> I think it's entirely possible that free accounts, of which there could be millions, offer no form of protection
Possible. I doubt it, though. The recent article about under the table influence applies. Hard disk and network backup storage technology has been an enormous money funnel. If Hotmail and Yahoo! can upgrade from 25 MB accounts (default) to 1 gig accounts (default) then, in all realms of real probability, all e-mail is archived someplace for a long time.
The point is that the original tech support response was that her mail could be retrieved for $19.95 and, when the consumer dared (dared, I say) to call the policy into question, the new response was that everything had been summarily, finally, and completely deleted.
Uh-huh. What's Lycos' archive, backup, restoration, and redundancy system like? How much money have they poured into their network stability?
>Your e-mails have been completely deleted, and no amount of money can now >restore them.
I doubt this is true. There are probably more than a hundred different archives, tarballs, and tape backups from which they could salvage most, if not all, of the poor woman's e-mail.
If his sister/wife/daughter would "lose" her e-mail would he be so dismissive?
His statement is especially suspect when the original tech support answer was
Should you want to restore the previous contents of your account, you will need to upgrade to the Lycos Mail Plus service...Restoration is not available to members who do not upgrade, and our policy will be strictly enforced. To have your account restored, you must upgrade, and pay the $19.95 upgrade fee I guess the corporate mantra is: If extortion won't work then resort to extermination.
> I haven't heard about all those Mac exploits he's referring to, have you?
I have. They exist. (Most of) The exploits themselves would take a phenomenal amount of knowledge about the entire underlying OS to turn them into a full-fledged rootkit installation exploit but they do exist.
> When somebody comes to us [after discovering a vulnerability] we've got [a fix] before there is any exploit
Bill. I thought you were an uber-hacker. You should know better. This is only true if they come to you with the vulnerability before they've written the full-fledged exploit.
> The number [of violations] will be way less because we've done some dramatic things [to improve security] in the code base. Apple hasn't done any of those things.
This statement is borderline libelous. Just the facts, please.
> I get the feeling most people on Slashdot work in inhumane hellholes
They can do what Battelle did to me. I gave my two weeks notice hoping that they would remedy the issues which I clearly addressed in my letter. When the two weeks passed without even the slightest attempt at negotiation I reiterated, in a meeting with my manager, the issues governing my decision to part ways with them. When I was treated with crude disdain I followed through on my notice and left.
The company then, over the course of the next week, notified me that I had been terminated unwillfully (making the official stance, in the eyes of corporate HR, a "firing") and made two direct deposits into my bank account. A month later they sent a collection letter to my address stating that I had been overpaid and demanding ~$1300 payment.
> If they don't want to pay for your unemployment, they need documented proof as to why they fired you
They can do what Battelle did to me. I gave my two weeks notice hoping that they would remedy the issues which I clearly addressed in my letter. When the two weeks passed without even the slightest attempt at negotiation I reiterated, in a meeting with my manager, the issues governing my decision to part ways with them. When I was treated with crude disdain I followed through on my notice and left.
The company then, over the course of the next week, notified me that I had been terminated unwillfully (making the official stance, in the eyes of corporate HR, a "firing") and made two direct deposits into my bank account. A month later they sent a collection letter to my address stating that I had been overpaid and demanding ~$1300 payment.
They can do what Battelle did to me. I gave my two weeks notice hoping that they would remedy the issues which I clearly addressed in my letter. When the two weeks passed without even the slightest attempt at negotiation I reiterated, in a meeting with my manager, the issues governing my decision to part ways with them. When I was treated with crude disdain I followed through on my notice and left.
The company then, over the course of the next week, notified me that I had been terminated unwillfully (making the official stance, in the eyes of corporate HR, a "firing") and made two direct deposits into my bank account. A month later they sent a collection letter to my address stating that I had been overpaid and demanding ~$1300 payment.
> What is unethical about cutting an employee loose who has expressed a desire to leave?
They can do what Battelle did to me. I gave my two weeks notice hoping that they would remedy the issues which I clearly addressed in my letter. When the two weeks passed without even the slightest attempt at negotiation I reiterated, in a meeting with my manager, the issues governing my decision to part ways with them. When I was treated with crude disdain I followed through on my notice and left.
The company then, over the course of the next week, notified me that I had been terminated unwillfully (making the official stance, in the eyes of corporate HR, a "firing") and made two direct deposits into my bank account. A month later they sent a collection letter to my address stating that I had been overpaid and demanding ~$1300 payment.
That's the nature of a government which has too many laws. Each law is selectively enforced (abused) only when it serves the convenience of those who write the rules and are in control.
> It's a legitimate way of doing business
Only insofar as the people conducting legitimate insider trading are in the good graces of those who hold the authority to order investigation and prosecution.
That's why Martha Stewart received such a light sentence. She fell out of the good graces of some people but retained the favor of others who kept her from sitting in prison for much longer.
> idle or underutilized Ethernet connections more energy efficient
There are several ways to increase measured efficiency. Two of them include:
1) Load the network with verbose transmission protocols, junk, or spam such that more network cards have higher sustained traffic (quantity means more than quality from the usage point of view).
2) Increase the number of hardware exploits such that underused network adapters can be continually used by those who know of the hardware exploits (make the network adapters available to those who have convinced themselves that they need more bandwidth than they're willing to pay for)
Rarely do companies give actual cash. Usually this sort of favoritism plays out in a more obfuscated form, on the golf course, along the lines of "Don't tell the guys over at HP or AMD, but we at Intel are planning on pumping a whole buttload of cash into companies A, B, and C. As long as you continue to more favorably market systems with our Intel chips we'll make certain that you're in on the IPO/higher return stock grades/more favorable interest rates on loans to help you short, etc. etc. etc."
Priveleged information used to maintain social relationships, bias, and control.
Very similar to the concept of a government security clearance.
They can, however, do what Battelle did to me. I gave my two weeks notice hoping that they would remedy the issues which I clearly addressed in my letter. When the two weeks passed without even the slightest attempt at negotiation I reiterated, in a meeting with my manager, the issues governing my decision to part ways with them. When I was treated with crude disdain I followed through on my notice and left.
The company then, over the course of the next week, notified me that I had been terminated unwillfully (making the official stance, in the eyes of corporate HR, a "firing") and made two direct deposits into my bank account. A month later they sent a collection letter to my address stating that I had been overpaid and demanding ~$1300 payment.
The only thing novel about my proposition was the perspective of viewing the Maxwell's Demon. If you have access to underground.pnnl.gov you can read a much more titillating writeup which I posted while working for Battelle.
> but every time, the reality was that Linux just was not ready
The reality is that Linux doesn't receive multi-billions of dollars in government (taxpayer) grants to make itself ready to the point where it functions as "click'n'run".
The point here is not which OS is "ready", but which OS exhibits the most functionality, stability, security, and programmability per dollar per capita. In this respect F/OSS software clearly wins. The expected trend is that, if we can make a product 50% as good with 0.0001% of the funding, then we could absolutely blow the competition out of the water if we had even half the funding they do.
Hooray for the stock market and the business-political pyramid scheme.
Most of the Maxwell's Demon experiments deal with particles which are assumed to be infinitely small and particles which are one iota larger than infinitely small.
Consider Maxwell's Demon operating on entire galaxies at a time. An infinitely large mass (typified as a black hole) has a much larger gravitational field than a mass which is one iota less than infinitely large. If Maxwell's Demon were a gravitational capacitor (ie. its effect is only realized when the gravitional field resulting from a mass exceeds a certain level but exhibits no behavior up to one iota less than that gravitational field) then the Demon could, possibly, move out of the way and selectively allow the object of infinite mass (eg. a black hole) to pass while reflecting all objects of lesser mass.
I first proposed a similar theory years ago when working for Abbott Laboratories.
> There is no new mass or energy being created in what you are describing
On the contrary. If an electron is excited to a higher energy level by the addition of energy from a photon then, during the time it takes for the electron to go through whatever relaxation is necessary to re-emit a photon and regain its original state, the cloud of probability resembling that electron has more energy or more mass. Due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle we don't really know which it is.
> This is just the change of energy from one form to another
Consider fiberoptic cable. Now consider the polymer from which it is made. Now consider a single monomer molecule of that polymer. Now consider the electron density field which makes up the HOMO (highest occupied molecular orbital) which absorbs the light used in fiberoptic transmission. When the molecule absorbs the photon the electron density transforms from the HOMO to the former LUMO (now the HOMO). No matter what the relaxation mode is for that particular molecule (certain molecules relax more quickly and make good fiberoptic cable for high speed transmission. other molecules relax more slowly and make good molecules for glow-in-the-dark clothing) the fact remains that, for the duration between the absorption of the photon and the emission of another photon, the electron probability cloud has either a higher energy (which it does) or a higher mass (which it does) or both. For that duration the exciting photon and the electron cloud cease to be separate entities.
I agree with you about the merits of floppies. I only noticed a degradation in reliability as I came from an era when floppy magnetic media was the standard and it was reliable.
Maybe there was a virus released to target floppies for the purpose of promoting HD and CD technology... nah...
Slashdot Mirror
I think the lie about the e-mail being completely deleted from everywhere on the planet is more important than your liberal use of the slur "whine".
> I think it's entirely possible that free accounts, of which there could be millions, offer no form of protection
Possible. I doubt it, though. The recent article about under the table influence applies. Hard disk and network backup storage technology has been an enormous money funnel. If Hotmail and Yahoo! can upgrade from 25 MB accounts (default) to 1 gig accounts (default) then, in all realms of real probability, all e-mail is archived someplace for a long time.
> them deleting her email
The e-mail isn't really completely deleted.
> Go read the replies
Exactly. This is a perfect example of social bullying.
The point is that the original tech support response was that her mail could be retrieved for $19.95 and, when the consumer dared (dared, I say) to call the policy into question, the new response was that everything had been summarily, finally, and completely deleted.
Uh-huh. What's Lycos' archive, backup, restoration, and redundancy system like? How much money have they poured into their network stability?
Policy is one thing. Bull5hit is another.
>restore them.
I doubt this is true. There are probably more than a hundred different archives, tarballs, and tape backups from which they could salvage most, if not all, of the poor woman's e-mail.
If his sister/wife/daughter would "lose" her e-mail would he be so dismissive?
His statement is especially suspect when the original tech support answer
was Should you want to restore the previous contents of your account, you
will need to upgrade to the Lycos Mail Plus service...Restoration is not
available to members who do not upgrade, and our policy will be strictly
enforced. To have your account restored, you must upgrade, and pay the
$19.95 upgrade fee I guess the corporate mantra is: If extortion won't work then resort to extermination.
Sounds like my last three
employers.
> I haven't heard about all those Mac exploits he's referring to, have you?
I have. They exist. (Most of) The exploits themselves would take a phenomenal amount of knowledge about the entire underlying OS to turn them into a full-fledged rootkit installation exploit but they do exist.
> When somebody comes to us [after discovering a vulnerability] we've got [a fix] before there is any exploit
Bill. I thought you were an uber-hacker. You should know better. This is only true if they come to you with the vulnerability before they've written the full-fledged exploit.
> The number [of violations] will be way less because we've done some dramatic things [to improve security] in the code base. Apple hasn't done any of those things.
This statement is borderline libelous. Just the facts, please.
> I get the feeling most people on Slashdot work in inhumane hellholes
They can do what Battelle did to me. I gave my two weeks notice hoping that they would remedy the issues which I clearly addressed in my letter. When the two weeks passed without even the slightest attempt at negotiation I reiterated, in a meeting with my manager, the issues governing my decision to part ways with them. When I was treated with crude disdain I followed through on my notice and left.
The company then, over the course of the next week, notified me that I had been terminated unwillfully (making the official stance, in the eyes of corporate HR, a "firing") and made two direct deposits into my bank account. A month later they sent a collection letter to my address stating that I had been overpaid and demanding ~$1300 payment.
It's probably still on my credit record.
> And then I might edit a high-definition movie
Bill, is that the MPAA on the phone?
> If they don't want to pay for your unemployment, they need documented proof as to why they fired you
They can do what Battelle did to me. I gave my two weeks notice hoping that they would remedy the issues which I clearly addressed in my letter. When the two weeks passed without even the slightest attempt at negotiation I reiterated, in a meeting with my manager, the issues governing my decision to part ways with them. When I was treated with crude disdain I followed through on my notice and left.
The company then, over the course of the next week, notified me that I had been terminated unwillfully (making the official stance, in the eyes of corporate HR, a "firing") and made two direct deposits into my bank account. A month later they sent a collection letter to my address stating that I had been overpaid and demanding ~$1300 payment.
It's probably still on my credit record.
They can do what Battelle did to me. I gave my two weeks notice hoping that they would remedy the issues which I clearly addressed in my letter. When the two weeks passed without even the slightest attempt at negotiation I reiterated, in a meeting with my manager, the issues governing my decision to part ways with them. When I was treated with crude disdain I followed through on my notice and left.
The company then, over the course of the next week, notified me that I had been terminated unwillfully (making the official stance, in the eyes of corporate HR, a "firing") and made two direct deposits into my bank account. A month later they sent a collection letter to my address stating that I had been overpaid and demanding ~$1300 payment.
It's probably still on my credit record.
> What is unethical about cutting an employee loose who has expressed a desire to leave?
They can do what Battelle did to me. I gave my two weeks notice hoping that they would remedy the issues which I clearly addressed in my letter. When the two weeks passed without even the slightest attempt at negotiation I reiterated, in a meeting with my manager, the issues governing my decision to part ways with them. When I was treated with crude disdain I followed through on my notice and left.
The company then, over the course of the next week, notified me that I had been terminated unwillfully (making the official stance, in the eyes of corporate HR, a "firing") and made two direct deposits into my bank account. A month later they sent a collection letter to my address stating that I had been overpaid and demanding ~$1300 payment.
It's probably still on my credit record.
> The only way to comply
That's the nature of a government which has too many laws. Each law is selectively enforced (abused) only when it serves the convenience of those who write the rules and are in control.
> It's a legitimate way of doing business
Only insofar as the people conducting legitimate insider trading are in the good graces of those who hold the authority to order investigation and prosecution.
That's why Martha Stewart received such a light sentence. She fell out of the good graces of some people but retained the favor of others who kept her from sitting in prison for much longer.
> idle or underutilized Ethernet connections more energy efficient
:)
There are several ways to increase measured efficiency. Two of them include:
1) Load the network with verbose transmission protocols, junk, or spam such that more network cards have higher sustained traffic (quantity means more than quality from the usage point of view).
2) Increase the number of hardware exploits such that underused network adapters can be continually used by those who know of the hardware exploits (make the network adapters available to those who have convinced themselves that they need more bandwidth than they're willing to pay for)
This is _not_ a troll.
> It's called deal making
ImClone, Sam Waksell, Martha Stewart, insider trading, what?
> If Intel was actually giving them cash
Rarely do companies give actual cash. Usually this sort of favoritism plays out in a more obfuscated form, on the golf course, along the lines of "Don't tell the guys over at HP or AMD, but we at Intel are planning on pumping a whole buttload of cash into companies A, B, and C. As long as you continue to more favorably market systems with our Intel chips we'll make certain that you're in on the IPO/higher return stock grades/more favorable interest rates on loans to help you short, etc. etc. etc."
Priveleged information used to maintain social relationships, bias, and control.
Very similar to the concept of a government security clearance.
> they dont have a basis for suing you
They can, however, do what Battelle did to me. I gave my two weeks notice hoping that they would remedy the issues which I clearly addressed in my letter. When the two weeks passed without even the slightest attempt at negotiation I reiterated, in a meeting with my manager, the issues governing my decision to part ways with them. When I was treated with crude disdain I followed through on my notice and left.
The company then, over the course of the next week, notified me that I had been terminated unwillfully (making the official stance, in the eyes of corporate HR, a "firing") and made two direct deposits into my bank account. A month later they sent a collection letter to my address stating that I had been overpaid and demanding ~$1300 payment.
It's probably still on my credit record.
The only thing novel about my proposition was the perspective of viewing the Maxwell's Demon. If you have access to underground.pnnl.gov you can read a much more titillating writeup which I posted while working for Battelle.
> I'm within my right to use
The ethical question is, more correctly, are you within your right to sell?
Current society says "sure, sell anything you can."
An ethical society says,"if you sell you are required to at least acknowledge those who assisted your profit."
Spirit of copyleft and the GPL.
> but every time, the reality was that Linux just was not ready
The reality is that Linux doesn't receive multi-billions of dollars in government (taxpayer) grants to make itself ready to the point where it functions as "click'n'run".
The point here is not which OS is "ready", but which OS exhibits the most functionality, stability, security, and programmability per dollar per capita. In this respect F/OSS software clearly wins. The expected trend is that, if we can make a product 50% as good with 0.0001% of the funding, then we could absolutely blow the competition out of the water if we had even half the funding they do.
Hooray for the stock market and the business-political pyramid scheme.
Most of the Maxwell's Demon experiments deal with particles which are assumed to be infinitely small and particles which are one iota larger than infinitely small.
Consider Maxwell's Demon operating on entire galaxies at a time. An infinitely large mass (typified as a black hole) has a much larger gravitational field than a mass which is one iota less than infinitely large. If Maxwell's Demon were a gravitational capacitor (ie. its effect is only realized when the gravitional field resulting from a mass exceeds a certain level but exhibits no behavior up to one iota less than that gravitational field) then the Demon could, possibly, move out of the way and selectively allow the object of infinite mass (eg. a black hole) to pass while reflecting all objects of lesser mass.
I first proposed a similar theory years ago when working for Abbott Laboratories.
> There is no new mass or energy being created in what you are describing
On the contrary. If an electron is excited to a higher energy level by the addition of energy from a photon then, during the time it takes for the electron to go through whatever relaxation is necessary to re-emit a photon and regain its original state, the cloud of probability resembling that electron has more energy or more mass. Due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle we don't really know which it is.
> This is just the change of energy from one form to another
Consider fiberoptic cable. Now consider the polymer from which it is made. Now consider a single monomer molecule of that polymer. Now consider the electron density field which makes up the HOMO (highest occupied molecular orbital) which absorbs the light used in fiberoptic transmission. When the molecule absorbs the photon the electron density transforms from the HOMO to the former LUMO (now the HOMO). No matter what the relaxation mode is for that particular molecule (certain molecules relax more quickly and make good fiberoptic cable for high speed transmission. other molecules relax more slowly and make good molecules for glow-in-the-dark clothing) the fact remains that, for the duration between the absorption of the photon and the emission of another photon, the electron probability cloud has either a higher energy (which it does) or a higher mass (which it does) or both. For that duration the exciting photon and the electron cloud cease to be separate entities.
Is everyone on the single-track mindset?
This was a question of ethics, not finances.
> Lots of services of other kinds keep some kind of log
And the same basic question of ethics applies to every single one of them.
> If you have a problem with that then use someone else's servers
Such a greedy, "mine mine mine!" point of view. There would be no internet if it weren't for the people who use the servers.
> to make everything run just don't drop out of the sky
This was a question of ethics; not finances.
> you'll never get it right.
Best fit approximation.
I agree with you about the merits of floppies. I only noticed a degradation in reliability as I came from an era when floppy magnetic media was the standard and it was reliable.
Maybe there was a virus released to target floppies for the purpose of promoting HD and CD technology... nah...