Posts by Tom 13 7544 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Please just go join Ted in the mountain hideaway. Your screed makes as much sense as any of his did.
Granted if used as Exhibit A for the prosecution, it goes a long way to explaining why so much is so frelled on both sides of the pond. But that really is all the more reason for you to go join Ted.
Of course they do. The sender is a legitimate business that sends legitimate promotional email. So every time the mail team blocks it in response to your request, they get a complaint from one of your compatriots that they have stopped getting their Grainger messages and please put it back. Not the guy who's been whacked with it, just the guy who was a fly on the wall for it. At least in this instance I can see the business case for it. Admittedly not a business case I'd buy, but at least a paper thin one that can be made. I never did understand how to do that for the Golf Magazine messages for one of the guys in the accounting department.
Since I can't see whatever the hell all this fuss is about, and we're now splitting hairs about SMPT etc.; let me ask this question:
If the advertisement is a frame on a webpage that is formatted to look like an email but is otherwise a normal advert, does the act apply?
As I recall part of the reason for all the uproar originally is we were downloading the spam into our mailboxes, sometimes over dial up. Which is where the transmission part comes into play.
Frankly, the stuff is supported by ads an mining your user profiling data. If you aren't paying for it, someone else is, and you accept those terms when you accept the free stuff. And yes, as indicated above I am a gmail user.
My reaction after wading through the first few paragraphs was: WTF?
I'm a US user of GMail for work and personal use and I have not noticed anything. Yes, I was annoyed with some sort of announcement that they were once again twiddling with my inbox and some new tabs appeared. But I live in the primary tab which still shows me everything and I'm quietly ignoring the rest. After realizing the corporate one isn't showing the tabs I checked my personal and clicked on Promotions. I still have no idea WTF the article is going on about. Granted I may have embedded wetware ad filters, but I think I'd notice it if I were actively trying to see it.
I wasn't aware that dedupe and compression were flash only technologies.
If they aren't then a side by side price comparison to platters is a more reasonable comparison since the efficacy of dedupe and compression both depend on the types and quantities of data being stored.
Let me fix that for you:
video is can be just another extension of that.
IF your company establishes policies that way yes, it can be. It can also be a colossal waste of time and resources if the company doesn't have established policies for handling it. Given the existence of a prior warning, AOL obviously had policies against. It might be naive and/or foolish, but it was company policy and employees, especially upper echelon types are expected to know and follow those policies.
Actually they already have them and yes they are expensive. They fly through the air and have an explosive device attached to them. I think they call them "missiles". Not sure how kindly the general population would take to them being routinely used for that purpose at the local airport though.
in the headlines which are grabbing our attention these days you are correct.
By my memory is longer than the current internet memes (or as some one once put it "10 minutes ago"). He and Woz designed, built, and yes soldered many a circuit board in the early days working out of their garage. So like I said, very overrated, but not a complete sham.
While I think Jobs is very overrated, I don't begrudge him the title inventor. Until he did the iPod, nobody had a digital portable song player that grabbed attention. Same thing with the iPad. And for all that he stole ideas for Xerox, they not only let him do it they shoved more stuff into his mitts as he was leaving. He knew what they had and what to do with it even when they didn't. Not all of them were "design patents" some of them were important engineering choices. And I expect the early Apple work did involve some actual patents. Gates may have created the commodity market, but I'll give Jobs (and Woz) props for their contributions in creating the market in the first place.
Yes sports teams and cities have these issues. In fact I think there was a study done and no major city has actually boosted its economy enough to pay for any of the stadium deals they've cut. But sports teams are owned by the same sorts as the boating events - people who can afford to buy and sell politicians and profit from it. I doubt ComicCon can, and think CES would be marginal on that front.
Knowing how much it costs a non-profit to put on one of those shows; knowing that at least two of those three are profit making conventions which get serious reamings from the politicians and the unions, and knowing how much our little con brought into the city in terms of tourism and other money flows, I have not problems with those events. Payback in our case was still on the order of the city getting $10 dollars for every dollar we spent.
Now start talking crap like the occupy movement and you have a point. But you shouldn't confuse the them.
As usual you misscharacterize your fellow Americans. Our objections aren't against its existential potential, they are about the logical fallacies of the HSR proponents. The proposed train will only get you between specific cities. You'll still need a car. If Musk can make it commercially viable, I don't have a problem with that. If it costs twice as much to build and only develops a quarter of the traffic he foresees and depends on the public dole, I have huge problems with that. The car still gets me there if slower, on already existing infrastructure that will be more readily and frequently used. The problem with conventional HSR is that given the historical track record of passenger rail, it wouldn't even make the failure numbers I've assigned to the Musk project. So they are IMPLEMENTATION objections, not existential.
Full disclosure: You damn fools have funded one of these boondoggles that I take to work everyday. Since I'm paying for it anyway I use it. Doesn't mean I can't see the problems with it or what better solutions might be out there.
Even at $20 billion, that's still about half the proposed price of the high speed rail, which is also almost certainly low. So as a replacement it seems desirable.
Also, despite the relatively high price for a commuter trip, the 35 minutes puts it inside what 'Merkins in big cities have come to expect time wise, so it might be used that way.
If you throw in some freight traffic, I think you might be able to get to a commercially viable system. Only actual use would tell.
When politics rules everything, everything becomes politicized.
I'd guess you can't, because that reads like a statement from a political illiterate. I might make a reasonable stab at it, but I wouldn't bet the cost of pint at the pub on my guess. But here's a hint: Stalin and Trotsky were politically closer than Stalin and Churchill. Make note of whom Stalin sent the assassination team after.
...to endure the risks of the transformation and the likely near-term adverse effects on earnings,...
For Dell to have any sort of longevity as a corporation it has to undergo a transformation plan and that transformation plan will necessarily have "adverse effects." The sort of thing Wall Street doesn't like to see. So it would be better done as by a company not being publicly traded. It's also likely to be a High Risk venture. One that by the numbers only is likely to go bust and it's only the addition of experienced leaders who move it above a 33.3% chance of success.
Is Mike's offer a good deal? Hard to say. I'm reminded of the lines from Seven Samurai where the farmers offer a pittance for the high priced swordsman to defend their village. In the past he worked for larger sums that were a lot of money. But today that pittance is a lot of money so he will once again sell his sword for high price.
It's not so much the Apple haters, of which I can reasonably be numbered. It's the freetards who are quite certain they are getting ripped off if the price of an ebook is anything much above zero.
What Apple did in this instance is quite reasonable from a vertically integrated, previously uninvolved competitor standpoint: We want to get into this market. We don't know what the right price is. We want margin X, when everything is said and done. If you'll agree to give us that percentage, we'll charge the price you set. And to protect ourselves, if you offer a competitor a better price, you have to offer it to us as well.
In the current environment, the DoJ doesn't give a shit whether it is constitutional or not.
In this instance*, it seems most of the El Reg readers will cheer them on as they ignore it even as they cry in their beer when they ignore it on other issues.
*Judging from the voting pattern observable on all previous ebook threads. The freetards are winning and won't know what they've lost by winning until it is way too late to recover.
Except of course that your whole argument is based on two counter-factual assumptions.
The Apple Agency system gave the bulk of the money to the publisher.
The publishers weren't making "excess profit" (by which I assume you mean 'excessive') they were losing money hand over fist and filing for bankruptcy. Apple much as I dislike the company and many of their products, saved the industry. Right up until Bezos greased the right palms to undermine the publishers again.
I've worked in IT for many years. Never ever locked a copier manual away. Usually they are in the plastic pouch attached to the copier. The one that's so old it is now yellow, and cracks when you open it because the plastic was never exercised by users in normal operation.
I will concur about the warning on the copier panel itself, and that the copier should not default to a setting where it could be a problem.
Google's work will create the first which will generate the second. Bill's won't.
Bill is handing them fish. Google is teaching them to fish. Both acts have their place.
Bill's work is good. The Google work will take longer, but it will be better. That's why whiny Bill came out to bitch slap Google.
Pay in organizations vary. Some nominally charitable organizations pay their staff at rates equivalent to the private sector and except for their tax status are indistinguishable from commercial organizations. Having been involved for extended periods of time with several charitable organizations (including 3 years as paid staff on a reasonably well know one), it's not a question of pay=skill.* It's a problem that most skilled people can't afford to volunteer 20, 40, or 60 hours a week to the organization, even if the position requires it. So if you want someone to work those kinds of hours, you have to re-jigger your organization so it can do so. Then you unexpectedly find yourself on the commercial treadmill and wonder how you got there. So far I haven't been able to puzzle a way out of the conundrum.
*In fact just this morning I was talking to a coworker about someone (God rest his soul) who was a very lucky find for one of those organizations. He handled our AV and stage management for a convention that grew from 350 people to 35,000. His day job was as a stage manager in New York including a few stints on Broadway plays. He organized everything for us for a few years. One day he came to us and said (more or less) "Guys I love the group and I wish I could stay on in this position. But I ran some numbers last year and it turns out I'm spending more time on this than I am on my real job. And unfortunately I just can't afford it." Recognizing how vital he was to the group we essentially said (in the correctly legal phrasing) "Okay, we understand. How much to keep you on?" And did. (Yes we followed the correct legal open bidding procedures. His proposal was somewhere between one third and half the cost of the next lowest bidder who also knew our show well.)
They're both scum sucking bottom feeders. Brilliant scum sucking bottom feeders, but still scum sucking bottom feeders.
Near as I can tell the difference is Jobs was an atheist so didn't care about the disposition of his eternal soul while Bill isn't. So now Bill is trying to buy his way into heaven because he knows how many people he screwed over and how badly he did it.
0) You could learn about Malaria and how to avoid catching it from the internet. <- and still go out and drink from your only water supply, full of feces and god knows what else.
Presumably one of the things you could find on the internet if information about how to improve your only water source. Although I expect most parts of the world figured out it not a good idea for your privy to run into your well before the English did.
1) You could use the internet to ask for medical assistance. <-Or approach the medical staff who have medicines with them, backed by international health organisations
I expect if International Health staff were just standing around the village with nothing to do, the first thing they would have done is improved that well we just finished discussing. In reality you probably have to hunt them down. So tell me, which is easier, having the family living on $1/month hunt down the medical staff backed by the billionaire, or having them send notice to the medical staff to come to the village or arrange a meeting at another location?
3) You could use the internet to discover how to treat malaria and acquire appropriate treatments. <-what, using paypal accounts full of sand?
Some of the stuff you can do to prevent it is no or very low cost. The internet certainly provides better chance to connect to organizations that assist with the expensive bits. Hell, put the a decent plan together and you might even be able to crowd source it. We 'Merkins take a lot of flack for not properly funding international organizations that governments create to handle these things. But what I've noticed is that if you go to a local church with a specific plan to help a specific location with a well thought out project, they'll cough up the money for it. Sometimes as quick as a week, sometimes longer depending on the size of the project.
You can't fix that overnight and there's no sense in trying to.
Funny thing about building out the internet into those places. First thing you're going to need is a healthy workforce to do the building. That means the first thing you're going to have to do is teach them how to clean up the water, build the house, and get the food. Supplying them with the job building that infrastructure is actually going to go a long way toward them having the kind of money to do it.
Second thing you're going to need is people using it. So you're going to have to do the same things for the people NOT working for you. And some of those people might start seeing opportunities to do things for people outside their villages. Things that might make them the kind of money so they can do their own things. Maybe even buy their own netting. And who knows, once connected to the internet one them might even have the breakthrough idea that creates an actual working renewable source of energy.
You forgot the most important one:
If you use the internet you might discover that the most effective way of preventing malaria is to use DDT to eliminate the mosquito threat and that all that noise about DDT was hype. If properly used DDT probably could wipe out malaria before Bill Gates is put in the ground. It is after all how we eliminated it here The States. But politics won't let that happen.
Not to fear, it was a joint effort.
The problem is that even with the release of the Venona Files and the KGB archives too few in society are willing to face the truth. Too many of our so called elected representatives were communist agents. Agents who set in motion ideas and processes designed to overthrow our liberty-centric governments over the course of time. They thought the time required would be shorter than it has been, but they never tired of pursuing their objective. Today they are at the top of the political food chain implementing their ideas and remaking the citizenry they desire.
Enjoy your popcorn while you can. After the shit hits the fan over here you'll be next.
And no, we aren't a democracy. We are, or at least were, a Constitutional Republic. Our founders were aware of democracies and tossed them on the ash heap of history precisely because they degenerate into these kinds of messes. The intention was to bind government so that mob justice as seen in the French revolutions wouldn't destroy the protection of God given rights. Or degenerate into the kind of corruption prevalent in Imperial Rome. Or the infighting of ancient Greece.
But no, we know better than they did. We are morally superior to them because we don't own slaves. And we tax the hell out of rich people to support the poor, the downtrodden, those unwilling to fend for themselves. So it looks like we won't get any of those bad results. No, we're going to combine all of them into one big hairy furball firefight. And once it starts you can look forward to the next worldwide Dark Age.
Wrong starting point. I doubt it was actually the bulk surveillance on US citizens that was falsified. I expect it was probably a perfectly legal satellite or other covert op against a cartel working outside the US. As a result of that operation you wind up with the names of contacts, suppliers, etc. operating in the US. You want to get those names to the civies, but you don't want to compromise the exact methods used to infiltrate the organizations operating on foreign soil. Which is exactly what the defense attorney will do because they aren't actually seeking justice, they are seeking to get their client off no matter what and no matter whether or not on the basis of the things they have told you, you think they are guilty. So they falsified the evidence trail. From the point at which the names are given to the DEA everything proceeds according to the book, and the guys swearing to the judges that the information presented in court have no idea they aren't telling the truth because from their limited viewpoint they are telling the unvarnished truth.
But because we didn't discuss and approve this as a legitimate firebreak in the chain of evidence rules, it will, as it should, get the cases tossed.
I have this weird schadenfreude as I read these complaints.
The US Government has been disregarding the Constitution, and in particular the Fourth Amendment since at least the time of FDR. Reading the Fourth Amendment makes it pretty clear to me that it isn't okay for the government to steal your money to give to other people, no matter how much you might think they have some vague "human right" to that money because of their misfortune. But it was okay to pack SCOTUS over 4 terms until they finally "expanded" our understanding of rights to approve such theft on a routine basis. You don't get to where we are without a long trail of abuse. All in the name of minorities, the economically suppressed, or if all else fails, the children.
Back in court? Sadly, back in court may be the best prosecutors can hope for.
Last night during the talking heads segment on Fox News Judge Napolitano noted that any conviction resulting from that data is legally required to be vacated. Any evidence gathered as a result of it is likely to be suppressed in future trials. The prosecutor might not have enough evidence left to hold a trial.
Yes, I'd like to see data gathered as part of national intelligence operations included as background information for the DEA. Possibly even specific tips. But the rules for doing that need to be clearly defined after public discussion. Doing it and lying about it isn't acceptable.
I've never concurred with the opinion that Linux was inherently safer than Windows in the sense of "you don't have to worry about it" which is too frequently the context in which the statement is used. It is in the sense that if you are security aware you CAN lock it down.
I'd also quibble over whether it is moving toward being less secure. Historically it has also been more secure in its default configuration. In the sense that the default configurations are becoming less secure it is true, but the ability to lock it down properly is still there. Also Windows has been asymptotically approaching Linux security in its ability to be locked down, but does look like it will always be asymptotically approaching approaching it.
Ultimately the security of any system rests in the hands of the people who administer them. Which can be a really scary thought in the consumer market.
While DAM does deserve some downvotes for his specific corrective action, he does have a point, "troll" =/= "bully" and in fact a skilled troll actually can't engage in bullying. As I learned the term a skilled troll starts a flame war with a single post and never replies thereafter. Particularly on a tech site we should work to defend the use of our words, not excuse them with bootnote definitions. It's a bit like a legislative body passing a law saying pi is 3.14 exactly.
There can be honor in being an anonymous coward. There isn't in his post. In his case I think El Reg's monitors should be allowed to change his tag from "Anonymous Coward" to "4Chan Coward."
There is some truth in what he says, but it is overwhelmed by his negativity and nihilism. Yes the woman probably ought to step back and examine her life. If her job is frequently causing her to breakdown in tears she should probably look for another job. If she is seeking God's love she should probably take some time to think about why she isn't feeling it. God does love her enough that he sent his only begotten Son to die on a tree for her sins. His sacrifice is big enough for all of us, but he would have done it for her alone. If you don't see it/feel it, there's something blocking it. As far as I've been able to determine, that something is always in ourselves, because we're the only ones to whom he allows that choice.
If on the other hand it's all an act because it brings in more money, that's her choice too.
Whatever choices we make, consequences follow from them. For good or for bad, to life or to death.
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