If you haven’t already at least heard about the new full length out by Hidden in Plain View, its likely that you also are waiting Richie Valen’s and Buddy Holly’s last record, because that was the last serious rock that you heard. It just debuted earlier this week, and let me assure you — this will not be the last you hear of them 🙂 GO MIKE! There is no better way to thank YOU!
→ No CommentsTags: Skippy Stuff
[Editor’s note: This article was all about the Paris Hilton T-Mobile Sidekick Leak of 2005. Paris Hilton’s phonebook was posted on this blog days before the news became mainstream. All the numbers eventually got disconnected because a ton of people on the internet called the numbers that were posted. The first post was a list of real celebrity phone numbers. But recently, a larger than usual number of imbeciles below posted random, non-celebrity phone numbers in comments. Once again,
The comments in the thread below are like the lewd graffiti strewn about the walls of a men’s bathroom of a desolate, remote truck-stop. You’re reading here, under the dim fluorescent glow of your Internet’s display, just like creepy weirdos read about phone numbers on bathroom walls. Caveat emptor.
P.S. 30 minutes of free VOIP calling, including custom caller ID spoofing, are available using this ZenoFon invite: http://www.zenofon.com/?TL3WX]
“They” were indeed posted here very shortly after the news broke. I removed the content from the main page as soon as I was made aware that it was posted. I should remind members of this site that it is against our member terms of service to post personal information including home addresses and phone numbers online, regardless if the information belongs to celebrities or not.
Those that are interested should just look harder on Google. When I first found out about the whole debacle, I’ll admit, I was a little curious to at least see the list. But then, it was actually difficult to find. Now it seems that you can pull up the whole list very quickly and easily. You could probably even find it on P2P networks or bittorrent by now. The point is, it’s out there, so I don’t really see a need to host it when it’s really only going to cause problems.
Might I remind everyone that celebrities are people too. Would you really want your phone number posted around on hundreds of sites, just because you knew Paris Hilton? There is a business listed inside the phonebook called “Mr. Chows” or something like that. That place is going to have to basically change its phone number because of this. Some random eatery is going to have to reprint its business cards and stationary, and change its website, all because thousands of people have been calling it without wanting to really do business. That could kill a delivery business dead for a few days, easily. Victoria Gotti reported that she was receiving as many as 20 calls per hour. That’s a lot of phone calls. Thats 480 phone calls a day. That would get really annoying really quickly. Also remember that placing a phone call without the intent to communicate is a crime in most states. Harassment is a crime in every state. If you call these numbers intending to harass the celebrities at the other end, you’re breaking the law, an if you call the numbers intending just to hear the celebrities at the other end, you’re likely still breaking the law.
Yet, I have to admit, it’s still quite interesting to see that so many people are interested in Paris Hilton’s phonebook. I’m sure that most of the people that are interested are also not fans of hers. Most of them are probably just stalkers. Whether they’re jealous, or spiteful, or what, I don’t know. You don’t have to like Paris Hilton. You do, however, have to obey the law. A little courtesy also wouldn’t hurt. Just because celebrities have more money than you, they don’t necessarily deserve to get 500 prank phone calls a day. That’s just ridiculous. Stick to prank calling your friends and family. Trust me, you’ll live longer.
→ 891 CommentsTags: pwn3d! (Hacks and Tricks) · Technology · Telephones
If you regularly use AOL(R) Instant Messenger(TM), it’s likely that you’ve at some point created a personal profile or used an away message. Some AIM users may have even found that often times they can get in trouble because of their away messages. Not in trouble with the law, necessarily, but social trouble. Friends, family, and significant others often check your away message because they are interested in waht you are doing, and you post that information in those profiles to let them know that. But besides those close to you, there are also people with more sinister intents. Some people use AIM(R) as a tool for harassment.
Plagued by the perpetual surveillance imposed on you by AIM(R)? Dissatisfied with your ability to thwart AIM(R) stalkers? Help is here! PCPete.net software is currently developing a web-based AIM(R) privacy management solution. With a few clicks of the mouse, a user can restrict access to their personal profile and away message to only authenticated users. Integrated logging and statistics are included, to make analysis of away message and profile access easy. Have you ever wanted to leave two different away messages for two different people? Now you can, and more.
PCPete.net software is currently seeking beta testers. If you are interested, get in contact with Pete. At this time, beta testing positions are open only to those that know Pete personally. A public beta will be coming soon!
AOL, AIM, and Instant Messenger are registered trademarks of America Online, Inc. We are in no way affiliated with America Online, Inc.
Update 2006: Sadly, SLAPM has already come and gone.
→ 4 CommentsTags: Computers · INeedAttention News · Site News · Technology
[Below is a paper that I wrote for my “Science, Technology, and Society” class. It embodies quite a bit about what I believe about the impact that technologies have had on our lives. A bibliography is provided in the extended text.]
As a society with such a strong emphasis on technological advancement, we are compelled to be responsible in our implementations of emerging technologies so that we can fully appreciate the impact that the changes we make will have on our lives.
Leisure time and product safety, as well as other indirect societal effects, are some of the issues raised by discussions about the impacts of technology. We have seen that technology can significantly impact these areas of our lives, but we are forced to decide when the costs incurred to these parts of our lives outweigh the benefits. Juliet Schor, in her article entitled “Technology, Work, and Leisure,” makes reference to the American sleep deficit – that is, that a majority of our citizens are sleeping up to 90 minutes less than is optimal for healthy living. With shift work, long working hours, and the “24 hour business culture,” the accelerating pace of life has led us to sacrifice our personal time in lieu of a commitment to work. We see ourselves as highly advanced, and American nationalism is certainly seen throughout the world – yet at the same time, in contrast to the statistics noted in Akash Kapur’s article regarding our ‘prosperity’ as defined by our gross domestic product per-capita, there is certainly strong evidence that our true prosperity is paradoxically not financial in nature.
A child in a ‘poor’ country by our standards surely faces hardships as well, but the hectic way of life we have espoused induces its own cause for stress. Referring to Schor’s note that “holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year,” it should also be noted that this was probably a product of seasonal requirements for varying amounts of labor (giving rise to celebrations such as Oktoberfest in Germany occurring after the harvesting ended). We have no such ‘rhythm’ to our lives. We instead operate on reflexes – even in this class, we reflexively lose points and thus hurt our grade by failing to complete assignments, yet our assignments are provided one after another. And, because students here hopefully seek the best employment possible after graduation, we all participate in the cycle. With our insatiable cultural desire for instant gratification, we have developed numerous institutions that ensure that we make the best available use of our precious time. Consider the effort expended in cooking a hamburger, from buying the meat at the supermarket, to cooking the meat, to serving the burger itself, to finally cleaning the silverware afterwards – if we decided culturally that this traditional approach to sustenance was appropriate, than we would have no need for McDonalds.
Certainly, our goals in the implementation of the deep-fryer or ‘assembly line’ cooking technologies were not to broadly detract from the health of our populace or to reinforce the trend of declining leisure time. In this way, these consequences are secondary consequences to the primary consequence of increased availability of foodstuffs. To this end, we must examine what secondary and tertiary consequences result from more complex technologies. Therefore, as a society it is our responsibility to ensure that we reject technologies have unintended undesirable costs associated with them.
No culture better understands this need for careful evaluation than the Amish. The Amish see a divide between innovation and acceptation of technology, and forcibly reject technologies whose uses detract from their way of life or otherwise are seen as a threat to their primarily agrarian culture. In terms of our responsibility to reject technologies that are detrimental, we too can analyze what is right and wrong about the technologies we adopt in order to protect ourselves from being put in a position where our systems intentionally or unintentionally possess a power over us, as discussed in Langdon Winner’s article.
Ironically, the Amish have experimented with the cultural assimilation of cellular telephones. “Does it bring us together, or draw us apart,” is the question asked by the Amish bishops before opting to approve the use of a technology. Yet, the Amish culture is not authoritarian in it’s rejection of culture. The article anecdotally describes how one particular man had used a cell phone for years because of his business. In this way, new technology is not outright rejected. Rheingold writes, “New things are not outright forbidden, nor is there a rush to judgment. Rather, technologies filter in when one of the more daring members of the community starts to use […] something new.” This cautious but not inhibiting approach to innovation seems especially appropriate in light of news that some of our emerging inventions may be harmful to us – such as nanotechnology.
However, though some Amish communities find the cellular telephone to be a boon rather than a burden, it is my opinion that because our culture embodies ‘essential’ electronic articles such as these, that we in fact have had the same effect caused to us culturally that the automobile had in the 1960s to the Amish – “decreasing the social cohesion.” We answer our cellular phones compulsively as we operate our automobiles because of the social pressures to do so. We surf the web when we should be focused in class simply because we have the capability to access the outside world in an instant. It is thus no surprise that the automobile was considered to be harmful to social order in these communities. Today, in particular, we are all but forced to sign up for AOL� Instant Messenger and “The Face Book,” because our friends seem to all choose to. Yet, why is it that we desire to network with our friends via a computer keyboard rather than in person?
Additionally, what about technologies whose impact is not something that can be qualitatively described by sociologists? What about technologies having quantitative impacts on our way of life, such as mechanized cattle ranching and nanotechnology? The Amish way of life effectively immunizes them from diseases such as CJD. Whereas we consciously choose to consume products that are not grown organically but rather mechanically, the Amish prefer to reject the technologies providing for enhanced cattle feeding at a higher immediate cost in terms of time investment. When Michael Gregor describes the plight of those who actually were diagnosed with CJD, we should at least ask ourselves – even if we are hungry, are we willing to be better fed at the risk of “a living nightmare of terrifying hallucinations”? While it should be noted that I in fact am not vegetarian, and that I do not agree with the author regarding the relative safety of our food supply, I do agree that “until the federal government stops the feeding of slaughterhouse waste, manure, and blood to all farm animals, the safety of meat in America cannot be guaranteed.”
Yet, in so many ways, our technologies have taken us so far. We have immunizations that have indisputably saved an innumerable amount of people, we have technologies to deliver drugs and treat cancers, and we even can travel into space. We are able to exchange information at light speed across continents, providing the potential for infinite inter-exchange between different cultures. Ignoring the shortcomings of nanotechnology (for the sake of argument), consider the potential benefits as listed by the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology: pure drinking water, cheap greenhouses, cheap solar energy, increased computing power, improved medicinal technology. Certainly we cannot ignore the fact that some technologies do indeed bring us to a state at which we are better than before.
The ability to recognize the problem, however, is not as important as the ability to recognize the source of the problem. When technologies hurt us, it is often indirect. For the moment, let us consider instead a particular use of technology that directly led to injury. As with all things corporate, every business decision is weighed (at some level) by its costs and benefits. When a decision is more costly than it is beneficial, pressures from stock holders and stakeholders force corporate executives to directly address the problem and re-tool their company to make things profitable once again. Reflect on the Ford Pinto incident – according to Mark Dowie, “Ford successfully lobbied, with extraordinary vigor and some blatant lies, against a key government safety standard that would have forced the company to change the Pinto’s fire-prone gas tank.” But why filibuster government legislation with a patently good-natured intent? “Ford waited eight years because it’s internal ‘cost-benefit analysis,’ which places a dollar value on human life, said it wasn’t profitable to make the changes sooner.” Certainly, economics played a considerable role here. The blame does not fall on an individual in this case, but rather is distributed because pressures from stock holders demand profit, while pressures from engineers and the public at large demand safety. As with everything in life, it is the point at which the two conflicting stances meet that determines history. Economically, the automobile has had a more positive than negative impact. There are plenty of jobs in manufacturing of the automobile itself, maintenance of the automobile, selling insurance policies to cover liability of operating an automobile, constructing and policing the highways – and the list goes on. Thus, arguably, the automobile has not necessarily been completely a harm to our culture (especially not economically), but has certainly also hurt us in a number of ways because of the economic pressures associated with it.
Political pressures often are a major driving force when considering why we often choose to accept problems with technologies rather than wait for issues to be resolved. Lawmakers are eager to legislate, even when there is no necessary need for new legislation – for example, the designation of official state birds or state songs, when other looming social problems exist. Politicians are particularly concerned with the future of their political career. A politician that affects no change is a lame duck merely waiting to be voted out. George Marshall and Mark Lynas wrote jokingly, about assigning blame, “The south blames the north, cyclists blame car drivers, and almost everyone blames George Bush.” But more seriously, they note that “85 percent of the British public say they are concerned about climate change [yet] domestic energy consumption still rises by 2 per cent per year, cars get bigger, and people boast of their holidays to ever-more-distant resorts.” The point to illustrate here is that even though we may believe that we are truly concerned about these issues, we choose not to focus on them because of the reality that the costs imposed by restructuring our society are too great. No politician that was seriously concerned with their career would dare introduce legislation to ban the use of automobiles, or for that matter even coal energy, because of their positive direct or indirect contributions to our daily lives. Politicians are afraid to ‘bite the bullet’ and enact socially responsible legislation in these regards because they fear the repercussions of their actions and do not want to be blamed. Japan is far more progressive in this sense, as it has already enacted legislation that makes it undesirable to own an automobile that has an unnecessarily large engine. This was not achieved via elected officials however, as it actually came hidden as a change in tax code that imposed a stiff tax liability on car owners that purchased new vehicles that were simply not small enough for the governments liking.
In conclusion our voracious desire for innovation comes at a cost, and while it is important to not become modern day Luddites, it is fundamental to carefully calculate the impacts that our choices will have, and be alert to the use of new technologies that may be injurious to our health, culture or environment.
→ No CommentsTags: Industrial · My Thoughts · Technology
A part of the now defunct Tricon Restauraunt portfolio (now a part of YUM! brands), Pizza Hut pales in comparison amongst its close relatives KFC, Taco Bell and Long John Silvers.
My close friends know that I am a huge fan of Taco Bell. KFC is another form of fast food that I find irresistable — after all, the Colonel was onto something when he figured out how to combine those eleven herbs and spices. And, although I’ve never been a huge fan of seafood, I’ve heard good things about Long John Silvers. Pizza Hut, however, always seemed distant to me. As a child, there was always both a Domino’s and a Pizza Hut in town, but since Pizza Hut didn’t deliver, we rarely ordered from them. In fact, the Pizza Hut in my town had a peculiar drive thru pickup system, in which you would get a number, which would be illuminated on a giant matrix of light-up numbers when your order was ready for pickup at the drive thru window. Overall, it was an ugly device with a uselessly large array of numbers on it, and I remember it to this day.
The other thing that I remember about Pizza Hut was a peculiar experience that I had there as a child, that in a way, suggested to me that Pizza Hut was a safe and happy place — a bastion of dedicated pizza places to be admired the world over. The story goes something as follows: I was a toddler, no older than six or seven years of age. My father took me to the local Pizza Hut, where just him and I were going to eat in. We waited an exorbitantly long time for service, so long that my father began to get upset. When a waitress came by, he pulled her aside and asked if someone could serve us. She politely told us that she’d find someone to help us, and then wandered off to do her job again. After waiting again for a substantial amount of time, we still had not even placed our order yet. This entire process took literally over a half hour, and then after finally obtaining service and placing our order, it seemed that they had forgotten about us entirely. At this point, you may be wondering why this was such a positive experience for me. As it turned out, some kind of regional manager was present in the store that day — not in his normal capacity, but actually as some type of secret shopper. When he saw this entire ordeal taking place, he couldn’t help but wonder if he could make the situation right. He stepped in, and offered us copious amounts of free pizza from Pizza Hut as a way of apologizing for the inconvenience. As a child, I was incredibly happy to hear that we had essentially ‘won’ a bunch of free pizza, and boy was I excited.
Of course, aside from eating out at Pizza Hut with little league teams or other isolated instances, I was rarely a customer. Occasionally, Pizza Hut advertising would catch my eye and draw me in. I can say for a fact that before the other day, the last time I ate Pizza Hut was when they still offered the “P’Zone” (the pizza-calzone hybrid). Again, some advertising had caught my eye — Pizza Hut was offering a “buy one, get additional pizzas for $5 each” deal according to the commercial. The next day, I found myself craving the cool sauce that Pizza Hut lathers their pizza in. It was the Sunday after the heavy snows that we received, and we cautiously headed to North Troy to set our stomachs to sail on a sea of pizza.
When we arrived, all hell broke loose. We found out that the deal we had seen advertised had expired the day prior. This immediately should have triggered warning flags in our minds. After the long drive though, we just decided to order from them anyway. As huge fans of Buffalo Chicken pizza, we all opted for that particular style — at a cost of approximately $17 and change. Upon asking how much pizza that $17 bought us, we were told it would cover a 12-cut pie. A twelve cut pie, mind you.
We were shocked to find out that not only was the ‘buffalo chicken’ pizza nothing more than sparsely added cuts of chicken breast added to a plain pizza, but that the ‘twelve cuts’ were so lean that they could not even satisfy the appetite of a small child.
We were able, amongst the three of us, to consume the entire pie in a few minutes without a problem. This, however, was the problem. When one is already lured in with the deceptive advertising practice of running a commercial in an evening timeslot mere hours before a promotion ends (with no end date specified in any obvious fashion), it’s clear that they should simply walk away from the deal altogether and find something better. This pizza would have been worth $5, perhaps, but certainly not $17. At $5 a pie, I would even have bought more so that I could eat all week. This makes sense to me economically because I like pizza.
I have, however, eaten enough pizza to know that the size of these slices is abysmally small. The pie itself measured only slightly over 12″ in diameter, barely filling its box. As someone that has lived all their life in New York, I can tell you that 12″ is not an appropriate size for a ‘large’ pizza. Even Domino’s, who I disliked because of their own stingy sizing, offers 12″ pizzas as medium-sized. Also, as an Italian, I was insulted to see pizza being exploited in such a fasion. Real New York pizza would never be served like this at any respectable place. Pizza Hut should be ashamed of themselves.
I for one will steer clear of Pizza Hut in the future because of this. I now would much rather support a local pizzeria than return to them. I was so turned off by this experience, that I had to write about it and share it with anyone that is interested.
For those that are inclined to see specific dimensions of a single slice of the ’12 cut’ pie, read on.
Tracing the pizza on the graph paper we can obtain a specific height of somewhere around 3″ if we estimate liberally to make the math easy. Using basic math we know that the area of this triangle can be represented by the equation:
A = 1/2*b*h = 1/2 * 6 in. * 3 in. = 9 sq. in.
Try to remember the last time you purchased a slice of pizza that was this small. I challenge readers to find a deal worse than this.
CONCLUSION: Avoid Pizza Hut and their preposterous premium pizza prices.
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