I agree, that is a closer analogy. Assuming he was smart enough to explain that he was seeing an unexplained energy drain and figured he'd find the cause with 10,000 volts (follow the boom.)
Ain't this fun?;)
I guess once we've bit into this flamebait of an "Ask Slashdot", might as well run with it.
What do you think, fellow/.'ers, will I win the lawsuit?
I agree with your sentiment, and realize you're joking, but in the hypothetical example you pose, you would probably win. Sure, you've stolen from him, but that doesn't give him the right to damage your equipment. He could file criminal charges for the theft and might even be able to make you pay his entire electric bill. You could still sue him in civil court for damaging your stuff (maybe even press charges as well.) Once he pulls the plug, the theft stops. What he does after that is a poorly considered act of vengence.
Criminals physically robbing homes who were shot by the owner have actually won civil cases for the pain and suffering of the gunshot received while commiting a crime. (Which is why you should shoot to kill.)
I've often considered doing something like this, with the added punch of it being triggered each time I receive UCE.
It's easy enough to write filters to handle UCE and send them to trash. What would be more fun would be to wrap them in a properly formatted forward and send it to these guys so they can have specific examples of what they are encouraging.;)
So all I have to do to experience pain is think I'm in pain?
With all due respect, I believe you are mixing the concepts of being in pain from being injured.
It is possible to feel pain without being injured and it is possible to be injured and not feel pain.
Pain relievers, for example, don't heal injuries, they screw with the chemistry of your nervous system to make you not feel the damage caused by the injury as much.
Likewise, it is possible to feel pain as long as you believe you are injured. Repetitive stress, like hours of typing, which can cause legitimate injuries, can also make you simply soar. Believing that the soarness you're feeling is an injury can cause you to experience the same pain as someone who actually is injured.
Awareness of Carpel Tunnel may cause many to react to soarness as if it were an actual injury, (using braces, cutting back on activity) and later find that it has gone away. These people probably were only *risking* developing Carpel Tunnel and avoided it by treating it beforehand.
Just my two cents, but I suspect this is what he was trying to say.
You can watch (record really) the show on a nightly basis from almost anywhere. I've seen it on Time Warner and Cox cable systems as well as DirecTV. It's on late at night on BBC America.
Oh, and they show it in the original 30 minute episodes, by the way. (We got whole story lines in a single blast on PBS when I was a kid.)
I did, however see the BBC thing where they asked who should play the next doctor, and some people actually voted for Rik Mayall and/or Adrian Edmonson. Dear God. Imagine Rik fucking Mayall as the Doctor.
Don't suppose you have a link to this? I'd love to see the list.
If people could be nominated, I'd nominate Alan Davies (Jonathan Creek.) I'd bet he could pull of a Bakeresque doctor and he's got tall, skinny and curly down.
Just because you perceive someone as being dumb, does that mean they don't deserve the same access as you, whether to the Net, the Web, or Usenet?
If only they knew the difference between Internet, WWW and UseNet. I'm all in favor of equal access to all these things, but you must admit that it's pretty damned frustrating when equal access doesn't mean equal quality, respect, or understanding.
Bait & Switch is simply offering one thing with every intention of selling the interested party something else entirely when they express interest.
Advertising a $100 PC and then not having any when customers arrive is poor inventory control. If you go on to refuse to offer a raincheck or honor the price in some fashion, that's Bait & Switch.
There's nothing wrong with trying to up-sell customers to a more profitable item. Refusing to honor the advertised price is Bait & Switch if it's not available at any price, and fraud if you have it, but won't sell it at that price.
than some standard stuff we have now. If you're gonna have a network of computers talking to a "central control unit" to maintain security by having the IP hop around their subnet. Aren't they better off with something as simple a NAT enabled firewall?
I could see the utility of two distant computers carrying on a conversation, each changing their IP to be a pain to packet sniffers, I guess, but wouldn't encryption be more secure?
Ahhh. One feature would be the ability to specify which applications are available to the outside. Well, couldn't a firewall do that as well?
Also, if the IP address keeps changing, how exactly would their servers be available? If not by DNS (which wouldn't change fast enough and would defeat the purpose) then they'd only be available by IP, right? Of course, if the IP keep changing, how would you know the one for the server you wish to connect to?
Automate things - write scripts to make life easier for everyone, and give yourself even more free time to worry about!
One word of caution about this bullet point: Don't knock yourself out scoring points on this with management. If there is a fixed amount of things to do, and you find a way to automate a significant percentage, you could automate someone out of a job. Reducing the work of three to a workload managable by two, could very well cost someone their job.
Best swear your co-workers to secrecy if you manage to automate quite a bit of your work.
I think you mean Registered Trademark (r) instead of (tm). Both types serve the same purpose, but a simple (tm) can be asserted as simply as putting a (c) in a document asserts copywrite.
My understanding of the utility of the value of a Registered Trademark is that you can have it granted, by application, by a governing authority (either Federal or International) to assert the trademark in all markets that government has authority over.
If two companies called themselves the same name in different states, each could assert a (tm) on their name or products in the market they serve. Going to the expense of actually registering a trademark can break a tie if there's a dispute (both companies enter the same market.)
Linking to their site violates no copyrights, as far as I am aware. The bandwidth excuse is bullshit though.
IANAL, and I'm not saying I agree with Ford, or not, but I don't know that any legal precendent has been set for linking copywritten images, potentially out of context, into your page without permission is legal. If infact a precedent has been set, I would bet that it is not legal.
The bandwidth thing is surely a statement to attempt to quantify the cost (i.e. damages) associated with mis-appropriating the images. Establishing some claim of cost incurred, would stand to increase any damages they might be awarded and could increase other penalties if this sort of thing was ever determined to be criminal.
Personally, I think Ford should just accept the extra traffic and call it a day. They could have gotten plenty of publicity simply by denouncing the site (driving up it's traffic) and then making it break after they've maximized the number of pass through clicks.
If the site is obviously intended to be some kind of parody or otherwise humorous, they (2600) may have some precedence, thanks to Falwell v. Hustler, to get away with using the copywritten images without Ford's permission.
I have a friend who worked for GE. He told me that many of the employees, upon hearing the 'We Bring Good Things To Life' slogan immediately though of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.
Sadly, this story is a mnemonic virus. Every time I've seen/heard the slogan since, Frankenstein's monster pops into my head. I wonder if any other slogans/trademarks have been hijacked this way.
I hope that we at least get to see the season finale!
Friday's episode was the season finale. Unfortunately, it was done as a cliff-hanger. Joy. Perhaps they'll finish the story my having Doggett & Scully (or even Mulder) come to their rescue, since they were pretty much screwed. They can explain it all in an X-Files episode next season. I doubt Carter will stop using them and it's pretty unlikely that he'll use them again without some explaination of how they got out of the trouble they were in. With any luck, Yves will get shot, driving Jimmy to suicide and we'll just have the guys back.
But how, exactly, would you prove you took those notes two years ago.
If you're really concerned about this, always mail a copy of your paper to yourself and leave the envelope sealed. This will establish that you had that paper on the date it was postmarked.
they both have the disadvantage of being file systems you'd use for windows, but prejudices aside, here's my understanding of the chied differences:
Security. It's my understanding that you cannot compromise NTFS simply by rebooting with a boot disk. FAT32 is allegedly vulnerable to this.
Access. I'm not aware of any NTFS drivers for Linux. So, if you want to setup a dual-boot system, you wouldn't be able access your NTFS partition while in Linux.
For more information, here's a link to a comparison in the Microsoft knowledge base.
I think the submittor is talking about the annoying tendency of comapnies to claim off-hours project as their IP. If I write a program on my own time, I should be able to claim it as my intellectual property, and slap the GPL on it. It's not like I'm taking a second job, I'm giving away my work.
Let me start by saying IANAL, but I've been looking into this quite a bit while working to go independent from my past employer. Current law (i.e., statute + rulings) leans really heavily toward the employer on this issue. For example, if you do a side project without any company resources and not on company time, it's still theirs if it's inspired by any IP of the company or addresses any current or future needs of the company that could be reasonably know by the employee.
But the land-grab mentality about intellectual property causes problems. If I use a company laptop, there might be grounds for them to claim they own my project. Same if I use a company email account on a project mailing list, or if post a quick note about a bug from work.
As I mentioned above, it gets worse than that. Let's say your company is working on an application to do X. You, on your own time, realize that there is a need out there to integrate X with Y and write some middleware to do it. Your employer could claim IP rights to the middleware, without compensation.
I'm not saying these things are right. Infact, I believe the opposite. But, getting an employer to waive their rights to the extent you describe is gonna take more than a simple contract. The contract might work now if employers still perceive a scarcity of employees. When a glut of IT workers comes, and it will, employers will have no incentive to sign it.
If you want to do something legal to protect your rights as an employee, unionize. Once organized, force the agreement on employers.
My condolences for your trouble. As a former PSINet employee, I wish I could have emailed people and warned them this was coming. I knew it was inevitable when I left in late '98. Cashed out before my options were worthless.
I've worked for various Internet providers in a variety of capacities right up to VP. The nature of the business has changed and I'd recommend you adapt to it.
PSINet was operating under the assumption that you could make a profit by distributing a commodity product, working to lower their costs by stock-piling inventory. I could go into details, but that's kinda off topic.
Here's my advice. Find a provider that gets it's income from more than one thing. Cable providers, for example, get substantial income from programming and can cheaply deliver service over the same facility (fiber and coax wire in this case.) Local telephone companies (avoid CLECs) get their income from voice service and also own the wires.
Another advantage of cable and telephone companies is a single point of blame. If your Internet service is down, it's their fault, period. Whether or not it's true, many ISPs waste a lot of time blaming outages on the people providing their cables.
As suggested by another poster, don't put all your eggs in one basket. There is a saying, "Jack of all traits, master of none." Don't rely on your ISP to handle your website and email. It is a rare exception to find an Internet provider that actually understands both Access and Servers well enough to do both well. Find a hosting provider that will take your security seriously.
Seperate providers for each service will cost you more, most likely. But it'll be worth it.
One more thing. When choosing a provider, make sure that their backbone connection isn't PSINet. There are many providers out there (e.g., Earthlink) that depend heavily on PSINet.
The alerts that go to the Air Force base that my father works at arrive about a week after I learn about the same security problems from other sources, usually from/..
Hmmm... do you also get the public CERT releases? I've never compared the times that items on Slashdot appear in the CERT Advisory emails. Other people in this discussion have suggested the difference is like a month.
If they're behind, and they try to charge, nobody will use them.
According to the articles linked to from the story, the stuff on their site and the emails are intentionally behind. Right now, only the government gets immediate notification of security concerns. The information is then delayed atleast 45 days before it is released elsewhere.
Perhaps they're at risk of loosing their Federal funding and want to sell the service they've been exclusively selling to the government to the public.
Also, I have never gotten a CERT advisory that didn't say how to fix the problem. Perhaps this earlier notification will simply be that there is a problem... solution to follow.
Slashdot Mirror
I keep reading this headline as:
"Apple Dumps Core"
Probably need sleep...
Other than, maybe "news for nerds? Stuff that matters?"
;)
Don't you think it's important to the future of geekdom to know how to attrack a mate?
Of course, using Laughing Gas (Nitrous Oxide) to do it is probably illegal in some states
I agree, that is a closer analogy. Assuming he was smart enough to explain that he was seeing an unexplained energy drain and figured he'd find the cause with 10,000 volts (follow the boom.)
;)
Ain't this fun?
I guess once we've bit into this flamebait of an "Ask Slashdot", might as well run with it.
What do you think, fellow /.'ers, will I win the lawsuit?
I agree with your sentiment, and realize you're joking, but in the hypothetical example you pose, you would probably win. Sure, you've stolen from him, but that doesn't give him the right to damage your equipment. He could file criminal charges for the theft and might even be able to make you pay his entire electric bill. You could still sue him in civil court for damaging your stuff (maybe even press charges as well.) Once he pulls the plug, the theft stops. What he does after that is a poorly considered act of vengence.
Criminals physically robbing homes who were shot by the owner have actually won civil cases for the pain and suffering of the gunshot received while commiting a crime. (Which is why you should shoot to kill.)
Nothing wrong with that, as long as the Department of Defense focuses on defense.
Sorry but this begs the obvious quote:
"The best defense is a good offense." - Vince Lombardi
Offensive deterence is a way better defense than any kind of literal defense, IMHO.
I've often considered doing something like this, with the added punch of it being triggered each time I receive UCE.
;)
It's easy enough to write filters to handle UCE and send them to trash. What would be more fun would be to wrap them in a properly formatted forward and send it to these guys so they can have specific examples of what they are encouraging.
This reminds me of one of the funniest Usenet .sigs I ever saw:
;)
"DOS is, quite possibly, the worst text-adventure game ever"
Atleast text-adventure game errors made sense
So all I have to do to experience pain is think I'm in pain?
With all due respect, I believe you are mixing the concepts of being in pain from being injured.
It is possible to feel pain without being injured and it is possible to be injured and not feel pain.
Pain relievers, for example, don't heal injuries, they screw with the chemistry of your nervous system to make you not feel the damage caused by the injury as much.
Likewise, it is possible to feel pain as long as you believe you are injured. Repetitive stress, like hours of typing, which can cause legitimate injuries, can also make you simply soar. Believing that the soarness you're feeling is an injury can cause you to experience the same pain as someone who actually is injured.
Awareness of Carpel Tunnel may cause many to react to soarness as if it were an actual injury, (using braces, cutting back on activity) and later find that it has gone away. These people probably were only *risking* developing Carpel Tunnel and avoided it by treating it beforehand.
Just my two cents, but I suspect this is what he was trying to say.
You can watch (record really) the show on a nightly basis from almost anywhere. I've seen it on Time Warner and Cox cable systems as well as DirecTV. It's on late at night on BBC America.
Oh, and they show it in the original 30 minute episodes, by the way. (We got whole story lines in a single blast on PBS when I was a kid.)
I did, however see the BBC thing where they asked who should play the next doctor, and some people actually voted for Rik Mayall and/or Adrian Edmonson. Dear God. Imagine Rik fucking Mayall as the Doctor.
Don't suppose you have a link to this? I'd love to see the list.
If people could be nominated, I'd nominate Alan Davies (Jonathan Creek.) I'd bet he could pull of a Bakeresque doctor and he's got tall, skinny and curly down.
Just because you perceive someone as being dumb, does that mean they don't deserve the same access as you, whether to the Net, the Web, or Usenet?
If only they knew the difference between Internet, WWW and UseNet. I'm all in favor of equal access to all these things, but you must admit that it's pretty damned frustrating when equal access doesn't mean equal quality, respect, or understanding.
--
Bait & Switch is simply offering one thing with every intention of selling the interested party something else entirely when they express interest.
Advertising a $100 PC and then not having any when customers arrive is poor inventory control. If you go on to refuse to offer a raincheck or honor the price in some fashion, that's Bait & Switch.
There's nothing wrong with trying to up-sell customers to a more profitable item. Refusing to honor the advertised price is Bait & Switch if it's not available at any price, and fraud if you have it, but won't sell it at that price.
--
than some standard stuff we have now. If you're gonna have a network of computers talking to a "central control unit" to maintain security by having the IP hop around their subnet. Aren't they better off with something as simple a NAT enabled firewall?
I could see the utility of two distant computers carrying on a conversation, each changing their IP to be a pain to packet sniffers, I guess, but wouldn't encryption be more secure?
Ahhh. One feature would be the ability to specify which applications are available to the outside. Well, couldn't a firewall do that as well?
Also, if the IP address keeps changing, how exactly would their servers be available? If not by DNS (which wouldn't change fast enough and would defeat the purpose) then they'd only be available by IP, right? Of course, if the IP keep changing, how would you know the one for the server you wish to connect to?
Sounds daft to me.
--
Automate things - write scripts to make life easier for everyone, and give yourself even more free time to worry about!
One word of caution about this bullet point: Don't knock yourself out scoring points on this with management. If there is a fixed amount of things to do, and you find a way to automate a significant percentage, you could automate someone out of a job. Reducing the work of three to a workload managable by two, could very well cost someone their job.
Best swear your co-workers to secrecy if you manage to automate quite a bit of your work.
--
Trademark ...
I think you mean Registered Trademark (r) instead of (tm). Both types serve the same purpose, but a simple (tm) can be asserted as simply as putting a (c) in a document asserts copywrite.
My understanding of the utility of the value of a Registered Trademark is that you can have it granted, by application, by a governing authority (either Federal or International) to assert the trademark in all markets that government has authority over.
If two companies called themselves the same name in different states, each could assert a (tm) on their name or products in the market they serve. Going to the expense of actually registering a trademark can break a tie if there's a dispute (both companies enter the same market.)
--
Linking to their site violates no copyrights, as far as I am aware. The bandwidth excuse is bullshit though.
IANAL, and I'm not saying I agree with Ford, or not, but I don't know that any legal precendent has been set for linking copywritten images, potentially out of context, into your page without permission is legal. If infact a precedent has been set, I would bet that it is not legal.
The bandwidth thing is surely a statement to attempt to quantify the cost (i.e. damages) associated with mis-appropriating the images. Establishing some claim of cost incurred, would stand to increase any damages they might be awarded and could increase other penalties if this sort of thing was ever determined to be criminal.
Personally, I think Ford should just accept the extra traffic and call it a day. They could have gotten plenty of publicity simply by denouncing the site (driving up it's traffic) and then making it break after they've maximized the number of pass through clicks.
If the site is obviously intended to be some kind of parody or otherwise humorous, they (2600) may have some precedence, thanks to Falwell v. Hustler, to get away with using the copywritten images without Ford's permission.
--
I have a friend who worked for GE. He told me that many of the employees, upon hearing the 'We Bring Good Things To Life' slogan immediately though of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.
Sadly, this story is a mnemonic virus. Every time I've seen/heard the slogan since, Frankenstein's monster pops into my head. I wonder if any other slogans/trademarks have been hijacked this way.
--
I hope that we at least get to see the season finale!
Friday's episode was the season finale. Unfortunately, it was done as a cliff-hanger. Joy. Perhaps they'll finish the story my having Doggett & Scully (or even Mulder) come to their rescue, since they were pretty much screwed. They can explain it all in an X-Files episode next season. I doubt Carter will stop using them and it's pretty unlikely that he'll use them again without some explaination of how they got out of the trouble they were in. With any luck, Yves will get shot, driving Jimmy to suicide and we'll just have the guys back.
--
But how, exactly, would you prove you took those notes two years ago.
If you're really concerned about this, always mail a copy of your paper to yourself and leave the envelope sealed. This will establish that you had that paper on the date it was postmarked.
--
they both have the disadvantage of being file systems you'd use for windows, but prejudices aside, here's my understanding of the chied differences:
Security. It's my understanding that you cannot compromise NTFS simply by rebooting with a boot disk. FAT32 is allegedly vulnerable to this.
Access. I'm not aware of any NTFS drivers for Linux. So, if you want to setup a dual-boot system, you wouldn't be able access your NTFS partition while in Linux.
For more information, here's a link to a comparison in the Microsoft knowledge base.
--
I think the submittor is talking about the annoying tendency of comapnies to claim off-hours project as their IP. If I write a program on my own time, I should be able to claim it as my intellectual property, and slap the GPL on it. It's not like I'm taking a second job, I'm giving away my work.
Let me start by saying IANAL, but I've been looking into this quite a bit while working to go independent from my past employer. Current law (i.e., statute + rulings) leans really heavily toward the employer on this issue. For example, if you do a side project without any company resources and not on company time, it's still theirs if it's inspired by any IP of the company or addresses any current or future needs of the company that could be reasonably know by the employee.
But the land-grab mentality about intellectual property causes problems. If I use a company laptop, there might be grounds for them to claim they own my project. Same if I use a company email account on a project mailing list, or if post a quick note about a bug from work.
As I mentioned above, it gets worse than that. Let's say your company is working on an application to do X. You, on your own time, realize that there is a need out there to integrate X with Y and write some middleware to do it. Your employer could claim IP rights to the middleware, without compensation.
I'm not saying these things are right. Infact, I believe the opposite. But, getting an employer to waive their rights to the extent you describe is gonna take more than a simple contract. The contract might work now if employers still perceive a scarcity of employees. When a glut of IT workers comes, and it will, employers will have no incentive to sign it.
If you want to do something legal to protect your rights as an employee, unionize. Once organized, force the agreement on employers.
--
The saying is "jack of all trades..." which has the advantage of making sense.
Hmmm... I knew that. Wonder why I typed the wrong word...Must be tired. Thanks.
--
My condolences for your trouble. As a former PSINet employee, I wish I could have emailed people and warned them this was coming. I knew it was inevitable when I left in late '98. Cashed out before my options were worthless.
I've worked for various Internet providers in a variety of capacities right up to VP. The nature of the business has changed and I'd recommend you adapt to it.
PSINet was operating under the assumption that you could make a profit by distributing a commodity product, working to lower their costs by stock-piling inventory. I could go into details, but that's kinda off topic.
Here's my advice. Find a provider that gets it's income from more than one thing. Cable providers, for example, get substantial income from programming and can cheaply deliver service over the same facility (fiber and coax wire in this case.) Local telephone companies (avoid CLECs) get their income from voice service and also own the wires.
Another advantage of cable and telephone companies is a single point of blame. If your Internet service is down, it's their fault, period. Whether or not it's true, many ISPs waste a lot of time blaming outages on the people providing their cables.
As suggested by another poster, don't put all your eggs in one basket. There is a saying, "Jack of all traits, master of none." Don't rely on your ISP to handle your website and email. It is a rare exception to find an Internet provider that actually understands both Access and Servers well enough to do both well. Find a hosting provider that will take your security seriously.
Seperate providers for each service will cost you more, most likely. But it'll be worth it.
One more thing. When choosing a provider, make sure that their backbone connection isn't PSINet. There are many providers out there (e.g., Earthlink) that depend heavily on PSINet.
--
The alerts that go to the Air Force base that my father works at arrive about a week after I learn about the same security problems from other sources, usually from /..
Hmmm... do you also get the public CERT releases? I've never compared the times that items on Slashdot appear in the CERT Advisory emails. Other people in this discussion have suggested the difference is like a month.
--
Once more, properly formatted:
... solution to follow.
If they're behind, and they try to charge, nobody will use them.
According to the articles linked to from the story, the stuff on their site and the emails are intentionally behind. Right now, only the government gets immediate notification of security concerns. The information is then delayed atleast 45 days before it is released elsewhere.
Perhaps they're at risk of loosing their Federal funding and want to sell the service they've been exclusively selling to the government to the public.
Also, I have never gotten a CERT advisory that didn't say how to fix the problem. Perhaps this earlier notification will simply be that there is a problem
--