I have two email accounts, one with Yahoo, and one with Rogers (a Canadian cable co). I've noticed that the amount of spam in my mailbox (which used to be 50-100 messages a day) has dropped to a much more manageable 5-10 messages per day. Somehow, the Nigerian type scams seem to get through, but I'm not getting Viagra, Cialis, or pen1s enlargement (it's like they know!) the way I used to. In addition to the Nigerian stuff, I still get phishing spam from people pretending to be my bank, MS, Target, etc. But the volume that's not automatically directed to my spam folder has fallen; I still have to go into my spam folder once a week to delete 1,000 messages.
I picked up Mario Galaxy on Sunday and was very, very impressed with the title.
Yep, my youngest daughter just celebrated her 11th birthday, and her friends were thrilled by the new game. "Super fantastic", "best game ever" were some of the comments. (Please note I'm not suggesting that you are 11 years old!) My taste in games goes more to bridge and chess than action games, but even I'll admit to enjoying the Sports game, and watching my daughters and friends having the time of their lives playing other games. I think Nintendo has done a good job of producing an innovative system, with games I'm comfortable letting my girls play, as opposed to MS and Sony, who seem to hype blood, guts, and slashing, which I am most definitely NOT OK with.
Hey, I live in Richmond Hill, and neither my local Wal-Mart or Canadian Tire or Zeller's has had a Wii in stock since I began asking last February. My brother in law found one on Long Island, and brought it up for my kids, so I'm not really looking for one anymore, but I still ask out of curiousity. Clerks tell me they are never in stock for more than a day.
The U.N is corrupted by it's continued need to allow the US to be involved in it.
The US invaded Iraq against the wishes of the UN and without proper evidence to back up their claims of immenient danger from the iraq government. But the UN has done nothing to delcare sanctions against the US for this action.
Thank you for dispelling the notion that only Americans are illiterate.
. And the UN is not just an organization, it is an organization of 192 countries. If the UN is highly critical towards the US, it means many of its member states are highly critical.
Er, how many of those 192 countries have democratically elected governments in countries with open media networks? China, Cuba, Russia, Iran, Syria, Malaysia, Indonesia, probably 3/4 of Africa? Yep, absolutely no reason to question the opinions of these governments of high integrity.
Cripes.. didn't Orwell say something like this over 50 years ago? I don't have a copy of Nineteeneightyfour available, but I'm pretty sure O'Brien says something like the purpose of laws are to make all people criminals, so they'll be scared and cowed by the state. Sounds to me exactly what's happening in Canada, the US, and Britain.
It seems fairly rare that someone gets tazered when they are following an officer's instructions. Also, I suspect it's rare that being belligerent or threatening an officer actually makes one less likely to be arrested or detained. Hence, it's just stupid to be belligerent or threatening to an officer. There are obviously excesses here and there, but in the vast majority of the tazer cases I've heard of, the recipient worked pretty hard to get tazered.
Um, have you actually read the details of the Vancouver case? Four policemen, one middle-aged man armed not with a knife, but a small table. He was hit with the taser less than 30 seconds after they entered the room. He must have worked really hard to get it.
And I call shenanigans on your statement that police officers are likely to "die on the job". Only 60 police officers were shot in the US last year, out of more than 700,000 state and local police (I'm not including federal police.) That's a rate of 0.1%. Meanwhile, there were more than 500 work related deaths in the 800,000+ agricultural workers. You're more than 8 times as likely to "die on the job" as a farmer than you are as a police officer. And I say that with all due respect for the police officers who give their lives to protect us, and with all sympathy for their families.
It's a lack of training. Any cop that can't wrestle a belligerent unermed suspect to the groud without a taser is a pussy.
The truth in the Vancouver case is even worse - FOUR burly cops against a middle-aged man armed with a small table. They tased him approximately 30 seconds after they entered the room. They didn't even make an attempt to negotiate with him (though, given that he didn't speak English, that probably wouldn't have worked).
There's now an official police inquiry; my bet is it will be a complete whitewash.
If you're really opposed to copyright, why not just avoid works where the creators assert copyright law against you rather than using it in your benefit such as GPL, Creative Commons, etc.?
Well, I don't know if you're American or not, but the US Constitution says, and I quote "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Limited times. Repeat that three times, would you? Disney spent millions getting Congress to change the law, so they wouldn't lose the rights to Snow White and Mickey Mouse. Clearly, the fact that Shakespeare and Milton are freely available is of great benefit to the English speaking world. So why should Pinocchio be protected?
99% of people who get caught by the RIAA are just freeloaders who think the world owes them a living.
Oh, please. I bought Steely Dan's "Can't Buy A Thrill" twice on vinyl (one warped, one stolen), on cassette (tossed out as a mass of spaghetti somewhere between Toronto and Montreal), and then on CD. Now the RIAA is telling me, after paying for the same music FOUR times and getting it on shoddy formats three times, that I can't copy it to my hard drive, and to my iPod? And when nearly 60 CD's were stolen from my car (which my insurance agency said wasn't covered), I don't feel the least bit bad about downloading my favourite songs by those artists. I paid for them.
On the other hand, house prices won't seem that ridiculous anymore after 150% or more inflation, but anybody living on a fixed income, like retirees, are going to be seriously screwed.
Spot on. I'm a geezer myself (51), and I remember in the 1970's working for a company that did tax returns for farmers (and former farmers) in Canada. I must have done returns for over 100 widows whose husbands had sold their farms, moved into town, and died shortly thereafter. These women were left to live on the capital generated by their farm's sale, which was usually invested in government bonds. Now, in 1970, in London, Ontario, you might have been able to eke out a living on $4,000 a year along with your Canada Pension, but by 1979, after a decade of government-induced inflation, these women were, to all intents and purposes, destitute.
What made it truly heartbreaking was the fact that they treated me, a commercial salesman, as an honoured guest. They would make dinner - steak for me, chicken for them. They would show me pictures of their children and grandchildren, and tell me stories about their families. They possessed a quiet dignity that would not acknowledge their diminished station, and I had no heart to break their illusions. At the end of dinner, I would thank them, sincerely, for their hospitality, and tell them that they were truly "ladies", in all the best senses of that word. I had no higher compliment to bestow. Some were Stoic; some allowed a flicker of happiness; some smiled outright. Inwardly, I wept for all of them.
Inflation quietly destroys lives. I'm only a Canadian, so I have no influence, but the only person running for US president who seems to understand this is Ron Paul. To my American friends: please support him, so that your parents and grandparents will not suffer these indignities.
Oh, sure. You could look here: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/goreerrors.html or you could look here: http://www.junkscience.com/, or you could go to www.stats.gov.nz and see that about 1100 people have emigrated from Tuvalu to New Zealand (sorry, I apologize, I thought it was Australia), or less than 10% of their population, hardly the "evacuation" that Gore claimed.
Now, some anecdotal evidence. My wife is from Zamboanga City, Mindinao, Philippines (you can look it up on a map; it's the extreme southwest corner). We have been married nearly 20 years, and I have made at least 9 trips to her city. It's not that big a city, and we generally go to a few select places for dining/swimming, etc. One hotel is right on the Sulu Sea, and their pool is built about 20 feet from the ocean. It was about 20 feet nearly 20 years ago, and it was about 20 feet on our last trip two years ago. The beach is very level; a rise of 2 inches would have cut it to about 10 feet, and left the concrete dock stranded at least five feet in the water. It wasn't. I can't believe that "sea level" some 1500 miles to the north is that much different than sea level around an archipelago like the Philippines. So, I call shenanigans on Mr. Gore, and his mis-statements on sea level rise.
Or this: According to The Tennessean newspaper's report, Gore buys his carbon offsets through Generation Investment Management. a company he co-founded and serves as chairman: Gore helped found Generation Investment Management, through which he and others pay for offsets. The firm invests the money in solar, wind and other projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe...
It gets better:
As co-founder and chairman of the firm Gore presumably draws an income or will make money as its investments prosper. In other words, he "buys" his "carbon offsets" from himself, through a transaction designed to boost his own investments and return a profit to himself. To be blunt, Gore doesn't buy "carbon offsets" through Generation Investment Management - he buys stocks.
Finally, as a simple google search will show, Gore's Tennessee home uses between 17-20 times the national average for electricity - as much as 220,000 kWh/month. Meanwhile, "environmental criminal George Bush" has a ranch in Crawford, TX, that uses deep groundwater for cooling, heat pumps, and other energy efficient methods to maintain it. Sounds to me that Gore talks the talk, but doesn't walk the walk, which makes him a major-league hypocrite in my book.
Totally agree it's your A/C. I looked this up on Wikipedia the other day, and they gave an example of a 2,000 sq.ft. home (not large), in Chicago (where you don't need A/C from November to April) with a 10 SEER rated A/C. (That SEER rating is lower than for new models, but if your system is more than 10 years old, it's probably in that range.) They estimated that that home would use over 4,000 kWh/year just for A/C, as compared to 400 kWh for a new refrigerator, or from TFA, 800 kWh for Mitchell's panoply of electronics.
During the Clinton years, the US government made 13 SEER the minimum standard for new A/C's. Can't remember where I read this, but someone estimated that if every A/C in the US was replaced by a 13 SEER or better unit, they wouldn't have needed to build any new powerplants since the mid-1990's. Wish I could confirm this, but I have to believe with all the growth in the South and Southwest over the last 20 years, where A/C runs pretty much all the time, it is certainly plausible. Bush proposed a roll-back to 12 SEER in 2001; this was challenged by state politicians, and I believe the DOE finally stayed with the higher number. The estimate of electricity saved by going from 12 to 13 SEER was 12.6 Billion kWh. At peak hours, this would have required some 40+ 300 MW plants to have been built.
On the other hand, I've been in Miami in August. Makes me glad I live in Toronto; in winter, I can always throw on another sweater; you can't walk around Miami naked. (Or, more properly, you wouldn't want to see ME doing that..)
It's a predictive dialer. These systems are designed to make multiple phone calls per agent simultaneously, on the well understood stats that say 70% of phone calls are not answered by a person. Usually, the systems make between 2 and 3 calls per available agent.
They're actually fairly intelligent. Since most people answer their phones with "Hello", and then wait for a response, the dialers have software which can choose between a 1-2 second voice activity, and the more typical 10-30 seconds for an answering machine. If the system thinks it detects a human voice, it immediately looks for an available agent to transfer the call to (and often downloads a file with information to the agent's screen at the same time).
The problems occur when some overzealous manager - who is probably under a lot of pressure to make his numbers, as most of these telemarketing agencies are working under contract to other firms - changes the dialer parameters. Those other firms hire 3-6 telemarketing agencies at a time, and compare the sales results on a daily basis. One or two bad days a month is probably OK, but if you're having one or two bad days a week, your contract probably won't be renewed. At third party telemarketers, this is considered a "bad thing". So, they up the dials to, say, 4 per agent. This gets them the desired high occupancy rates for their agents, but it also results in a lot of situations where a person answers the phone, and there are no agents available. Those are your "ghost calls".
It's actually quite short-sighted as a strategy, as the contracting firms normally only supply a certain amount of numbers to the telemarketing firm for a given campaign, and this burns through them quickly. You're typically limited to a certain number of calls to any specific number; the contracting firms aren't completely stupid, and they know that a bunch of ghost calls showing up on your caller ID will make it that much more difficult to close the sale when they do get through. But when your job is on the line, some people will take those chances.
Dear Lord! Another Al Gore fan-boi.. never mind that his "A convenient lie" is full of mis-statements, such as that Tuvalu is sinking and there's a mass exodus of people from there to Australia, neither of which are true. Gore is behind the largest carbon trading company on the planet; gee, do ya think he might have a slight conflict of interest?
And, for the record, the earth is NOT warming up at an alarming rate. There's not a shred of credible evidence that the earth is getting warmer because of man-made gases. There's just bad science fueled by a political agenda.
If you could read, you'd understand that previously I could see
numbers and names, but with my increasing age, I can't. Firefox
lets me adjust the font size; none of my "web-enabled" phones
' Qualcomm and Nokia' allow me to do so. I hope you never have
vision problems, but do look around, will you? There are a lot
of people whose vision isn't perfect. It seems trivial to let
us change font size, given all the other features we're offered.
As the Who put it, "Hope you die before you get old."
No where, actually, but every so called "web phone" I've seen has the same failings: slow speed, small fonts, crappy display. If Google can change that, I'll certainly consider them for my next phone.
Slashdot Mirror
I have two email accounts, one with Yahoo, and one with Rogers (a Canadian cable co). I've noticed that the amount of spam in my mailbox (which used to be 50-100 messages a day) has dropped to a much more manageable 5-10 messages per day. Somehow, the Nigerian type scams seem to get through, but I'm not getting Viagra, Cialis, or pen1s enlargement (it's like they know!) the way I used to. In addition to the Nigerian stuff, I still get phishing spam from people pretending to be my bank, MS, Target, etc. But the volume that's not automatically directed to my spam folder has fallen; I still have to go into my spam folder once a week to delete 1,000 messages.
Have you considered visting Senator Larry Craig?
Yep, my youngest daughter just celebrated her 11th birthday, and her friends were thrilled by the new game. "Super fantastic", "best game ever" were some of the comments. (Please note I'm not suggesting that you are 11 years old!) My taste in games goes more to bridge and chess than action games, but even I'll admit to enjoying the Sports game, and watching my daughters and friends having the time of their lives playing other games. I think Nintendo has done a good job of producing an innovative system, with games I'm comfortable letting my girls play, as opposed to MS and Sony, who seem to hype blood, guts, and slashing, which I am most definitely NOT OK with.
Hey, I live in Richmond Hill, and neither my local Wal-Mart or Canadian Tire or Zeller's has had a Wii in stock since I began asking last February. My brother in law found one on Long Island, and brought it up for my kids, so I'm not really looking for one anymore, but I still ask out of curiousity. Clerks tell me they are never in stock for more than a day.
Thank you for dispelling the notion that only Americans are illiterate.
Er, how many of those 192 countries have democratically elected governments in countries with open media networks? China, Cuba, Russia, Iran, Syria, Malaysia, Indonesia, probably 3/4 of Africa? Yep, absolutely no reason to question the opinions of these governments of high integrity.
Cripes.. didn't Orwell say something like this over 50 years ago? I don't have a copy of Nineteeneightyfour available, but I'm pretty sure O'Brien says something like the purpose of laws are to make all people criminals, so they'll be scared and cowed by the state. Sounds to me exactly what's happening in Canada, the US, and Britain.
Um, have you actually read the details of the Vancouver case? Four policemen, one middle-aged man armed not with a knife, but a small table. He was hit with the taser less than 30 seconds after they entered the room. He must have worked really hard to get it.
And I call shenanigans on your statement that police officers are likely to "die on the job". Only 60 police officers were shot in the US last year, out of more than 700,000 state and local police (I'm not including federal police.) That's a rate of 0.1%. Meanwhile, there were more than 500 work related deaths in the 800,000+ agricultural workers. You're more than 8 times as likely to "die on the job" as a farmer than you are as a police officer. And I say that with all due respect for the police officers who give their lives to protect us, and with all sympathy for their families.
The truth in the Vancouver case is even worse - FOUR burly cops against a middle-aged man armed with a small table. They tased him approximately 30 seconds after they entered the room. They didn't even make an attempt to negotiate with him (though, given that he didn't speak English, that probably wouldn't have worked).
There's now an official police inquiry; my bet is it will be a complete whitewash.
Well, I don't know if you're American or not, but the US Constitution says, and I quote "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Limited times. Repeat that three times, would you? Disney spent millions getting Congress to change the law, so they wouldn't lose the rights to Snow White and Mickey Mouse. Clearly, the fact that Shakespeare and Milton are freely available is of great benefit to the English speaking world. So why should Pinocchio be protected?
Oh, please. I bought Steely Dan's "Can't Buy A Thrill" twice on vinyl (one warped, one stolen), on cassette (tossed out as a mass of spaghetti somewhere between Toronto and Montreal), and then on CD. Now the RIAA is telling me, after paying for the same music FOUR times and getting it on shoddy formats three times, that I can't copy it to my hard drive, and to my iPod? And when nearly 60 CD's were stolen from my car (which my insurance agency said wasn't covered), I don't feel the least bit bad about downloading my favourite songs by those artists. I paid for them.
Insert Library of Congress meme here.
Capitalization. Should have hit the Preview button!
I enjoyed your innovative use of capitization.
Only $5k?! Why, I'd never sell out my principles for less than.. well, $10k at least!
Spot on. I'm a geezer myself (51), and I remember in the 1970's working for a company that did tax returns for farmers (and former farmers) in Canada. I must have done returns for over 100 widows whose husbands had sold their farms, moved into town, and died shortly thereafter. These women were left to live on the capital generated by their farm's sale, which was usually invested in government bonds. Now, in 1970, in London, Ontario, you might have been able to eke out a living on $4,000 a year along with your Canada Pension, but by 1979, after a decade of government-induced inflation, these women were, to all intents and purposes, destitute.
What made it truly heartbreaking was the fact that they treated me, a commercial salesman, as an honoured guest. They would make dinner - steak for me, chicken for them. They would show me pictures of their children and grandchildren, and tell me stories about their families. They possessed a quiet dignity that would not acknowledge their diminished station, and I had no heart to break their illusions. At the end of dinner, I would thank them, sincerely, for their hospitality, and tell them that they were truly "ladies", in all the best senses of that word. I had no higher compliment to bestow. Some were Stoic; some allowed a flicker of happiness; some smiled outright. Inwardly, I wept for all of them.
Inflation quietly destroys lives. I'm only a Canadian, so I have no influence, but the only person running for US president who seems to understand this is Ron Paul. To my American friends: please support him, so that your parents and grandparents will not suffer these indignities.
Thanks, Yoda.
Now, some anecdotal evidence. My wife is from Zamboanga City, Mindinao, Philippines (you can look it up on a map; it's the extreme southwest corner). We have been married nearly 20 years, and I have made at least 9 trips to her city. It's not that big a city, and we generally go to a few select places for dining/swimming, etc. One hotel is right on the Sulu Sea, and their pool is built about 20 feet from the ocean. It was about 20 feet nearly 20 years ago, and it was about 20 feet on our last trip two years ago. The beach is very level; a rise of 2 inches would have cut it to about 10 feet, and left the concrete dock stranded at least five feet in the water. It wasn't. I can't believe that "sea level" some 1500 miles to the north is that much different than sea level around an archipelago like the Philippines. So, I call shenanigans on Mr. Gore, and his mis-statements on sea level rise.
Or this: According to The Tennessean newspaper's report, Gore buys his carbon offsets through Generation Investment Management. a company he co-founded and serves as chairman: Gore helped found Generation Investment Management, through which he and others pay for offsets. The firm invests the money in solar, wind and other projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe... It gets better: As co-founder and chairman of the firm Gore presumably draws an income or will make money as its investments prosper. In other words, he "buys" his "carbon offsets" from himself, through a transaction designed to boost his own investments and return a profit to himself. To be blunt, Gore doesn't buy "carbon offsets" through Generation Investment Management - he buys stocks.
Finally, as a simple google search will show, Gore's Tennessee home uses between 17-20 times the national average for electricity - as much as 220,000 kWh/month. Meanwhile, "environmental criminal George Bush" has a ranch in Crawford, TX, that uses deep groundwater for cooling, heat pumps, and other energy efficient methods to maintain it. Sounds to me that Gore talks the talk, but doesn't walk the walk, which makes him a major-league hypocrite in my book.
During the Clinton years, the US government made 13 SEER the minimum standard for new A/C's. Can't remember where I read this, but someone estimated that if every A/C in the US was replaced by a 13 SEER or better unit, they wouldn't have needed to build any new powerplants since the mid-1990's. Wish I could confirm this, but I have to believe with all the growth in the South and Southwest over the last 20 years, where A/C runs pretty much all the time, it is certainly plausible. Bush proposed a roll-back to 12 SEER in 2001; this was challenged by state politicians, and I believe the DOE finally stayed with the higher number. The estimate of electricity saved by going from 12 to 13 SEER was 12.6 Billion kWh. At peak hours, this would have required some 40+ 300 MW plants to have been built.
On the other hand, I've been in Miami in August. Makes me glad I live in Toronto; in winter, I can always throw on another sweater; you can't walk around Miami naked. (Or, more properly, you wouldn't want to see ME doing that..)
They're actually fairly intelligent. Since most people answer their phones with "Hello", and then wait for a response, the dialers have software which can choose between a 1-2 second voice activity, and the more typical 10-30 seconds for an answering machine. If the system thinks it detects a human voice, it immediately looks for an available agent to transfer the call to (and often downloads a file with information to the agent's screen at the same time).
The problems occur when some overzealous manager - who is probably under a lot of pressure to make his numbers, as most of these telemarketing agencies are working under contract to other firms - changes the dialer parameters. Those other firms hire 3-6 telemarketing agencies at a time, and compare the sales results on a daily basis. One or two bad days a month is probably OK, but if you're having one or two bad days a week, your contract probably won't be renewed. At third party telemarketers, this is considered a "bad thing". So, they up the dials to, say, 4 per agent. This gets them the desired high occupancy rates for their agents, but it also results in a lot of situations where a person answers the phone, and there are no agents available. Those are your "ghost calls".
It's actually quite short-sighted as a strategy, as the contracting firms normally only supply a certain amount of numbers to the telemarketing firm for a given campaign, and this burns through them quickly. You're typically limited to a certain number of calls to any specific number; the contracting firms aren't completely stupid, and they know that a bunch of ghost calls showing up on your caller ID will make it that much more difficult to close the sale when they do get through. But when your job is on the line, some people will take those chances.
Which piece?
Dear Lord! Another Al Gore fan-boi.. never mind that his "A convenient lie" is full of mis-statements, such as that Tuvalu is sinking and there's a mass exodus of people from there to Australia, neither of which are true. Gore is behind the largest carbon trading company on the planet; gee, do ya think he might have a slight conflict of interest? And, for the record, the earth is NOT warming up at an alarming rate. There's not a shred of credible evidence that the earth is getting warmer because of man-made gases. There's just bad science fueled by a political agenda.
If you could read, you'd understand that previously I could see numbers and names, but with my increasing age, I can't. Firefox lets me adjust the font size; none of my "web-enabled" phones ' Qualcomm and Nokia' allow me to do so. I hope you never have vision problems, but do look around, will you? There are a lot of people whose vision isn't perfect. It seems trivial to let us change font size, given all the other features we're offered. As the Who put it, "Hope you die before you get old."
Thanks, that looks exactly like what I want. Too bad they're not available in Canada yet.
No where, actually, but every so called "web phone" I've seen has the same failings: slow speed, small fonts, crappy display. If Google can change that, I'll certainly consider them for my next phone.