Entries Tagged 'Miscellanea' ↓

Folks are changing their legal name to march their online handle, screen name, website, title, weblog.

The Internet has played a fascinating role in this shift through the seemingly innocuous requirement of asking people to choose usernames for their email, websites, and IM clients — what is this but an adult choosing to name themselves? Thus it is put into common consciousness the idea that one’s identity is self-defined, rather than externally assigned. There’s nothing stopping people from using their real name online, but how many people do you know that do that?

Until recently, online identities tended to be secondary — almost like secret identities — but as the line between the online world and the offline world blurs, the dominant identity takes control, and often that’s the online one. … As a result, name tags usually list the IAM name, and it’s very normal for people to refer to each other by those names in conversation — and often not even know the given name of their friend!

People with body modifications are already very used to a self-defined identity — an adult identity that’s different than the child identity — so it should come as no surprise that an increasing number of IAM members are legally changing their “real” names to match the identity they’ve created for themselves.

Shannon Larratt: What’s in a Name?

Originally posted 2003-10-19 13:15:33. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Just installed Norton System Works Pro 2003. The ad promised that it would automatically delete viruses. The bookshop’s email address is widely posted so we get bucket loads of the damned things. Often when we come into the morning most of our email hasn’t been downloaded because Norton is sitting their waiting for us to click Quarantine and Finished. Annoyingly the latest version still requires the second click. I just want the emails sent to Hell. Oh well, at least by ordering it from Amazon.com the rebates reduced the cost to little more than the renewal fee for updates to Norton Antivirus. (Wonder whatever happened to Peter Norton after he sold out to Symantec?)

Verizon has upgraded its spam filtering. With luck we’ll see fewer “I just lost my dog” (aren’t those spammers clever?) and “hey bdfar, [insert your own spammer’s lie].”

I’m so broke I couldn’t afford to but also so broke it can’t make things any worse. I decided to register for the commercial edition of HTML-Kit and sent a donation to thank the authors of MovableType. And I upgraded my webhosting plan to add MySQL*. The latter was only an extra $3.00 a month and also gave me 150 Meg, up from 50. My little group of online journals has been eating up more space than I’d ever have guessed. Only a few months ago I upgraded from 25 Meg. I think MovableType may need a feature that automatically deletes entries of a certain age unless they are marked with a no-kill flag.

* You’d think Microsoft would’ve added that to Word’s spelling dictionary.

Originally posted 2002-11-08 18:23:15. Republished by Old Post Promoter

I wondered why a beauty school in Los Angeles might be linking to Edifying Spectacle. I found this on their site. One of my subdirectories is “sexuality.”

Amorous Propensities
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The man who sued a Los Angeles beauty school because it would not let him go to class dressed as a woman has settled the lawsuit and
http://www.edifyingspectacle.org/(DELETED)uality/blog/

Originally posted 2003-09-18 15:15:35. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Author: Daniel Punch

The Internet has opened up whole new avenues of freedom for people: freedom of information, thoughts and the ability to achieve anonymity while still being active in a community. This freedom has been latched onto by a large proportion of the Internet user base and has fuelled a desire for even more liberties. This in turn has given rise to the ‘Internet Grey Areas’, those little things that ‘everyone’ does but which aren’t quite legally correct. A few examples are Abandonware, MP3 downloads, warez and their kind.

Abandonware is the label applied to games that have been ‘abandoned’ by their original developers. The standard rule has become that if the games are more than four years old and no longer freely available for purchase, or if the developer has closed and hence the game is no longer supported, then it can be called Abandonware and distributed freely. Some developers willingly release their older software titles into the public domain making them legally Abandonware but a large number of titles labelled as such are not technically free for public access. The licences are still owned by someone and the distribution of their software titles could be harming their licence validity.

Abandonware justifies itself by preserving gaming history in a ‘living’ way. It allows people to play the games they used to love long after they’re available to purchase. In many cases the only hope for finding older games is to trawl second hand shops and online stores such as Ebay in the slim hopes of coming across a particular title. Sometimes when you finally get hold of the old software it simply won’t run on your PC leaving you with a pretty box but no closer to actually playing the game. Several times I’ve purchased an old game and then downloaded a copy off the Internet so that I can actually play it due to the fact that old disks are either damaged or the wrong type (I don’t have a 5 1/4″ floppy drive on my PC any more…).

MP3 downloads have a less honourable ideology. Simply put, people want free music so they download it. It is said that the activities harm no one and that the downloading process doesn’t adversely affect artists’ profits. Who can say for sure? At the time of writing this article the RIAA’s site is down and I’m not able to find any accurate figures that estimate the amount of revenue lost due to music piracy. I believe that it was estimated at around $5 billion in 1997 and that’s sure to have increased with the advent of broadband. However, these figures are said to be highly inaccurate. A standard argument against them is “I wasn’t planning on buying the CD anyway so they haven’t lost any money out of me downloading it”, an argument that is ridiculous at best. The Movie downloading scene is almost identical. I’m not going to swing one way or another here, but I will say that I can think of several films that didn’t receive the box office takings from a number of associates of mine after they had gotten to experience the film before its release date. The quality of the films almost justifies the stealing, but that’s a whole different issue!

The Internet community gets riled up over companies asserting their rights on the Internet (which is odd… companies asserting their legal rights being seen as evil while individuals illegally attempting to assert what they believe should be their rights are forces for good…) but the simple fact is that it is damaging for a company to allow the theft of their licences to go unnoticed. In the case of Abandonware, if it can be proven that a company knew their products were being illegally distributed but did nothing about it then the copyright over that particular licence can be lost. The revenues lost due to piracy in its many forms are surprisingly enough, damaging to companies.

I think that it’s unfortunate that the freedom provided by the Internet has lead to such abuse but I can see the validity of both sides of the arguments. Companies want and deserve their revenue for the services they provide. Abandonware infringes on a company’s copyright and can lead to them losing their licences if they don’t hunt down offenders. The consumers on the other hand have to pay increasingly steeper and steeper prices for the products, something that is often blamed on the increasing rate of piracy, which is blamed on the continuous increase in prices and the whole thing becomes a vicious cycle. CDs are very expensive if you only want one or two songs off the CD, which is where online music stores can come into play. There you can purchase the licence to a song relatively cheaply without having to pay a lot for an entire CD you that don’t particularly want (and they have the added upside of having more of the money make it back to the artists who created the music as opposed to the corporations that distribute it).

I guess in the end everyone has to make their own decision about where they stand between the concepts of ‘Morally Correct’ and ‘Legally Correct’. Me personally, I like to stand a little closer to ‘Legally Correct’ than most. It’s been my experience that ‘morals’ tend to change and warp a lot sooner than the law does, and not always for the better. If we restrain ourselves on the Internet then maybe authorities won’t see the need to attempt to restrain us. The freedom that is relished so much on the Internet may in fact be increased with just a little self-control.

About the author: Daniel Punch M6.Net http://www.m6.net

Originally posted 2005-03-29 11:31:57. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Often while I’m browsing the web I’ll come to a site that cites several links I want to follow. I’ll open them seriatim in tabs. Sometimes when a web site is slow to load Firefox will keep me staring at the hourglass. I can move to another tab or even scroll in the open tab.

Sometimes if I’m patient enough Firefox will finally let me go on with my browsing. Other times going and making a pot of coffee finds me coming back to a still paralyzed web browser. Annoyed I finally open Task Manager and kill the Firefox process.

I’d hoped that Firefox .9 would see the end of this. No luck.

Is there a setting I can change? This is as annoying as anything IE has ever done. And makes me wonder why I’m not using Opera (well, my websites are even less appealing in Opera).

Originally posted 2004-06-16 15:42:44. Republished by Old Post Promoter

National Science Foundation’s Approaches to Combat Terrorism has award over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the development of automated analysis of internet chat room activity. The stated goal is to spot al-Qaida and other terrorists chatting online.

But if you develop technology to ferret out one pattern you can put it to scanning for others. And the best software in the world will be deaf to nuances. Who knows you may find themselves innocently caught in a tangle of government surveillance.

Chat rooms are the highly popular and freewheeling areas on the Internet where people with self-created nicknames discuss just about anything: teachers, Kafka, cute boys, politics, love, root canal. They are also places where malicious hackers have been known to trade software tools, stolen passwords and credit card numbers. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that 28 million Americans have visited Internet chat rooms.

Is Bush Planning To Listen In On Gay Chat Rooms?

Originally posted 2004-10-12 15:12:10. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Another unanticipated email:

How do i sell my panties on this site, where do i start?

Since I’m perpetually impoverished maybe I should be peddling folks’ used panties on Edifying Spectacle. But I’ve never given anyone reason to think that I do.

Originally posted 2003-07-25 15:34:40. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Via Atom Smasher’s Error Message Generator

Originally posted 2005-03-20 11:57:22. Republished by Old Post Promoter

21% of all adults report that they or a family member has a personal Web-site

Personal Online Activities

Via Media Savvy

Originally posted 2003-02-11 10:26:41. Republished by Old Post Promoter

I think I read somewhere something about Google being able to recognize mouse clicking patterns of individuals (don’t know how true it was. Combine that with an emotionally aware computer and you might have the beginning of a techno-thriller.

“Imagine a computer that could pick the right emotional moment to try to sell you something, a future where mobile phones, cars and Web sites could read our mind and react to our moods,” he added.

Coming soon — mind-reading computers

Originally posted 2006-06-26 18:04:36. Republished by Old Post Promoter