Posted by CmdrTaco (39% noise) View
An anonymous reader writes “The Palme d’Or of the Festival de Cannes was presented this year by Charlize Theron to Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore. I don’t know if it’s the first time this prize is awarded to a documentary, but I guess it’s rare enough to be mentioned, especially given the problems this film encounters.”
Some factual errors yes, but overall quite good - by shoemakc (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Movies, by nature, are not scholarly works. The power of movies is that they can appeal to a wider audience and more directly manipulate emotions. How often do you see citations in a movie? It’s just not common practice.
That being said, I’d say bowling for columbine was rather good. Yes parts of it exploited sensationalism and there were some factual errors, but it :::did::: raise a number of excellent questions.
Also…give one of Moore’s books a skim sometimes. I wouldn’t have expected it, but Moore does a better job providing evidence for his claims then the supposedly more prestigious Noam Chomsky. Noam likes to make wild claims while assuming you’ll take his word for it…Moore at least cites his sources.
-Chris
What a bunch of pussy footers - by imrdkl (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
This guy is like one of 3 people in our great nation who’s truly willing to get up in the collective face of the administration, and still we have hand-wringing “reasonable” liberals who advise “caution”, and fret about him being a provocateur.
Fuck that. Until the rest of the 150 million or so people who haven’t been utterly brainwashed by this administration find the gonads to say something more than, “But, he has no exit plan..”, Moore is the mouthpiece of the home of the brave, as far as I’m concerned.
before somebody asks… - by SmellsLikeFish (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
four of the nine jurors were American: Mr. Tarantino, Kathleen Turner, the director Jerry Schatzberg, and the Haitian-born novelist Edwidge Danticat. one juror, the actress Emanuelle Béart, is a French citizen, British actress Tilda Swinton, Benoit Poelvoode, a Belgian actor; Peter von Bagh, a Finnish critic; and the Hong Kong director Tsui Hark made up the rest of the jury. taken from here
Censorship - by Punchinello (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Gosh, how do you post to this thread without looking like a troll?
I know the topic of censorship is near and dear to the Slashdot community. I hope people can see that the right wing has a history of using money to censor media outlets in this country. This is a good example of that as is the holy war the FCC has declared on broadcasters.
The liberals in this country want open and free discussion. the conservatives think that they can get away with censoring the liberals by labeling everything opposed to them as indecent.
Want more information on the republican campaign to quiet the liberal voice check out howardstern.com. (warning, site may be offensive to compassionate conservatives).
Yes!! - by Yuioup (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
This is beautiful, really beautiful.
The French were a bit apprehensive because it looked like the US seemed to be taking over the prestigeous festival with their blockbusters and the like, leaving the “other” movies (or what you Americans would call “Foreign Film” movies) largely unnoticed.
Well the Americans did, even awarding an anti-Bush movie top merits. It looks like they were finally able to say the things that they’ve wanted to for a long time now, but were afraid to back home (look at Moore’s reception at the Oscars) and used the Cannes Film Festival for that purpose.
This is history in the making. I’m really curious to see what the American public is going to make of this movie and what they will do next.
Posted by timothy (33% noise) View
iosdaemon writes “didtheyreadit.com claims to be able to track your sent email: “When, exactly, your email was opened. How long your email remained opened. Where, geographically, your email was viewed. DidTheyReadIt works with every single internet provider and e-mail account, including EarthLink, AOL, NetZero, Juno, Netscape, Hotmail, Yahoo, and much more.” Read on for more.
“This appears to be snake oil. I put it to test just in case someone had come up with some magical code. I sent email from a Yahoo.com account through the service, to an account on a Linux Box. Running tcpdump, I received the email from my pop and let 5 minutes pass before opening it. I left the message open with the cursor in the text for another 5 minutes. Tcpdump revealed absolutely no questionable traffic. And, the service control panel indicated the email had not been viewed. Sending email to a Yahoo.com account results in a ‘read’ in the service CP. But I had the message open for 10 minutes, and it indicated a 2-minute read…”
The company’s “How it works” page explains the system to some degree; it involves redirecting all mail to be tracked through their servers by appending “didtheyreadit.com” to your recipient’s email address. I doubt this is mutt-compatible … Reader xrxzzy points out USAToday’s article on the service as well.
get your privacy back easily - by xlyz (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
just set your mail client to not download images
Single pixel gif? - by ilikejam (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Sounds to me like they just embed a simgle pixel gif in the message, and monitor when they recieve the request for it.
How they monitor the length of time the mail stays open is a bit of a mystery.
Turn off ‘Download images’ and I’d imagine their system becomes useless.
Wasn’t there a scare about spam merchants doing this once?
Re:Single pixel gif? - by Neon Spiral Injector (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
The time is probably calculated by not actually sending the image file, or sending it very slowly. So they just keep the HTTP session open, then note when the client closes. That would limit the tracking time to when the connection times out. Like the author said, he left the Yahoo mail open for 10 minutes and it only reported 2.
An additional note, Yahoo does have an option to disable remote images, which would also break this.
Seems this company is too late to the party. Almost all current e-mail clients now don’t or have an option to not to load remote images.
How it ‘works’ - by ZiZ (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
This is nothing more than off-site image tracking, as has been seen in spam for ages and ages. Here’s an example of the image it adds:
<img src=“http://didtheyreadit.com/index.php/worker?cod e=2f985e815bd2b46450e 07957611ab6c9” width=“1” height=“1” /> So not only will it not work in text-based email clients (such as mutt), it won’t work in modern versions of Outlook which block inline images by default. (It was nice enough to leave my plain-old-text message - “blah blah blah” - alone in the original format, as well as adding a text/html mangled version.)
Re:How it ‘works’ - by amembleton (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
From the ‘How It Works’ page: Will my recipient know that I am tagging my e-mail?
No. Not unless you want them to know.
As I suspected, they are just using a tracking image, sometimes I look at the source of messages (sad, I know), then I would know if I was being tracked. That saves me opening an account to see how they were going to do this.
I always view my email as Plain Text using Mozilla, so this wouldn’t work unless I decided to switch back to HTML. I made some of these tracking images once and tried it out. I found that browsers were cacheing them, so it wouldn’t always register if it was viewed in a webmail acount.
Do you really need this company to track your e-mails? If you have access to a webserver, you can insert a web bug into the body of your e-mail message and you'll be able to track it forever. If you are (still) using Outlook, you can write a macro to insert the webbug in your signature. It is not that tough... If you are using Linux, it is even simpler as your SMTP-agent can systematically add the web bug to all outgoing e-mails... A simple Perl script can parse the log of an Apache server, extract the entries generated by the web bugs you put in your outgoing e-mail, process them to find out the reading time, how long it took the recipient to read the e-mail, location of the reader and then publish everything through an RSS feed. I should try it out... ;-)
