New Year’s Resolution: Get a junk email account, and reply to every spam you get. If we all do that, it will be bad news for the spammers.
Spammers only make money when they can either 1) Sell your address. or 2) Make a sale.
It’s a junk email adress- if you reply and say “Take me off your list!” then they’ll know your adress is real, and they’ll sell it to other spammers. It’s unfortunate, but I can’t see how to mess with those people. However, if we reply to all the spam, the people who are actually trying to sell something will have hundreds of “Screw you spammer” emails to pick through before they find any “yes! i am interested in your product” emails. Spam the spammers.
I read this idea in a Slashdot forum. I don’t know how good of an idea it is, but I think I’ll give it a shot.
http://www.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.dir/at/intro.htm
Ok, so I’m starting to get a better grip on what this here thesis is going to be about. I believe that Ron Eglash is trying to say that certain people whom we would normally consider to be empowered are also normally thought of as the producers of technoscience. He goes on to say that this is not always the case- that sometimes those who appear to be purely consumers are not passive, but are actively creating new technoscience when they appropriate it for their own needs.
I think that what I want to say is that the people who traditionally have that power are catching on to appropriation, and even if it’s not a conscious effort they are making it more difficult to appropriate technology. Since I have been focusing on journalism, media, and lately advertising- I can probably get some good examples there.
I’m not trying to argue that it’s becoming impossible, or that para-digm is about to change… I’m just saying that big business isn’t blind and deaf to the phreakers anymore, and they’re stepping onto the playing field.
The whole David vs Goliath thing might not be so simple, if Goliath wises up enough to wear a helmet. Ya dig?
Report Card
Look at the internet… it’s freaking huge. For the last 6 months I have been focusing on giving people a public voice in the political process- but now it’s starting to look to me like we’ve got our voices. The problem is the same as a crowded football stadium- we’ve all got voices, but there are so many voices that most individuals don’t count for much. It’s information glut.
I want to think about getting all this media coming at us from the TV, radio, internet, and bilboards to just simmer down a bit. I just came up with that off the top of my head- so I’m not sure where I’m going with it yet.
Sometimes i wonder if it would have been more productive for me to study computer science. It seems like there are so many interesting problems out there that can be approached as programming problems, but not many at all that are purely mechanical. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to learn as I go…
Gee, I sure am glad we took care of Iraq.
Because I don’t feel like writing these down, or switching to my laptop right now…
http://www.hermenaut.com/a5.shtml
http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/infotech/asg/ag7.html
http://www.bogieland.com/postings/post_construct.htm
http://www.uni-paderborn.de/~winkler/koerp_e.html
http://ibs.lgu.ac.uk/forum/ameara.htm
http://www.probe.org/docs/we-are-tv.html
http://www.notbored.org/transparent.html
http://www.xplana.com/whitepapers/archives/mind_makes_meaning_part1
I was just thinking about wireless filesharing, user interface, and style…
What if some day we have these wireless fileservers we carry with us, and they’re basically just in our cell phones- but the way we send files to each other isn’t by pressing buttons- that’s boring and lame- it’s just by shaking hands. Well, you don’t want to send you photo album to each person you shake hands with, so there has to be a protocol…
That’s right- an urban handshake hand-jive language that controls wireless connections to the people we’re interacting with. You do an intricated hand shaking arm smacking ritual to transfer images, funds, files, and other stuff. Wouldn’t that be cool? Dopey white guys in suits approach each other, look around, and then greet each other like they’re from the hood.
It could happen.
You’ve beaten my giant, which means you’re exceptionally strong. So, you could have put the poison in your own goblet, trusting on your strength to save you. So I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But, you’ve also bested my Spaniard which means you must have studied. And in studying, you must have learned that man is mortal so you would have put the poison as far from yourself as possible, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
Wilhelm
Seriously, this is some funny stuff. An actor did some screams for a sound effects library in 1951, and it’s been re-used in movies since then. The same scream was used in Star Wars, Lethal Weapon 4, and two of the Lord of the Rings movies.