Yes, but the story here is that Ameritrade is not only spamming, they are spamming stock tips, or at least they are causing that to happen.
A brokerage firm that randomly gives stock tips with the intent of buying the the stock low beforehand, and selling it after a bunch of people purchase it, thus passing the loss on to their customers, is in violation of half a dozen laws and can be subject to large fines and lose its ability to trade stock, which, considering that's all Ameritrade does, would kill it. A firm that lets someone at that firm do it is, instead of the firm itself, is just as culpable.
Screw involving Ameritrade or the media in this, someone needs to inform the SEC of what's going on.
Threshold didn't do that. Threshold actually made a somewhat interesting premise, and stuck with it. And, for once, it was interesting being inside the 'cover up aliens' conspiracy. Almost every episode we learned something new, and there while there was some interesting interpersonal stuff, it was almost all due to the enormous pressure they were operating under, and there were absolutely no love triangles at all.
The speed of the show is probably due to the fact it was only supposed to run three years, and by at the end of the first year it would become 'Foothold' and then 'Stranglehold' the last year.
This was frowned on and discouraged by the managers.
That, right there, is the difference. Best Buy has people sitting at the registers who's sole purpose is to lie to you to sell you extended warranties. It has an intranet that exactly mirrors its web site so people can inform you you are wrong about web deals.
Any store that 'ranks' cashiers is going to have stuff like this pop up. I worked at Walmart as a cashier, and we got ranked not by how much we sold (Cashiers, obviously, have almost no ability to actually affect what is purchased at Walmart.), but by how long it took to ring people up. The more ethical ways of 'cheating' included hitting 'total' or a certain specific key to get a harmless error message, both of which stopped the clock, in the middle of a long checkout. You'd then rearranging things and fix the bags you just threw things in while the clock was running, and then clearing the error or just continue. The error method required an extra keypress that restarted the clock, as opposed to it starting the instant you scanned the next item, but OTOH the extra totals would show on the receipt and some customers would ask questions about why you randomly repeatedly totaled their order during the middle of it.
Those two methods were harmless, although they did make checkout take slightly longer, than, in theory, simply working as fast as possible would take. I suspect the speed losses were more than countered by the gains of just trying to be faster, though.
OTOH, we sometimes had people who'd 'fail' to meet the eye of customers with large carts full of dissimiliar things, which were the slowest to check out, or who'd suddenly realize they had to do returns. I don't know if management knew if they were trying to keep up their checkout time, or just assumed them to be lazy, but that was really frowned on.
I don't know if they're still doing that at Walmart, I haven't seen anyone do that trick on anything I've purchased, and I do actually watch for it.(1) But they still seem to mostly be going as fast as possible, although sometimes I get a cashier that doesn't care.
1) Incidentally, while I'm being nice to Walmart for once, I'll let everyone in on a tip. If they close the cash drawer, they can't open it again, and it opens after every transaction. The important thing here is, if you use a debit card and get cash back, the drawer will open, and if they're not paying attention, they'll reflexively close it. (They are trained to close the drawer when they don't need it open.) This will result in you standing there for two minutes while they call over a CSM to reopen the drawer to give you your money, and, no, the transaction is over, they can't undo it. So if you're wanting cash back, tell them while you're punching it in. It could save you and everyone behind you a few minutes of time, and it can't possible hurt.
This is also relevant if you want change. I can't tell you how many times someone would come up to the other side of the register while I was checking someone out, politely wait for everyone to finish, and then ask for change, which of course I couldn't give them because I'd just closed my damn cash drawer and couldn't open it. No, we can't ring up a zero transaction or 'no sale' and open it.
For a while, I purchased every 'extension' USB cable I found for under 5 dollars. Because, normally, every damn place would have them for the absurd price of 20 dollars, but sometimes you run across one priced normally. (By normally, I mean about twice what it costs the store.) I'd immediately buy any I found until I figured I had enough.
What was really absurd is that places would sell USB hubs with cables for 20 dollars, and, next to it, a USB cable for 20 dollars. Or an 'active' extension cable (One with a single port hub built in.) for the same price as a 'passive' one. (One that is just a cable.) (1)
I'm the go-to guy with computer purchasing for about four people, and I've told them all: Never, ever, buy any cables, period. Usually things comes with cables, if they do not, I probably have them, if I do not, I will buy it from the correct place, and I'll even pay for the damn cable myself, just to keep those fucking scammers from making money.
Maybe if everyone refused to buy such insanely overpriced stuff, they'd stop trying to sell it for that price.
1) I really like all the passive cables certified 'USB 2.0'. Well, that's good to know. I'll put that with my RCA 'digital audio' certified cables and my 'transmits the sound of speech' certified air. Nice to know the pieces of copper don't have some magical ability to only carry USB 1.1 signals.
I wish everywhere had stopped selling alkaline rechargables. I've still got half a dozen of those things, and no working charger. I finally bit the bullet and threw away my half-broken charger, and now I've had to switch to NiCd rechargables. But sometimes you want actual 1.5 volts instead of 1.2. OTOH, sometimes you want a high-current load and don't need higher voltage. The theory was that you could put the correct battery in the correct charger, and for a while there were at least three different types on the marker and chargers for each, or for multiple types, but apparently no more.
Speaking of NiCd rechargables, has anyone noticed that Energizers are 2500 mAh and Duracells are 2650 mAh? What's with that?
If you want any kind of advice, service, or are easily frustrated by a positively byzantine return process then rest assured that Fry's is not the place for you.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
I'm sorry, but the people at Fry's are easily more knowledgeable than any other place that sells electronics. I don't know where you live, but around here we're got:
Best Buy, where the salesmen work on commission or something and thus lie, all the time. Like this article explains.
Walmart, where the guy working in electronics is just a normal cashier and has no special electronics knowledge. (OTOH, they at least don't claim to have any.) Also, they have no selection.
Compuserve, where apparently employees' sole function is to show you where things are located. Which is at least not unuseful.
Radio Shack, where they are actually unable to show you where things are located, much less answer questions. I've asked for simple things, and been misdirected, in their tiny-ass stores. The damn store is smaller than three of the dorm rooms where I went to college, do you employees not sometimes wander around and look at things?
Yes, often Frys' employees do not know things, but they have, for some unknown reason, literally ten times the floor staff they actually need, and usually they can find someone who does know something. (Seriously, I walk around in the store and half the people I pass are employees. What's going on with that?)
Maybe you live in Silicon Valley or New York City or some huge place, but, around here, we had nothing until Frys.
OTOH, I don't know about their return procedure as implimented, but as it's stated you won't find a better one.
Other insurances either are required, like car insurance, or result in lower prices regardless thanks to negotiation, like health insurance. Also, they cover things you couldn't cover on the fly, and hence work like an investment, which in theory is wasteful, but people like that.
Service plans, OTOH, are scams. All of them.
And I don't know in what universe service plans are more convenient. Walking into the store and out with a new item is easier than dealing with the service desk. And talking about 'Piece of mind' is about like talking about people who play the lottery for 'excitement'. No, in both examples they are innumerates who have had the statistics explained to them, but think somehow that they, of all people, will come out ahead.(1)
I don't have a problem with crazy people buying service plan, really, or stores selling them, any more than I have a problem with stores selling lottery tickets. (I myself have sold lottery tickets.) I do have a rather large problem with the fact Best Buy has people who come up to you as you're checking out and lie that you need the service plan. Frys, OTOH, does not.
1) Of course, sometimes you are one of those people, if you plan to regularly abuse the product that is purchased. That probably voids the service plan, but, hey, that seems like counting at blackjack to me. Turnable is fair play.
I was sitting here reading all the comments waiting to see if someone had mentioned that, because I was going to if they hadn't. Scrapbook is amazing, and what wasn't mentioned is that you can use file shares to put your scrapbook on, and have them accessible on multiple computers.
Something that wasn't mentioned: The pages are normal HTML pages, and stored wherever you want, so they get indexed by whatever search tool you have on your computer, like GDS...and if you open them back up in Firefox, even without using the Scrapbook interface, you get all the editing tools and the original URL and all the stuff you need. (Also, it comes with the ability to search itself.)
It not only lets you capture a page with images and stuff, it lets you crawl sites and capture all of them. And you can also capture tiny parts of pages.
And if you have multiple pages, say four pages of a single article, you can merge them together, which, along with the aforementioned removal of elements, can make nice single page articles for reference later, and, of course, Scrapbook remembers where they all are from, even in merged pages.
It was designed for people in school to be able to find information later, to be able to take a web page, trim it down to the information they need, and then cite it's original URL, but I'm not in school and I find it very handy.
It eventually results in a context shift in bookmarking: You start scrapbooking information you need later, and only bookmarking places that you think will have useful information in the future. I run across a 'How to do something complicated in PHP', I don't bookmark it, I scrapbook it.
It doesn't have any internet sync, just the ability to keep a store on a network drive, which seems to work okay with offline sync in Windows XP Pro. There's an extension for box.net that lets you import and export to box.net, but it isn't automatic and not incredibly useful.
That, and the ability to check if certain pages had changed, would be very useful, but other than that it is awesome.
Oh, don't get me started on that. Notepad sucks ass, and OSes are supposed to have actual functional text editors, not ones that barf on files bigger than 2^16. Windows has astonishing failures as an OS:
1) Total inability to write or read a floppy or CD image.
2) So...no packet sniffing at all, eh?
3) No bluetooth application. Ooookay. So how exactly do I use by HID hardware to control the computer?
4) No modem on hold program. How long has that standard been around? I guess we're lucking we got a terminal program, although you'll notice MS didn't bother to write their own.
All of those are actual functions of an OS, and MS didn't see fit to include them. It's a damn OS, hardware is its job. But I guess they were too busy building in a web browser and email client.
After all, his laptop was passively receiving radio signals and did *not* broadcast an SSID or otherwise initiate a negotiation for connectivity...but their WAP actively did.
That's what I keep trying to bring up to all these morons. Access points access computers first. They sit there and broadcast.
Making connecting, via wifi, without explicit authorization illegal would make all wireless access points illegal (Well, ones broadcasting), and not any laptops. The laptops are just responding to the broadcast.
Yes, you might accidental admit to a crime, but there's an even better reason to not talk to cops.
It's illegal to lie to cops. Now, that requires intent in theory, but in practice they can get you for any falsehood.
So if the cops ask you anything, don't refuse on 5th amendment grounds, which, in theory, requires you to actually have a belief you could incriminate yourself. And don't refuse on 1st amendment grounds that you can't be forced to speak.
Instead, say something like 'As I understand the law, responding in a certain way to your questions is a felony. I hope you'll understand if I don't risk that by refusing to speak to you at all.'.
And the most important point, which you should take to heart, is that you didn't even CONSIDER that possibility that the cop wasn't a rights trouncing, citizen abusing asshole, even though such individuals are BY FAR the exception. Most cops are regular guys, but your overwhelming paranoia clouds your ability to see that.
Only one out of twenty of our airline pilots is drunken on duty, and your demands to speak to the pilot before the flight is extreme paranoia.
Considering that it's the rights trouncing, citizen abusing asshole that hassle people for no reason to start with, I think a little paranoia is well justified when dealing with police.
Therefore, if you don't see that explicit authorization, you can assume you're not welcome.
So, I assume you can produce the permission you were granted to access slashdot? No, the AUP doesn't count unless you managed to get that without, you know, contacting slashdot.org.
When will you fools who don't understand how 'unauthorized access' is defined in the law shut the fuck up? Unauthorized access is when access has been disallowed, either via some automated means such as passwords, or via notifying the users in person. I.e., you think it's 'nonauthorized', but it would be better explained as 'disauthorized access', where authorization has been revoked.
By default, you are allowed to access any computer and network without permission. The whole internet would be completely unusable otherwise.
Personal revokations, of course, override automated acceptances, just like someone who's been barred from a store can't argue the door let them in and hence they weren't trespassing. I don't know why that's hard to understand, it's how trespassing law works.
What doesn't work like trespassing law is the fact that all places are 'public'. If someone wanders into our house and into our bathroom while we're taking a shower, the law says they should have assumed that was not public and hence they are trespassing.
With computers, the legal assumption is that everywhere that is not behind any sort of security system, like a username and password, is public. Everywhere. This makes sense because, unlike real property and doors and fences, which have existed for thousands of years, computers are still in flux and, just as important, it's much harder to make guesses from a distance about what the owner would find acceptable.
If it doesn't open, of course it's not legal to ram it. Physically damaging other's property is illegal, but I fail to see how this even vaguely applies to the article here.
Under the law? You certainly were (trespassing) - you entered private property without permission. What the shop looks like or doesn't look like is irrelevant. In reality (under those circumstances), if you were charge you'd probably get off with a stern lecture from the judge for lack of good judgement (at least the first time).
You are utterly incorrect. Trespassing law specifically is based on various standards, and the most important one is 'Did you know that area was intended to be private?'. Or, more accurately, would a reasonable person assume that area was intended to be private. Sometimes these assumptions are coded into law, sometimes they are not.
If you did not know somewhere was intended to be private, you are not trespassing. It doesn't matter if the property owner thinks you are.
Do I need to put my physical address in the SSID so they can come and ask?
Can I just say, while I agree with you, that people should do this anyway? Maybe not their physical address, but some way to figure out who the damn operator of the network is?
There have been dozens times I've run across networks I had no idea if they were intended to be open or not. I would have been willing to track the operator down, and ask, out of politeness, if I could use it, maybe even offering to held defray costs, maybe offering to secure it if they didn't want it public, and in one case offering to move one of the four damn wifi routers named 'linksys' off channel 6.
I couldn't figure out who any of the people were.
My wireless network, while encrypted, is named my last name. I've never had anyone contact me about it, and my ISP would prohibit me sharing the bandwidth, and I wouldn't really want to do that anyway, but they can track me down if I'm on a frequency they need to use or whatever.
I'm beginning to think having a completely unlicensed spectrum was a mistake. There's a reason radio stations and ham operators are required to identify themselves.
If she wants something more stringent, then she can put up a sign that says, "Wireless access for customers only. Password: coffee."
That's the way to do it. Put up a password, on the wall, and put restrictions on the use. Cracking a password, no matter if it's only 64-bit WEP or whatever, is illegal, as is using a network you know you don't have permission to access.
Although saying something is 'for customers' is pretty silly, as you left out a time frame. What would be more logical is printing out a key on the receipt, and changing it every day or week or whatever. You wouldn't need to make any 'rules' at all...if the key still works, they are allowed to use it, if not, they're still not allowed to guess or crack one.
Really now? So the first packet you send someone should be illegal?
So, you think the coffee shop owner should be in jail? The law I checked, wifi routers sit there and broadcast their name continually.
What gives them the right to put a packet in my computer, but disallows me putting a packet in theirs in response? Especially as theirs is an advertisement the network exists (It's even called an advertisement) and mine is a question if I'm allowed to access them or not?
If we're going to disallow some packets and not others, I think, logically, we should disallow the ones that say 'Hey, connect to me' when a router doesn't actually mean it, and not 'Hey, am I allowed to connect to you?' packets.
Except that Federal law has been repeatedly held to mean that access is 'unauthorized' if and only if at some point it was indicated to the end use such access was not authorized, either by some sort of notification on their screen, a sign they can read, they have been informed in person, or there's a username and/or password prompt.
It, admittedly, hasn't been tried with wifi access, but open wifi pretty much automatically rules out some sort of a prompt on screen, unless you can name the AP something clever and demonstrate they had to have read the name, and it rules out a physical sign unless you can show they read it, which won't work because people aren't require or even encouraged to go wandering around private property looking for signs.
And, of course, an open wifi has no name or password required to use. (This is, however, why cracking an encryption key for it is illegal.)
Ergo, under federal law, which incidentally is the template for a lot of state laws, using an open wifi is only 'unauthorized' if you've personally been notified by the operator of that computer network to stay off. (1)
This town, however, noticed this, and apparently 'fixed' the laws. The problem is, 'fixing' the laws in this way probably made all access of computers and computer networks without permission illegal, which means they just outlawed the internet. There are only two ways to have the laws: One, what we have, allows use of any resources not specifically prohibited, which means idiots get their computer networks used by other people, and the other disallowed the use of any resources not specifically allowed, which means no internet. Pick one.
Either that, or they didn't fix the laws, and this guy's lawyer is a moron.
That guy should take his computer down there, run a copy of Network Stumbler with 'Query access points' disabled so he doesn't broadcast anything, and have the coffee shop brought up on charges because they're accessing his computer with AP broadcasts. Or, as the police would ignore that, do it to the police instead, or at leas the city government...if you catch the local police violating the law, that's when you get to call the FBI in.
1) And, just to piss off people stupid enough to operate an open wifi AP and think they can 'protect' it by telling people to stay off it, if that happened to me, if someone noticed me using an open wifi access point and asked me to stop, I'd make them demonstrate they operated that network. You can't just wave your arms in midair and claim ownership of a radio network surrounding you, I don't have triangulation equipment on me that shows that it originates on your property, and even if it does, anyone on your property could be operating that and you have no right, under FCC rules, to restrict their operation of said network. Once they demonstrated they operated the network, I'd then make them lay out the exact boundaries their signal reached and the frequency it operated on. Maybe around this point they'd be getting a clue that maybe it would be easier to lock down their network and stop whining.
If they didn't, the next step is to grab my spare AP and my inverter, stick them in my car, drive back over there, and have them log into my network and then demand they stop. I have as much right to use that frequency and AP name as they do.
However, manipulating the router in order to gain access to the owner's network using transmissions of your own is an entirely different concept, and not remotely similar to using spare light to read a book.
Manipulating?
Please explain how saying 'Can I use this network?' using standard protocols is 'manipulating'.
Windows automatic codec download probably works fine for Microsoft codecs that no one uses, although why wouldn't those don't come preinstalled in the first place?
That's the question that's been bugging me. Does anyone have a way to put codecs in, or is it just MS? If it's MS, then aren't those already downloaded? So I have a challenge:
Does anyone have any files that will cause, and finish, an automatic codec download on an up-to-date Windows Media Player? If not, does anyone have one that will cause, and finish, an automatic codec download even on an older copy of WMP?
If yes to either question, please provide a link to them if you can.
Windows' 'Find an application to handle this file extension' functionality seems about as useless as this, also.
I would like to second that. I've never had Windows download a codec that I needed.
I claim that the main codecs that people need that they don't have to start with, on Windows, are XviD, DivX, quicktime, and real audio. Those, and WMV, are how 95% of the videos people get handed are encoded. These codecs do not, under any circumstances, automatically download. Ergo, Windows's automatic download is near useless. What's worse is that you have no actual way of knowing the name of the codec so you don't know what you need to download, and once you figure out the name, you have to do some pretty heavy searching to find something. Yes, we all know about the K-Lite codec pack, but J. Random Window User does not.
OTOH, Linux does not come with mp3, so let's say they're tied there. Sadly for Windows, Linux, while, it doesn't automatically download, in, say, Ubuntu, it directs you to a pretty simple interface to download it.
Windows would come out ahead if its automatic download actually functioned for the codecs people need to download. It in no way actually does so. I don't know what codecs it does automatically download, but I've never run across them.
What the fuck is with printer drivers that installed all sorts of crap along with them? It's a fucking printer driver, it's like 750k at most.
People may want other random applications along with their printer, and hardware companies should feel free to provide them, although I'm forewarning them now that I don't give a damn about that and if you raise the price of your printers to provide said software I'll go with someone else.
But these applications aren't drivers. That crapware shouldn't get installed when you install the drivers.
Of course, some companies still seem to understand the difference between drivers and applications, like motherboard manufactures. Wifi makers, OTOH, all seem to install their own software to take control of wifi away from Windows. Medium-end video cards also, but that's more understandable, as Windows' software for them is crappy. But half the people out there, thank God, aren't providing any drivers at all because XP is actually somewhat comprensive about what drivers come with the system.
I don't think anyone here has any idea what 'respect' means.
Children should not automatically 'respect' anyone. No one should automatically respect others past a certain point, or be asked to do so, or punished for failing to do so.
In a polite society, even if you don't respect someone yet, you show them at least a tiny amount of respect unless they've done something to earn your disrespect. And since schools are attempting to prepare students for the world, they logically should be able to teach that, but schools lost the moral authority to punish people for that around the time they started disrespecting students by saying they can't wear black armbands to schools to protest Vietnam.
I.e., while the default is to show some respect(1), and teaching that would be good, schools almost by definition show disrespect towards their students from the very first day ths tudent shows up, so the students have a damn good reason to pretty quickly lose that default level of respect.
But more to the point, mocking the teacher in class is one of the few things in schools that actually are disruptions of class.
Most of the time a school asserts something is a 'disruption', they are lying. Clothing is never a disruption, people passing out flyers during break is never a disruption. But a student mocking a teacher in class when her back is turned? Yep, that's a disruption, and punish the bastard.
Of course, 40 day is near nonsensical, especially considering this specific instance was so non-disruptive the teacher didn't notice it at the time.
1) If people wonder what, exactly, I mean by that, I'm talking about things like holding doors for people with packages, waiting for people to get off the elevator before you try to get on, and politely clearing your throat to get someone's attention instead of shouting 'Hey, you!'. Teenagers, believe it or not, have to be taught such things, and the school would be the logical place to teach them, except that respect is a two way road and schools don't show the slightest amount of respect towards their students. They can feel free to try to teach that, but they don't get to punish violators.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the story here is that Ameritrade is not only spamming, they are spamming stock tips, or at least they are causing that to happen.
A brokerage firm that randomly gives stock tips with the intent of buying the the stock low beforehand, and selling it after a bunch of people purchase it, thus passing the loss on to their customers, is in violation of half a dozen laws and can be subject to large fines and lose its ability to trade stock, which, considering that's all Ameritrade does, would kill it. A firm that lets someone at that firm do it is, instead of the firm itself, is just as culpable.
Screw involving Ameritrade or the media in this, someone needs to inform the SEC of what's going on.
Threshold didn't do that. Threshold actually made a somewhat interesting premise, and stuck with it. And, for once, it was interesting being inside the 'cover up aliens' conspiracy. Almost every episode we learned something new, and there while there was some interesting interpersonal stuff, it was almost all due to the enormous pressure they were operating under, and there were absolutely no love triangles at all.
The speed of the show is probably due to the fact it was only supposed to run three years, and by at the end of the first year it would become 'Foothold' and then 'Stranglehold' the last year.
This was frowned on and discouraged by the managers.
That, right there, is the difference. Best Buy has people sitting at the registers who's sole purpose is to lie to you to sell you extended warranties. It has an intranet that exactly mirrors its web site so people can inform you you are wrong about web deals.
Any store that 'ranks' cashiers is going to have stuff like this pop up. I worked at Walmart as a cashier, and we got ranked not by how much we sold (Cashiers, obviously, have almost no ability to actually affect what is purchased at Walmart.), but by how long it took to ring people up. The more ethical ways of 'cheating' included hitting 'total' or a certain specific key to get a harmless error message, both of which stopped the clock, in the middle of a long checkout. You'd then rearranging things and fix the bags you just threw things in while the clock was running, and then clearing the error or just continue. The error method required an extra keypress that restarted the clock, as opposed to it starting the instant you scanned the next item, but OTOH the extra totals would show on the receipt and some customers would ask questions about why you randomly repeatedly totaled their order during the middle of it.
Those two methods were harmless, although they did make checkout take slightly longer, than, in theory, simply working as fast as possible would take. I suspect the speed losses were more than countered by the gains of just trying to be faster, though.
OTOH, we sometimes had people who'd 'fail' to meet the eye of customers with large carts full of dissimiliar things, which were the slowest to check out, or who'd suddenly realize they had to do returns. I don't know if management knew if they were trying to keep up their checkout time, or just assumed them to be lazy, but that was really frowned on.
I don't know if they're still doing that at Walmart, I haven't seen anyone do that trick on anything I've purchased, and I do actually watch for it.(1) But they still seem to mostly be going as fast as possible, although sometimes I get a cashier that doesn't care.
1) Incidentally, while I'm being nice to Walmart for once, I'll let everyone in on a tip. If they close the cash drawer, they can't open it again, and it opens after every transaction. The important thing here is, if you use a debit card and get cash back, the drawer will open, and if they're not paying attention, they'll reflexively close it. (They are trained to close the drawer when they don't need it open.) This will result in you standing there for two minutes while they call over a CSM to reopen the drawer to give you your money, and, no, the transaction is over, they can't undo it. So if you're wanting cash back, tell them while you're punching it in. It could save you and everyone behind you a few minutes of time, and it can't possible hurt.
This is also relevant if you want change. I can't tell you how many times someone would come up to the other side of the register while I was checking someone out, politely wait for everyone to finish, and then ask for change, which of course I couldn't give them because I'd just closed my damn cash drawer and couldn't open it. No, we can't ring up a zero transaction or 'no sale' and open it.
Everyone does this with USB cables.
For a while, I purchased every 'extension' USB cable I found for under 5 dollars. Because, normally, every damn place would have them for the absurd price of 20 dollars, but sometimes you run across one priced normally. (By normally, I mean about twice what it costs the store.) I'd immediately buy any I found until I figured I had enough.
What was really absurd is that places would sell USB hubs with cables for 20 dollars, and, next to it, a USB cable for 20 dollars. Or an 'active' extension cable (One with a single port hub built in.) for the same price as a 'passive' one. (One that is just a cable.) (1)
I'm the go-to guy with computer purchasing for about four people, and I've told them all: Never, ever, buy any cables, period. Usually things comes with cables, if they do not, I probably have them, if I do not, I will buy it from the correct place, and I'll even pay for the damn cable myself, just to keep those fucking scammers from making money.
Maybe if everyone refused to buy such insanely overpriced stuff, they'd stop trying to sell it for that price.
1) I really like all the passive cables certified 'USB 2.0'. Well, that's good to know. I'll put that with my RCA 'digital audio' certified cables and my 'transmits the sound of speech' certified air. Nice to know the pieces of copper don't have some magical ability to only carry USB 1.1 signals.
I wish everywhere had stopped selling alkaline rechargables. I've still got half a dozen of those things, and no working charger. I finally bit the bullet and threw away my half-broken charger, and now I've had to switch to NiCd rechargables. But sometimes you want actual 1.5 volts instead of 1.2. OTOH, sometimes you want a high-current load and don't need higher voltage. The theory was that you could put the correct battery in the correct charger, and for a while there were at least three different types on the marker and chargers for each, or for multiple types, but apparently no more.
Speaking of NiCd rechargables, has anyone noticed that Energizers are 2500 mAh and Duracells are 2650 mAh? What's with that?
If you want any kind of advice, service, or are easily frustrated by a positively byzantine return process then rest assured that Fry's is not the place for you.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
I'm sorry, but the people at Fry's are easily more knowledgeable than any other place that sells electronics. I don't know where you live, but around here we're got:
Best Buy, where the salesmen work on commission or something and thus lie, all the time. Like this article explains.
Walmart, where the guy working in electronics is just a normal cashier and has no special electronics knowledge. (OTOH, they at least don't claim to have any.) Also, they have no selection.
Compuserve, where apparently employees' sole function is to show you where things are located. Which is at least not unuseful.
Radio Shack, where they are actually unable to show you where things are located, much less answer questions. I've asked for simple things, and been misdirected, in their tiny-ass stores. The damn store is smaller than three of the dorm rooms where I went to college, do you employees not sometimes wander around and look at things?
Yes, often Frys' employees do not know things, but they have, for some unknown reason, literally ten times the floor staff they actually need, and usually they can find someone who does know something. (Seriously, I walk around in the store and half the people I pass are employees. What's going on with that?)
Maybe you live in Silicon Valley or New York City or some huge place, but, around here, we had nothing until Frys.
OTOH, I don't know about their return procedure as implimented, but as it's stated you won't find a better one.
Other insurances either are required, like car insurance, or result in lower prices regardless thanks to negotiation, like health insurance. Also, they cover things you couldn't cover on the fly, and hence work like an investment, which in theory is wasteful, but people like that.
Service plans, OTOH, are scams. All of them.
And I don't know in what universe service plans are more convenient. Walking into the store and out with a new item is easier than dealing with the service desk. And talking about 'Piece of mind' is about like talking about people who play the lottery for 'excitement'. No, in both examples they are innumerates who have had the statistics explained to them, but think somehow that they, of all people, will come out ahead.(1)
I don't have a problem with crazy people buying service plan, really, or stores selling them, any more than I have a problem with stores selling lottery tickets. (I myself have sold lottery tickets.) I do have a rather large problem with the fact Best Buy has people who come up to you as you're checking out and lie that you need the service plan. Frys, OTOH, does not.
1) Of course, sometimes you are one of those people, if you plan to regularly abuse the product that is purchased. That probably voids the service plan, but, hey, that seems like counting at blackjack to me. Turnable is fair play.
I was sitting here reading all the comments waiting to see if someone had mentioned that, because I was going to if they hadn't. Scrapbook is amazing, and what wasn't mentioned is that you can use file shares to put your scrapbook on, and have them accessible on multiple computers.
Something that wasn't mentioned: The pages are normal HTML pages, and stored wherever you want, so they get indexed by whatever search tool you have on your computer, like GDS...and if you open them back up in Firefox, even without using the Scrapbook interface, you get all the editing tools and the original URL and all the stuff you need. (Also, it comes with the ability to search itself.)
It not only lets you capture a page with images and stuff, it lets you crawl sites and capture all of them. And you can also capture tiny parts of pages.
And if you have multiple pages, say four pages of a single article, you can merge them together, which, along with the aforementioned removal of elements, can make nice single page articles for reference later, and, of course, Scrapbook remembers where they all are from, even in merged pages.
It was designed for people in school to be able to find information later, to be able to take a web page, trim it down to the information they need, and then cite it's original URL, but I'm not in school and I find it very handy.
It eventually results in a context shift in bookmarking: You start scrapbooking information you need later, and only bookmarking places that you think will have useful information in the future. I run across a 'How to do something complicated in PHP', I don't bookmark it, I scrapbook it.
It doesn't have any internet sync, just the ability to keep a store on a network drive, which seems to work okay with offline sync in Windows XP Pro. There's an extension for box.net that lets you import and export to box.net, but it isn't automatic and not incredibly useful.
That, and the ability to check if certain pages had changed, would be very useful, but other than that it is awesome.
Oh, don't get me started on that. Notepad sucks ass, and OSes are supposed to have actual functional text editors, not ones that barf on files bigger than 2^16. Windows has astonishing failures as an OS:
1) Total inability to write or read a floppy or CD image.
2) So...no packet sniffing at all, eh?
3) No bluetooth application. Ooookay. So how exactly do I use by HID hardware to control the computer?
4) No modem on hold program. How long has that standard been around? I guess we're lucking we got a terminal program, although you'll notice MS didn't bother to write their own.
All of those are actual functions of an OS, and MS didn't see fit to include them. It's a damn OS, hardware is its job. But I guess they were too busy building in a web browser and email client.
After all, his laptop was passively receiving radio signals and did *not* broadcast an SSID or otherwise initiate a negotiation for connectivity...but their WAP actively did.
That's what I keep trying to bring up to all these morons. Access points access computers first. They sit there and broadcast.
Making connecting, via wifi, without explicit authorization illegal would make all wireless access points illegal (Well, ones broadcasting), and not any laptops. The laptops are just responding to the broadcast.
Yes, you might accidental admit to a crime, but there's an even better reason to not talk to cops.
It's illegal to lie to cops. Now, that requires intent in theory, but in practice they can get you for any falsehood.
So if the cops ask you anything, don't refuse on 5th amendment grounds, which, in theory, requires you to actually have a belief you could incriminate yourself. And don't refuse on 1st amendment grounds that you can't be forced to speak.
Instead, say something like 'As I understand the law, responding in a certain way to your questions is a felony. I hope you'll understand if I don't risk that by refusing to speak to you at all.'.
And the most important point, which you should take to heart, is that you didn't even CONSIDER that possibility that the cop wasn't a rights trouncing, citizen abusing asshole, even though such individuals are BY FAR the exception. Most cops are regular guys, but your overwhelming paranoia clouds your ability to see that.
Only one out of twenty of our airline pilots is drunken on duty, and your demands to speak to the pilot before the flight is extreme paranoia.
Considering that it's the rights trouncing, citizen abusing asshole that hassle people for no reason to start with, I think a little paranoia is well justified when dealing with police.
Therefore, if you don't see that explicit authorization, you can assume you're not welcome.
So, I assume you can produce the permission you were granted to access slashdot? No, the AUP doesn't count unless you managed to get that without, you know, contacting slashdot.org.
When will you fools who don't understand how 'unauthorized access' is defined in the law shut the fuck up? Unauthorized access is when access has been disallowed, either via some automated means such as passwords, or via notifying the users in person. I.e., you think it's 'nonauthorized', but it would be better explained as 'disauthorized access', where authorization has been revoked.
By default, you are allowed to access any computer and network without permission. The whole internet would be completely unusable otherwise.
Personal revokations, of course, override automated acceptances, just like someone who's been barred from a store can't argue the door let them in and hence they weren't trespassing. I don't know why that's hard to understand, it's how trespassing law works.
What doesn't work like trespassing law is the fact that all places are 'public'. If someone wanders into our house and into our bathroom while we're taking a shower, the law says they should have assumed that was not public and hence they are trespassing.
With computers, the legal assumption is that everywhere that is not behind any sort of security system, like a username and password, is public. Everywhere. This makes sense because, unlike real property and doors and fences, which have existed for thousands of years, computers are still in flux and, just as important, it's much harder to make guesses from a distance about what the owner would find acceptable.
What the hell are you talking about?
If it doesn't open, of course it's not legal to ram it. Physically damaging other's property is illegal, but I fail to see how this even vaguely applies to the article here.
Under the law? You certainly were (trespassing) - you entered private property without permission. What the shop looks like or doesn't look like is irrelevant. In reality (under those circumstances), if you were charge you'd probably get off with a stern lecture from the judge for lack of good judgement (at least the first time).
You are utterly incorrect. Trespassing law specifically is based on various standards, and the most important one is 'Did you know that area was intended to be private?'. Or, more accurately, would a reasonable person assume that area was intended to be private. Sometimes these assumptions are coded into law, sometimes they are not.
If you did not know somewhere was intended to be private, you are not trespassing. It doesn't matter if the property owner thinks you are.
Do I need to put my physical address in the SSID so they can come and ask?
Can I just say, while I agree with you, that people should do this anyway? Maybe not their physical address, but some way to figure out who the damn operator of the network is?
There have been dozens times I've run across networks I had no idea if they were intended to be open or not. I would have been willing to track the operator down, and ask, out of politeness, if I could use it, maybe even offering to held defray costs, maybe offering to secure it if they didn't want it public, and in one case offering to move one of the four damn wifi routers named 'linksys' off channel 6.
I couldn't figure out who any of the people were.
My wireless network, while encrypted, is named my last name. I've never had anyone contact me about it, and my ISP would prohibit me sharing the bandwidth, and I wouldn't really want to do that anyway, but they can track me down if I'm on a frequency they need to use or whatever.
I'm beginning to think having a completely unlicensed spectrum was a mistake. There's a reason radio stations and ham operators are required to identify themselves.
If she wants something more stringent, then she can put up a sign that says, "Wireless access for customers only. Password: coffee."
That's the way to do it. Put up a password, on the wall, and put restrictions on the use. Cracking a password, no matter if it's only 64-bit WEP or whatever, is illegal, as is using a network you know you don't have permission to access.
Although saying something is 'for customers' is pretty silly, as you left out a time frame. What would be more logical is printing out a key on the receipt, and changing it every day or week or whatever. You wouldn't need to make any 'rules' at all...if the key still works, they are allowed to use it, if not, they're still not allowed to guess or crack one.
Really now? So the first packet you send someone should be illegal?
So, you think the coffee shop owner should be in jail? The law I checked, wifi routers sit there and broadcast their name continually.
What gives them the right to put a packet in my computer, but disallows me putting a packet in theirs in response? Especially as theirs is an advertisement the network exists (It's even called an advertisement) and mine is a question if I'm allowed to access them or not?
If we're going to disallow some packets and not others, I think, logically, we should disallow the ones that say 'Hey, connect to me' when a router doesn't actually mean it, and not 'Hey, am I allowed to connect to you?' packets.
Except that Federal law has been repeatedly held to mean that access is 'unauthorized' if and only if at some point it was indicated to the end use such access was not authorized, either by some sort of notification on their screen, a sign they can read, they have been informed in person, or there's a username and/or password prompt.
It, admittedly, hasn't been tried with wifi access, but open wifi pretty much automatically rules out some sort of a prompt on screen, unless you can name the AP something clever and demonstrate they had to have read the name, and it rules out a physical sign unless you can show they read it, which won't work because people aren't require or even encouraged to go wandering around private property looking for signs.
And, of course, an open wifi has no name or password required to use. (This is, however, why cracking an encryption key for it is illegal.)
Ergo, under federal law, which incidentally is the template for a lot of state laws, using an open wifi is only 'unauthorized' if you've personally been notified by the operator of that computer network to stay off. (1)
This town, however, noticed this, and apparently 'fixed' the laws. The problem is, 'fixing' the laws in this way probably made all access of computers and computer networks without permission illegal, which means they just outlawed the internet. There are only two ways to have the laws: One, what we have, allows use of any resources not specifically prohibited, which means idiots get their computer networks used by other people, and the other disallowed the use of any resources not specifically allowed, which means no internet. Pick one.
Either that, or they didn't fix the laws, and this guy's lawyer is a moron.
That guy should take his computer down there, run a copy of Network Stumbler with 'Query access points' disabled so he doesn't broadcast anything, and have the coffee shop brought up on charges because they're accessing his computer with AP broadcasts. Or, as the police would ignore that, do it to the police instead, or at leas the city government...if you catch the local police violating the law, that's when you get to call the FBI in.
1) And, just to piss off people stupid enough to operate an open wifi AP and think they can 'protect' it by telling people to stay off it, if that happened to me, if someone noticed me using an open wifi access point and asked me to stop, I'd make them demonstrate they operated that network. You can't just wave your arms in midair and claim ownership of a radio network surrounding you, I don't have triangulation equipment on me that shows that it originates on your property, and even if it does, anyone on your property could be operating that and you have no right, under FCC rules, to restrict their operation of said network. Once they demonstrated they operated the network, I'd then make them lay out the exact boundaries their signal reached and the frequency it operated on. Maybe around this point they'd be getting a clue that maybe it would be easier to lock down their network and stop whining.
If they didn't, the next step is to grab my spare AP and my inverter, stick them in my car, drive back over there, and have them log into my network and then demand they stop. I have as much right to use that frequency and AP name as they do.
However, manipulating the router in order to gain access to the owner's network using transmissions of your own is an entirely different concept, and not remotely similar to using spare light to read a book.
Manipulating?
Please explain how saying 'Can I use this network?' using standard protocols is 'manipulating'.
Windows automatic codec download probably works fine for Microsoft codecs that no one uses, although why wouldn't those don't come preinstalled in the first place?
That's the question that's been bugging me. Does anyone have a way to put codecs in, or is it just MS? If it's MS, then aren't those already downloaded? So I have a challenge:
Does anyone have any files that will cause, and finish, an automatic codec download on an up-to-date Windows Media Player? If not, does anyone have one that will cause, and finish, an automatic codec download even on an older copy of WMP?
If yes to either question, please provide a link to them if you can.
Windows' 'Find an application to handle this file extension' functionality seems about as useless as this, also.
I would like to second that. I've never had Windows download a codec that I needed.
I claim that the main codecs that people need that they don't have to start with, on Windows, are XviD, DivX, quicktime, and real audio. Those, and WMV, are how 95% of the videos people get handed are encoded. These codecs do not, under any circumstances, automatically download. Ergo, Windows's automatic download is near useless. What's worse is that you have no actual way of knowing the name of the codec so you don't know what you need to download, and once you figure out the name, you have to do some pretty heavy searching to find something. Yes, we all know about the K-Lite codec pack, but J. Random Window User does not.
OTOH, Linux does not come with mp3, so let's say they're tied there. Sadly for Windows, Linux, while, it doesn't automatically download, in, say, Ubuntu, it directs you to a pretty simple interface to download it.
Windows would come out ahead if its automatic download actually functioned for the codecs people need to download. It in no way actually does so. I don't know what codecs it does automatically download, but I've never run across them.
No shit.
What the fuck is with printer drivers that installed all sorts of crap along with them? It's a fucking printer driver, it's like 750k at most.
People may want other random applications along with their printer, and hardware companies should feel free to provide them, although I'm forewarning them now that I don't give a damn about that and if you raise the price of your printers to provide said software I'll go with someone else.
But these applications aren't drivers. That crapware shouldn't get installed when you install the drivers.
Of course, some companies still seem to understand the difference between drivers and applications, like motherboard manufactures. Wifi makers, OTOH, all seem to install their own software to take control of wifi away from Windows. Medium-end video cards also, but that's more understandable, as Windows' software for them is crappy. But half the people out there, thank God, aren't providing any drivers at all because XP is actually somewhat comprensive about what drivers come with the system.
You forgot the first step:
'Nemosoft decides to use some weird patented compression for its cameras.'
Every problem followed from that decision.
I don't think anyone here has any idea what 'respect' means.
Children should not automatically 'respect' anyone. No one should automatically respect others past a certain point, or be asked to do so, or punished for failing to do so.
In a polite society, even if you don't respect someone yet, you show them at least a tiny amount of respect unless they've done something to earn your disrespect. And since schools are attempting to prepare students for the world, they logically should be able to teach that, but schools lost the moral authority to punish people for that around the time they started disrespecting students by saying they can't wear black armbands to schools to protest Vietnam.
I.e., while the default is to show some respect(1), and teaching that would be good, schools almost by definition show disrespect towards their students from the very first day ths tudent shows up, so the students have a damn good reason to pretty quickly lose that default level of respect.
But more to the point, mocking the teacher in class is one of the few things in schools that actually are disruptions of class.
Most of the time a school asserts something is a 'disruption', they are lying. Clothing is never a disruption, people passing out flyers during break is never a disruption. But a student mocking a teacher in class when her back is turned? Yep, that's a disruption, and punish the bastard.
Of course, 40 day is near nonsensical, especially considering this specific instance was so non-disruptive the teacher didn't notice it at the time.
1) If people wonder what, exactly, I mean by that, I'm talking about things like holding doors for people with packages, waiting for people to get off the elevator before you try to get on, and politely clearing your throat to get someone's attention instead of shouting 'Hey, you!'. Teenagers, believe it or not, have to be taught such things, and the school would be the logical place to teach them, except that respect is a two way road and schools don't show the slightest amount of respect towards their students. They can feel free to try to teach that, but they don't get to punish violators.