Yeah. Not popular to go against the herd, but having read numerous books on NDEs, there are people who met people they did not in any way know. Only later, to have a parent or relative bring over a box of photographs they dug out of the attic and find out the person in the NDE was actually a long dead relative that had died before they were born.
In one case, the person met in a NDE was a twin that they never knew they had. It turns out that the person did have a twin that died, but had never been told of it.
> We have a built-in need to figure out patterns
Yes, even when it would have been impossible to work out an unknown pattern!
If it is similar to Audible.com, then you are wrong on a lot of things here. It may be different, though.
Audible.com, you can either have an app on a tablet/smartphone, or a windows/mac machine. To make MP3s, the process is this: From Windows, burn to CD image with a virtual CD drive that burns to an image. Mount the image with virtual CD software, save to MP3 using your favorite software.
I usually listen on my phone, but convert all my books to MP3 just to store them in a DRM-free format. It is really pretty quick to do it. Some people have even automated the process. I just do it using the above process.
I have all the convenience of the audible format, with the peace of mind of long-term storage in a format I know will work quite some time.
Linux-based Netbooks were killed by MS right when they were fixing to take off. Maybe this means we are finally to a point MS can't just kill off competitors easily any more.
Chrombooks don't make much sense to me...but it seems like a good thing that someone can launch something with a OS with a tiny market share, and it actually sell well enough to keep making them.
It's funny. I wrote this in 2006 and originally posted it to Slashdot. Turns out, it was a fairly prophetic piece. It got posted to Slashnot, google finance picked it up, and listed it as a blog post under AT&T's stock!
-=-=-=-=
AT&T Introduces Privacy+ Tier for Consumers and an NSA Turbo-Speed Tier for the government, at Market-Leading Prices
Wednesday April 26, 6:00 am ET
For $24.95 a month extra, the new Privacy+ Tier offers consumers the ability to feed all data to the NSA at the slowest speeds available. However, for an extra $28.95 per month, per customer, the NSA can override the Privacy+ Tier and spy on Americans at Speeds of up to 6.0 Megabits per Second
SAN ANTONIO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 26, 2006--AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T - News) today announced a new, higher-privacy tier for its AT&T Yahoo!® High Speed Internet service that meets consumers' growing outrage for allowing the NSA full availability to its backbone. At the same time, it announced a new NSA Turbo-Speed Tier that, for a fee, allows the government to override the newly introduced Privacy+ Tier.
Beginning Monday, May 1, new residential customers who order AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet service online through www.att.com can purchase the Privacy+ Tier -- offering data to the NSA at speeds sometimes as slow as 56k. (other monthly charges and a 12-month term commitment apply). Effective today, the new Privacy+ Tier is available for $24.99, when it is ordered with a qualifying service bundle. Existing AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet customers can upgrade to the Privacy+ service through the company's Web site and take advantage of the current pricing promotion beginning Monday.
"Consumers are craving greater privacy, and now with the AT&T Privacy+ service, they can at least get the satisfaction that the government is going to get their private data at the slowest speeds possible; "Consumers could easily get more privacy from a company that doesn't offer the NSA a fat pipe right onto its backbone, but with the incredible amount of money that the government paid us for that pipe, we just couldn't pass it up. The new Privacy+ Tier, tips the scales back just a little bit in favor of the consumer," said Scott Helbing, chief marketing officer-AT&T Consumer.
Also effective Monday, May 1, the NSA can sign up for the new NSA Turbo-Speed Tier, which for an extra $28.95 per month, per customer, allows the government to override the newly created Privacy+ Tier. "The NSA is craving greater speed to American's private communications, and now with the NSA Turbo-Speed Tier, they can at least get the satisfaction that they can resume domestic spying at the highest speeds possible; "The NSA will be hard-pressed to find this speed at a better price, for a full 12 months, from one of our leading competitors," said Scott Helbing, chief marketing officer-AT&T Consumer.
AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet also announced that with the NSA paying an undisclosed, but very large amount of money for access to its backbone data, and with a higher than expected demand from consumers, that it has decided to ask popular web sites, such as Google and eBay to also pay a monthly fee to insure a speedy deliver of all consumer data to these web sites. In that regard, AT&T Yahoo introduced the new Extortion-racket Tier.
Also, in a move that is sure to stun Wall Street, AT&T has announced that they will soon enter the "garbage collection" business.
About the New AT&T
AT&T Inc. is one of the world's largest telecommunications holding companies and is the largest in the United States. Operating globally under the AT&T brand, AT&T companies are recognized as the leading worldwide providers of IP-based communications services to business and as leading U.S. providers of high-speed DSL Internet, local and long distance voice, and directory publishing and advertising services. AT&T Inc. holds a 60 percent ownership interest in Cingular Wireless, which is the No. 1
Assume Amazon, Netflix, etc., etc., go out of business, I can still use Plex or Playon to stream movies off my own LAN.
The really bad thing that would happen is the death of DVDs. DVDs were the single greatest thing to ever happen to the "public domain," copyright be damned.
I spent extra money for a 47" "smart" TV. Picture is fine. The smart part of it SUCKS compared to my roku box. Get the dumb TV you want and then pick the streaming box you want.
What did my smart TV get me? Well, it randomly locks up while streaming. Note, by "locks up" I mean you have to unplug the TV to get it restarted. Looked online and a lot of people have the same problem. You know, restarting a buggy app is fine. Stuff happens. Having to unplug your TV to reboot it...that should *never* happen. I paid extra to get that feature.
Navigating the Yahoo TV apps sucks. With a 47" TV, a lot of them do not even use much more than 1/4 of the screen. It's like they were designed for a cell phone. If I compared the apps to the Roku box navigation, Yahoo would be 1 star, Roku would be five.
I do have a remote with a full QWERTY keyboard on it, though. That was worth at least an extra 150.00!:)
They should proceed with caution. They could end up quacks at any time. The famous Royal Rife machine used vibrations to kil bacteria. And here it is, all these years later, and it turns out bacteria *does* vibrate:
Rife also reported that a 'beam ray' device of his invention could weaken or destroy the pathogens by energetically exciting destructive resonances in their constituent chemicals.[4]
Or adding bloat. Good grief, I want a web browser to be a web browser. This is why we can't have nice things. Because as soon as someone gets a great product, they have to keep screwing with it until they ruin it...FIREFOX...GNOME.
How about using the right tool for the right job??? Imagine that. A web browser to browse with, and a bloated office product to edit bloated office files.
I do like the fact that Microsoft jumped through such hoops to get vendor lock-in, that all these years later it bit them in the butt because corporations are hanging on to XP simply because of non-standards compliant IE 6...which they tied to the OS. Hahahaha.
The real obstacle to Microsoft on the desktop over the next few decades is not Linux or OS X, it is prior versions of Windows that had some feature that won't work in a new version. Again, Hahahaha.
Look at the per transaction fees on debit/credit cards. A banking cartel has figured out how to extract a few percentage points off a large percentage of every sale made in the United States, especially if you are a small business.
Imagine starting a business where you get a cut of sales off of a large percentage of sales in the US. Wow. Just Wow.
I would bet if I suggested a similar scheme in the early 20th century, people would have laughed at me.
For the costs of everything mentioned, it wouldn't be that much more per year to join Audible. The selection is excellent and even the worst readers are better than text to speech readers. I just spent around 100.00 for the best text to speech reader I could find, and it still hard to listen to for any extended amount of time. Out of well over 100 books in the last two years, I've only gotten a handful of crappy readers from Audible books.
Also, Audible is a piece of cake to break the DRM. You just convert to audio CDs and then to MP3 or Ogg.
Somewhat fair prices, great selection, easily breakable DRM, and 100% legal. That's not a bad deal.
Glenn Beck loves big government, as long as it is bombing people he doesn't like or arresting them for drugs that he doesn't like. The deficit? It is horrible, just horrible, unless they are printing up money for war.
He had a real chance to make a real difference with Ron Paul, with hours to talk about him on the radio...but the few times he mentioned him was to crap all over him. Oh the ironies that Beck just likes the Constitution when it works in his favor.
Yes. Exactly. Studies show that a strong middle class helps the economy grow much faster than any other scenario. Go all the way back to Ford. He paid his employees enough to afford one of his cars, and started a trend that helped build America with a strong middle class. There was a point in America were employees were slaves. Then there was a point in America where employees were seen as partners, rather than slaves (the good ol' days, when you could work for one company all your life and retire from it.). The trend now is a move back toward slavery, with the future outlook being, "hey, we don't even need to employee anyone any more. Look at our profit margins!"
Our robot-wielding rich, are killing jobs for short-term gains. It's mutually assured destruction, for *everyone.*
I do see from some of the other comments, they are looking even further down the line to some type of Star Trek economy. Sounds nice, but good luck with that.
One fork in the eye of the Uber Rich is that the process is somewhat self-correcting. Nobody will have money to buy their stuff if nobody has jobs, or there are some jobs but they pay squat.
Carnivorous animals usually feed on grazing animals (not that they don't "eat their own" from time to time, they *usually* don't have a steady diet of eating other carnivorous animals). I've seen this explained that these animals are instinctively choosing foods that contain nutrients they need. In this case, they are getting the nutrients second hand through animals that eat lots of grass.
Why so negative about lab grown meat? Because meat is more than just proteins. There are other nutrients in it. What the animal eats that you eat, makes a difference, believe it or not.
With the finding of vitamins, it was thought that diet didn't really matter; we can just take a pill if our food is missing some nutrient. How is that working out for us?:
Vitamins and supplements could do more harm than good in some cases, according to a new report in Consumer Reports.
The report, in Consumer Reports' September issue, investigates 10 unknown dangers associated with taking vitamins, minerals, herbs, and nutritional supplements. More than half of all Americans take supplements, and the supplement industry has grown to a $27 billion industry.
But supplements aren't necessarily risk-free, according to Dr. Jose Mosquera, medical adviser for Consumer Reports. While patients may believe supplements are safe because they are natural, he says not all supplements are truly all-natural.
My understanding is this can be turned off. It is less Windows and more Windows Defender:
"Windows 8, set for release on 26 October, automatically deletes entries in the HOSTS file for specific domains. Try, for example, to prevent attempts to access Facebook.com, Twitter.com or ad servers such as ad.doubleclick.net by rerouting them to 127.0.0.1 by adding entries to the HOSTS file and the relevant entries will soon disappear from the HOSTS file as if by magic, leaving nothing but an empty line."
This behavior is due to Windows Defender in Windows 8 thinking it has discovered malicious modification of the Hosts file. Windows Defender is enabled by default in Windows 8. Users who would like to continue using the Hosts file as a simple, albeit effective method of blocking certain sites, can do so by adding the Hosts file to Defender's exceptions list. Of course, that means that Defender will never be able to notice any actual malicious changes to the Hosts file.
Windows 8 seems to be rather prejudicial about which entries in the Hosts file Defender will automatically delete. It automatically deletes Twitter, Facebook, doubleclick and other ad sites but other domains such as "heise.de" it leaves intact.
Slashdot Mirror
Be interesting if the course were a book and they sold it on Amazon instead of teaching a class. Make the 1st Amendment kick in a little harder.
Yeah. Not popular to go against the herd, but having read numerous books on NDEs, there are people who met people they did not in any way know. Only later, to have a parent or relative bring over a box of photographs they dug out of the attic and find out the person in the NDE was actually a long dead relative that had died before they were born.
In one case, the person met in a NDE was a twin that they never knew they had. It turns out that the person did have a twin that died, but had never been told of it.
> We have a built-in need to figure out patterns
Yes, even when it would have been impossible to work out an unknown pattern!
This is the New Economy 2.0. You are a product. Nothing benefits you, it benefits the corporations.
This shift was bad for you. It was fantastic for Google, Facebook, etc., etc.
Or your insurance agent! Smoke one in the bar while drinking...rates go up on Monday.
Let me be the first to say, HOLY CRAP.
If it is similar to Audible.com, then you are wrong on a lot of things here. It may be different, though.
Audible.com, you can either have an app on a tablet/smartphone, or a windows/mac machine. To make MP3s, the process is this: From Windows, burn to CD image with a virtual CD drive that burns to an image. Mount the image with virtual CD software, save to MP3 using your favorite software.
I usually listen on my phone, but convert all my books to MP3 just to store them in a DRM-free format. It is really pretty quick to do it. Some people have even automated the process. I just do it using the above process.
I have all the convenience of the audible format, with the peace of mind of long-term storage in a format I know will work quite some time.
It still covers up to 10% of the Amazon basin, is man made, and if we could figure out how they did it:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081119-lost-cities-amazon.html
Imagine if manure spread thousands of years ago still grew crops today. The terra preta —"dark earth" — of the Amazon is still working today.
> .these guys used USB drives to move data between countries
Look, if anyone with any sense can bypass the snooping, they must know that. That only leaves *us* that they are snooping on.
Linux-based Netbooks were killed by MS right when they were fixing to take off. Maybe this means we are finally to a point MS can't just kill off competitors easily any more.
Chrombooks don't make much sense to me...but it seems like a good thing that someone can launch something with a OS with a tiny market share, and it actually sell well enough to keep making them.
It's funny. I wrote this in 2006 and originally posted it to Slashdot. Turns out, it was a fairly prophetic piece. It got posted to Slashnot, google finance picked it up, and listed it as a blog post under AT&T's stock!
-=-=-=-=
AT&T Introduces Privacy+ Tier for Consumers and an NSA Turbo-Speed Tier for the government, at Market-Leading Prices
Wednesday April 26, 6:00 am ET
For $24.95 a month extra, the new Privacy+ Tier offers consumers the ability to feed all data to the NSA at the slowest speeds available. However, for an extra $28.95 per month, per customer, the NSA can override the Privacy+ Tier and spy on Americans at Speeds of up to 6.0 Megabits per Second
SAN ANTONIO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 26, 2006--AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T - News) today announced a new, higher-privacy tier for its AT&T Yahoo!® High Speed Internet service that meets consumers' growing outrage for allowing the NSA full availability to its backbone. At the same time, it announced a new NSA Turbo-Speed Tier that, for a fee, allows the government to override the newly introduced Privacy+ Tier.
Beginning Monday, May 1, new residential customers who order AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet service online through www.att.com can purchase the Privacy+ Tier -- offering data to the NSA at speeds sometimes as slow as 56k. (other monthly charges and a 12-month term commitment apply). Effective today, the new Privacy+ Tier is available for $24.99, when it is ordered with a qualifying service bundle. Existing AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet customers can upgrade to the Privacy+ service through the company's Web site and take advantage of the current pricing promotion beginning Monday.
"Consumers are craving greater privacy, and now with the AT&T Privacy+ service, they can at least get the satisfaction that the government is going to get their private data at the slowest speeds possible; "Consumers could easily get more privacy from a company that doesn't offer the NSA a fat pipe right onto its backbone, but with the incredible amount of money that the government paid us for that pipe, we just couldn't pass it up. The new Privacy+ Tier, tips the scales back just a little bit in favor of the consumer," said Scott Helbing, chief marketing officer-AT&T Consumer.
Also effective Monday, May 1, the NSA can sign up for the new NSA Turbo-Speed Tier, which for an extra $28.95 per month, per customer, allows the government to override the newly created Privacy+ Tier. "The NSA is craving greater speed to American's private communications, and now with the NSA Turbo-Speed Tier, they can at least get the satisfaction that they can resume domestic spying at the highest speeds possible; "The NSA will be hard-pressed to find this speed at a better price, for a full 12 months, from one of our leading competitors," said Scott Helbing, chief marketing officer-AT&T Consumer.
AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet also announced that with the NSA paying an undisclosed, but very large amount of money for access to its backbone data, and with a higher than expected demand from consumers, that it has decided to ask popular web sites, such as Google and eBay to also pay a monthly fee to insure a speedy deliver of all consumer data to these web sites. In that regard, AT&T Yahoo introduced the new Extortion-racket Tier.
Also, in a move that is sure to stun Wall Street, AT&T has announced that they will soon enter the "garbage collection" business.
About the New AT&T
AT&T Inc. is one of the world's largest telecommunications holding companies and is the largest in the United States. Operating globally under the AT&T brand, AT&T companies are recognized as the leading worldwide providers of IP-based communications services to business and as leading U.S. providers of high-speed DSL Internet, local and long distance voice, and directory publishing and advertising services. AT&T Inc. holds a 60 percent ownership interest in Cingular Wireless, which is the No. 1
On top of advertising, they get to charge the federal government to snoop on us:
What the government pays to snoop on you
Every wonder how some of these startups were actually making money? I think we have stumbled upon their business model.
Assume Amazon, Netflix, etc., etc., go out of business, I can still use Plex or Playon to stream movies off my own LAN.
The really bad thing that would happen is the death of DVDs. DVDs were the single greatest thing to ever happen to the "public domain," copyright be damned.
I spent extra money for a 47" "smart" TV. Picture is fine. The smart part of it SUCKS compared to my roku box. Get the dumb TV you want and then pick the streaming box you want.
What did my smart TV get me? Well, it randomly locks up while streaming. Note, by "locks up" I mean you have to unplug the TV to get it restarted. Looked online and a lot of people have the same problem. You know, restarting a buggy app is fine. Stuff happens. Having to unplug your TV to reboot it...that should *never* happen. I paid extra to get that feature.
Navigating the Yahoo TV apps sucks. With a 47" TV, a lot of them do not even use much more than 1/4 of the screen. It's like they were designed for a cell phone. If I compared the apps to the Roku box navigation, Yahoo would be 1 star, Roku would be five.
I do have a remote with a full QWERTY keyboard on it, though. That was worth at least an extra 150.00! :)
They should proceed with caution. They could end up quacks at any time. The famous Royal Rife machine used vibrations to kil bacteria. And here it is, all these years later, and it turns out bacteria *does* vibrate:
Or adding bloat. Good grief, I want a web browser to be a web browser. This is why we can't have nice things. Because as soon as someone gets a great product, they have to keep screwing with it until they ruin it...FIREFOX...GNOME.
How about using the right tool for the right job??? Imagine that. A web browser to browse with, and a bloated office product to edit bloated office files.
Contrast that to Alec Baldwin, who was making a direct threat: Alec Baldwin Melts Down On Twitter, Threatens To 'F*ck Up' Reporter
http://gawker.com/alec-baldwin-melts-down-on-twitter-threatens-to-fuck-604856776
I wonder if the rich still have their rights?
Feds: PayPal not a bank: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-858264.html
Link is old. It may be one now, but for many years it walked like a bank, flied like a bank, and quacked like a bank.
I do like the fact that Microsoft jumped through such hoops to get vendor lock-in, that all these years later it bit them in the butt because corporations are hanging on to XP simply because of non-standards compliant IE 6...which they tied to the OS. Hahahaha.
The real obstacle to Microsoft on the desktop over the next few decades is not Linux or OS X, it is prior versions of Windows that had some feature that won't work in a new version. Again, Hahahaha.
Look at the per transaction fees on debit/credit cards. A banking cartel has figured out how to extract a few percentage points off a large percentage of every sale made in the United States, especially if you are a small business.
Imagine starting a business where you get a cut of sales off of a large percentage of sales in the US. Wow. Just Wow.
I would bet if I suggested a similar scheme in the early 20th century, people would have laughed at me.
If only they had a large database with all of this stuff in it.
For the costs of everything mentioned, it wouldn't be that much more per year to join Audible. The selection is excellent and even the worst readers are better than text to speech readers. I just spent around 100.00 for the best text to speech reader I could find, and it still hard to listen to for any extended amount of time. Out of well over 100 books in the last two years, I've only gotten a handful of crappy readers from Audible books.
Also, Audible is a piece of cake to break the DRM. You just convert to audio CDs and then to MP3 or Ogg.
Somewhat fair prices, great selection, easily breakable DRM, and 100% legal. That's not a bad deal.
Glenn Beck loves big government, as long as it is bombing people he doesn't like or arresting them for drugs that he doesn't like. The deficit? It is horrible, just horrible, unless they are printing up money for war.
He had a real chance to make a real difference with Ron Paul, with hours to talk about him on the radio...but the few times he mentioned him was to crap all over him. Oh the ironies that Beck just likes the Constitution when it works in his favor.
A pox on him.
Yes. Exactly. Studies show that a strong middle class helps the economy grow much faster than any other scenario. Go all the way back to Ford. He paid his employees enough to afford one of his cars, and started a trend that helped build America with a strong middle class. There was a point in America were employees were slaves. Then there was a point in America where employees were seen as partners, rather than slaves (the good ol' days, when you could work for one company all your life and retire from it.). The trend now is a move back toward slavery, with the future outlook being, "hey, we don't even need to employee anyone any more. Look at our profit margins!"
Our robot-wielding rich, are killing jobs for short-term gains. It's mutually assured destruction, for *everyone.*
I do see from some of the other comments, they are looking even further down the line to some type of Star Trek economy. Sounds nice, but good luck with that.
One fork in the eye of the Uber Rich is that the process is somewhat self-correcting. Nobody will have money to buy their stuff if nobody has jobs, or there are some jobs but they pay squat.
Carnivorous animals usually feed on grazing animals (not that they don't "eat their own" from time to time, they *usually* don't have a steady diet of eating other carnivorous animals). I've seen this explained that these animals are instinctively choosing foods that contain nutrients they need. In this case, they are getting the nutrients second hand through animals that eat lots of grass.
Why so negative about lab grown meat? Because meat is more than just proteins. There are other nutrients in it. What the animal eats that you eat, makes a difference, believe it or not.
With the finding of vitamins, it was thought that diet didn't really matter; we can just take a pill if our food is missing some nutrient. How is that working out for us?:
My understanding is this can be turned off. It is less Windows and more Windows Defender:
"Windows 8, set for release on 26 October, automatically deletes entries in the HOSTS file for specific domains. Try, for example, to prevent attempts to access Facebook.com, Twitter.com or ad servers such as ad.doubleclick.net by rerouting them to 127.0.0.1 by adding entries to the HOSTS file and the relevant entries will soon disappear from the HOSTS file as if by magic, leaving nothing but an empty line."
This behavior is due to Windows Defender in Windows 8 thinking it has discovered malicious modification of the Hosts file. Windows Defender is enabled by default in Windows 8. Users who would like to continue using the Hosts file as a simple, albeit effective method of blocking certain sites, can do so by adding the Hosts file to Defender's exceptions list. Of course, that means that Defender will never be able to notice any actual malicious changes to the Hosts file.
Windows 8 seems to be rather prejudicial about which entries in the Hosts file Defender will automatically delete. It automatically deletes Twitter, Facebook, doubleclick and other ad sites but other domains such as "heise.de" it leaves intact.
www.h-online.com/security/news/i927.html