Bayosphere

Don’t let the door hit you in the ass when you leave!

Five Rivers versus WalMart

Did you know that Walmart was dumping TV’s on the market at lower than market prices and that this was possible (partialy) because China has purpously devalued the Yuan (their currency) and held it down artificialy for years? This is a MAJOR cause of job-loss in the United States.

OK, this is from a friend of mine who sometimes gets out of control, but can someone tell me how legit it is?

If manufacturing is the baseline of our economy and someone else is doing (manufacturing) more than us, does that mean that they are gaining on us as an economic power in the world? Last quarter trade deficit with China was over $120Billion!

It’s only a matter of time before China will be a bigger economy than the US. Current World Bank estimates put the changeover as happening at about 2025; using current GDP and growth rates puts it at more like 2040. But: it will happen sooner or later.

Nihao, Dan–

You’ll be amused to know that as your award was announced, the screenshot shown to the crowd was headlined: “Please don’t feed the troll.”

Congratulations Dan,

and thank you for keeping your comments section open to the public

Congratulations, Dan.

This reminds me of Time’s piece with the headline “Hyper-Democracy?” The Internet and now blogging is on its way to destroying Big Media Owners’ monopoly on defining the “normal” scope of political debate — and it’s about damn time!

This is an interesting point and adds a new dynamic to blogging journalists. As a more or less direct analogy, is Dan Rather more influential because he has a large audience in America or is Dan Gillmor more influential because his audience is global and fully interactive (meaning he hears their views as well as “broadcasting” his own)?

Traditional news media provides the occasional editorial comment within a sea of, essentially, “announcements” whereas blogs offer an number of, essentially, “editorials” and viewpoints with each and every story. We become a more educated reader when we are offered the “why” and “how” in addition to “what, where and when”.

More and more I am seeing traditional news outlets as providing stale, diluted and often unfiltered “sound bites” straight from the spin masters and PR people. Moving forward can someone like Dan Rather (as an analogy) compete in terms of accuracy and insight with a medium whose readers are potentially a vast army of “on the spot” editor reporters distrubed across the globe?

I sent this to a bunch of international poison control centers today:

http://slashdot.org/~js7a/journal/89475

I have a feeling that sending to the email inboxes of poison control centers’ directors will be more effective than just blogging it.

This is an April Fool’s Joke, right?

blogging has become a social networking kind of tool i assume but it is smaller scale if compare to friendster, flickr or orkut.

Dan,

a slight correction to the post. The Drezner/Farrell piece appears in Foreign Policy magazine, not Foreign Affairs.

Tom Davey
Web producer for www.foreignaffairs.org

Dan, Be careful, you may be the crank that started a revolution.

Lawrence Lessig, President 2008

The Direct Marketing Association and their furry little friends have this fantasy that there is such a thing as “legitimate” spam. There isn’t — it’s a matter of simple arithmetic. If there are 100,000 busineees worldwide that might want to sell you something, and each of them sent you one e-mail per year, that would be 274 *per day*. Both of those assumptions are wild underestimates, of course.

Spam is looking less and less like marketing and more like a massive denial- of- service attack. Cyberterrorism, anyone?

I agree with Lightning. I get 15-20 Fake Rolex ads a day as well as the other garbage and I have noticed in the last two or three days that some idiot had spoofed my email address and sending spam from me, at least I am getting the bounce messages.

Hey Guys

The Feds have a way for you to, at least, get rid of that spam… well, in a manner of speaking.

Look here: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/online/inbox.htm

About half-way down that webpage is this:

“What Can I Do With the Spam in my In-Box?

“Report it to the Federal Trade Commission. Send a copy of unwanted or deceptive messages to spam@uce.gov. The FTC uses the unsolicited emails stored in this database to pursue law enforcement actions against people who send deceptive spam email.”

The Feds are asking for the spam you receive. There’s only one way you can make ’em work on it. Send the spam to the FTC.

Microsoft has been both a spammer, and spammer-friendly, for a long time.

Back in the days when inames was giving away free addresses, I got one from them. I never had any use for it, until one day we had a problem at work that required access to some of their tech support databases. Since we didn’t have a net conection at work, I volunteered to do the research at home. The database access required that I cough up an email address, and, being suspicious, I gave them the inames one. Not long after that, I started getting email from MSN Sidewalk vendors offering me cheap DVDs, airfare discounts, etc. And it got worse: apparently, either one of their vendors sold my address, or someone hacked an MS server and stole their database, because the inames address started getting all kinds of crap. I even got a few 419 spams through it.

One of the very first things MS did when they bought Link Exchange was to amend its TOS to eliminate the provision that banned spammers. This had been a useful way of starving them of free advertising.

Before they sold out to MS, hotmail had an aggressive policy of closing accounts that were being used as dropboxes to collect replies to spams. MS modified their software to make it impossible to even _complain_ about such abuse by autobouncing any complaint about email that didn’t _originate_ from their servers (To be fair, they appear to have stolen this idea from Yahoo, so it’s not like they actually went out of their way to “innovate” any means of being a spamhaven).

Like everything else that isn’t tied down (and quite a few things that were), the net is, in Microsoft’s view, just another resource to be ripped off to the extent they can get away with it.

“Cyberterrorism, anyone?”

This is starting to sound pretty tempting: some slimeball (probably a spammer I got busted) put my email address on one of those “FFA” sites, and now every moron who’s ever fallen for one of those “$29.95 bulk emailer software with 50 gazillion opt-in leads!!!!” scams is trying to sell me a copy of it. Hacking a few of those scam sites (so that, say, the “add an address” script sends a few thousand “new sucker signed up” emails to the domain owner’s whois contact for every new entry) might give them a hint…

The plot emerges through Carson’s meditative, microsoft elusive fragments, mysteriously isolated couplets, nude excerpts from versified conversations and letters, sears interior monologues and (as Carson’s readers have band come to expect) digressions on matters of classical christina aguilera scholarship. This kind of thing is imitated badly harry potter and often by others, but Carson’s phraseology vacation within poems remains her own: “Rotate the husband dog

I woke up, compared my “civic duty” to my “conscience” and decided I couldn’t vote for either of the candidates. First time ever I didn’t vote for a presidential candidate.
Until a party chooses a real leader, a statesman, my voting days are over. I’m not voting for incompetents, opportunists, or clowns anymore.

From Jeff Jarvia, via Andrew Sullivan:

After the election results are in, I promise to:
: Support the President, even if I didn’t vote for him.
: Criticize the President, even if I did vote for him.
: Uphold standards of civilized discourse in blogs and in media while pushing both to be better.
: Unite as a nation, putting country over party, even as we work together to make America better.

I’ll agree with Mike. Although I didn’t vote for the president that won, I will support him even though I’m not that happy with him.