The same titans of responsibility absolutely refuse to consider the idea of paying off our debt with taxes, but can't seem to name anything that consumes more than.1 percent of the federal budget when pressed for programs to cut.
Oh, it's worse than that. They can name two programs: Social Security and Medicare.
Which, as anyone who's paying the slightest notice knows, cutting cannot result in less debt.
Social security isn't even part of the budget. Unless they plan on outright stealing all the money the general budget has borrowed, and never pay it back, that can't work.
And they'd have to keep 'social security' removal from paychecks, and then not pay it...aka, raise taxes. But it's a very regressive tax so I'm sure they're fine with that. I'm sure their 'privatize social security bullcrap' includes 'in addition to having people pay into private accounts, keep collecting all those social security taxes and use them to fund the government instead.', although strangely I can't seem to find that documented anywhere.
And Medicare, while technically part of the general budget, is voluntary insurance. So...we're going to cut benefits and hope that people inexplicably keep buying it? Somehow, I suspect they'd stop.
Both Social Security and Medicare are lowering the debt, because we're borrowing from their surplus income instead of China. Yes, yes, at some point in the future, with the rates and payouts where they are, they won't be able to pay for themselves, and at some point even farther, they'll have to start withdrawing from surplus, but that isn't causing any budget problems now, and can't affect the 'deficit problem' the Republicans think is happening now.
The reason for all this, incidentally, is the right's insistence that social programs pay for themselves. So....um...they do. Cutting them can't fix the problem with the general budget, or save any money at all. To repeat: Social. Programs. Pay. For. Themselves.
The Republicans party cannot conceive of raising taxes. (Or even fucking not lowering taxes.) They cannot conceive of cutting spending of things paid out of general revenue, like defense. Those are literally the only way to balance the budget.
And because the Democrats are cowardly fucktards, they've gotten halfway sucked into this mentality also.
It doesn't change the fact that a lot of people lost a lot of money on old GM.
Yes, but that has nothing to do with saving GM at all. GM's mismanagement blew that money up, not the government saving GM from burning entirely to the ground.
What you are saying makes sense, but is not a valid response to 'saving GM will eventually not cost the taxpayers anything'.
GM disintegration cost quite a lot of people quite a lot of money, but there is very little of that you can pin on the government.
Yes, yes, the bankrupcy courts may make different determinations of who got paid what, which, I guess, is the government costing people money(1), but, as you said, that's not even finished yet. And more relevantly, that isn't costing the taxpayers.
1) Which is, frankly, the most idiotic complaint ever. Those debt-holding companies are almost entirely suppliers, and now, thanks to the government, they have someone to supply to and who can pay off the entire debt, and this temporary involuntary loan is a good deal better than, um, getting paid 1/3rd of what GM owes them as GM is dismantled by a bankrupcy court.
Well, if you're talking about 'fraudulent', simply signing up for a service for the phone with the intent to cancel immediately and keep the phone certainly fits the definition of 'fraud'. If you intend a breach of contract while you're signing the contract...yeah, that's fraud.;)
But probably not theft, and you're right that any attempt to make it theft would just be the provider trying to manipulate the law...they do not actually want the phone back. But, like I said, it's the moral equivalent of not returning video rentals. Whether or not it's legally theft, it certainly is ethically.
Which is why I get annoyed when people call it 'jailbreaking'. No, what I did to my entirely legal and still under contract iPhone is 'jailbreaking'. Someone who signed a contract and then skipped out with the phone without paying for it probably 'unlocked' it, which is different.
Although the problem is the 'skipping out without paying for it' part, not the 'unlocking' part. But that's 'hard' for companies to deal with (Yes, dealing with people who skipped out on unsecured loans you made to them is, indeed, rather annoying, which is why most companies don't do that. Duh.), whereas laws about 'unlocking' are easy in our corporately-owned government.
I agree about criminal penalties. For some reason, corporations seem able to make everything actually illegal, which saves them time and money and uses police resources.
Meanwhile, no individual torts, not even deliberate ones, are illegal.
So something like unlocking a phone is illegal, but selling you a product they know is defective and unsuited for the purpose sold, you have to sue them over.
The company should pursue you for breach of contract to collect what you owe them.
What the phone company should really do is stop giving damn unsecured loans to people, which is essentially what it's doing. It's a damn stupid business model.
As I said elsewhere, any 'rent to own' plan for items under $500(1) is inherently a scam. That's what they're doing here.
While I'll stop short of calling for those business practices be illegal, I'm hardly going to help enable them do it automatically.
There's a good reason for society to having a system where companies can easily loan people a car or a house and have them pay it off over time. There is fuck-all a reason to have an easy system like that for phones.
Of course, that doesn't make people who sign up for deals like this, break them, and keep the phone ethical.
1) $500 is actually too low. I'd generalize it to 'one month's income'. There is absolutely no way that having people make a purchase less than a their month's income over time benefits society. People who cannot save enough for that purpose either either entirely broke or entirely incompetent with money, and it does not help anyone for them to go into debt.
You still have to pay your contracted plan regardless of if you're using it or not, so whether the phone is unlocked is entirely irrelevant.
Except that people have started just giving bogus information and walking off with phones.
That may not be legally 'theft', but it is morally theft. (And not like 'pretend morally theft', like copyright violation. Someone actually took some physical thing of theirs.)
Anyone trying to make any form of unlocking illegal ever should jump off a bridge, and those who build their business models on locked phones without contracts are setting themselves up to get fucked when an unlock method is eventually discovered.
Yeah, but at least that post could summarize what was happening.
But let's recap the posts:
1) NASA schedules a weird press conference, link to NASA's press release. Very good.
2) Gizmodo guesses that NASA's press conference is about something, link to Gizmodo. Then instead of linking to any report of the press conference, another link back to #1. This is moderately stupid.
3) Claim story is confirmed, without actually mentioning what this 'story' is.
Please note we have no link actually confirming the guess, or reporting on what actually happened.
This is akin to saying 'This column from last week was correct about the winner of last night game'. Um, how about some actual information about how the actual game went, you idiots. Perhaps even state who was playing who! Or at least stating the goddamn winner.
And you have to follow at least three links to actually confirm the press conference even exists, with no evidence of what was actually said their.
Slashdot, you have outdone yourself in your inability to actually convey news.
No, it's a breach of contract for which the carriers have manifold legal remedies, including civil court, collections and so on. Essentially you are in debt to the carrier and your contract with them is basically an agreement to repay them. You owe them money, more or less.
That depends on the wording of the contract, whether or not you've actually bought the phone or just leased it.
However, I stating a moral argument, and not a legal one.
It's morally equivalent to renting a video with no intent to return it.
And if you sell the phone, knowing you contractually have to return it, it could, indeed, be actual theft by conversion.
It's incorrect to criminalize this debt, since it basically asks the police to be the enforcers of whatever poor contracts the seller originally used.
I actually agree with you.
What should be happening is this entire business model is just way too risky and expensive. It's making collateral-free loans.
If the businesses had to assume the risk, I suspect the rather stupid and annoying business model would change.
Almost all 'pay over times' services for items under $500 serve no help societal purpose at all. None whatsoever.
While I'm not going to run around outlawing them, I won't shed a tear if their business model does not work.
There are cases where you could claim fraud or other misrepresentation, but if you're just buying packages at retail and the seller *hopes* their existing technical configuration is limitation enough to enforce their contract it's not really fraud or misrepresentation as the "promise" to use your service to repay their equipment subsidy is implied, not agreed.
I've heard several explanations of what this actually was, and one of them agree with you. (Although it also says he was then funneling the money to terrorists. Which is also why he got everything thrown at him.)
Which doesn't even make this a contract breach, and he can do whatever the hell he wants with the phone. I have no sympathy for corporations selling stuff that actually doesn't work and requires you to buy an additional service to make it usable when someone discovers you don't have to buy the service from them.
Another said that he was modifying actual stolen-from-store phones. If that's the case, I think we agree that 'helping make usable and disguise the origin of stolen stuff' should be, and probably is, illegal. (And we don't need any specific laws about cellphones.)
Instead of telling us 'Gizmodo was right', like we all read Gizmodo and keep constantly up to date about what's going on over there, how about TELLING US THE ACTUAL THING THAT HAPPENED.
No, I shouldn't have to follow a link to figure it...there's supposed to be an 'article summary', which, you know, gives some hint as to what happened.
Instead of just saying 'Oh, hey, these other people were right in their guess about a thing which i won't mention that they thought NASA would say.'. Well, woo-fucking-hoo. I'm sure we were all on the edge of our seat betting in the 'How correct is Gizmodo?' pool, and they just got a point! Wow! Who cares about actual news events, let's all sit there and count Gizmodo's points, or something.
Timothy, you goddamn fucking moron. It's one thing when the article summary is misleading or just flat out incorrect, but slashdot has now managed to hit a new low where the article summary doesn't even exist.
Then you should be happy, as T-Mobile also will send you an unlock code if you buy a phone from them unsubsidized, so you can get around this problem legally with perfect ease. They'll even send you an unlock code if you've been on a plan with them for two months even if you bought it subsidized. If you're buying mobile phone or data service from a major carrier in the U.S., I do recommend T-Mobile (or one of their affiliates such as SimpleMobile) for exactly this reason, even though their network is much smaller than Verizon's.
While I agree with you that phone companies should be required to break out the subsidy on the bill, and further agree that people should not expect to be able to run off with the phones...
...there is the issue of, what if you want to use the phone for something else and yet keep paying for it. Perhaps you upgraded your phone, and wish to give a phone to a sibling...but he's on a different network? Or perhaps you personally have two cell phone services, and wish to use the new phone for the other service?
That is something that should be legal, and should be contractual possible, but right now is up to the largess of the phone company.
Likewise, if you wish to cancel the contract, but keep the phone, it's hard to actually do this without paying large fees that are undisclosed at startup. Requiring them to list the fees separate on the bill is a start, but it should be possible to actually get a breakdown, like 'The phone is 240 dollars, we will charge you 10 dollars a month which will reduce the amount you owe us for the phone 20 dollars a month, and if you leave you have to pay for the rest of the phone.'
Importantly, the law should require the total be a) pro-rated of actual proportion paid, and b) the actual price that the company is selling the phone for without service. (It doesn't, and shouldn't, require that they actually charge you the entire full price for the phone, just that if you had a two year contract, and were with them one year, you can now buy the phone for half original list price.)
With this law, it would be hard to justify any other charges for early cancellation, and I think any additional charges should be capped at the price of one month of service.
Indeed, I'm all for jailbreaking, but unlocking so you can run out on the contract you signed and keep the phone is not something we want to allow.
I mean, I'm all for freedom, but running off with a phone that you signed a contract to pay off over the next two years is theft. I can see some argument that the law should require the cell phone company to let you pay off the phone at some pro-rated rate or something, but just walking off with it is stealing.
Whether or not not letting people unlock phones is the best way to stop that theft is unknown. Perhaps a better method might simply to require people to put up a deposit or something.
Regardless, this guy wasn't unlocking those phones, he was unlocking actual stolen from the store phones. Again, I don't know if the best way to solve this problem is via restricting unlocking...I though they could report the IDs as stolen and the second anyone tried using them, they'd be caught, but maybe not.
I'm just annoyed because I remember, in 1999, talking about how the IPv6 transition was going to be hard because all consumer-level hardware would need to be replaced, and as people weren't likely to do it manually, that could take several years or even a decade!
Little did I know that we actually would not make any steps in that direction. At all, whatsoever.
At this point in time, it literally should not be possible to purchase IPv4-only routers. That shouldn't have been possible in 2002, when the stock ran out! All new hardware post 2001 or so should have supported IPv6, even if some of the support would probably be crappy.
There never should have been, for example, an IEEE 802.11g device (standard created in 2003.) ever sold that didn't do IPv6. Much less a 802.11n device!
It's not 'broken', it literally has no options for IPv6 at all.
Granted, for all I know it magically works once my ISP starts giving out IPv6 addresses, but logically it should at least have IPv6 DHCP support already showing.
I think it bears repeating: The problem isn't lack of time. If we'd started in 2000, we'd be done by now. If we'd started in 2008, we'd be mostly done by now.
WE HAVEN'T STARTED. WE ARE STILL DISTRIBUTING NON-IPV6 ROUTERS.
This isn't people 'failing to update'. People have probably fucking updated routers three times. No one's running an non-IPv6 OS, everyone could be running IPv6 routers if they'd actually, ever, at any point in time, been handed out. They weren't. Consumer-priced IPv6 routers were never sold, and they certainly weren't distributed how 75% of the people get their router...via ISP.
'Recovering IPv4 addresses' is akin to calling your teacher and asking for 30 minutes on a deadline because you're running late in traffic...on a paper you've literally not started.
It would probably on buy a few more years to reclaim these addresses and chop them up, but surely the problem is just poor usage as opposed to exhaustion.
*SLAP*
Seriously, we've already done this. Repeatedly. At no point has the actual transition started happening, even with all the 'extra time' given it.
Attempting to figure out a way to get more time will not actually solve the problem at all.
At the very least, we need IPv4 to blow up first, so the transition actually starts. After that point, if need be, we can start looking for more IPs to use during the transition.
But first, we actually have to start.
I got new ISP service in August. I got a router with it. This router does not do IPv6. In August. 2010.
The problem isn't 'lack of time', the problem is LACK OF STARTING.
Whether we write down numbers in base 16 or base 256 (each digit in base 10) doesn't make one iota of difference to the upgrade difficulties.
But base 16 is an fuckload easier to segment in your head if you can't instantly change base 10 to binary. (I can change it in my head, but I can hardly do it instantly.)
For networks, sure, 'decimal' (IPv4 is actually closer to base 256.) address worked great when we just had class A, B, and C. Once we got rid of them, people essentially had to memorize the network addresses for/25 to/30. And heaven forbid if you ran across a/22 or something!
With IPv6, all you need to know to memorize is..the hex digits, which essentially means you need to memorize A-F, ten through 15. And for speed, remember that 16 divides into quarters with: 4, 8, B, 10. (And you can figure out what 'half' and 'eighths' are easily.)
Take A982. Network mask FF00? It's in A900. Network mask FF40? It's in A980. Fs are copied, 0s are blanked, any remaining digits are the intervals you have to round down to. Tada. It's an instant binary AND in your head.
It's complicated to explain, but it's really easy to do in your head, for any network mask. Or you can instantly convert it to binary and do it that way, each hex digit is four binary digits.
IPv4 is actually just as easy in base 16, but no one ever writes it that way.
This approach also means that you only have to have enough IPs to support your active users, instead of every user on your network.
I'm not sure this makes much difference, in the days of all applications assuming they're online all the time. If the computer's up, it's probably made some connection, somewhere, even if it's just to check for updates.
Now, an interesting trick might be to use port mapping just for HTTP and email ports (Which don't have any reverse-connections at all.), but flip to an IP when anything else is used.
However, that introduces some weird logistical nightmares of dealing with existing connections during the switch, and might not make much difference when people are running Skype and IM clients and stuff.
And it might not work for 'smarter' protocols, which might use HTTP to connect to connect to a server, at which point the server tries connecting backwards to them to see if they're going to need to proxy connections, or if two people can connect directly to each other. I think some games work this way.
If you were running a server, of course, it wouldn't work, but if you were running a server you'd be knowledgeable to run some program that would trip the individual IP.
Still over a third of a billion to go, which should be more than enough time for everyone to replace equipment that doesn't support IPv6, and deal with applications like Teredo that leak IPv6 address space across NATs and through VPNs.
We've repeatedly had 'more than enough time'.
Adding more time does not actually work. It is not a problem with time.
I moved and hooked up Internet in August. I got the ISP's router. Guess what? No IPv6. Less than a year from the predicted end of IPv4, no IPv6.
That's because we're not saying 'the 80th decade', like we're saying 'the third millennium'. This obviously wouldn't even vaguely be right, it's the '198th decade'...and the 'the 199th decade' started in 1991, not 1990. If we counted decades, like we do centuries, we'd be just as confused there,and debating over when we hit 'decade 200' or 'the 200th decade'.
Saying 'the eighties' is like if we were saying 'the one thousands' and 'the two thousands' which, would indeed, refer to 1xxx and 2xxx. But no one says that.
When we say 'the eighties', we're not actually counting decades at all. That span of time, because we're in base ten, happens to be ten years, which is a decade, but there are not, in any sense, '80' or '1980' of them. It is a span of time that ended in 8x, which coincidentally happened to be a decade.
People, you need to realized that Assange still hasn't been charged with anything.
This type of INTERPOL thing is apparently for suspicious people who have disappeared and if the police see them, they should notify Sweden where they are. That's it. he is 'wanted', but not in the sense of 'arrest him'. He's wanted for questioning.
Assanage has not disappeared. Everyone knows exactly where he is. He's offered to participate in questioning.
This is a nonsensical INTERPOL request, and it was issued so Sweden could repeat the 'Assange is a rapist' claim, despite the fact that, so far, they still haven't put up any actual charges he could actually go before a judge and fight.
This is the plan, do this for months, and then stop. Without any resolution at all. No charges, no verdict, no nothing. Just months of Sweden repeating that he's a rapist.
And it will forever be 'Accused rapist Assange today release more information...'.
Implement your high import taxes, and unless you give ONE IMPORTER company a preferential deal, all of the prices will go up by the amount of the import tax you charge.
Or, alternately, the business will go to the companies who do not have to import. Which is, you know, half the stated point of this entire thing. (The reason I brought this up was to to stop tax dodges, but it's equally nice it allows us to bring manufacturing back, also.)
I don't understand how you got 90% of the way there, and then stopped.
Now, obviously, there are a few industries where there are literally no native suppliers, and I assumed I was talking to someone with a minimal amount of logic that would realize we'd have to treat those a bit differently to start with. Like announcing we would start the taxes in five years, so local industry has time to build up.
In fact, we'd probably want to do that for all of this. It's a giant process, where different industries and even different countries need different tariffs and they're going to tax us differently back, etc. And that's on top of the other changes I suggested, like getting rid of corporate income tax.
But feel free to invent an imaginary implementation process which I didn't state at all, and then find problems with the thing you just invented. Because that's certainly useful.
Wow. Utter Poe's Law at an epic scale. I really have trouble telling if you're serious.
First, people who start retirement are generally the wealthiest category of age group.
Yes, strangely, invest money, and you will be most wealthy when you retire. Um, duh.
However, you have no almost income.
Second, Social Security still provides an incentive not to work.
Yes, and the elderly must work, or, really, what are they for? *cracks whips*
Third, Medicare provides an incentive to deplete assets (say by spending them or giving them to the kids) when the serious medical bills start to show up.
Medicare does not means test, so your premise is entirely screwy to start with. How much money someone has has no bearing how many benefits it pays out, just like any other health insurance.
Fourth, people are living longer and the Baby Boomers are retiring. Yet Social Security doesn't take these changing demographics into account.
Because the media has been giving idiots who think it's 'failing' a megaphone instead of people just passing the trivial change required to keep it working, which is to remove or just raise the $106,800 cap on income. Right now, only the first $106,800 of income is taxed, which is, at most, $6621. A billionaire pays $6621 in social security each year.
I.e., the only 'problem' with social security is that no one's bothered to increase the cap on it with inflation in recent history, and that's been blocked because Republicans want to insist it's 'failing'.
Slashdot Mirror
The same titans of responsibility absolutely refuse to consider the idea of paying off our debt with taxes, but can't seem to name anything that consumes more than .1 percent of the federal budget when pressed for programs to cut.
Oh, it's worse than that. They can name two programs: Social Security and Medicare.
Which, as anyone who's paying the slightest notice knows, cutting cannot result in less debt.
Social security isn't even part of the budget. Unless they plan on outright stealing all the money the general budget has borrowed, and never pay it back, that can't work.
And they'd have to keep 'social security' removal from paychecks, and then not pay it...aka, raise taxes. But it's a very regressive tax so I'm sure they're fine with that. I'm sure their 'privatize social security bullcrap' includes 'in addition to having people pay into private accounts, keep collecting all those social security taxes and use them to fund the government instead.', although strangely I can't seem to find that documented anywhere.
And Medicare, while technically part of the general budget, is voluntary insurance. So...we're going to cut benefits and hope that people inexplicably keep buying it? Somehow, I suspect they'd stop.
Both Social Security and Medicare are lowering the debt, because we're borrowing from their surplus income instead of China. Yes, yes, at some point in the future, with the rates and payouts where they are, they won't be able to pay for themselves, and at some point even farther, they'll have to start withdrawing from surplus, but that isn't causing any budget problems now, and can't affect the 'deficit problem' the Republicans think is happening now.
The reason for all this, incidentally, is the right's insistence that social programs pay for themselves. So....um...they do. Cutting them can't fix the problem with the general budget, or save any money at all. To repeat: Social. Programs. Pay. For. Themselves.
The Republicans party cannot conceive of raising taxes. (Or even fucking not lowering taxes.) They cannot conceive of cutting spending of things paid out of general revenue, like defense. Those are literally the only way to balance the budget.
And because the Democrats are cowardly fucktards, they've gotten halfway sucked into this mentality also.
It doesn't change the fact that a lot of people lost a lot of money on old GM.
Yes, but that has nothing to do with saving GM at all. GM's mismanagement blew that money up, not the government saving GM from burning entirely to the ground.
What you are saying makes sense, but is not a valid response to 'saving GM will eventually not cost the taxpayers anything'.
GM disintegration cost quite a lot of people quite a lot of money, but there is very little of that you can pin on the government.
Yes, yes, the bankrupcy courts may make different determinations of who got paid what, which, I guess, is the government costing people money(1), but, as you said, that's not even finished yet. And more relevantly, that isn't costing the taxpayers.
1) Which is, frankly, the most idiotic complaint ever. Those debt-holding companies are almost entirely suppliers, and now, thanks to the government, they have someone to supply to and who can pay off the entire debt, and this temporary involuntary loan is a good deal better than, um, getting paid 1/3rd of what GM owes them as GM is dismantled by a bankrupcy court.
Well, if you're talking about 'fraudulent', simply signing up for a service for the phone with the intent to cancel immediately and keep the phone certainly fits the definition of 'fraud'. If you intend a breach of contract while you're signing the contract...yeah, that's fraud. ;)
But probably not theft, and you're right that any attempt to make it theft would just be the provider trying to manipulate the law...they do not actually want the phone back. But, like I said, it's the moral equivalent of not returning video rentals. Whether or not it's legally theft, it certainly is ethically.
Which is why I get annoyed when people call it 'jailbreaking'. No, what I did to my entirely legal and still under contract iPhone is 'jailbreaking'. Someone who signed a contract and then skipped out with the phone without paying for it probably 'unlocked' it, which is different.
Although the problem is the 'skipping out without paying for it' part, not the 'unlocking' part. But that's 'hard' for companies to deal with (Yes, dealing with people who skipped out on unsecured loans you made to them is, indeed, rather annoying, which is why most companies don't do that. Duh.), whereas laws about 'unlocking' are easy in our corporately-owned government.
Blarg, this isn't NASA's fault. NASA didn't post the story.
I agree about criminal penalties. For some reason, corporations seem able to make everything actually illegal, which saves them time and money and uses police resources.
Meanwhile, no individual torts, not even deliberate ones, are illegal.
So something like unlocking a phone is illegal, but selling you a product they know is defective and unsuited for the purpose sold, you have to sue them over.
If anything, it should be the other way around.
The company should pursue you for breach of contract to collect what you owe them.
What the phone company should really do is stop giving damn unsecured loans to people, which is essentially what it's doing. It's a damn stupid business model.
As I said elsewhere, any 'rent to own' plan for items under $500(1) is inherently a scam. That's what they're doing here.
While I'll stop short of calling for those business practices be illegal, I'm hardly going to help enable them do it automatically.
There's a good reason for society to having a system where companies can easily loan people a car or a house and have them pay it off over time. There is fuck-all a reason to have an easy system like that for phones.
Of course, that doesn't make people who sign up for deals like this, break them, and keep the phone ethical.
1) $500 is actually too low. I'd generalize it to 'one month's income'. There is absolutely no way that having people make a purchase less than a their month's income over time benefits society. People who cannot save enough for that purpose either either entirely broke or entirely incompetent with money, and it does not help anyone for them to go into debt.
You still have to pay your contracted plan regardless of if you're using it or not, so whether the phone is unlocked is entirely irrelevant.
Except that people have started just giving bogus information and walking off with phones.
That may not be legally 'theft', but it is morally theft. (And not like 'pretend morally theft', like copyright violation. Someone actually took some physical thing of theirs.)
Anyone trying to make any form of unlocking illegal ever should jump off a bridge, and those who build their business models on locked phones without contracts are setting themselves up to get fucked when an unlock method is eventually discovered.
I agree completely.
Yeah, but at least that post could summarize what was happening.
But let's recap the posts:
1) NASA schedules a weird press conference, link to NASA's press release. Very good.
2) Gizmodo guesses that NASA's press conference is about something, link to Gizmodo. Then instead of linking to any report of the press conference, another link back to #1. This is moderately stupid.
3) Claim story is confirmed, without actually mentioning what this 'story' is.
Please note we have no link actually confirming the guess, or reporting on what actually happened.
This is akin to saying 'This column from last week was correct about the winner of last night game'. Um, how about some actual information about how the actual game went, you idiots. Perhaps even state who was playing who! Or at least stating the goddamn winner.
And you have to follow at least three links to actually confirm the press conference even exists, with no evidence of what was actually said their.
Slashdot, you have outdone yourself in your inability to actually convey news.
No, it's a breach of contract for which the carriers have manifold legal remedies, including civil court, collections and so on. Essentially you are in debt to the carrier and your contract with them is basically an agreement to repay them. You owe them money, more or less.
That depends on the wording of the contract, whether or not you've actually bought the phone or just leased it.
However, I stating a moral argument, and not a legal one.
It's morally equivalent to renting a video with no intent to return it.
And if you sell the phone, knowing you contractually have to return it, it could, indeed, be actual theft by conversion.
It's incorrect to criminalize this debt, since it basically asks the police to be the enforcers of whatever poor contracts the seller originally used.
I actually agree with you.
What should be happening is this entire business model is just way too risky and expensive. It's making collateral-free loans.
If the businesses had to assume the risk, I suspect the rather stupid and annoying business model would change.
Almost all 'pay over times' services for items under $500 serve no help societal purpose at all. None whatsoever.
While I'm not going to run around outlawing them, I won't shed a tear if their business model does not work.
There are cases where you could claim fraud or other misrepresentation, but if you're just buying packages at retail and the seller *hopes* their existing technical configuration is limitation enough to enforce their contract it's not really fraud or misrepresentation as the "promise" to use your service to repay their equipment subsidy is implied, not agreed.
I've heard several explanations of what this actually was, and one of them agree with you. (Although it also says he was then funneling the money to terrorists. Which is also why he got everything thrown at him.)
Which doesn't even make this a contract breach, and he can do whatever the hell he wants with the phone. I have no sympathy for corporations selling stuff that actually doesn't work and requires you to buy an additional service to make it usable when someone discovers you don't have to buy the service from them.
Another said that he was modifying actual stolen-from-store phones. If that's the case, I think we agree that 'helping make usable and disguise the origin of stolen stuff' should be, and probably is, illegal. (And we don't need any specific laws about cellphones.)
See, this is why I hate slashdot.
Instead of telling us 'Gizmodo was right', like we all read Gizmodo and keep constantly up to date about what's going on over there, how about TELLING US THE ACTUAL THING THAT HAPPENED.
No, I shouldn't have to follow a link to figure it...there's supposed to be an 'article summary', which, you know, gives some hint as to what happened.
Instead of just saying 'Oh, hey, these other people were right in their guess about a thing which i won't mention that they thought NASA would say.'. Well, woo-fucking-hoo. I'm sure we were all on the edge of our seat betting in the 'How correct is Gizmodo?' pool, and they just got a point! Wow! Who cares about actual news events, let's all sit there and count Gizmodo's points, or something.
Timothy, you goddamn fucking moron. It's one thing when the article summary is misleading or just flat out incorrect, but slashdot has now managed to hit a new low where the article summary doesn't even exist.
Then you should be happy, as T-Mobile also will send you an unlock code if you buy a phone from them unsubsidized, so you can get around this problem legally with perfect ease. They'll even send you an unlock code if you've been on a plan with them for two months even if you bought it subsidized. If you're buying mobile phone or data service from a major carrier in the U.S., I do recommend T-Mobile (or one of their affiliates such as SimpleMobile) for exactly this reason, even though their network is much smaller than Verizon's.
While I agree with you that phone companies should be required to break out the subsidy on the bill, and further agree that people should not expect to be able to run off with the phones...
That is something that should be legal, and should be contractual possible, but right now is up to the largess of the phone company.
Likewise, if you wish to cancel the contract, but keep the phone, it's hard to actually do this without paying large fees that are undisclosed at startup. Requiring them to list the fees separate on the bill is a start, but it should be possible to actually get a breakdown, like 'The phone is 240 dollars, we will charge you 10 dollars a month which will reduce the amount you owe us for the phone 20 dollars a month, and if you leave you have to pay for the rest of the phone.'
Importantly, the law should require the total be a) pro-rated of actual proportion paid, and b) the actual price that the company is selling the phone for without service. (It doesn't, and shouldn't, require that they actually charge you the entire full price for the phone, just that if you had a two year contract, and were with them one year, you can now buy the phone for half original list price.)
With this law, it would be hard to justify any other charges for early cancellation, and I think any additional charges should be capped at the price of one month of service.
Indeed, I'm all for jailbreaking, but unlocking so you can run out on the contract you signed and keep the phone is not something we want to allow.
I mean, I'm all for freedom, but running off with a phone that you signed a contract to pay off over the next two years is theft. I can see some argument that the law should require the cell phone company to let you pay off the phone at some pro-rated rate or something, but just walking off with it is stealing.
Whether or not not letting people unlock phones is the best way to stop that theft is unknown. Perhaps a better method might simply to require people to put up a deposit or something.
Regardless, this guy wasn't unlocking those phones, he was unlocking actual stolen from the store phones. Again, I don't know if the best way to solve this problem is via restricting unlocking...I though they could report the IDs as stolen and the second anyone tried using them, they'd be caught, but maybe not.
Yeah, I know they exist somewhere.
I'm just annoyed because I remember, in 1999, talking about how the IPv6 transition was going to be hard because all consumer-level hardware would need to be replaced, and as people weren't likely to do it manually, that could take several years or even a decade!
Little did I know that we actually would not make any steps in that direction. At all, whatsoever.
At this point in time, it literally should not be possible to purchase IPv4-only routers. That shouldn't have been possible in 2002, when the stock ran out! All new hardware post 2001 or so should have supported IPv6, even if some of the support would probably be crappy.
There never should have been, for example, an IEEE 802.11g device (standard created in 2003.) ever sold that didn't do IPv6. Much less a 802.11n device!
It's not 'broken', it literally has no options for IPv6 at all.
Granted, for all I know it magically works once my ISP starts giving out IPv6 addresses, but logically it should at least have IPv6 DHCP support already showing.
I think it bears repeating: The problem isn't lack of time. If we'd started in 2000, we'd be done by now. If we'd started in 2008, we'd be mostly done by now.
WE HAVEN'T STARTED. WE ARE STILL DISTRIBUTING NON-IPV6 ROUTERS.
This isn't people 'failing to update'. People have probably fucking updated routers three times. No one's running an non-IPv6 OS, everyone could be running IPv6 routers if they'd actually, ever, at any point in time, been handed out. They weren't. Consumer-priced IPv6 routers were never sold, and they certainly weren't distributed how 75% of the people get their router...via ISP.
'Recovering IPv4 addresses' is akin to calling your teacher and asking for 30 minutes on a deadline because you're running late in traffic...on a paper you've literally not started.
It would probably on buy a few more years to reclaim these addresses and chop them up, but surely the problem is just poor usage as opposed to exhaustion.
*SLAP*
Seriously, we've already done this. Repeatedly. At no point has the actual transition started happening, even with all the 'extra time' given it.
Attempting to figure out a way to get more time will not actually solve the problem at all.
At the very least, we need IPv4 to blow up first, so the transition actually starts. After that point, if need be, we can start looking for more IPs to use during the transition.
But first, we actually have to start.
I got new ISP service in August. I got a router with it. This router does not do IPv6. In August. 2010.
The problem isn't 'lack of time', the problem is LACK OF STARTING.
Whether we write down numbers in base 16 or base 256 (each digit in base 10) doesn't make one iota of difference to the upgrade difficulties.
But base 16 is an fuckload easier to segment in your head if you can't instantly change base 10 to binary. (I can change it in my head, but I can hardly do it instantly.)
For networks, sure, 'decimal' (IPv4 is actually closer to base 256.) address worked great when we just had class A, B, and C. Once we got rid of them, people essentially had to memorize the network addresses for /25 to /30. And heaven forbid if you ran across a /22 or something!
With IPv6, all you need to know to memorize is..the hex digits, which essentially means you need to memorize A-F, ten through 15. And for speed, remember that 16 divides into quarters with: 4, 8, B, 10. (And you can figure out what 'half' and 'eighths' are easily.)
Take A982. Network mask FF00? It's in A900. Network mask FF40? It's in A980. Fs are copied, 0s are blanked, any remaining digits are the intervals you have to round down to. Tada. It's an instant binary AND in your head.
It's complicated to explain, but it's really easy to do in your head, for any network mask. Or you can instantly convert it to binary and do it that way, each hex digit is four binary digits.
IPv4 is actually just as easy in base 16, but no one ever writes it that way.
This approach also means that you only have to have enough IPs to support your active users, instead of every user on your network.
I'm not sure this makes much difference, in the days of all applications assuming they're online all the time. If the computer's up, it's probably made some connection, somewhere, even if it's just to check for updates.
Now, an interesting trick might be to use port mapping just for HTTP and email ports (Which don't have any reverse-connections at all.), but flip to an IP when anything else is used.
However, that introduces some weird logistical nightmares of dealing with existing connections during the switch, and might not make much difference when people are running Skype and IM clients and stuff.
And it might not work for 'smarter' protocols, which might use HTTP to connect to connect to a server, at which point the server tries connecting backwards to them to see if they're going to need to proxy connections, or if two people can connect directly to each other. I think some games work this way.
If you were running a server, of course, it wouldn't work, but if you were running a server you'd be knowledgeable to run some program that would trip the individual IP.
Still over a third of a billion to go, which should be more than enough time for everyone to replace equipment that doesn't support IPv6, and deal with applications like Teredo that leak IPv6 address space across NATs and through VPNs.
We've repeatedly had 'more than enough time'.
Adding more time does not actually work. It is not a problem with time.
I moved and hooked up Internet in August. I got the ISP's router. Guess what? No IPv6. Less than a year from the predicted end of IPv4, no IPv6.
It's nothing to do with 'time'.
Tunnels have to have an endpoint, which now means you need an IPv4 address there. All you've done is move the address!
It doesn't actually solve IPv4 address problem at all. All it does is let experienced people figure out a way around NAT'd connections.
That's because we're not saying 'the 80th decade', like we're saying 'the third millennium'. This obviously wouldn't even vaguely be right, it's the '198th decade'...and the 'the 199th decade' started in 1991, not 1990. If we counted decades, like we do centuries, we'd be just as confused there,and debating over when we hit 'decade 200' or 'the 200th decade'.
Saying 'the eighties' is like if we were saying 'the one thousands' and 'the two thousands' which, would indeed, refer to 1xxx and 2xxx. But no one says that.
When we say 'the eighties', we're not actually counting decades at all. That span of time, because we're in base ten, happens to be ten years, which is a decade, but there are not, in any sense, '80' or '1980' of them. It is a span of time that ended in 8x, which coincidentally happened to be a decade.
People, you need to realized that Assange still hasn't been charged with anything.
This type of INTERPOL thing is apparently for suspicious people who have disappeared and if the police see them, they should notify Sweden where they are. That's it. he is 'wanted', but not in the sense of 'arrest him'. He's wanted for questioning.
Assanage has not disappeared. Everyone knows exactly where he is. He's offered to participate in questioning.
This is a nonsensical INTERPOL request, and it was issued so Sweden could repeat the 'Assange is a rapist' claim, despite the fact that, so far, they still haven't put up any actual charges he could actually go before a judge and fight.
This is the plan, do this for months, and then stop. Without any resolution at all. No charges, no verdict, no nothing. Just months of Sweden repeating that he's a rapist.
And it will forever be 'Accused rapist Assange today release more information...'.
Id be especially interested in the "currently torturing someone to death"... is that rhetoric, or should you be posting AC?
You really don't know about any of the examples?
Wow, our media has utterly failed us.
The materials themselves were hardly earth shattering, very little of it wasn't publicly known previously or at least suspected.
Although it's very nice to have documentation that, for example, the US is threatening Iran at Saudi Arabia's request.
Implement your high import taxes, and unless you give ONE IMPORTER company a preferential deal, all of the prices will go up by the amount of the import tax you charge.
Or, alternately, the business will go to the companies who do not have to import. Which is, you know, half the stated point of this entire thing. (The reason I brought this up was to to stop tax dodges, but it's equally nice it allows us to bring manufacturing back, also.)
I don't understand how you got 90% of the way there, and then stopped.
Now, obviously, there are a few industries where there are literally no native suppliers, and I assumed I was talking to someone with a minimal amount of logic that would realize we'd have to treat those a bit differently to start with. Like announcing we would start the taxes in five years, so local industry has time to build up.
In fact, we'd probably want to do that for all of this. It's a giant process, where different industries and even different countries need different tariffs and they're going to tax us differently back, etc. And that's on top of the other changes I suggested, like getting rid of corporate income tax.
But feel free to invent an imaginary implementation process which I didn't state at all, and then find problems with the thing you just invented. Because that's certainly useful.
Wow. Utter Poe's Law at an epic scale. I really have trouble telling if you're serious.
First, people who start retirement are generally the wealthiest category of age group.
Yes, strangely, invest money, and you will be most wealthy when you retire. Um, duh.
However, you have no almost income.
Second, Social Security still provides an incentive not to work.
Yes, and the elderly must work, or, really, what are they for? *cracks whips*
Third, Medicare provides an incentive to deplete assets (say by spending them or giving them to the kids) when the serious medical bills start to show up.
Medicare does not means test, so your premise is entirely screwy to start with. How much money someone has has no bearing how many benefits it pays out, just like any other health insurance.
Fourth, people are living longer and the Baby Boomers are retiring. Yet Social Security doesn't take these changing demographics into account.
Because the media has been giving idiots who think it's 'failing' a megaphone instead of people just passing the trivial change required to keep it working, which is to remove or just raise the $106,800 cap on income. Right now, only the first $106,800 of income is taxed, which is, at most, $6621. A billionaire pays $6621 in social security each year.
I.e., the only 'problem' with social security is that no one's bothered to increase the cap on it with inflation in recent history, and that's been blocked because Republicans want to insist it's 'failing'.