It's a large step toward the end of free personal computing. You have to register your computer to pay this tax, right? If you don't pay your tax, you lose your computer or some other fine occurs. To make sure you paid your tax, the computer has to be identifiable. There you have it - no computing without a license. It comes in small steps. Evil, very evil. It's not about the money, it's about control and much larger money that will be lost by certian entrenched intrests when control is lost.
Instead, try for a more narrow target. Something like "funds for the engineer school,
How about, "any computer that handles student records or has permision to access them". Wait, that's about what this is proposing to do. $2.4 million dollars could easily replace all of a 7,000 student University's administrative hardware, not that replacements would be needed where a software swap would do.
Uhhh. Pardon me, but I think that 2.5 yrs ago, when MS bought it's $135M share in Corel, Corel wasn't in the Linux business.
Bzzzzt! You could not be more wrong. By late 1999, Corel had a Linux distribution and had ported Word Perfect and Correl Office to it. They were giving away "personal" versions of Word Perfect, the Word Processor that ruled the PC world untill Microsoft dumped Word on business students. As Word Perfect format was still the only officialy accepted private document format at most government agencies and business, Word Perfect still represented a significant threat to M$ and combined with a non M$ operating system M$ had no power to mess with it. Word Perfect 2000 came Windows only and the Linux version used Windoze emulation. Was this a co-incidence? I think not. Crappy management wimped out and took their little M$ bribe when they could have made something new and useful.
First comes chemical, then comes nuclear. The energy to be had from nuclear reaction is 1,000,000 times what you can get from chemical reactions. Even using fision with 90% of your energy going into fision fragment heat, you can get 100.000 time the energy of chemical. Get yourself a nice little highly enriched core, pulse it and somehow turn the photons into laseable light/xrays. Or perhapse you could use the heat itself to excite CO2. Hot stuff tonight!
There is no confidence with offensive weapons. No matter how good they are, someone can get you where you don't expect it.
This laser is designed to kill much larger and (initially) slower targets like ICBMs.
Slow? The article mentions hitting target on boost, at multiple mach. ICBMS eventually go faster than SAMS. If SAMS could go that fast, too would be ICBMS.
Let's think about this NDA bull shit. A tells B, and thus violates a non-disclosure agreement. B has no idea and tells C,D, Everybody. Someone else has the same idea independently. Is everyone beholden to A because B? Sounds like what patents are for, the ownership of a few useful ideas granted in return for public knowledge. What if B has proof that they knew what A did before they made an agreement? Even then B might get draged to court to hash it out.
People have made ugly noises about the "viral" nature of the GPL but NDAs look far worse. I doubt IBM thought is was giving up all of its previous work and I hope that SCO gets all chewed up so that others won't be tempted to pull the same thing, NDAs that is.
Oh yeah, it's "The Lawsuit". You might want to atribute your sources when you quote them. Hell, you might have simply linked to the page and told us why you think the BSD lawsuit is relavent. Why it's relavent is not obvious to everyone, much less why YOU think it matters.
I imagine it's relavent because it shows that Novel, purchaser of Unix System Labs, forgave any losses that might have arising from dissemination of trade secrets in 1993. It also shows that the whole nightmare has happened before, sort of like the MPAA's attack on the VCR coming back to life in the form of DRM.
Looking at the returns here, a $45,000 and a $1,700 theft, both if foreign countries, it looks like these things work better than a bundle of counterfiet 20 dollar bills. Take that Iraq, all your publication efforts are second rate! Oh, wait a minute!
And the US thinks it can stop the "infrastructure of terrorism" by freezing the assets of a few charities. Bah. If we can't get a grip on our own record and banking systems, the money will continue to flow. TIAA is a distraction at best, another place to lose information at worst, and a waste of resources either way.
In Germany, the post offers a service called postident [deutschepost.de] - the mail carrier will only give you the letter if you show him your passport, and he'll send the passport number back to the sender of the letter.
Can he tell the difference between a real ID and any old fake one that can be had for $20? Green cards, drivers licenses, passports, what have you, if the government can print it so can a forger. That's why so many institutions used SSNs, it was unlikely that a forger would know the SSN that matched a name. Yet it's widespread use by the clueless, such as UT, is the downfall of it's use. Fewer people will trust SSNs as a unique identifier and the government will have to implement some other form of difficult to forge and know identifier.
Meanwhile, in the RIAA office of the Total Information Awareness Department, agent Beazbub reads this story and laughs to himself.
"Those hicks still use sneaker net, ha, ha. Search warrents are so 90s!"
Looking up with satisfaction he calls, "Monika! do we have the piracy database up?"
A bleary and somewhat pudgy young woman answers afirmativly.
"Hmmm, curt. Who said that one is easy?", thinks Beazbub as he punches a few buttons. A program with big ugly buttons apears. The agents smile comes back as he eagerly presses the one with a picture of Captian Hook on it. The smile soon fades and is replaced with something very different as the list scrolls:
LARS is FROM MARS LARS is FROM MARS LARS is FROM MARS LARS is FROM MARS You have been 0wned.
"Authorities in [your country name here] today raided several houses, looking for Satilite Theft components, such as unautharized recievers and mod chips, in a widespread crackdown on Satilite Piracy that several large consortiums claim is responsible for annual corporate loses in the millions." (has already happened)
"Authorities in [your country name here] today raided several houses, looking for Free Software and mod chips in a widespread crackdown on unlicensed software that several large consortiums claim is responsible for annual corporate loses in the millions." (they all hate free software)
"Authorities in [your country name here] today raided several warehouses, looking for illegal wireless components in a widespread crackdown on pirate Internet Service that several large consortiums claim is responsible for annual corporate loses in the millions." (not yet, as the wireless mesh is not big enough, though government intentions are as clear as day)
"Authorities in [your country name here] today raided several houses, looking for pirate MP3 encoders in a widespread crackdown on music piracy that several large consortiums claim is responsible for annual corporate loses in the millions." (it is against the law to distribute MP3 encoders without paying a license fee)
What more can you say? You already can't modify your own equipment, tell other people how to do it or sell means to do it, right down to copier tonners. If you can't mod it, you don't really own it do you?
Earlier on the same day O'Connor was questioned, officials at St. John's--as well as at the College of Santa Fe and Santa Fe Community College--issued warnings to students and faculty that the FBI had been alerted to the presence of "suspicious" people on campus within the past four weeks.
Talk about ruined reputation. They post this "suspicious people" stuff and then lead the librarian out in handcuffs for alegedly threatening the president. He will never be able to live it down and most thoughtless people will assume he's guilty.
The whole thing creeps me out. It's one thing that the FBI would pay people to sit around and read chat groups, it's another entirely when they know exacly who posted what or think they do.
This has infringed on the first amendment. Anonymity is part of free speech and press. If you can't publish anonymously, there is no free press. Obviously, this man was not as anonymous as he thought and therfore the federal government has made laws that infinges on free speech and press. The result is that the internet will not be a place where people can voice candid opinion or exchange real infomation.
Blah, I hate responding to AC posts. This one writes:
If you had actually read the Robinson-Patman act you would see that selling the same product to different parties is not illegal. There is a list of 10 items that must be met to have the act apply. Number 10 is a big one.
10) For the Act to apply, there must be a showing of an adverse effect on competition.
Unless you can prove that offering the same product to different customers at different prices will have an adverse effect on competition, then this law doesn't apply.
Thanks for telling me I did not read the link I posted to share with people. As you astutely read on that page, proving damage to competition is the most difficult thing to prove and is the grounds most challenged.
It would be difficult indeed to prove that a company did not use this as a means to dump in locations or engage in any other predatory behavior. Why, because the actual prices are only known to people who buy the goods. The numbers can be fudged to balance for any record demanded in a chanlenge. Strategically lowering prices for a few influential people could create just enough buzz to draw shopers away from a competitor on a "percieved value" that is not real. A truely sinister use would be for a credit card banks to offer clients a "maxi-pad" service to retailers, which would be outright price fixing. Other abuses are possible, but I'm not devious enough to think of them in a short time.
Other restrictions include: sales must cross state boundaries
All the listed companies are national international.
relevant time periods.. applies to commodities only.., equivalent goods...
WinnDixie and Home Depot, dude, we are talking about lumber and eggs. What could be less time dependent, more a comodity or more equivalent?
In the end, the people getting bilked are the retailers who invest in this system. People know it's a swindle at Winn Dixie already despite the billboards promising "it lowers prices, yes it does." They know their bills increased, despite the lotto like savings they might have enjoyed on a bag of chips. They are going to troop on over to a store down the street that sells things honestly for a fixed price, leaving the black card managers to lower their prices in a panic. Often, when you colude with others to rob your friends, the person being robbed is you. Add the word "scientific", as Redkin did with "pH balanced" shampo, and you a clasic scam in the making.
you say, " That'd mean no real lightwave pollution (it's all line-of-sight) and little visual pollution or distractions due to thousands of flashing lights?"
The next time you see a refinery at night, notice how all of the thousands of lights at a distance seem to quaver. It's trying to tell you something but you don't know how to read it!
Did anyone get the idea that fast company thought that individual price setting was a good idea? That they missed it's illegal is not the only stupid thing about the article. Let's nit-pick:
The neat curves and crisp laws of supply and demand, elasticity, and rational behavior that everyone learns in microeconomics class don't work in the real world.
That's macroeconomics and it does indeed work. That's the whole problem with this aproach. To paraphrase Alan Greenspan, "laws of supply and demand are not to be conned."
Business is at the start of a new era of pricing. This era is being shaped by a new set of insights into business strategy and human behavior, and these insights are turbocharged with software, mathematics, and rapid experimentation. The result is what might be called "scientific pricing." There is even a blossoming industry of a dozen companies that offer scientific-pricing services.
I'll bet there are a whole pile of companies willing to charge you to piss off your customers like that. "Turbocharged" indeed, that means twisted, right? Anyone who believes charging two people different prices for the same thing will make them happy, has a serious lack of insight into human behavior. People talk and feel ripped off.
Changes in pricing will alter every part of the economy. The way that business gets done will change, and companies will flourish or be crushed based in part on their ability to grasp and master the new science of pricing. Among those already using the new techniques are Best Buy, DHL, Ford Motor Co., the Home Depot, JC Penney, Safeway, Saks, Staples, UPS, and Winn-Dixie. General Electric, perhaps taking Jack Welch's warnings to heart, is not only working with at least two different pricing companies -- it has also invested in one.
Send that list to fucked company. All are known for overpricing shoddy merchanise. Soon they will be known for anti-trust violations, save GE which still makes good industial wares and might be smart enough to avoid this new scheme to bilk companies. Winn-Dixie with it's silly little black punishment card is wasting money that could better be spent elsewhere, while my wife now buys groceries at WalMart.
The oldest records of prices ever found are clay tablets with pictographic symbols found in a town known as Uruk, in what was ancient Sumer and what is now southern Iraq. These price records are from 3300 BC -- they've survived 5,300 years. The documents -- records of payment for barley and wheat, for sheep, and for beer -- are really receipts. "Uruk was a large city, at a minimum 40,000 people," says UCLA professor Robert Englund, one of the few experts on the Uruk documents. "So some of the quantities are very high -- hundreds of thousands of pounds of barley, for instance."
OK so far.
But here's the really remarkable thing. The earliest Uruk tablets aren't just the oldest pricing records ever found. They are the oldest examples of human writing yet discovered. In other words, when humans first took stylus to wet clay, the first thing that they were compelled to record was . . . prices.
Bzzzzt - they recorded your generosity to the temple and other administrative stuff. What they show is a deeply rooted human desire for equal treatment and fairness. This is exactly the oposite of using electronic records in a vain atempt to foist higher prices on, "suckers".
Am I the only one who has taken basic economics? It's called "discriminatory pricing", and is not at all illegal or unethical.
No, you are not the only one who has studied basic economics but you are one of the many who fail to grasp basic concepts. There's still no substitute for brains.
What really baffles me is that people think they're entitled to know what goes on behind the scenes when businesses set prices, or base buying decisions on that.
No one thinks that but you. What people worry about is that companies might charge different individuals, of the same "class", different prices . It's not legal, it's not ethical, it's a waste of time that will damage your reputation.
I can go anywhere I want to buy anything amazon has to offer me. The internet allows me to shop around with minimal effort. "Memory sticks are $52 at amazon? Well I saw them at compusa for $42"
I'm not worried about this because I don't shop and expect to get the lowest price unless I do some work.
CompUSA might get smart and read your Amazon cookie or, worse, your new URU passport. Then both memory sicks might run you $100, wherever you go. Oh yeah, it will fluctuate with "market conditions", but when YOU see the big gold star price of $75 someplace and are tierd of shopping, you will buy.
thanks for the link, shows this is bogus.
on
Another Garbage Patent
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Also from the about.com above:
In addition, 35 U.S.C. 171 requires that a design to be patentable must be "original." Clearly a design that simulates a well-known or naturally occurring object or person is not original as required by the statute. Furthermore, subject matter that could be considered offensive to any race, religion, sex, ethnic group, or nationality is not proper subject matter for a design patent application.
Anyone want to tell me that a trash can for things you want to get rid of is, O-rig-inal? Looks more like a well known object to me. If a trash can is orignial and non-obvious then a picture of my go-nads is uncommon and inoffensive. The patent office is insane and might actually consider a porno motif for design patent. I'll send them the pictures right away. I'm in the money, I'm in the money.
I agree with all of your concerns about early and full disclosure of exploitable bugs. The fact is that other packages can be used when serious expoits are found and that decision should be made by each administrator guided by full knoledge. The "there's always someone better" rule should awlays be applied when you discover an exploit. Hiding the bug is as good as not knowing about it. This stood out:
"This is the model for what you do if you want to find a vulnerability," said Alan Paller, director of research for the SANS Institute, a research and education group that lets security companies, system administrators and others share information. "The DHS are the ones that can put the pressure on all the vendors and keep it quiet."
How, exactly, did they keep people from talking? Could the same be used against private citizens?
More chilling however, is the implied government guidance and endorsement of private work and enforced silence. What is the federal government doing working with Sendmail INC? How about a little of my tax money going to Exim's developers? I'll pass if that means that no one can talk about bugs the feds happen to stumble across. Is sendmail to be considered the "secure" mail program, sanctioned by my federal government?
At first glance, centralization of bug fixes within the federal government sounds good but it might make problems. this poster sings praises for the effort, having been told what patch to apply without a meeting to get his opinion. What he seems to have missed is that the red tape still exists, hence the lag time between discovery and implementation, it's just been taken from his control. Now, if this kind of thinking is applied throughout the federal government, every one of their machines will be running exactly the same software! Bust one, bust all. The creators of this agency hope to bring the best talent to the problem. If they have done that and if they stay out of the way, great. What I fear however, is the usual political pressures turning this office into a means of making money for particular vendors of software. It could and might result in a system that enforces worst practices everywhere, especially if the government decides that private networks are also "security risks" to be managed.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a large step toward the end of free personal computing. You have to register your computer to pay this tax, right? If you don't pay your tax, you lose your computer or some other fine occurs. To make sure you paid your tax, the computer has to be identifiable. There you have it - no computing without a license. It comes in small steps. Evil, very evil. It's not about the money, it's about control and much larger money that will be lost by certian entrenched intrests when control is lost.
How about, "any computer that handles student records or has permision to access them". Wait, that's about what this is proposing to do. $2.4 million dollars could easily replace all of a 7,000 student University's administrative hardware, not that replacements would be needed where a software swap would do.
Bzzzzt! You could not be more wrong. By late 1999, Corel had a Linux distribution and had ported Word Perfect and Correl Office to it. They were giving away "personal" versions of Word Perfect, the Word Processor that ruled the PC world untill Microsoft dumped Word on business students. As Word Perfect format was still the only officialy accepted private document format at most government agencies and business, Word Perfect still represented a significant threat to M$ and combined with a non M$ operating system M$ had no power to mess with it. Word Perfect 2000 came Windows only and the Linux version used Windoze emulation. Was this a co-incidence? I think not. Crappy management wimped out and took their little M$ bribe when they could have made something new and useful.
the misappropriation of UNIX code, methods or concepts
How do you misapropriate a concept? Surely, that's a misconception?
There is no confidence with offensive weapons. No matter how good they are, someone can get you where you don't expect it.
Slow? The article mentions hitting target on boost, at multiple mach. ICBMS eventually go faster than SAMS. If SAMS could go that fast, too would be ICBMS.
Ducks taste good.
Let's think about this NDA bull shit. A tells B, and thus violates a non-disclosure agreement. B has no idea and tells C,D, Everybody. Someone else has the same idea independently. Is everyone beholden to A because B? Sounds like what patents are for, the ownership of a few useful ideas granted in return for public knowledge. What if B has proof that they knew what A did before they made an agreement? Even then B might get draged to court to hash it out.
People have made ugly noises about the "viral" nature of the GPL but NDAs look far worse. I doubt IBM thought is was giving up all of its previous work and I hope that SCO gets all chewed up so that others won't be tempted to pull the same thing, NDAs that is.
All bad luck, I presume.
I imagine it's relavent because it shows that Novel, purchaser of Unix System Labs, forgave any losses that might have arising from dissemination of trade secrets in 1993. It also shows that the whole nightmare has happened before, sort of like the MPAA's attack on the VCR coming back to life in the form of DRM.
There are some things you should not do for money.
And the US thinks it can stop the "infrastructure of terrorism" by freezing the assets of a few charities. Bah. If we can't get a grip on our own record and banking systems, the money will continue to flow. TIAA is a distraction at best, another place to lose information at worst, and a waste of resources either way.
Can he tell the difference between a real ID and any old fake one that can be had for $20? Green cards, drivers licenses, passports, what have you, if the government can print it so can a forger. That's why so many institutions used SSNs, it was unlikely that a forger would know the SSN that matched a name. Yet it's widespread use by the clueless, such as UT, is the downfall of it's use. Fewer people will trust SSNs as a unique identifier and the government will have to implement some other form of difficult to forge and know identifier.
Vanderbilt the real world? Cheap? I'd love to take some classes, wanna pay the bill for me?
cdrudge is smart, like a donkey.
And someone with $40 billion is going to have all his friends here before you and me. Looks like another way to make the fanboys pay.
"Those hicks still use sneaker net, ha, ha. Search warrents are so 90s!"
Looking up with satisfaction he calls, "Monika! do we have the piracy database up?"
A bleary and somewhat pudgy young woman answers afirmativly.
"Hmmm, curt. Who said that one is easy?", thinks Beazbub as he punches a few buttons. A program with big ugly buttons apears. The agents smile comes back as he eagerly presses the one with a picture of Captian Hook on it. The smile soon fades and is replaced with something very different as the list scrolls:
LARS is FROM MARS
LARS is FROM MARS
LARS is FROM MARS
LARS is FROM MARS
You have been 0wned.
"Authorities in [your country name here] today raided several houses, looking for Free Software and mod chips in a widespread crackdown on unlicensed software that several large consortiums claim is responsible for annual corporate loses in the millions." (they all hate free software)
"Authorities in [your country name here] today raided several warehouses, looking for illegal wireless components in a widespread crackdown on pirate Internet Service that several large consortiums claim is responsible for annual corporate loses in the millions." (not yet, as the wireless mesh is not big enough, though government intentions are as clear as day)
"Authorities in [your country name here] today raided several houses, looking for pirate MP3 encoders in a widespread crackdown on music piracy that several large consortiums claim is responsible for annual corporate loses in the millions." (it is against the law to distribute MP3 encoders without paying a license fee)
"Authorities in [your country name here] today raided several houses, looking for illegal servers in a widespread crackdown on cable theft that several large consortiums claim is responsible for annual corporate loses in the millions."(has already happened for serving and uncapping cable modems against user agreements)
What more can you say? You already can't modify your own equipment, tell other people how to do it or sell means to do it, right down to copier tonners. If you can't mod it, you don't really own it do you?
Earlier on the same day O'Connor was questioned, officials at St. John's--as well as at the College of Santa Fe and Santa Fe Community College--issued warnings to students and faculty that the FBI had been alerted to the presence of "suspicious" people on campus within the past four weeks.
Talk about ruined reputation. They post this "suspicious people" stuff and then lead the librarian out in handcuffs for alegedly threatening the president. He will never be able to live it down and most thoughtless people will assume he's guilty.
The whole thing creeps me out. It's one thing that the FBI would pay people to sit around and read chat groups, it's another entirely when they know exacly who posted what or think they do.
This has infringed on the first amendment. Anonymity is part of free speech and press. If you can't publish anonymously, there is no free press. Obviously, this man was not as anonymous as he thought and therfore the federal government has made laws that infinges on free speech and press. The result is that the internet will not be a place where people can voice candid opinion or exchange real infomation.
You ought to submit that as a story.
If you had actually read the Robinson-Patman act you would see that selling the same product to different parties is not illegal. There is a list of 10 items that must be met to have the act apply. Number 10 is a big one.
10) For the Act to apply, there must be a showing of an adverse effect on competition.
Unless you can prove that offering the same product to different customers at different prices will have an adverse effect on competition, then this law doesn't apply.
Thanks for telling me I did not read the link I posted to share with people. As you astutely read on that page, proving damage to competition is the most difficult thing to prove and is the grounds most challenged.
It would be difficult indeed to prove that a company did not use this as a means to dump in locations or engage in any other predatory behavior. Why, because the actual prices are only known to people who buy the goods. The numbers can be fudged to balance for any record demanded in a chanlenge. Strategically lowering prices for a few influential people could create just enough buzz to draw shopers away from a competitor on a "percieved value" that is not real. A truely sinister use would be for a credit card banks to offer clients a "maxi-pad" service to retailers, which would be outright price fixing. Other abuses are possible, but I'm not devious enough to think of them in a short time.
Other restrictions include: sales must cross state boundaries
All the listed companies are national international.
relevant time periods .. applies to commodities only .., equivalent goods...
WinnDixie and Home Depot, dude, we are talking about lumber and eggs. What could be less time dependent, more a comodity or more equivalent?
In the end, the people getting bilked are the retailers who invest in this system. People know it's a swindle at Winn Dixie already despite the billboards promising "it lowers prices, yes it does." They know their bills increased, despite the lotto like savings they might have enjoyed on a bag of chips. They are going to troop on over to a store down the street that sells things honestly for a fixed price, leaving the black card managers to lower their prices in a panic. Often, when you colude with others to rob your friends, the person being robbed is you. Add the word "scientific", as Redkin did with "pH balanced" shampo, and you a clasic scam in the making.
The next time you see a refinery at night, notice how all of the thousands of lights at a distance seem to quaver. It's trying to tell you something but you don't know how to read it!
My but Mr. Babage is quick on the helioscope key.
The neat curves and crisp laws of supply and demand, elasticity, and rational behavior that everyone learns in microeconomics class don't work in the real world.
That's macroeconomics and it does indeed work. That's the whole problem with this aproach. To paraphrase Alan Greenspan, "laws of supply and demand are not to be conned."
Business is at the start of a new era of pricing. This era is being shaped by a new set of insights into business strategy and human behavior, and these insights are turbocharged with software, mathematics, and rapid experimentation. The result is what might be called "scientific pricing." There is even a blossoming industry of a dozen companies that offer scientific-pricing services.
I'll bet there are a whole pile of companies willing to charge you to piss off your customers like that. "Turbocharged" indeed, that means twisted, right? Anyone who believes charging two people different prices for the same thing will make them happy, has a serious lack of insight into human behavior. People talk and feel ripped off.
Changes in pricing will alter every part of the economy. The way that business gets done will change, and companies will flourish or be crushed based in part on their ability to grasp and master the new science of pricing. Among those already using the new techniques are Best Buy, DHL, Ford Motor Co., the Home Depot, JC Penney, Safeway, Saks, Staples, UPS, and Winn-Dixie. General Electric, perhaps taking Jack Welch's warnings to heart, is not only working with at least two different pricing companies -- it has also invested in one.
Send that list to fucked company. All are known for overpricing shoddy merchanise. Soon they will be known for anti-trust violations, save GE which still makes good industial wares and might be smart enough to avoid this new scheme to bilk companies. Winn-Dixie with it's silly little black punishment card is wasting money that could better be spent elsewhere, while my wife now buys groceries at WalMart.
The oldest records of prices ever found are clay tablets with pictographic symbols found in a town known as Uruk, in what was ancient Sumer and what is now southern Iraq. These price records are from 3300 BC -- they've survived 5,300 years. The documents -- records of payment for barley and wheat, for sheep, and for beer -- are really receipts. "Uruk was a large city, at a minimum 40,000 people," says UCLA professor Robert Englund, one of the few experts on the Uruk documents. "So some of the quantities are very high -- hundreds of thousands of pounds of barley, for instance."
OK so far.
But here's the really remarkable thing. The earliest Uruk tablets aren't just the oldest pricing records ever found. They are the oldest examples of human writing yet discovered. In other words, when humans first took stylus to wet clay, the first thing that they were compelled to record was . . . prices.
Bzzzzt - they recorded your generosity to the temple and other administrative stuff. What they show is a deeply rooted human desire for equal treatment and fairness. This is exactly the oposite of using electronic records in a vain atempt to foist higher prices on, "suckers".
No, you are not the only one who has studied basic economics but you are one of the many who fail to grasp basic concepts. There's still no substitute for brains.
Discriminatory pricing is illegal. Read this fine post and learn something. Or just peruse a reasonable legal opinon.
What really baffles me is that people think they're entitled to know what goes on behind the scenes when businesses set prices, or base buying decisions on that.
No one thinks that but you. What people worry about is that companies might charge different individuals, of the same "class", different prices . It's not legal, it's not ethical, it's a waste of time that will damage your reputation.
I'm not worried about this because I don't shop and expect to get the lowest price unless I do some work.
CompUSA might get smart and read your Amazon cookie or, worse, your new URU passport. Then both memory sicks might run you $100, wherever you go. Oh yeah, it will fluctuate with "market conditions", but when YOU see the big gold star price of $75 someplace and are tierd of shopping, you will buy.
In addition, 35 U.S.C. 171 requires that a design to be patentable must be "original." Clearly a design that simulates a well-known or naturally occurring object or person is not original as required by the statute. Furthermore, subject matter that could be considered offensive to any race, religion, sex, ethnic group, or nationality is not proper subject matter for a design patent application.
Anyone want to tell me that a trash can for things you want to get rid of is, O-rig-inal? Looks more like a well known object to me. If a trash can is orignial and non-obvious then a picture of my go-nads is uncommon and inoffensive. The patent office is insane and might actually consider a porno motif for design patent. I'll send them the pictures right away. I'm in the money, I'm in the money.
"This is the model for what you do if you want to find a vulnerability," said Alan Paller, director of research for the SANS Institute, a research and education group that lets security companies, system administrators and others share information. "The DHS are the ones that can put the pressure on all the vendors and keep it quiet."
How, exactly, did they keep people from talking? Could the same be used against private citizens?
More chilling however, is the implied government guidance and endorsement of private work and enforced silence. What is the federal government doing working with Sendmail INC? How about a little of my tax money going to Exim's developers? I'll pass if that means that no one can talk about bugs the feds happen to stumble across. Is sendmail to be considered the "secure" mail program, sanctioned by my federal government?
At first glance, centralization of bug fixes within the federal government sounds good but it might make problems. this poster sings praises for the effort, having been told what patch to apply without a meeting to get his opinion. What he seems to have missed is that the red tape still exists, hence the lag time between discovery and implementation, it's just been taken from his control. Now, if this kind of thinking is applied throughout the federal government, every one of their machines will be running exactly the same software! Bust one, bust all. The creators of this agency hope to bring the best talent to the problem. If they have done that and if they stay out of the way, great. What I fear however, is the usual political pressures turning this office into a means of making money for particular vendors of software. It could and might result in a system that enforces worst practices everywhere, especially if the government decides that private networks are also "security risks" to be managed.