computer problem.
I think you may have hit the head on the nail with that one. These days, it's irrelevant what the public thinks or wants, but about organizations protecting themselves.
I realize this is highly generalized, but it's the view I have of society as a whole lately.