Title: "Roomba costumes." My first thought: people dressing up as Roombas. And it ain't even Halloween.
Oh that sucks -- and it's all too typical. My excellent GP quit the entire business of medicine because the insurance just killed him. My urologist stopped taking my insurance. So did my other specialist. All this in the last 10 months.
And this is what it's like for those of us who HAVE insurance...
But enough -- you've got my sympathies, T.
An interesting difference between Goldstein and Ebert: Goldstein's attack was personal, and it was based on...what? Ebert stuck to what he had seen and said the movie sucked. I like Ebert for that.
Patrick -- can you spell out what you found and changed? I had a comment rejected for that same reason on a friend's photoblog this morning and I'll drop him a note if it applies...
Wait a minute.
From what I heard some time ago, Apple doesn't have any control over the database of names. They license the audio and the database from the music industry, and they make available via iTunes.
That is, blame Sony, Universal, BMG...
>> Of all the companies to get that one wrong —
Not that $90/share Apple needs me to defend them, but I'm betting their excuse is the same as it was for some of the dopey music title mistakes -- they post the database as they get it from the publishers. And the publishers give them a stupid database. (Which excuses only part of that frustrating interface...)
Anyway, Apple should be beyond excuses. The company is powerful enough in audio distribution to demand better data from the publishers. Their reputation for sensible interface design is at stake...
Re: unsolicited commercial faxes. They're illegal and you can collect as much as $2500 per junk fax by suing the faxers in small claims court. Info here:
http://www.junkfax.org/fax/action/outside_how_to_sue.html
http://ftp.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/unwantedfaxes.html
http://www.junkfax.org/fax/basic_info/junk_fax_qa.htm
http://www.junkbusters.com/fax.html
Nothing will stop these people faster than taking lots of their money.
In purely practical terms, the latest MT Blacklist plug-in 2.x, which requires MovableType 3.x, is much more than just a blacklist for stopping comment spam in blogs. It's got some flexible settings that will shut down spam based on, for example, multiple comments from the same source, postings in older inactive entries, and multiple URLs within one comment. Rather than simply block these, it will notify you and allow you to review the comments -- "forced moderation" they call it. And each of those parameters can be fine-tuned in the configuration pane of MovableType -- for example, you can set how many URLs within a comment will trigger forced moderation. It's very slick. The plug-in also stops spam based on a GREP-like matching that looks for combinations of words in the subject.
These new capabilities have come in really handy on my photoblog, where the plug-in has successfully stopped spam that isn't yet part of the master blacklist. I looked at my MT Blacklist log today and saw dozens of spams that had been turned away. I'm normally blissfully unaware that anyone is attempting to post that shit. Only two or three spams get past the plug-in each week for me.
I'm always skeptical about these Mac OS X security flaws (so far, not a one has actually been exploited), but I've taken this one seriously because I trust the people reporting it and because it's such an easy, painless fix. But as I said, so far, this one exists in theory. No one has yet exploited it. And every few hours we seem to find a new wrinkle ("actually it can't run "rm -rf /", because..."
Nonetheless, um, I *have* taken the precautions. I like the little utility here: http://isophonic.net/
-=-Joe
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2006 | 3 |
| 2005 | 4 |
| 2004 | 3 |
Total: 10 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Joseph Holmes:
Show all comments by Joseph Holmes.