Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Intuit, Telemetry, Meetup
I'd prefer an apology from the IRS. Rico writes "Intuit have spoken out about the CD-protection methods of their TurboTax software. According to them, the protection is harmless to computers and does not erase data. Despite the huge negative customer feedback, Intuit are still profiting from the product."
Train the dog, then never call the command. Mitch Wagner writes "Barry Shein, subject of this week's /. interview, proposes in "ISP Head Floats Plan To Legalize Spam" that spam is impossible to block, and so instead should be legitimized and regulated, with a central, not-for-profit company charged with collecting fees from spammers and distributing those fees to ISPs that receive the spam. Of course, there have been many other plans for charging spammers to send spam, but those plans mostly have the fees going to the ISP that sends the e-mail, or to the user that receives the mail, rather than the ISP that receives it and has to deliver it to the end-users. I'm the author of the piece I link to in this article."
Make big money as an open source telemetrist! For anyone who missed it in the Science section, there's a great followup to the Linux-based home-brewed weather balloon we recently featured: the OpenTRAC project is looking for help in building an APRS-like protocol. If that's gibberish to you, check out their introduction to the protocol to get an idea of how it's useful. Future experimenters will thank you.
One good deed escapes punishment. Psyiode writes with a link to this story at the Houston Chronicle which begins "Jurors needed only about 15 minutes to acquit a Houston man who was accused of hacking into the Harris County district clerk's wireless computer system in March. One juror, Helen Smith, 62, said she and the other jurors found that Stefan Puffer indeed hacked into the system but they did not believe he caused any damage as the government had alleged."
Puffer was arrested last summer for demonstrating that the county court's wireless LAN wasn't secure, and telling them about it.
Do we need manned spaceflight? Professor_Quail writes "The BBC has a story on NASA's plans for a successor to the Space Shuttle. From the article: Nasa has revealed its first set of mission criteria for the Orbital Space Plane (OSP) - the series of space vehicle expected to replace the space shuttle from 2012. The new spacecraft's primary function will be to ferry crews to and from the International Space Station (ISS) and serve as a lifeboat if the station has to be evacuated."
Or do you have other plans? Finally, rufo writes "For those of you brave enough to weather the elements and meet your fellow geek, don't forget that the Slashdot Meetup is this Thursday at 7PM your local time zone. I've been to a couple and there's some rather interesting characters that show up, and the conversations are quite engaging. Highly recommended if you have nothing better to do on a Thursday evening." Hmmm, must check to see if there's one around Knoxville ...
damn you! i was so close, so close...
Of course Intuit is profiting - their competition sucks. Anyone manage to get an upgrade to successfully download from taxcut.com?
It keeps reminding me that I STILL have to do my taxes, why can't I read slashdot when I get home and can remember it there.
I guess I just have to much to do at home and not enough to do at work, or is it that my priorities are out of whack?
moo.
I bet everyone is very corteous, civilized and good-manered. Nobody says "fuck you" or tells you you're a "dumbass" while hiding under a table. No asbestos suits are used or otherwise present. They all shake hands in the end and promise to send postcards.
Then on Monday it's open warfare again.
Instead of focusing on the dangerous space station, we should revive our plans to walk on Mars. Mars is virgin territory, and that excites me.
I have no idea how these people think spammers would volunteer to be regulated and pay more. Even given the prescribed system the current bulk mailing methods will still work and still be cheaper.
I seriously doubt most of these guys care at all about regulations or laws given the lame illegel or immoral crap I see flooding my inbox.
I emailed their PR contact, and posted their reply to both the original slashdot story and my journal.
Despite the huge negative customer feedback, Intuit are still profiting from the product.
how is this a big shock? yes there were many up in arms and angry, but how many average users even know what the dangers and such are in writing to the boot sector? people will still buy because they dont really understand what the dangers might be (yes, i am aware that they have reported no dangers, but im still skeptical).
xao
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
"Harmless" to your computer in that it doesn't catch on fire, yes. "Harmless" as in not breaking other programs, no.
yeah, now if only i had a reminder about my cable bill. Oh, there's one.
If the first person to the meetup says something and nobody else is there to hear, does said person really have first post?
I must've missed the period where it stopped being dangerous. Maybe when there wasn't any?
We (few) Geeks in Prescott AZ need to remeber to vote on the meetup location.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
...yummy!!!
Nope, no sig
Why do people keep buying this stuff when they're just going to complain about it? There's plenty of software out there that doesn't do this kind of stuff, and one does have options besides software for tax preparation. Use the alternatives, and quit funding the companies that don't have any respect for your property. Technically speaking, this is far more innocuous than monkeying in the Windows Registry.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
After reading previous Slashdot posts regarding TurboTax activation and CDilla issues plus reviews from Walter Mossberg and others, I bought TaxCut this year.
I was able to install on 2 machines and print forms from either one. I'm gonna file later this week, and I won't be doing it from the machine I did the original install on. Couldn't have done that with TurboTax. Only TaxCut gotcha is that the rental property assistant isn't that good at reading data from last year's TurboTax return.
Seems pretty nice. The best part is, you don't have to pay a dime until you get to the printing/filing part, so you can try it out and see if it suits you. No DRM/platform hassles that I can see; it works in Safari, Chimera and Internet Explorer on my Mac OS X box. The basic version is only $20 (+ $15 for your state forms), which seems to be worth the hassle of puzziling over the IRS's forms and all the different classifications you could possibly fall under (I'm in a slightly odd situation though, so the 1040EZ may wind up being a cheaper choice if there's nothing funky you have to do...) Here's the link if people are interested: http://www.turbotax.intuit.com/welcome/perm/banner 11/welcome.htm.
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
So at this meeting will there be any hot slashdot gir....oh.. nevermind..
sigh.
-=SiGH=-
Do we really need to spent millions (billions?) of $ just for saying "we were on mars"?
I think the money should be used somewhere else where its actually useful.
Space traveling was "cool" some decades ago because it was the first time a human stood on another orb - but right now noone cares.
We already know how it looks on mars, we sent robots there and stuff. And we know there isn't anything actually useful. (Oh, c'mon, i dont think some dead cells which were probably brought from earth anyway are "useful" - would be interessting but it wouldn't legitimate the costs IMHO)
I cant see much difference to seeing how your hamster behaves in zero gravity.
Oh, and i think flying to mars is far more dangerous than living on the ISS
If it is impossible to effectively block the spam, why does Mr. Shein believe it would be reasonably easy to collect on spam? Spammers are just not the type to be honest. Does he think they are going to start using real "From:" addresses and stop using open relays and throw-away accounts?
The strange part of the article is this:
Key to the success of the plan would be the participation of the major consumer Internet service providers... If those companies banded together and threatened to cut bulk-mailers off from their recipients -- combining that threat with the incentive of easier access to the recipients if the bulk mailers pay a reasonable fee -- bulk mailers would have no choice but to go along with it.
Get real. These ISPs have been cutting bulk-mailers off from their recipients the best they can already. So by the whole premise of spam being impossible to filter, Mr. Shein contradicts the feasability of the idea. We could go after spammers who do not pay if such a plan were enacted. But really, we can go after spammers now in many states and we all know how well that works. Good luck trying to collect Mr. Shein. If I get spam from your ISP because you are tryin a "make it legit" experiment, I will be sure to forward it back to you.
Are trolls invited?
"Despite the huge negative customer feedback, Intuit are still profiting from the product." (sic)
[sarcasm]Well its nice to know the nerd and IT community's opinion means exactly DICK to the rest of the American population.[/sarcasm]
At least my mom took my advice, although TacAct is an ad-laden POS as well. She asked why it was such a big deal. I had to explain the boot track as "if computers had private parts, this would be one."
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Just a thought... I'm a student at Carnegie Mellon. We have /. meetups every day...they're called "class". ;)
It's ridiculous to say that you would need to touch the boot sector to provide a safeguard for your product. You're a program for crimony sakes !!
Maybe this'll affect my Karma, but I say let's have a Turbo Tax CD burning. Or maybe everyone ought to send their CD's back and ask for a refund all at the same time. Or, maybe some more clever lawyer out there, will see this and smell "Class Action". Maybe they should've let M$ buy them out a few years ago, then at least they'd have an argument by saying they're "part of the OS", like M$ has said IE is supposed to be.
This idea to let ISPs charge for spam is preposterous. Shein is just looking to make money out of our discomfort. He argues that charging is a better solution because you can't stop spam - but if you can find a spammer to charge him then you can just as easily find him to stop him and make him pay a fine.
Red alert everybody, if he gets enough industry support behind this idea and throws enough money at Washington, we'll *never* see an end to the spam.
Even with ISP charging, spam will always be cheaper than traditional mail and most other forms of advertising, and if legalized in this way I strongly suspect that we'll see the quantity of spam increase rather than the opposite.
we see Quicken commercials for our Linux pc's?
;)
Then I'll KNOW it's time to switch over to gnu/hurd!
In Canada MYOB software was sold to Intuit. .... well buying different software. This helpful advice came strait from a support call.
They now no longer support any payroll tax table updates and a bunch of other things that basically make the software useless. However, even with these horrendous omissions, they are as of today, still selling the software at full retail in stores across the country.
Lucky customers purchasing this software and want full functionality now have the option of
This is FRUAD and these clowns should be charged criminally. I will never by an Intuit product for as long as I live.
Trips to Mars
We need them now
Oh please, NASA
Tell the Chinese how
Away they go
Into the sky
Their angle of re-entry, oh no!
They burn up and die die
So here's to space travel
It litters the orbit with metal of hunk
So that's what I pay taxes for?
I'd prefer a kick to the junk.
He took a reporter and presumably obtained a DHCP lease on the county's LAN and he's tried as a hacker? Everyone in IT Security knows that nobody does anything unless they are publicly embarrased about it. In the case of Microsoft, sometimes not even then. Taking a reporter also seems like a good way to prove your intentions are honourable.
I guess unless I am missing some critical aspect of the case the lesson here for the patriotic American to learn is that if you see a hole in the country's critical infrastructure, you should ignore it and move on.
I wouldn't want to be this guy. If there is this much fuss over an insecure 802.11b access point I can just imagine the trouble you could get in for walking around Los Alamos.
Lesse, I'm a spammer, I can spam people almost for free by stealing services from a bunch of folks who live half way around the globe ... or I can pay a comparably huge sum of cash and be perceived as a legitimate bulk mailer of my herbal viagra and penis enlargers.
Right.
Message for Barry Shein @ TheWorld ISP -- Stick to mission statements.
Cheers,
-- RLJ
I guess it wont be long before free email goes the way of the dodo. I can see all the network execs thinking "why the hell aren't we getting $$ out of this? " BTW, I know email is not free ofcourse we pay the ISP, the phone or the cable company or whatever but we *still* can send an unlimited number of mails..
While I understand that selecting a successor to the Space Shuttle is an important task, there is a much more important issue at hand: where will NASA get its next generation of visionary rocket scientists, to take us to Mars and beyond?
Many current NASA astronauts, scientists, and technicians first became interested in space exploration as a result of the "Space Race" in the 60s, and, later, grew and maintained their interest thoughout their adolescence by participating in the hobby of model rocketry.
After the space race ended, model rocketry started to decline, but the emergence of high power rocketry in the 80s and 90s revitalized the hobby, and brought back many "Born Again Rocketeers", or BARs, into the hobby; these are people who flew model rockets as kids, and rediscovered the hobby later in life. Many of these BARs are now introducing the hobby to a new generation, and passing on their inspiration.
Now, in the middle of a resurgence of interest, the hobby is in danger of being killed by overzealous overregulation. Due to a combination of misclassification of the most common hobby rocket propellant (Ammonium Perchlorate Composite Propellant) as an explosive (instead of a flammable solid) by ATF, and background checks being mandated by the Homeland Security Act for any employees of companies that ship explosives, shippers like UPS have decided to stop carrying "explosives" altogether, meaning that rocket motors are now virtually impossible to ship, even by UPS ground.
Bottom line, this, and other similar regulations, are leading to the demise of rocketry as a safe, educational hobby. The next generation of rocket scientists will simply not exist.
However, there is hope. Efforts are underway to push a bill through Congress to explicitly exempt the materials used in the hobby of rocketry, when they are used for rocketry (i.e.: non-weapon) uses.
What is needed is a groundswell of support from concerned citizens, supporting this effort. There are complete details on this effort at http://www.space-rockets.com/congress.html, along with a number of talking points you may wish to incorporate into faxed letters to your Senators.
The bill hasn't been introduced yet, but should be this week some time. If you decide to join in, and send a letter, please wait until the notice is posted on http://www.space-rockets.com/congress.html before doing so. That way, the messages will have the most effect (and your senator may have some idea what you're talking about, as there will be a bill on the subject up for debate...).
If you want to help keep the dream alive, I encourage you to read the background info at that site, and join in this worthy effort.
Thanks,
- Rick "Rocket Geek" Dickinson
It is not a question of *how* people use the software it is a question of how Intuit deceived their customers by covertly installing Macrovision C-Dilla.
"In all the test systems they set up, they didn't find any appreciable deterioration in performance for any of the computer systems they tested," Allanson said.
Excuse me? I'll make the determination of what 'appreciable deterioration' *is* on *my* PCs.
One thing that Intuit is learning the hard way is not to listen to so-called 'experts' like Allanson's think tank. It is what your customers think and believe that is important. I used to use Quicken (for the last 6 years) and TurboTax (for the last three tax seasons). After several recent annoyances with Quicken and TurboTax's covert use of the Macrovision C-Dilla (Safecast) license manager was more than enough to push me toward using Microsoft's Money software and to use Klipenger's TaxCut software.
Piss your customers off and you'll be looking for new markets no matter *how* incorrect the consumers perceptions of the product's deficiencies are.
Why do people keep buying this stuff when they're just going to complain about it?
Exactly.
Some years ago, at 1 AM on a weeknight, on a back-country road on the south side of Austin, I saw the most incredible traffic jam I've ever seen.
I live in Dallas. I've driven in Los Angeles. I've seen some traffic jams.
What made this incredible is that it was also the politest traffic jam I've ever seen. Everyone was having a good time, no one was arguing, no horns were honking.
That road ran by Bergstrom Air Force Base, by the ramp. The Shuttle transporter 747, with a Shuttle on its back, was sitting on the ramp overnight. Everyone in that traffic jam wanted to see the Shuttle.
I wish I'd taken some pictures of the crowd, to give to the people who MISTAKENLY believe that "nobody is interested in space." There sure were a lot of "nobody" out on that road at 1 AM that night.
Doesn't the new shuttle look a lot sturdier? Seems like it could handle atmospheric maneuvering a lot easier.
I'm curious what changes will be made to this design as a result of the Columbia tragedy.
I'm not buying it.
I do, however, feel sorry for the people who buy it and then find out that it wouldn't run after they upgraded their hard disk and did a bit-copy of their C: and D: partitions to prevent problems -- or after having a system failure that required a full restore.
They're making money with -- or without DRM. All DRM does is kill consumer freedom.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
from the possums-are-harmless-and-tasty dept.
Yet another Slashdot 'editor' that cannot spell simple words correctly. The proper spelling is "opossum." Welcome to 3rd-grade english class.
"Why do people keep buying this stuff when they're just going to complain about it? "
how the fuk are you supposed to know it does that unless you by it
"Technically speaking, this is far more innocuous than monkeying in the Windows Registry."
Technically speaking, no, it very much isn't. Programs are *supposed* to add information to the registry when they're installed/run, that's the entire point of the registry. This is not true of the boot sector.
NASA should get on with X-39. Forget about the X-38 designs -- it was put on the chopping block for too long and now newer technology could be used. If more funding for X-38 had succeeded, then it should all be transferred to the newest program for X-39.
I suggest you read Slashdot
"We did it that way because we don't want to eat up disk space, and we wanted to make it easier if people had to restore from a backup.
Just how do you manage to restore data that never gets backed up?
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
If you want to be brutally practical, the ultimate reason for space exploration is simple: survival of the human species.
Species are able to survive disasters that strike their ecological niches by the simple expedient of being elsewhere. When a flood wipes out all of the creatures living in one particular meadow, the creatures in the next meadow over carry on as though nothing had happened.
Given the fact that, on a sufficiently long time scale, the odds of a worldwide ecological disaster (such as a "planet killer" asteroid, or a nuclear war) eventually approach certainty, it's absolutely imperative for the survival of "earthlings" that we start working towards a goal of spreading out, and taking steps to move beyond this one rock.
Disasters do happen, however infrequently. As every good sysadmin knows, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
Let's plan for the big one, and set up a RAIL (Redundant Array of Independent Lifeforms).
Possum seems correct enough.
If the sales are the same as last year, when they didn't have this problem, then I would say that next year, they should remove it considering the "small but vocal" group's objection to it. I mean, if it was supposed to cut down on piracy, and yet, the market share remains the same even with this flap, then it probably bothered the neither the consumers nor the pirates. So why bother?
So which Teletubby was the gay one?
So, why did they use activation in the 1st place? Presumably to reduce sharing or the illegal selling of the software. Thus, more people will buy the software, and Intuit makes more money...
I would imagine that there sales would go up; that's the whole point, after all. If sales drop or they stay the same, it then brings to bear the question, "what's the point."
Now, according to Intuit (via C|Net), 'Bennett added that Intuit's share of the tax preparation software market stands at 69.3 percent, almost identical to its market share at the same point in the tax season last year. "While it's still too early to declare victory, all the signs are positive...and we're on track for another great consumer tax season," he said.'
Conclusion: The copy-protection software is completely usless! It did not help Intuit increase sales. Instead, sales remained at the same level and support costs went up!
Good job Intuit. You just proudly demonstrated the utter lack of utility of complicated copy-protection schemes on a $20 piece of software.
Yes, that's pretty gosh-darned compelling. Next time you are accused of a crime, don't ask what the punishment might be. After all, that would be exactly the same as admitting you are guilty. Sounds like something out of Kafka's "The Trial".
Unless, of course, it's my 5 year old son.
OK, I'll admit it: I didn't read the entire book. I mean, I tried, but after a while my eyes blurred over and I just skimmed the rest of the chapters. Zzzzzzz... Thank goodness for smarmy sarcasm. Now there's a philosophy you can build a career on.
to track zero problem," he said. "We did it that way because we don't want to eat up disk space, and we wanted to make it easier if people had to restore from a backup."
Good grief! Intuit must think that users out there are total morons if they expect them to believe that load of malarky. And since when have these bloatware companies been interested in saving a few megabytes, much less kilobytes of disk space?
why ya gotta be a GNU-playa hatah, brah?
"We did it [write to track 0] that way because we don't want to eat up disk space..." Thank goodness because my 40GB hard drive couldn't spare the sapce.
Because if we don't invest in space travel, we'll never find out if aliens really do speak English and look human except for a bump and a mark here and there.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
At my state college, seems like noone uses linux/does interesting programming or electronic projects.
I want your education; I want your environment!
-------
Incite and flee.
All I know is, my CPA never touches my boot sector. I have fixed his computers a few times, though. And he doesn't get me audited and stuck owing the IRS tens of thousands of dollars later on the way TurboTax has done to some of my friends.
Intuit was a great company a few years back. I was proud to partner with them om some things. But everything they've done lately has been pathetic.
I only keep NYB on track 0, but I'll be damned if I'll let Intuit store their garbage there too! And besides, what if products A, B, C, D, and E all want to store their stuff there too? It's not elegant, but a bad idea.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
I was born there! No clue that any /. types would be there ;-)
We are not going back to the "original plan." A hell of a lot was learned from the Shuttle fleet. One of the most important payoffs from flying the Shuttle was the experience gained in reprocessing reusable vehicles. This information will be integrated into OSP and all other future reusable spaceflight vehicles.
OSP would suffer from many of the Shuttles' problems if we had built it in 1975 and stacked it on top of Saturn Vs. We'd now instead be discussing when we were going to replace the expensive and risky OSP.
By the way, in case anyone is confused, OSP was planned before we lost Columbia. People have been discussing this for the past year, and the proposal went to Congress in the Fall.
I'm completely fed up with IT weenies on Slashdot pontificating on how the space program should be run. Most don't know shit about space exploration beyond what they've read on Slashdot, CNN, and in Discover. Not only do they not understand how to evaluate courses for the future, they don't actually understand what the planning failures were in the past!!!!
All the uninformed bull on Slashdot is really starting to drive me crazy.
It seems that they have assumed that everyone uses Windows only, and only addresses sector 0 issues from that point of view. Their study does not address any complications that their software may cause with alternative bootloaders, etc...
Has anyone experimented with TurboTax with GRUB or LILO? I'm interested in your results.
So... which one will you be at? ;)
Cheers!
Why haven't ISP's started limiting the amount and speed with which you can send email. Most people send to maybe a dozen others at once tops. Why don't they set a 100 (25?) address limit per hour or something. One mail would go full speed, 50 would go at half speed, etc...(and flag users/sysop if it goes over! This would help reduce virus attacks!) Comercial sites like Slashdot, could get a business account with higher limits and certian responsibility expected!
Simply slowing down the system would stop most spammers. You can only send 2400 emails in a day from a user account. To send millons would take days--costing them money! Also, ISP's should limit incomming traffic in a similar fashion. Again, watch headers and if too many come at once, drop 'um!
I can't see any legitimate use for normal users to have that kind of power. Legitimate users of newsgroups, non-profits, commercial sites could get a special flag from the ISP to allow full-speed access.
They key is for them to DO SOMETHING! They don't have to broadcast everyting, just start slipping in the filters a little at a time.
Also, if ISPs get paid for receiving spam, won't that encourage them to create more spam to send to themselves/each other? I really don't think adding another revenue stream to spam is going to fix the problem.
Brooks
I'm glad I've got floor tickets for Metallica.
Thank you. That is all.
Tomorrow's rocket scientists will likely come in large part from India, Pakistan, and China, countries looking to build the bigger better missile. Those countries are going to give incentive for engineers to go into rocketry programs, because that is a priority of theirs, and they will fund it accordingly.
When it comes to Rocketry, Military need is going to produce more rocket scientists than will sheer enthusiasm, and to that end, shed no tears, the US military will always want that shinier rocket that can turn corners and stop on a dime.
Your average kid may not grow up playing with model rockets, because he can't get his hands on the materiel, but I'm sure he'll take the tuition break and a career in rocketry if it's offered him.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My favorite quote from the cnet article on Intuit's financial situation:
Bennett added that Intuit's share of the tax preparation software market stands at 69.3 percent, almost identical to its market share at the same point in the tax season last year. "While it's still too early to declare victory, all the signs are positive...and we're on track for another great consumer tax season," he said.
So, you implement this new technology because 2/3rds of the tax returns using your software may be from pirated copies. This new technology rapes peoples hard drives, (whether it causes damage or not, it "touches" in in private places.) So now that 2/3rds has to buy a copy or not use it.
And after all this effort, taking a risk of pissing off many many people, you didn't convert any market share? Did all the pirates buy something else? And you are on track?
Someone's head should roll. It nice to make a little more profit (they are) but if your going to rape the public, but the goal was to make more CUSTOMERS, too. More market share. A _LOT_ more money.
These morons screwed the public and couldn't squeek a single 1% more market share doing it.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Look. It's a trade off. Go to Carnegie-Mellon, meet other geeks and commiserate. Go to a state university, meet some kindergarten teachers-in-training and get some shaggin' done. You can't have it both ways, or can you?
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Correct enough for a Slashdot editor, anyway...
I for one am glad to see that this man wasn't punished. He saw a vulnerability checked it out, and alerted the people(I hope I have that right). If anything the man should be thanked. What if someone malicious had come along. If they had things could have been bad. Because of this vulnerability with Wireless networks, I choose to keep my home network hardwired. Now I just wish that guy with the laptop outside my house would realize I don't have a wireless network and go away.
FOML: Rise to Power
if they had the backup on another computer(or a cd, etc, etc, etc), and the computer the software is installed on had its harddrive, yes, what you said would be completely true, BUT, if windows just decided to, ummm, be windows :), and die, then the software would see the data written on the HD, provided the HD wasn't wiped clean.
I'd prefer an apology from the IRS. Rico writes "Intuit have spoken out about the CD-protection methods of their TurboTax software. According to them, the protection is harmless to computers and does not erase data. Despite the huge negative customer feedback, Intuit are still profiting from the product."
LIARS! Computer data has been replaced! Binary data on the harddrive's MBR, whether implied as used or not, has been replaced! Just because the MBR isn't part of the filesystem does NOT constitute the MBR as not being data. There is not any specification for marking space on a harddrive as used or not used; it is either binary 0 or binary 1 and TurboTax has unethically and immorally modified the harddrive's MBR with extreme prejudice and without consideration! Intuit, this means WAR! IRS, I've always recognized you as maintaining WAR and this is just another bullet aimed at normal hard-working people!
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
Privatizing manned space flight is our best hope for reducing costs and improving safety (look at how well it worked for manned heavier-than-air flight inside the atmosphere!) -- but how should one get the ball rolling? Several SSTO manned programs flourished in the heady investment-rich days of the .com bubble, but now that the economy is in the tank, it's pretty hard to get investment dollars for blue-sky (black-sky?) projects. The technology to build a new rocket is pretty straightforward these days, regardless of what folks would have you believe. After all, Sputnik flew nearly 50 years ago. At that time, television was the latest, greatest consumer technology. I'd like to think we've advanced a little since then.
Wow, Jon Katz is here posting under another name.
Space is always dangerous, anytime you go 100 miles up into a vacuum with hard radiation and spin around at 17,000 miles an hour with 30,000 screws, bolts, pain chips and rocket boosters shit is hairy.
If you think LEO is too dangerous, then you should be dead set against sending humans or hamsters to Mars.
On a side note, NBC reported that 16 minutes of video tape from right before and during the Columbia re-entry survived the fall and then was found and is being shown to the crew's family. That's Super VHS.
Of course Intuit's not showing a hit on profits yet. Most of the people who are complaining already bought the software before they found out about the problems (from someone else if they were lucky, the hard way if they weren't). What Intuit needs to question is what effect this will have on next year's profits, when the people who complained this year buy some other tax software package instead of TurboTax. Of course, by that time nobody will make the connection between declining sales and the screw-up 12 months before
Ignoring the fact that other people probably do use the full boot sector area of their disks, there's an obvious reason why Intuit shouldn't do it: standards. Standards have defined the boot sector not as a DRM tool, but as the first place on the disk that gets executed at boot time. It's a critical piece of every (AFAIK) operating system's core design, and needs to be very reliable, because it's hard to fix if you can't load your operating system, and even harder without rescue media handy.
This is the same as all of the CD-ROM copy-protection schemes out there that write special "bad" sectors or mess with the table-of-contents in a non-standard way. Plenty of people have CD drives that are unable to use those forms of copy-protection, and some of the manufacturers end up patching the game to remove it. Anyone who wants to actually copy the game, of course, can easily download a utility to get around the problem. It only hurts unknowing consumers.
Microsoft frequently plays the "embrace and extend" game and has been called to task for it. So should Intuit, Sony, and everyone else who tries to violate a standard instead of playing by the rules.
--Elentar
Footnote: Consider that a laissez-faire economy results in prices that rise to what the market will bear. If, then, a piece of software is regularly pirated, copied, or used once and returned, doesn't that indicate that the price is too high, according to the market? Corporations should listen to the message consumers are sending and reduce the cost of their software, not impede upon the rights of consumers to use their own possessions.
The wheel it turns, around and around, with an ancient rumbling sound.
that is interesting about the VHS. have you got a link to an article about this?
I was down at Eglin AFB in '96 and one day around 11am I was driving along the road that is at the end of one of the runways, traffic came to a hault and there was the 747 and Shuttle taking off after a refuel for Florida.
It was amazing.
People don't stop there for F-15s, AC-130s, F-16s or even the F-22s that are there for weapons and climate testing, but they stop for the Shuttle.
I used TurboTax for the first (and, likely, last) time last year. I have the press, including Slashdot, to thank for steering me clear of this year's defective edition.
BTW, today's Techbargains, a popular deal and coupons site, has a blurb on this very topic: "Tax season is coming. Staples has Taxcut with lots of free software. Turbotax has Macrovision copy protection that most users would prefer to avoid."
All you freaks in Grand Rapids, MI - CONFIRM dammit.
last months meetup ended up being kinda small - the selected venue ended up being closed unexpectedly, and only myself and one other person showed up (and went to another location)..
Everyone I know who has bought Turbotax has done so before they knew about the full pain in the ass that this copy protection is. To these people, I have evangelized TaxCut, which I have used for my taxes this year. Most people's hangup is that they think that TaxCut can't bring in their previous year information from a TurboTax file, but it can.
As far as the protection itself is concerned, I know I am preaching to the choir when I say that writing any kind of information to the MBR other than the day you format a disk or install a bootloader is a big no-no. Inuit is deluding themselves if they think this won't affect them in the long run.
-R
Every time someone vocalizes thier opinion, they have to finish with a Karma score joke or something.
/.er 1: "Yeah, I'm running Mandrake 9.1. Here are the cds if you want it. What're you running? Karma: bitchin, mostly due to your Camaro."
/.er 2: "Slackware, man. Keep yer frenchie distro. Dot sig. Insert funny sig here."
/.er 3: "Well, I build my own linux system myself. Those give away thier freedom to achieve a sense of security get nothing in return. Thomas Adams."
What we need is a law making sending spam a felony
then establish a separate anti-spam police force
to hunt down spammers. I think a mandatory
1 years jail sentence (max security) for 500+
spam emails would quickly teach spammers what
the deal is. And frankly, we would also need
to actively seek extradition of foreign spammers,
although I would also support the use of remote
controlled weapons to kill spammers where
extradition is impossible. Lastly, the law should
provide for heavy fines for corporations which
send unsolicited e-mail, with something like a
three strikes law: the first time you pay a fine,
the next time you pay THE FINE, the third time
you are out of business and all your assets go
to the state/get sold at an auction. If the spamming
by a corporation happens more than once under
the same management then the management should
go to jail for 1 year (mandatory minimum).
Because I won't be able to use Turbo Tax, I'm going to have to actually go down to the library to get the suplemental forms I need. It will take a while and reminders are nice.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
If you had followed some of the other links suggested in this thread, you would have noticed that AppGen's MyBooks runs on Linux as well as MacOS and Windows, and will import/read Quickbook files. It has a bit too much MSMoney-style whizbang graphics for my taste, but I would rather that than Intuit's anti-consumer practices.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Nasa's plan stinks and is as about as ambitious and has as much exploration value as me sticking my hand up my own ass. To create a super expensive bus line to go to/from the ISS? That is like setting up a railway built of solid gold that only goes to Cleveland... Drop the waste bucket we call we call the ISS and build a moon base or something. At least it will have some value to someone (other than the scientists who are basically doing ISS stuff as busy work, doing experiments on Ants in space? Give me a break!)
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
However, it was because some dipshit semi-driver (is there any other kind?) jack-knifed and dumped his whole freakin load of logs (logs in Texas for god's sake, wtf?!?!) on I-35. The funny part was it took about 1 1/2 hours before the Highway Patrol had everyone routed around the wreck. So in the wait some kids in a car next to mine notice the Ice Cream Truck about 5 cars up (8 lane highway (w/hov lanes), complete stop) and everyone was getting out and buying ice cream. Quite funny actually. It lightened the mood, where the rules of the road are > drive as fast as your car will go until you catch the car in front of you, then follow at a very unsafe distance to avoid getting cut off (which will happen anyway).
Actually I think that is my only good memory of living in Dallas. Oh wait, I have a Jenna Jamison story but that's for another time... ah memories...
many years ago, a bunch of 12 year olds (including myself) were bicycling down one of the historic jefferson district streets when the most amazing roar made us all fall....
the 6 of us stared skyward in amazement as a shuttle piggy backed upon a 747 roared directly above us...headed for one of the local airforce bases here in san antonio texas.
i'll never forget my astonishment, the beauty, and shear size. it was VERY close (we were close to the base) to the ground. we could see everything in detail....
columbia astronauts, rest in peace.
In reading that NASA is going to spend 10 years and billions of dollars to build a new space shuttle that does even less than the current space shuttle I'm left shaking my head. Is this all NASA can manage, spending more and more money to do less and less. I appreciate the new mini space shuttle may be cheaper, simpler and safer than the space shuttle but it also can't carry any cargo and all it will do is ferry people to and from the ISS which is already recognized as a dead end a giant waste of money in space.
NASA may as well pack it in if this space plane and the ISS is their vision of manned space flight for the next decade. They talk about the ISS as crucial to the trip to Mars but I just don't see it.
If NASA wants to do something to stay relevent they need to pour their resources into:
- Cheap heavy lift launchers to get big cargos in to low earth orbit
- Innovative interplanetary propulsion like the ion drive starting initial tests
- Innovative means to protect againt radiation on interplanetary space flight, cowering in low earth orbit in the ISS wont help.
- Serious closed biosystem research. The ISS is a joke because it requires constant resupply of water and food.
- Continued discovery of the resources available on Mars and figure out smart ways for colonists to tap them when they get there.
If we want to get to Mars stop planning for a round trip. Round trips make the mission MUCH harder and make it in to the same dead end that was Apollo. We need to start designing one way missions that send people to Mars as colonists and not visitors. There would be no shortage of volunteers for a one way trip as long as they have a fair shot at long term survival. If I were a little younger I would be at the head of the line. Throughout history there have always been exceptional individuals that want to explore new frontiers. At this point, short of exploring the oceans, there simply aren't any frontiers left here to explore. Spinning around in low earth orbit sure isn't a new frontier any more. Create a new frontier to explore on Mars and will capture the imagination of the world again and NASA you really, desperately need that if you dont want to wither away as poinless bureaucracy.
Its an absurd waste to have to try to get a ship to Mars that has to get back to earth. The round trip scenario has led to the massive NASA fixation on long duration zero gravity research which is about all the ISS is good for.
A far more rational apporach is a fast one way trip for colonists with periodic cargo flights before and after they arrive to insure the colonists have the resources and equipment to create permenent habitats, raise food, find water and survive.
We should be doing research on how people cope with 6-9 months in zero G en route to indefinite periods at the %38 Martian gravity. Going from zero G to %38 is a lot less of a problem than spending years in zero G on a round trip and ending up back in Earth's gravity.
Please NASA, start designing fast propulsion, biospheres and Mars colonization missions. Please stop reinventing the space shuttle and wasting money on dead ends that are relatively easy for you to do but pointless. Please do things that are hard but worth it.
@de_machina
"Puffer was arrested last summer for demonstrating that the county court's wireless LAN wasn't secure, and telling them about it."
This is backwards. In March of last year Puffer told the county their wireless LAN was insecure. He then arranged a demonstration. Three or four months later he was indicted - not arrested - for wire fraud.
Yep, copy "protection" that eats your computer for the sake of a $20 software package is really dumb.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
spam is spam
/dev/null with the rest.
close off those open relays, continue to black list people who don't.
generate black lists of ip addresses that just continue to send crap (there's a rolling 'r' there). and send their useless tripe to
it's not a marketing thing, people. it's got to be the most annoying thought ever devised. perhaps second only to the useless killing of trees for all the junk mail I get that I did not ask for.
Mr. Shein knows that spam is unstoppable. He wants to profit from it. If anyone should be paid, it should be the end recipients. Better still, the ISPs should pay the endusers for each spam received. That would give them some incentive to stop spam.
Intuit has done something dumb and will pay. It's bad enough on it's own. M$ could use this to wipe Intuit out the same way they rubbed out DR Dos. A bunch of bogus error messages on top of a few real crashes and no one will ever buy another Turbo Tax again. They will use M$ Taxman or something.
I'm never going to use another non free tax package again. Intuit has proved abusive despite having a good program that was worth the money. It's lowered my confidence in comercial software one more notch.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
1) It's nowhere NEAR anything to do with UT
2) They serve beer.
Canuck stuck in Knoxville.
Google(TM) is your friend.
Subtitute "illegal drugs" for spam, and we just may be able to solve both problems.
I do not understand why companies take this risk.
Writing to sector 0 (as an example) contains risks. I'm not going to risk my computer for a $30 program to file my taxes. (While writing to sector 0, or any other reserved area may have, may only cause a corrupt disk I'm the one who has to fix the damn thing if they break it, if that means I spend timing fixing my computer, instead of working (I often work from home) then it's costing me a lot more than their program is worth.)
Such systems are generally used for software with siginificantly higher price point (a few hundred, if not thousand) and generally a much higher payoff than a single tax return.
I can tell you that if it screwed up a computer system of anyone I know they (Intuit) would never sell a product to people I know again.
...First Host.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Intuit are still profiting from the product.
I'm happy to say that I did not contribute to their profits this year. They did not respond to my query about last years rebate which I did not receive.
This year I chose TaxAct. It wasn't perfect, but for $30 including e-file I can't complain.
Call me old-fashioned, but I still hoard every precious byte of free memory I can, probably a throw-back to the days when I felt super-cool having 4 megs of RAM. I strive valiantly to kill every unnecessary process, in hopes that I can squeeze just one more frame per second out of my games, and these jokers are busy trying to write to my boot sector and bury me under TSRs.
It isn't really that Intuit's actions were evil on their own, but if we just rolled over and accepted this type of scheme, every software publisher would think it's okay to toss in their own piece of chaff to clog up our PCs. Memory may be cheap, but I buy it for ME, not for some hobo who sees every consumer only as a potential pirate.
Sheesh. Has anyone actually read the cnet story?
"We thought it was important to get some independent answers on some of these concerns," Tom Allanson, senior vice president of Intuit's TurboTax Division, told CNET News.com. "There's a lot of noise out there--we want people to be able to come to one place and get the facts and make up their own minds."
More like, we want people to come to one place, get facts that aren't relevant, and go back to being consumer sheep.
Customers have complained in online discussion groups, shopping sites and other forums that SafeCast runs continually in the background on computers with Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, even when TurboTax isn't running, thus consuming memory and other resources. The PCTest results show that SafeCast consumes less than 1MB of memory on a typical Windows XP machine, according to Intuit.
"In all the test systems they set up, they didn't find any appreciable deterioration in performance for any of the computer systems they tested," Allanson said.
What about an appreciable deterioration in privacy?
Complaints have also targeted SafeCast's mechanism of storing its activation code on an unused portion of the PC hard drive--known as track zero--where it can't be viewed or altered by the customer.
It can't be viewed or altered by the customer, unless the customer gets a virus that is normally nondestructive but stores data on track zero, or the customer accidentally runs other software that erases or overwrites this _totally unprotected storage area_.
Allanson said that although neither of those mechanisms should be a problem for consumers, Intuit will remove them in next year's version of TurboTax.
Can anyone say "backpedaling"?
"We did it that way because we don't want to eat up disk space, and we wanted to make it easier if people had to restore from a backup. But when you write to an area of the disk that's not ordinarily used, people think you're trying to hide something. I can understand why people would be concerned about it."
They didn't want it to eat up disk space? I hate to sound like I'm in favor of bloat-ware, but a single extra sector's worth of data on the filesystem isn't going to make a difference -- especially considering that it would be protected from accidental erasure.
Easier to restore from a backup? What about backup programs that don't save data that's hiding where there shouldn't be any data in the first place? It would be just as easy to put it in a regular file where a backup program would be sure to copy it.
The PCTest results also show that SafeCast does not collect or transmit any information on the PC it's installed on, contrary to frequent mischaracterizations of the program as "spyware."
[...]
Allanson acknowledged that customer support surrounding activation issues was spotty during the first month or so after TurboTax went on sale, with some customers receiving conflicting or erroneous information on common issues such as installing TurboTax on a new hard drive.
Spyware isn't the issue. If there were spyware included in the product, that would be completely unacceptable and consumers should have been made aware of the product's deficiency before they were given the opportunity to make a purchase.
The real issue is that product activation itself is not acceptable. There is no legitimate reason for a company to force each and every consumer to have post-sale contact with the company to get the software to work as advertized beyond preventing piracy, and even with post-sale contact that's not possible when the consumer has total physical control over their own hardware.
"I think we might have missed the general goal by upsetting the number of customers we upset--we certainly missed the mark on that one," he said. "We've learned a lot, and were going to do it differently next year.
[...]
Intuit executives said during the company's second-quarter earnings call earlier this month that the TurboTax flap has had a negligible effect on the company's business.
Translation: "We didn't realize how many people are committed to protecting their privacy, and we certainly didn't expect anyone to discover we weren't playing straight. Next year, we'll make sure to dress it up as a plus to quell consumer fears. It's a relief to know, though, that the general population is so technically illiterate that our bad behavior didn't affect our profit margins.
Sheesh indeed.
Personally, I think that they should be developing a reusable shuttle able to travel to the moon and back. In preparation for a moon base, of course.
Not sure I see what interesting about this little rant from the anonymous coward who just has to work at NASA and on the shuttle program. The holier than though, we know how to do it and no one else does is classic NASA. I know I used to work there.
What the hell is so great about the OSP. 6 billion and 10 years later and all you'll be able to do is to get 4 people into space and back. The russians have been sending 3 people there and back for decades. Oooh but the OSP is "reusable". I hate to break it to you but we can live without the "reusable" part when they end up costing more per mission than expendable and NASA wastes decade after decade building them to the exclusion of actually doing anything with them.
NASA, the agency that brought you the space shuttle that costs 500 million to a billion dollars a mission so astronauts can ride bicycles in zero G. The same agency thats spent 60 billion plus on a space station that doesn't do anything useful. The Russians did 10 times more in Mir for a fraction of the cost and a couple decades sooner.
Someday you all need to step back and realize for all your hubris that you are jusr wasting tons of money that could better be spent to do something, instead of the current high tech jobs program for going to and from low earth orbit at exorbinant cost.
With spamd just around the corner their days are numbered. Spamd will be in the next base install of OpenBSD and it WILL shut down most if not all of the spammers.
Well - it will shut it down for people who run OpenBDS firewalls and servers. For everyone else... well perhaps an openBSD firewall is in your future.
There should be more information found at www.openbsd.org
It goes:
.
In soviet russia . . .
boot sector tax-spyware updates YOU
I hate to break it to you, but I don't work for NASA and I certainly don't work on the Shuttle Program. I am a physicist, and have a damned good working knowledge of the space program.
You don't get the purpose of the Orbital Space Plane, do you? They're selling it as a way to transport people to and from the Station. But, it's clearly intended to do much more. They're intending to stack it on much larger rockets, so that we can push out to the Earth-Moon L1 point, perform large telescope construction, do manned asteroid exploration, etc. It's an element of a broader plan to push the envelope of joint human-robotic exploration outwards.
All of this was described in detail in NASA Exploration Team (NExT) comments last year. It also fits in nicely with broader NASA plans which have been around for decades.
We all understand that spaceflight costs far too much right now. We also have to remain always vigilant that those who wish to use spacecraft development and operations as a jobs program don't succeed. But, after twenty years with the Shuttle there has been significant movement over the last couple of years toward trying to get the hell out of Low-Earth orbit and doing it in a sustainable manner.
http://www.pctest.com/intuit/test.htm
The top of this page says:
Turbo Tax Uninstalls Fully....Pass
Then below it says:
TurboTax was not uninstalled completely, some files and registry entries...
Intuit will let you use Turbotax for the web for Free as in beer and efile for free if you have a AGI of $27,000 or less, or can claim the earned income tax credit. That is state and fed forms and efileing.
The point is that the boot track is there for boot code, not Intuit's scribbleware. Hey, I just coined a word.
I suspect it's because the outside of the box didn't say WARNING, OUR DRM MAY MAKE YOUR COMPUTER UNBOOTABLE.Seriously, your argument seems to be, "You bought it, you must like it. So shut up!!". Capitalism works a lot better if consumers tell each other when a company rips them off. Intuit may not have taken a big hit to the bottom line this year, but wait till the '03 tax season. My dad has sworn off Turbo Tax, and he's been buying it for many years. And not because I told him to -- because he read about it in the Wall Street Journal and thinks they're a sneaky, underhanded company.
Even Intuit's damage control shows how out of touch they are. They say the memory-resident program is not a problem since it only takes up a megabyte. Whew, I know my fears are allayed.
"Opossum" is an indian word, or the word used by yankees who learned it from an encyclopaedia. "Possum" is the redneck word, which in addition to the marsupial also refers to certain character traits. Hope that helps.
Intuit: War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
Sing to the tune of "who's afraid of the big bad wolf..."
In-tuit is a piece-of-shit
A piece-of-shit
A piece-of-shit
In-tuit is a piece-of-shit
La la la la la
In my opinion, Intuit is doing the wrong thing by introducing this garbage into their software. I used to use that shit but I bought from their competitor instead, this year. Below, I'll include a letter I wrote to them and the response I received:
I wrote:
"Don Support" (Don_Support@intuit.com) replied with the following email, which I quote in full here...
In other words, Mr. Support is saying, "Please bend over while I stick the business end of a gun into your asshole, kind of like the way Adam Sandler was telling some guy to 'take that out of my ass' in one of his movies, where he was trying to escape from a bathroom window in a motel and some cop or whatever had a gun to his ass, but when he said this, the motel manager, who was walking outside and overheard this portion of the conversation, thought there was all kinds of weird sex going on inside the motel room, which happened to be the honeymoon suite, since there were no more normal rooms available, but I don't remember what this movie is called." That's ok, Mr. Support... I don't know what the hell you're talking about. DRM is a piece of shit, just like Intuit, Microsoft, the RIAA, the MPAA, the DMCA, the SSSCA, and whatever else I missed...
To close, I'd like to add the following:
This post is very intellectual. As such, it is VALUABLE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. By reading this post, you have agreed to be bound by the conditions of the following agreement: You agree that this post is intellectual. You agree that this post is intellectually stimulating. You agree that having read this valuable intellectual property has caused a copy of said property to be placed in your head. Since the aforementioned copy has been placed in your cabeza without the prior written consent of rice_burners_suck, as none has been given here, you have violated rice_burners_suck's intellectual property rights and the God-given right to eternal perpetually increasing profits. The aforementioned eternal perpetually increasing profits must be enjoyed by rice_burners_suck because rice_burners_suck has put a great deal of effort into creating the aforementioned valuable intellectual property and for this, rice_burners_suck must become the richest person in the world and should be able to live like a king over the investment placed into producing the valuable intellectual property. Since you HAVE AGREED to this agreement, you have agreed to send $100.00 once a week for the rest of your life to Rice Burners Suck, 80923 Sunny Venison Road, Kansas City, MO 32238. You have furthermore agreed that you have waived your rights to any kind of court action, including the right to a trial by jury should you be charged with any crime, now known or later developed, including but not limited to: stealing a loaf of bread and/or the serial murder of 900 ants by spraying with Raid. Oh yeah, and YOU HAVE AGREED TO BECOME THE SLAVE OF RICE BURNERS SUCK, because for all intents and purposes, RICE BURNERS SUCK is a greedy multinational corporation with infinity dollars in the bank, which gives it the right to own slaves.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. REPORT TO ROOM 101.
Note that the tax program TaxCut will import your last year's TurboTax files, if you still have them on your hard drive. And it's cheaper than TurboTax, and (IMHO) easier to use, too.
To my annoyance, they charge separately for e-filing Federal & State taxes (and they charge $2 more for filing state taxes than I actually would have gotten back!), but one can't have everything.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
What is your opinion on http://www.highliftsystems.com/ ?
It seems to be the way to go.
I am the Barber of Seville.
No.
Economics is concerned with the distribution of scarce resources (By 'scarce', I mean finite rather than rare). Since software can have a copy created without affecting the availability of the original, it can be argued that software is not a scarce resource. The classical market rules you describe simply do not apply.
Ther are people who can afford software who will simply copy it anyway. There are others who will ensure that every scrap is licensed correctly. With relatively little enforcement going on, it becomes a matter of personal choice and honesty.
Cheers,
Ian
.headed for one of the local airforce bases here in san antonio texas.
Yup, December 14-15, 1983, and it was at Kelly AFB.
I have a picture from one of those days, and had been meaning to dig it out just for the sake of completeness. Then it turned into something even more interesting a few weeks ago. Funny how that works.
Don't worry -- if you wait long enough, some nice men will come to your door and let you know.
Actually, even better, you still don't need to do your taxes -- they will take care of taking away anything you have to ensure you are in compliance.
Where did all the rocket scientists in the American and Russian programs come from after WWII? Why Germany, of course.
How much Karma do you get for showing up?
last post, last post, last post, last post, last post, last post.
Now, don't all of you go and make another post just to prove me wrong.
You do know that you can get every form as a PDF at the IRS website don't you?
there is some closed ecosystem research going on, check e.g. BIO-Plex at http://pet.jsc.nasa.gov/
i think at the moment they have some loops closed and a 50% closed food loop - first 100% closed test coming next year or so.
it isn't much, i agree, but at least something is being done.
eetu.
I was annoyed enough about Intuit's protection scheme and had prevaricated long enough still to have an unopened package. I took it back to Costco who happily gave me back my money and then went and saved $20 buying Tax Cut! Felt good and saved money, how much better can it get!! :=)
In light of Intuit's comments about how harmless their software and SafeCast are, I feel that I need to tell everyone about my ordeal with TurboTax.
/mbr
/mbr
My workstation at home is running Windows 2000 Professional. Generally, it's pretty stable and I never reboot (unless some stupid software or update I'm installing requires it). About 2 weeks ago, I bought and installed TurboTax.
Over the course of those two weeks I completed and filed my returns. I don't remember having to reboot my computer in this span of time. This weekend, I decided to make my regular visit to Windows Update to grab any product updates or security fixes. There was an IE6 updated that I selected which required a reboot to complete the install (why application installs require OS reboots is something I'll never understand).
Anyway, I reboot the computer. I get halfway through the Windows boot splash screen and BAM. BSOD. I spent the entire weekend trying to determine the problem.
Eventually, I booted off a Windows 98 boot floppy and ran:
fdisk
Surprisingly, that allowed Windows 2000 to boot. Totally pissed off at this point (and figuring it has something to do with TurboTax and SafeCast) I uninstalled both TurboTax and SafeCast from the "Add/Remove Programs" interface.
Then, just to see if everything was still peachy, I rebooted. BSOD.
fdisk
Windows 2000 boots. Go to Intuit's site, download their SafeCast uninstaller. Run that.
Reboot. Windows 2000 boots.
So obviously there was still some part of SafeCast left on my machine that was ruining the MBR of my hard drive every single time I booted Windows 2000.
If there are any lawyers here, I would be interested in talking to someone about filing a class action lawsuit. I'm sure there are plenty of other people who have gone through the same crap.
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
Read the fine print on their site...you can let as many people as you want use the software and file electronically, problem is, they are now saying you can only install it once on the same machine without getting them involved. This reminds me of the first and only copy of Mathematica i bought back when it was version 3. After trying to reinstall it on my same machine with a new mobo, i was told to contact customer no-service. In speaking with the tard at Wolfram, I actually had to FAX, that's right, FAX a my license agreement to them to get them to verify that I was not cheating the system. Needless to say, I fax a copy of the license with my middle finger to the side, and wrote on it "This is the last copy of your software I will buy"...and it has been to this day :)
"Simon Says, Fuck You" - George Carlin
Since the drive heads make a controlled crash there, it is sort of gambling that the data will not be corrupted.
-------------------------
As easy as herding cats!
then only outlaws will spam!
Oh wait...
Despite what meetup.com claims, they sell/give your email address to spammers. I created an account for the Fark meetup and then created a throwaway address on my mail server. A month passes by and suddenly it is spammed beyond belief. It wasn't a "common" address either.
Needless to say, I inquired as to why they support spammers and they insisted that they do not. I then read their privacy policy in detail, and sure enough, they have the right to do whatever they want to with your information.
In closing, meetup.com is a sham.
Guess they have to make money somehow.
Yes, it was.
I bought the dang thing, thinking that I could live with it.
Unfortunately, it screwed up my anti-virus software.
It also made me waste 4 to 6 hours installing it, re-installing it several times, and then finally taking it back to the store. It seems that although the basic install worked, the one-click update wouldn't, and the downloaded update program just trashed the whole install.
I was pretty nervous the first time I uninstalled it too. I wasn't positive that uninstalling it wouldn't prevent me from re-installing it. I didn't know at the time that the c-dilla program writes to sector 33 of track 0, and it would be safe.
Also, something to consider: I understand that if you have more than one program using c-dilla, they won't co-exist. c-dilla stores the license for each program in the same sector. Installing program one will be fine. Installing program two will overwrite the license key of program one.
Lastly, since it uses such poor copyprotection (not cd-protection as the story shows), it's relatively easy to break. All you have to do is copy that sector from a licensed machine, and keep it with the cd key. It would be relatively simple to write a program to do that, and release it to everyone.
Btw, since it doesn't warn people about the boot sector, people could easily lose their bootloaders, and possibly drives, if they use install this.
Ironically, I think Intuit's marketing dept is even more out of touch than the top poster realized.
They are actually getting a lot more returns than they seem to be admitting. I understood that the fund they use for returns actually bottomed out. Of course, I read that on xtremetech, so take it for what it's worth.
Stores are accepting it back without many questions, too. I know I had no problems returning my copy to walmart, even though it was opened and well past the posted policy of 15 day returns on unopened software.
Don't you all see that the point of the obscence software harassment (a better term then copy protection or DRM) is to push you to NOT buy the software, but to use their on-line model. No physicial product to deliver. No more friends sharing the expenses for the software. Once they go you locked in they could charge per print out or charge for "extras" like deduction finder. There are many monatary reasons for this, and they would be quite happy chaging as much as HR block-heads. They know they are by FAR the leader in their field (even though TaxCut is quite good).
Other than the root contraversy about the convoluted tax code, the *REAL* contraversy is WHY, oh WHY, doesn't the IRS have this software online. This reminds me of the building code that most of us have to live with, but it not "owned" by the people. ARGH!!
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
Heh.
Just what percentage of people who buy tax software actually buy it by the beginning of Feb? (I think that was the date of their pr crud.) I usually buy mine in April. This year I bought tax software early so I could do my sister's taxes because she needs her refund.
Even worse, how do they calculate the actual store sales by then?
Most stores don't submit sales figures for individual products on a daily basis. Perhaps monthly is done, but I doubt if that's where they get their figures.
I suspect that the figures they are using are the total sales TO STORES. Stores stock up on software based on last year's sales figures. If they figure they will sell X next month, then they will order that many.
So Intuit sold X copies of Turbotax to all the stores based on last year's sales only.
In other words, Intuit's sales figures for this year so far have no relation to reality whatsoever. They won't have the actual figures of true sales until May, and they will still need to take into account store returns and customer returns.
Of course, sometime in April we might start seeing trends. If stores aren't buying more copies, because the product isn't selling well, then we'll have clues by then. But Feb is way too early to see any real information on sales.
"NASA, the agency that brought you the space shuttle that costs 500 million to a billion dollars a mission so astronauts can ride bicycles in zero G" To be fair, the basic cost of a shuttle flight is around $150,000,000. It's the fixed costs of maintaining KSC and various other NASA facilities that make up the vast majority of the shuttle budget; this is why NASA has come to be considered by some as a welfare program, not a space program.
H&R Block online has a turbotax like setup. They ask you questions and you fill in the numbers. They do all the real work and will e-file your federal and state taxes so you get the money back in a few weeks.
I've used it the last two years, and it woorks great. Also, this second year of using it, they show a comparison between the refund for both years. Thats a bit helpful if you are trying to maximize your refund.
No, I did not know that, thank you very much, it might save me a trip to the library. So long as they don't use M$ Word as a document generator, I should be able to view and print any of those forms. I have had trouble with PDF forms in the past which Ghost Script was not able to deal with, so the format is not fool or M$ proof. Adobe's client was able to deal with some, but not all of the forms that contained such intentional errors.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
That's also a good reason to have kids. I like to call them a DNA Backup (kiddo #1 is named Deena Bacup [accent on "Bac"]). In my will it says to clone replacement parts from my DNA Backup to help restore my life if its possible... and "legal".
When the wife asks why I screw around on her, I just tell her about the time a fire killed my backup tapes, and the server they backed up. For some reason she just doesn't seem to understand why I'm talking about work in the middle of an argument.
* no i don't have kids, or a wife. mod me down for lack of humor, but not for bad morals.
whoops... also, there is nothing you need to install on your machine... I did it all using mozilla 1.3a.
In addition to the Slashdot Meetups, there are plenty of other cool Meetups as well, such as Digital Cameras, Home Theater, Metal, and even tea. Give some of them a try, especially if you live in Dallas ;).
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Okay, so I'm an old fart, but I clearly remember what NASA said the Space Shuttle would do. You know, things like a fleet with >200 missions per years, very low launch costs, stuff like that.
As we all know, they didn't quite succeed.
Now I see another idea from NASA: a smaller version of the space shuttle. No cargo capacity, 4 people only, and all the inherent dangers of the shuttle again.
Hmpf.
Let's look at what they say in more detail:
* "The new spacecraft's primary function will be to ferry crews to and from the International Space Station"
Cool. We can all see that the ISS is a major waste of money. And the new plane can't be used to bring cargo up, only people. Sounds Useful!
* "and serve as a lifeboat if the station has to be evacuated."
The ISS already has a lifeboat. A Soyuz. Much safer than a shuttle, I might add. Cheaper, too.
* "land like a plane upon its return to earth."
Instead of using much safer methods like parachutes? What, exactly, is the *point* in flying this thing down to earth like Buck Rogers?
* "although it will be able to carry cargo in an emergency."
Mhm. Hey, John, shift up a little so we can stick this six-pack in the corner, okay?
* "The craft will be cheaper and easier to prepare than the current space shuttle"
Isn't this the exact same argument NSAS had for building the shuttle? Didn't it fail miserably? Think it might happen again?
* "The Orbital Space Plane system will give us the flexibility needed to safely and efficiently get crew to and from orbit and to provide crew rescue and logistical support to the International Space Station"
As opposed to the current shuttle - right?
* "Provide a safer lifeboat option than the current Soyuz craft"
What, exactly, makes this thing safer than a capsule coming down on a parachute? It is vastly more complex, has a much more difficult way of returning, and has any amount of failure points.
* "Have better orbit manoeuvrability"
Okay, I'm not a rocket scientist. But how would you do this? Bigger maneuver engines?
* "President George W Bush has already asked the US Congress for about $1bn to fund the project - the request was made before the Columbia disaster."
Is this actually true? I keep reading about the prez cutting NASA back a lot. Several times.
After the accident he used the opportunity for some nice PR and said that he'll get money for NASA. Which he now did. Afterwards.
Perhaps they meant "Challenger" instead of "Columbia"?
I don't normally rant on NASA, but they really did turn into a bunch of bureaucrats quite some time ago.
Example: Microsoft has some damn good programmers (no, really!). But in a company of MS's size, they don't stand a chance.
In the same way, NASA has some brilliant people - struggling in a huge, bureaucratic mess.
Bah.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
"We did it that way because we don't want to eat up disk space, and we wanted to make it easier if people had to restore from a backup. But when you write to an area of the disk that's not ordinarily used, people think you're trying to hide something. I can understand why people would be concerned about it."
Somehow, saving 512 bytes or less for license info doesn't seem like a real good reason for putting it in track 0 when the rest of the program is already several megabytes in size.
Chip H.
I'll close with the author's conclusions:
Nope, no sig
That's an excellent observation. Software *IS* an unlimited resource once it's created - just like music and movies, incidentally. And you can go out and buy CDs of your favorite bands, or you can listen to a radio station for free but get lower quality and advertising.
People want to own what they've paid for, and they don't think about their CD and DVD collections as just a bunch of licenses. The solution must lie between the extremes of having hardware to block our senses when confronted with material we haven't licensed, and forcing all non-scarce material to be free. Maybe if software/music/movies gracefully degraded into public domain after a reasonable lifetime (maybe a year for tax software, 5 years for movies and 10 years for music, etc.) or after interest had dropped below a certain point.
I wish I had the perfect solution. In the mean time, I assist open-source projects and try to only buy software from small, reasonable software companies.
-Elentar
The wheel it turns, around and around, with an ancient rumbling sound.
If you've got simple tax forms, you can do it online with no charge. The feds link to numerous locations that allow it for free. My state (California) also lets you go online to file. I've already had my rebate for two weeks, thanks!
I already have a nice man who comes to my door and takes care of everything...He's called an "accountant."
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".