Be Excellent To Each Other

Mind bogglingly I've just discovered that Advertisements on the Internet, include banner ads and pop-up ads count but not claims on companies own website.

So you can spout whatever shit you like on your products on your own website.

Astonishing.

Yup. This was always a useful loophole for the multi-national cosmetics company I used to be an in-house lawyer for (as well as doing their contracts work, we used to have to check all of their advertising and packaging in conjunction with some scientists).

However, under the ASA's rather tortuous rules on viral marketing, if you include a link to your website in a DM email, it arguably brings your website under the ASA's purview... Time to check if this company does email marketing, perhaps?

It's been done before, but when I was due to go on a break so they can't find me upstairs. Makro customers do tend be a little bit more proactive in coming to hunt you down than most. If only they put that much energy in to researching their purchases before they came, eh?

I personally research using the Internet, ask people I trust their opinions, then research some more. If the guy in the shop says anything I just disregard it. I do most of my shopping online anyway

It's like invisible lead soup.

Hey, rather than the ASA, perhaps a letter to the Bad Science guy in the Guardian might be worth a try? Anything that would stop him going on about fish oil trials would be good, anyway.
It's kind of on a level with making up psychiatric diseases to sell medication for.

"Dirty Electricty" and "Graham Stetzer" seem to appear next to each other a lot on net searches.... is he just spreading FUD in the hope of selling some fancy power packs?

Me and him are like that man.

Well not at all. But he has a lovely website and forum here. I'm far, far too proud of the tiny link he gives my rubbish blog on his front page (way, way at the bottom, under posse).

I'll mention on his forum tomorrow, and see what they think.

http://www.dirtyelectricity.org/health-issues.shtml
http://www.electricalpollution.com/

Those two sites are the biggest load of horse shit I've ever read. It actually made me angry to read it. It's pure psuedo science bullshit. They quote completely out of context facts and then say complete toss right after doing so. To an impressionable audience I imagine it reads like the unadultered TRUTH. It's actually made me angry to read it.

Well I hope it's better than the viral marketing this company are doing. Someone on Popbitch just received this casting email:

"We are casting a 2 minute viral for Momentum Pictures to promote the upcoming movie 'Teeth' for which they are the distributors.

'Teeth' is a witty horror movie about a girl with a 'Vagina Dentata' or toothed vagina. This thankfully mythical condition appears in folk tales or cautionary tales about the dangers of sleeping with strange women!

The premise of the viral campaign is to claim that 'Vagina Dentata' is in fact a real condition! It will be viewed in the context of a fictitious health website offering practical advice to women and their partners on this rather sensitive issue. The viral will take the form of a short documentary, thus absolute realism and total sincerity is the key to the actors performances.'"

"Heavy Electricity"

That teeth thing has been going for a few months now, right?
Also; I'm actually really angry about this electricity thing. Thankfully this SA thread has saved me having to get even more worked up: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showth ... id=2795040

God Bless the Goons.

I'm going out in a moment, so I'll look at these properly tomorrow. But they seem disgusting. The thing with this always is you have to work out how 'big' they are. But if the guy is selling stuff...

EDIT: Oooh the goon link looks great.

http://www.badscience.net/?p=425
http://www.badscience.net/?p=239

The guy you were on about seems to have already done something on EMF. Infact he puts down a product that's even more horse shit. (A microcontroller that uses a 'holograph' to defend your house from EMF. Excellent! I'll buy 10!!!)

Thing is, those kind of places have their sales people on commission, or on some kind of "sell X amount this month or you're fired" type employment, so I'm not surprised they con the fuck out of customers when they can. I would, if it meant the only thing keeping a roof over my head. (Not that it excuses it, mind. The whole system's rotten.)

Or if it meant Ting Tong not running back to Thailand I suppose. [shudders at the memory]

The saw the excellent new Transformers cartoon series today. Featured Soundwave. Saw it too?

You should have asked how these 'electricity cleaners' would affect a Homeplug LAN.

Can you all shut up about the science and tell me where I can get one of these cables?

Mrs Grim... has already installed them silly.

What cables? An electricity cleaning one? They don't really exist, see....

Interestingly, having 'switched' appliances (portable telephone charger docks etc) on the same 6-gang as my homeplugs fucks my LAN throughput.

You're meant to put homeplugs straight into a wall socket, are you not?

I'm gonna stick mine next to the A1 canvas print i won, next to the press photo, recieviing the canvas print I won, on the 20th April when the FIA GT are at silvertone, I'm a cunt, aren't I?

eh?
I've really lost track of this thread. What cables and what is MailA on aboot?

Yeah, but they're too fucking big to get anything else in a double socket. Plus it's my media center, so I need the trailer bars for my TV, amp, Wii, PC, and Sky box.....

See, my Homeplugs are plugged into strips, one of which is a surge protector, and it's completely fine.

No wait, I noticed the other night that it's struggling to give me 4 of its superleet 200 mbps. Annoyingly, the sockets in the corner of the bedroom are 2 feet up the wall and directly face the bed. Having twinkling green LEDs blaring at us all night wouldn't go down well with my girlfriend.

Much testing is in order - they're separated by the breakerbox as well, so might even be on different rings.

Black insulation tape IS YOR FREIND.

And it doesn't matter if they're on different rings, does it?

Sorry, I might have been drinking last night. I've a headache. However I did finish another race series on Forza.

Doh! I never think of the simple ideas.


It can, apparently.

Fucksticks - move the Homeplugs to wall sockets, speed ups to 6mbps. Move the bedroom one into the living room, on the next socket pair along - 25.6mbps, which is still pretty crappy, given the "100mbps LAN being passed over 200mbps HomePlug"-ness, even allowing for Windows networking being a stinking pile of shit; I'd still expect to be able to read at more than 3.2MB/sec from my NAS. So - dodgy HomePlugs? Really fucking shitty electrics (over the short distance - clearly "fucking shitty" for the massive crapness at the other end of the flat)? Both?

Edit: Hm, looks like 7-zip is pretty inefficient at writing data; testing the archive instead of properly extracting got me 3.9MB/sec. Just copying a 715MB file took 2m25s, so around 39.5mbps. Still pretty shitty, across 2 metres.

Edit: A steady 25mbps from the massively inconvenient socket by the bedroom door. Which dropped to a wavy 6mbps when I plugged my Samsung phone charger back in next to it. Unplugging that again and back to the socket by the telly/360 - a reasonably steady ~18mbps. No difference with the strip they're on turned off at the wall. Wow, that's some shitty unloaded transformer (yes yes, leaving an unloaded transformer in a turned-on socket, I know). Still not really happywith that but it's an improvement.

DIRTY ELECTRISITY IN YOUR WIREZ, STEALIN UR BANDWIDZ@@!

Yeah, it's all true, I'm ordering a Monster thing immediately.

I've read this entire thread but understood about 14% of it.

So.. My internet will go faster if I plug something into a different socket?

You lot are sooo crazy!

I've learned that sticking things in the mains is a quick way to exploding mains.

Yes, if you are using the mains system as your network cable.
No if not.