AIM's New Terms Of Service

acaben writes "AOL has posted new terms of service for AIM, that include the right for AOL to use anything and everything you send through AIM in any way they see fit, without informing you. A sample passage: '...by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy.'"

Comments

Re:Oooh, I'm shocked!

[HD Webdev]

Lord Omlette (124579) said>> I'm pretty sure this is wrong. Everything goes through AOL's servers.

ceejayoz said> I know for certain the file transfers don't - I get two megabyte per second speeds transferring between computers on the LAN here, far faster than my DSL permits over the 'Net.

Yes, that's why I mentioned looking at network traffic.

Although you have direct experience with what I was explaining, you don't get credit for that. Yet, an "I'm pretty sure this..." post without any personal experience to relate gets credit for being informative on slashdot instead of someone like you who has actually seen the direct p2p activity going on.

Either today's chosen mods are not having a good day or anything rebutting an "AOL IS SCANNING YOUR BRAIN" type story isn't as likely to get modded up.

Re:New Terms in A Nutshell

[TedCheshireAcad]

I bet you have a giant erection right now.

oh god, a company that provides a service free of charge is altering their terms of service...i am in no way forced to use such service or pay for it but still i need to get my panties in a twist

Re:New Terms in A Nutshell

[Lightning Hopkins]

The only people who can logically believe there exists non-manmade concepts are theists believing in divine revelation.

No. That is a fallacious generalization, and frankly I don't see how you can believe it. I believe that there exist non-manmade concepts because there is an objective, external reality that functions independently of human (or any other) thought or perception. If a tree falls in a forest with no observers, naturally it must make a sound because sound waves are generated by oscillations in compressible materials like air, earth, or wood.

Look, mathematics (except for the symbols and conventions used to express it) is not manmade, and neither are logic or memes. Two and two make four, no matter what. It isn't some divine revelation, it is simply necessarily true, regardless of whether conscious beings exist to comprehend it or not. Humans do not "make" mathematics, we discover it; we come to be aware of it through the power of reasoning. A valley that contains two large boulders which are later joined to two more will contain no other than four large boulders, irrespective of whether someone figures that out or not. Facts do not cease to be true simply because they are unknown. The same with logic. Logic and math (closely related fields) are what is necessarily true given a set of premises, and no one can "make" a valid line of reasoning untrue. There are schools of thought about logic that are manmade, but logic itself does not depend upon us.
Memes as a thing in themselves do not require humans for them to exist; they are the natural result of information processing systems, sentient or otherwise, propagating information in a larger system. You seem to have mistaken my meaning on this. I did not mean all memes are non-manmade, but that the things themselves (units of information propagating and duplicating through an information system) depend only on an information system in which they can exist. Here's an article on how apparently apes are capable of "socially transmitted behaviors." They can and will exist without human intervention.