If I offer a service or a product, why am I obligated to make it so that EVERYBODY can use/buy my product/service?
Because, once upon a time, we had a country (here in the US anyhow) where many stores had signs that said "NO BLACKS ALLOWED" on them. Was that fair? "Hey, if I don't wanna serve them darkies, why should I? It's my right, ain't it?" Should we roll back the clock and say "screw it, discriminate all you want" just because some Slashdot nerds are offended that they might have to think about someone other than themselves for a few seconds? No, we as a society decided that if you offer a service to the public, you have to offer it to everyone. Otherwise, we would fall back into segregation.
I mean, by your argument I could say that even though I'm not attractive enough to be a model, I should be able to sue a modeling agency because they're descriminating against people who aren't the most attractive people in the world
Um, no, because there the actual job requirement is for you to be physicially attractive, in this case, which is entirely subjective anyhow. There are classifications under the ADA as to what constitutes "disabled." Ugly ain't one of them. Also the ADA doesn;t require things like having a certain number of baseball umpires be blind or musicians be deaf.
The anti-discrimination clause works both ways. How would you feel if you were fired from your job as an IT professional because they found someone who was better looking? Would that be fair? No, because looks have nothing to do with IT (lord ain't that the truth!). It's part of the law in this country that we cannot use arbitrary measures for deciding who to employ or who not to. IT people need to be judged on how well they do IT, and how good of an employee they are. Looks shouldn't enter into that.
I feel your pain....but if everybody keeps being so selfish, NO progress will be made because someone will ALWAYS be left out.
Um, remarkable use of the word "selfish" there. People are whining that companies are actually *gasp* forced to think about people who aren't exactly like everyone else when designing a service. Darn those selfish cripples! And, if you'd just bother take a few seconds and Google for information about the Americans with Disabilities Act before you sound off, you'd learn about the key phrase "reasonable accomodations." Jesus, people, they aren't asking for the world to be reconstructed from the ground up to accomodate them. All it means is that where possible, you take into account the needs of the blind, deaf, and handicapped.
In the case in question, how hard is it to find a workaround? Not very. Have an alternative means for the blind to prove they are human. Like, say, audio. Sounds like a reasonable accomodation to me.
because the nex time someone who does not understand English accuse my site of discriminating against them
Bullshit. The inability to read English (or of writing it properly) is different than being physicially handicapped. People can learn to read English given time. The blind can't learn how not to be blind.
In my experience, this has been due to one thing: someone who thinks he or she is a visionary. At my former company, we had a marketing director who came up with a bizarro-world business model for our product. Everyone in the trenches knew it was a bad idea. Everyone above the low-level managers, however, thought this guy crapped gold (oddly, despite the fact that his former companies all tanked). Supposedly, they did do market research, mostly by asking clueless industry analysts (i.e. the Gartners of the world) if it would fly, and got back a thumbs up.
End result? Crash & burn. Granted, what we were selling is one of those almost-impossible-to-get-off-the-ground products, but the dumbass licensing and revenue model ensured failure. Had we used a standard business plan, we might have been able to get enough traction in the market to keep our head above water. I got laid off about a year ago. The marketing twit deployed his golden parachute, doubtlessly off to destroy another company and put more people out of work. The company still exists, but is on life support.
Except for the fact that the point of spam is to extract money from suckers. In order to do that, the suckers have to have a way to get the money to you. If the suckers can get money to you, the Microsoft bloodhound lawyers can follow that trial. You can try dodging, money laundering, and so forth, but unless you're using the same accountants that the mafia and drug cartels are using, you're going to get burned.
The guy in the story was a friend's roomate at the time. This article from the school newspaper goes a bit more into the medical treatment of liquid nitrogen ingestion.
Well, what really could IBM do? Has SCO shown them the code? Has anything gone bfore a judge yet? I don't believe so.
With SCO prancing around and running off at the mouth before the fight actually begins, there's not much IBM can do at the moment other than issue statements like "they're wrong." The second SCO is forced to actually put up its dukes and fight, IBM will then be able to land a haymaker and knock SCO out of the ring and up into the cheap seats.
SCO has limited resources here. IBM could just tie things up in the courts until SCO withers and dies. So, SCO's tactic is to make as much noise as possible now, before IBM can do diddly squat, and hope that IBM just buys them to make the whole thing go away.
I can't think of any other legal dispute recently in which one party has been so vocal. Usually, party A sues party B, and both keep pretty mum about it. With SCO screaming like a little girl in the press and pointing fingers at IBM, one has to think their tactic is to get this resolved in a back room, rather than in a court.
... Other than that, the first boot in this beta version of Zeta greets you with two dead replicants, but that's easily fixable (as long you understand what a replicant is, which is a concept that new users have trouble with).
Oh "understanding what a replicant is" is easy once you administer the Voit Kamph test...
And which dead replicants show up, anyhow? Zora and Priss?
Yeah... because to get truely wooden performances, you need puppets.
Maybe Lucas should switch to making movies with no characters in them whatsoever. He can then dispense with his really awful dialog. Stick to "Triumph of the Will" like marching scenes and space ships blowing up, George.
More appropriate, from an advertisement standpoint
on
Prince of Pop-ups
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· Score: 1
At a dollar US a song, it's probably cheaper (and certainly better value) to buy a CD at the store.
You're right, asssuming all you ever do is buy entire albums. However, if you can pick and choose a few tracks you really want, and just not buy the rest, you'll end up saving money. Why buy 3 tracks you want and 7 tracks you don't for $10 when you can get just the 3 tracks you want for $3?
And, I suspect there will be a discount if you buy the entire album, anyhow. I'm sure someplace they have a "buy the entire album" button, with a lower price for the entire package.
...i dont doubt this happens, these people are in the minority
Oh? You have proof of this? Let's see a study that has been done which supports any of your statements. Hell, try giving some anecdotal evidence even.
Personally, I have something like 40Gb of MP3's. All of them are legally mine. I have the CDs or tapes still. Many people I know have ripped their music to MP3's to use with iPods and MP3-based CD players. Most seem to have only MP3s of music they own, in part since they find only pop-crap fit for 13-year-olds on P2P networks.
. and all the comments about needing to make a backup copy? you dont get to make a backup copy of your car when you buy it.
That, my shift-challenged friend, is because a car is a physical object, whereas what you are buying in the case of music, books, movies, etc. is the right to the use the works. Hence the term copyright.
this is no different.
Wrong. Physical goods are not treated the same as intellectual property. This was understood back when the U.S. Constitution was written. It's not just that people want to make copies of the music they buy, they have (in the U.S. at least, and probably in most other countries) the legal right to make copies of a work they have bought legally, as long as they adhere to fair-use principles.
get over it.
The music industry has to "get over" their obsession of controlling how people can listen to music. The industry has been, for many decades, bloated and decadent. They jacked their prices through the roof out of all proportions to the cost of manufacture and distributing music. They regularly screw over their talent by continuing to charge fees for things such as records broken during shipment (virtually no CDs are broken during shipment nowadays, but the record companies charge artists as if they are still shipping fragile 30's era records). The record companies broke price fixing laws, and were forced to offer rebates to customers.
Frankly, I have no sympathy for the record industry. All they are is a bunch of middlemen who screw artists and their audience. They are little more than a pimp. If they want to make their product more unpalatable to me than it already is, so be it. I can live without them. I'm willing to bet that both artists and their fans can live without them as well. Implementing DRM may be good, in that it could make them face the fact that piracy isn;t their biggest enemy. Their biggest enemy is themselves.
You'd need additional hardware to wire up something like a toaster, which itself generally doesn't have electronics in it. Web enabling your toaster is a bit of hyperbole.
However, as a home user, you could bash together something with these. Say you have an electronic thermometer that has a serial output. Attach one of these doodads and voila! You now have a web-enabled thermomemter. Stick it in the toaster. Now your toaster is web-enabled! (err... sorta) I can't think of many common appliances around that have serial ports on them. I guess my TiVo is the only one I can think of, that I own.
These are aimed at the manufacturer of the thermometer, however. They could take the existing design that has a serial port, add in one of these modules, and release their new iThermometer that's networkable, at a low engineering cost. They can probably tag $100 onto the price, easily swallowing the $33/module cost and making themselves a nice profit in addition. There's tons of industrial equipment out there that has serial ports, which means they need to be within 30 feet or so of a PC. With these, you can have a whole network of machines tying into a single PC which is capable of monitoring an entire factory.
I suspect any manufacturer of actual web-enabled coffeemakers, toasters, etc. would skip the serial interface (and $33 overhead) and instead just get some off-the-shelf integrated TCI/IP chip.
Personally, I'd love to get one of these things and web-enable my old Apple//c (although this particular model is a bit pokey at 300 baud).
That's hardly a solution for a customer who is running a server of some type. It's also somewhat hard to do if the customer has a colocated system or is just renting space on a shared server.
At what point is an incoming packet logged as being charged to the customer? When the ISP gets it from its upstream link, or when it is routed to the user? If it's the former, then shutting down your system is irrelevant, since the ISP will dump the incoming requests but still charge you for them. The fact that the packet isn't relayed to the customer doesn't really change the fact that it took up bandwidth on the ISP's feed.
Err... the problem is customers are billed by the ISP for incoming bandwidth. How is a customer supposed to stop incoming packets from some pinhead's server that got itself infected with some virus? Is the ISP allowing them to setup a firewall outside the ISP to block this stuff? If not, then saying 'hey, there are some nasty viruses going around' is pretty much beside the point. There's nothing the customer can do to block those incoming packets before they are charged for them by the ISP.
This is a thorny issue. The real answer is that the twit whose server got owned and is spewing garbage out on the net should be responsible for paying. But enforcing that is going to be a problem.
The whole Scrum thing was a major change of pace for the company I used to work for. They had just "re-engineered" the company, and extreme programming was the next "in" thing for executives to do, so they hired on a new VP (nothing gets done in a company like this without a new VP to manage it) and that VP brought in Scwaber. Apparently, the guy was a real jerk, and there was major friction between him and the rest of the company. One person I know who actually worked with him called him 'a cancer' and claimed he connived to get people fired, including one manager whose job he coveted. From what I was told, Schwaber himself actually got fired over that.
Scrums worked out OK, overall. Since I was not a developer, the daily meetings actually were good for me, because that's when small issues that I needed to know about usually got hashed out. Not being a developer, I can't say much beyond the daily meetings on how scrum worked out.
I transition out of development about 6 months after scrum was introduced. There were major morale issues at the company, and about a year and a half later I finally left to a small startup. It's hard to untangle how scrums worked out in the environment where there were many other issues negatively affecting the company. Lots of stupid decisions, lots of idiot executives. The group I was in just before leaving the company was laid off entirely a month later. Then they freaked out and rehired several people, with back pay and huge pay increases, because they realized after the fact they couldn't get along without them. The company has survived, and its stock has actually gone up in the past year.
That's my feeling about all invasive testing/disclosure by a company. You want to test me for drugs? Can I first see the results from the HR person, the CEO, and the CFO? I mean, if a peon like me is on drugs, there's probably a limited amount of damage I can do. If the CEO is an alcholic, the company is screwed. You want financial disclosure? How do I know the company's books are honest?
I've known a number of people who have been screwed over by dishonest companies. People who have inquired about the financial health of the company, only to be lied to so they would sign on. These people then found themselves unemployed a few months later when the company tanked, having passed up other job offers. I have been lied to by a past employer. I asked if the position I was being hired into was new, or if someone had held it previously. They lied and told me it was new. They glossed over the fact that the asshole pathelogical type-A goon of a CTO flipped out one day and fired my predecessor on the spot. I left after 9 months of dealing with that twit.
At some point in the employment process, there has to be trust between the employee and the employer. They have to trust that you are the real deal, that you've not faked your resume, that your employment history is legit, and that your references are really the people who they claim to be. You have to trust that the company isn'ton the virge of going out of business, that you will be assigned the work that you agreed to do, and thatthe work conditions are acceptable. Attempting to remove all doubt about an employee is generally useless, and is quite likely to piss them off more than it will help.
I have the NR70V, which is an older model with the camera. It has come in handy a few times, for things like when I'm in a store or something, and I see something I need to talk to someone about ("Hey, are these the plates you were talking about buying...?"). The NR70V's pictures are low res and can be fairly blurry, but it's usually clear enough to get the point across. It's a neat little add-on but it's not what I bought the PDA for in the first place.
Depending on the clarity of the camera in this model, I think it could fill in in a pinch for a low-end digital camera. While some complain about the "everything/all in one"-ness of Sony's product lines, I personally like the fact that I have a PDA, an MP3 player, and a digital camera all in one.
Hmm... I smell an interesting scam here. Under strikeback rules, I could legally hack. Let's say I go out and create a virus or a worm that is designed to intentionally go out and attack one of my own sites, then anonomously release it into the wild. Why would I do this? Because then, I'd have legal authority to hack any infected system. And, while I was in there fixing things, perhaps some interesting and useful data could turn up.
Slashdot Mirror
If I offer a service or a product, why am I obligated to make it so that EVERYBODY can use/buy my product/service?
Because, once upon a time, we had a country (here in the US anyhow) where many stores had signs that said "NO BLACKS ALLOWED" on them. Was that fair? "Hey, if I don't wanna serve them darkies, why should I? It's my right, ain't it?" Should we roll back the clock and say "screw it, discriminate all you want" just because some Slashdot nerds are offended that they might have to think about someone other than themselves for a few seconds? No, we as a society decided that if you offer a service to the public, you have to offer it to everyone. Otherwise, we would fall back into segregation.
I mean, by your argument I could say that even though I'm not attractive enough to be a model, I should be able to sue a modeling agency because they're descriminating against people who aren't the most attractive people in the world
Um, no, because there the actual job requirement is for you to be physicially attractive, in this case, which is entirely subjective anyhow. There are classifications under the ADA as to what constitutes "disabled." Ugly ain't one of them. Also the ADA doesn;t require things like having a certain number of baseball umpires be blind or musicians be deaf.
The anti-discrimination clause works both ways. How would you feel if you were fired from your job as an IT professional because they found someone who was better looking? Would that be fair? No, because looks have nothing to do with IT (lord ain't that the truth!). It's part of the law in this country that we cannot use arbitrary measures for deciding who to employ or who not to. IT people need to be judged on how well they do IT, and how good of an employee they are. Looks shouldn't enter into that.
I feel your pain....but if everybody keeps being so selfish, NO progress will be made because someone will ALWAYS be left out.
Um, remarkable use of the word "selfish" there. People are whining that companies are actually *gasp* forced to think about people who aren't exactly like everyone else when designing a service. Darn those selfish cripples! And, if you'd just bother take a few seconds and Google for information about the Americans with Disabilities Act before you sound off, you'd learn about the key phrase "reasonable accomodations." Jesus, people, they aren't asking for the world to be reconstructed from the ground up to accomodate them. All it means is that where possible, you take into account the needs of the blind, deaf, and handicapped.
In the case in question, how hard is it to find a workaround? Not very. Have an alternative means for the blind to prove they are human. Like, say, audio. Sounds like a reasonable accomodation to me.
Bullshit. The inability to read English (or of writing it properly) is different than being physicially handicapped. People can learn to read English given time. The blind can't learn how not to be blind.
In my experience, this has been due to one thing: someone who thinks he or she is a visionary. At my former company, we had a marketing director who came up with a bizarro-world business model for our product. Everyone in the trenches knew it was a bad idea. Everyone above the low-level managers, however, thought this guy crapped gold (oddly, despite the fact that his former companies all tanked). Supposedly, they did do market research, mostly by asking clueless industry analysts (i.e. the Gartners of the world) if it would fly, and got back a thumbs up.
End result? Crash & burn. Granted, what we were selling is one of those almost-impossible-to-get-off-the-ground products, but the dumbass licensing and revenue model ensured failure. Had we used a standard business plan, we might have been able to get enough traction in the market to keep our head above water. I got laid off about a year ago. The marketing twit deployed his golden parachute, doubtlessly off to destroy another company and put more people out of work. The company still exists, but is on life support.
Except for the fact that the point of spam is to extract money from suckers. In order to do that, the suckers have to have a way to get the money to you. If the suckers can get money to you, the Microsoft bloodhound lawyers can follow that trial. You can try dodging, money laundering, and so forth, but unless you're using the same accountants that the mafia and drug cartels are using, you're going to get burned.
Ah, this page brought a smile to my face just by knowing that soon, a Google search for "beefupyourpenis.com" will probably lead to a Microsoft page.
The guy in the story was a friend's roomate at the time. This article from the school newspaper goes a bit more into the medical treatment of liquid nitrogen ingestion.
Well, what really could IBM do? Has SCO shown them the code? Has anything gone bfore a judge yet? I don't believe so.
With SCO prancing around and running off at the mouth before the fight actually begins, there's not much IBM can do at the moment other than issue statements like "they're wrong." The second SCO is forced to actually put up its dukes and fight, IBM will then be able to land a haymaker and knock SCO out of the ring and up into the cheap seats.
SCO has limited resources here. IBM could just tie things up in the courts until SCO withers and dies. So, SCO's tactic is to make as much noise as possible now, before IBM can do diddly squat, and hope that IBM just buys them to make the whole thing go away.
I can't think of any other legal dispute recently in which one party has been so vocal. Usually, party A sues party B, and both keep pretty mum about it. With SCO screaming like a little girl in the press and pointing fingers at IBM, one has to think their tactic is to get this resolved in a back room, rather than in a court.
Pretend to answer the phone while taking a dump or having sex. They'll become trained not to expect you to drop everything for the phone.
Oh "understanding what a replicant is" is easy once you administer the Voit Kamph test...
And which dead replicants show up, anyhow? Zora and Priss?
Yeah... because to get truely wooden performances, you need puppets.
Maybe Lucas should switch to making movies with no characters in them whatsoever. He can then dispense with his really awful dialog. Stick to "Triumph of the Will" like marching scenes and space ships blowing up, George.
How about the Meow Mix jingle?
"Meow meow meow meow - meow meow meow meow - MEOW meow meow meow MEOW meow meow meow meow..."
Muahahaha!
Oh some good 'ol Ludwig Van, oh me brothers.
You're right, asssuming all you ever do is buy entire albums. However, if you can pick and choose a few tracks you really want, and just not buy the rest, you'll end up saving money. Why buy 3 tracks you want and 7 tracks you don't for $10 when you can get just the 3 tracks you want for $3?
And, I suspect there will be a discount if you buy the entire album, anyhow. I'm sure someplace they have a "buy the entire album" button, with a lower price for the entire package.
Oh? You have proof of this? Let's see a study that has been done which supports any of your statements. Hell, try giving some anecdotal evidence even.
Personally, I have something like 40Gb of MP3's. All of them are legally mine. I have the CDs or tapes still. Many people I know have ripped their music to MP3's to use with iPods and MP3-based CD players. Most seem to have only MP3s of music they own, in part since they find only pop-crap fit for 13-year-olds on P2P networks.
That, my shift-challenged friend, is because a car is a physical object, whereas what you are buying in the case of music, books, movies, etc. is the right to the use the works. Hence the term copyright.
Wrong. Physical goods are not treated the same as intellectual property. This was understood back when the U.S. Constitution was written. It's not just that people want to make copies of the music they buy, they have (in the U.S. at least, and probably in most other countries) the legal right to make copies of a work they have bought legally, as long as they adhere to fair-use principles.
The music industry has to "get over" their obsession of controlling how people can listen to music. The industry has been, for many decades, bloated and decadent. They jacked their prices through the roof out of all proportions to the cost of manufacture and distributing music. They regularly screw over their talent by continuing to charge fees for things such as records broken during shipment (virtually no CDs are broken during shipment nowadays, but the record companies charge artists as if they are still shipping fragile 30's era records). The record companies broke price fixing laws, and were forced to offer rebates to customers.
Frankly, I have no sympathy for the record industry. All they are is a bunch of middlemen who screw artists and their audience. They are little more than a pimp. If they want to make their product more unpalatable to me than it already is, so be it. I can live without them. I'm willing to bet that both artists and their fans can live without them as well. Implementing DRM may be good, in that it could make them face the fact that piracy isn;t their biggest enemy. Their biggest enemy is themselves.
Sorta like the fusion joke:
Enlightenment is the window manager/platform of the future... and always will be!
Maybe that explains the fanactial devotion of Mac users...
"I do what the voices in my Mac tell me" sounds like a t-shirt begging to be printed up.
You'd need additional hardware to wire up something like a toaster, which itself generally doesn't have electronics in it. Web enabling your toaster is a bit of hyperbole.
//c (although this particular model is a bit pokey at 300 baud).
However, as a home user, you could bash together something with these. Say you have an electronic thermometer that has a serial output. Attach one of these doodads and voila! You now have a web-enabled thermomemter. Stick it in the toaster. Now your toaster is web-enabled! (err... sorta) I can't think of many common appliances around that have serial ports on them. I guess my TiVo is the only one I can think of, that I own.
These are aimed at the manufacturer of the thermometer, however. They could take the existing design that has a serial port, add in one of these modules, and release their new iThermometer that's networkable, at a low engineering cost. They can probably tag $100 onto the price, easily swallowing the $33/module cost and making themselves a nice profit in addition. There's tons of industrial equipment out there that has serial ports, which means they need to be within 30 feet or so of a PC. With these, you can have a whole network of machines tying into a single PC which is capable of monitoring an entire factory.
I suspect any manufacturer of actual web-enabled coffeemakers, toasters, etc. would skip the serial interface (and $33 overhead) and instead just get some off-the-shelf integrated TCI/IP chip.
Personally, I'd love to get one of these things and web-enable my old Apple
Um... how'd you play this? Has it been ported to the Palm?
That's hardly a solution for a customer who is running a server of some type. It's also somewhat hard to do if the customer has a colocated system or is just renting space on a shared server.
At what point is an incoming packet logged as being charged to the customer? When the ISP gets it from its upstream link, or when it is routed to the user? If it's the former, then shutting down your system is irrelevant, since the ISP will dump the incoming requests but still charge you for them. The fact that the packet isn't relayed to the customer doesn't really change the fact that it took up bandwidth on the ISP's feed.
Err... the problem is customers are billed by the ISP for incoming bandwidth. How is a customer supposed to stop incoming packets from some pinhead's server that got itself infected with some virus? Is the ISP allowing them to setup a firewall outside the ISP to block this stuff? If not, then saying 'hey, there are some nasty viruses going around' is pretty much beside the point. There's nothing the customer can do to block those incoming packets before they are charged for them by the ISP.
This is a thorny issue. The real answer is that the twit whose server got owned and is spewing garbage out on the net should be responsible for paying. But enforcing that is going to be a problem.
Oh, you must mean this 3D filesystem viewer on IRIX (the page even says "as seen in Jurassic Park!").
Well, as it turns out, yes Linux has something like it available.
And, on top of that, what other UNIX allows you blast processes with various armaments?
You know what, it was inappropriate of me to spread rumors about that guy. Please do me a favor and mod the above down...
The whole Scrum thing was a major change of pace for the company I used to work for. They had just "re-engineered" the company, and extreme programming was the next "in" thing for executives to do, so they hired on a new VP (nothing gets done in a company like this without a new VP to manage it) and that VP brought in Scwaber. Apparently, the guy was a real jerk, and there was major friction between him and the rest of the company. One person I know who actually worked with him called him 'a cancer' and claimed he connived to get people fired, including one manager whose job he coveted. From what I was told, Schwaber himself actually got fired over that.
Scrums worked out OK, overall. Since I was not a developer, the daily meetings actually were good for me, because that's when small issues that I needed to know about usually got hashed out. Not being a developer, I can't say much beyond the daily meetings on how scrum worked out.
I transition out of development about 6 months after scrum was introduced. There were major morale issues at the company, and about a year and a half later I finally left to a small startup. It's hard to untangle how scrums worked out in the environment where there were many other issues negatively affecting the company. Lots of stupid decisions, lots of idiot executives. The group I was in just before leaving the company was laid off entirely a month later. Then they freaked out and rehired several people, with back pay and huge pay increases, because they realized after the fact they couldn't get along without them. The company has survived, and its stock has actually gone up in the past year.
That's my feeling about all invasive testing/disclosure by a company. You want to test me for drugs? Can I first see the results from the HR person, the CEO, and the CFO? I mean, if a peon like me is on drugs, there's probably a limited amount of damage I can do. If the CEO is an alcholic, the company is screwed. You want financial disclosure? How do I know the company's books are honest?
I've known a number of people who have been screwed over by dishonest companies. People who have inquired about the financial health of the company, only to be lied to so they would sign on. These people then found themselves unemployed a few months later when the company tanked, having passed up other job offers. I have been lied to by a past employer. I asked if the position I was being hired into was new, or if someone had held it previously. They lied and told me it was new. They glossed over the fact that the asshole pathelogical type-A goon of a CTO flipped out one day and fired my predecessor on the spot. I left after 9 months of dealing with that twit.
At some point in the employment process, there has to be trust between the employee and the employer. They have to trust that you are the real deal, that you've not faked your resume, that your employment history is legit, and that your references are really the people who they claim to be. You have to trust that the company isn'ton the virge of going out of business, that you will be assigned the work that you agreed to do, and thatthe work conditions are acceptable. Attempting to remove all doubt about an employee is generally useless, and is quite likely to piss them off more than it will help.
I have the NR70V, which is an older model with the camera. It has come in handy a few times, for things like when I'm in a store or something, and I see something I need to talk to someone about ("Hey, are these the plates you were talking about buying...?"). The NR70V's pictures are low res and can be fairly blurry, but it's usually clear enough to get the point across. It's a neat little add-on but it's not what I bought the PDA for in the first place.
Depending on the clarity of the camera in this model, I think it could fill in in a pinch for a low-end digital camera. While some complain about the "everything/all in one"-ness of Sony's product lines, I personally like the fact that I have a PDA, an MP3 player, and a digital camera all in one.
Hmm... I smell an interesting scam here. Under strikeback rules, I could legally hack. Let's say I go out and create a virus or a worm that is designed to intentionally go out and attack one of my own sites, then anonomously release it into the wild. Why would I do this? Because then, I'd have legal authority to hack any infected system. And, while I was in there fixing things, perhaps some interesting and useful data could turn up.