I don't understand how a company that sold the software has any choice but to supply the updates. It is their legally-binding obligation to do so unless specific terms of the agreement under which the goods were sold are violated.
Most of the software TOS I see say something like "we don't warrant this software to do anything, and have the right to change these terms whenever it strikes our fancy". So much for "legally-binding obligation".
But even leaving that aside, companies are under no obligation to accept a renewal order. "Sorry, sir, that serial number does not qualify for an update subscription."
Also this idea that they weed out anyone with the slightest problem (or intelligence) is bunk. For extremely important cases, jurors get vetted pretty hard and there are a lot of challenges allowed by lawyers on both sides. For normal cases? Has to be a pretty good reason or the judge won't accept a challenge.
Maybe it's different where you are. Last time I was in a jury pool, the two cases I was assigned were a bar assault, and a shoplifting case. You wouldn't call either "extremely important", except maybe to the defendant. Something like 2/3 the pool was removed by lawyers from one side or the other in both cases. Both sides had a certain number of challenges (10?) that they didn't have to give any reason for. Jurors were questioned in public, and it was pretty obvious that they didn't want anyone who might introduce ideas of their own (and I think there is good legal reason for that) .
The demographics (large city) weren't "too stupid to get out of it", some were excused because they couldn't risk 2 weeks of absence from work, their English wasn't good enough, etc. It seemed like a pretty good cross section of the population, though retired people were over-represented and high-income types were under-represented.
If generals are held responsible for the actions of their troops during wartime, then surely we can hold the leadership of a corporation responsible for the actions of the corporation.
That's only if they're on a side that got conquered. No generals were held responsible for My Lai (hell, not even the gunmen who committed the crimes were held responsible.. their lowest-ranking officers did get a slap on the wrist).
And except for war, even the top dogs are usually exempt from punishment. Sometimes they'll sacrifice a subordinate.
The corporate liability shield does not (in theory) protect you if you knowingly perform illegal actions.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.
Suppose you were a hacker who rootkitted a million computers. We all know that would fall under computer crime statutes.
Now suppose your name is Sony.
Rule of law. All equal before the law. Feh. If you're employed by the government, it doesn't apply to you. If you're a large corporation, it rarely applies to you. At least, in the USA (doesn't seem like it's much different anywhere else). It's a nice concept, would be great to see some country try it.
The barrier to entry is the GOVERNMENT forbidding any other company but Comcast to run high-speed lines.
I very much doubt that the government forbids any other company but Comcast to run high-speed lines. Any company that wishes to run high-speed lines can do so, so long as they reach agreement with each property-owner on or over whose land those lines will go.
The municipal wireless in Minneapolis doesn't pull any of those stunts.
People should note that the "municipal" wireless in Minneapolis is really only sorta. It's a private company (USInternet) that got a franchise and that the city government is "anchor tenant" on for their (mostly wired) connection.
For the average user, the price is quite good (half what Comcast or Qwest will charge). Performance ranges from excellent to terrible, it's subject to all the effects that you'd expect an access point to be subject to: weather, leaves on trees, shared bandwidth and interference, and objects between you and the WAP (Minneapolis has lots of stucco houses, which is more or less concrete applied over wire mesh, an excellent shield against radio waves). It's also very location dependent.. often good at the corner, and poor in the middle of the block or on the 12th floor.
But it is nice to have that third choice. Well, fourth, I've seen Clearwire ads but don't know of anybody who actually uses it.
Big jammers, though, would be among the top targets for anti-radiation missiles and small ones(say vehicle mounted) would likely be too short ranged to be effective until the weapon being jammed was already too close for comfort.
I dunno. I think you could pack quite a bit of power onto a truck that had an onboard or towed generator. Thousands of watts, easily. The antenna would probably be the most difficult bit, if you were going to operate while in motion.
Perhaps some forward-thinking bloke, back in the day 40 years ago, installed a 130V lamp instead of a 120V, which is a common "trick" for
...decreasing the lifetime of the lamp. Undervolting harms the lifespan AND puts out less light. You never want to undervolt your light source.
Don't be silly. A 130-volt bulb has a higher resistance (for the same wattage rating) than a 120-volt bulb therefore at 120 volts pulls less current. It puts out less light, and runs at a lower temperature. And lasts longer. That's what most 'long life' bulbs are. The effect on lifetime is governed by the 12th power of the ratio of voltages, i.e. a 1500hr 130-volt bulb would last almost twice as long at 120 volts (1500e(130/120)).
The access was restored after 30 minutes or so. It says so in the article. It also says this was a new website. The system there is set to block all new websites until they are checked out. It doesn't matter what the web site is.
Yes, access was enabled, right after the shit hit the fan in national media. But I'm sure that was merely a coincidence.
You're saying that every single website that hasn't already been checked, has to be "checked out" by a government employee before granting access? For all the gazillions of constantly changing websites on the web, all around the world? If that is the case, they must have a large department of "checkers" who spend their long days doing nothing but vetting websites.
And the Governor wants to lay off workers who aren't necessary? Wow, there's the ones to start with.
Long story short Ubuntu went from being used on our communal home built desktop to being replaced by a new Windows 7 PC within two weeks of the installation of a version with the buttons on the other side, and the move to get a new PC came mainly as it became unusable to the other half because of the buttons being shifted round.
Um.. so you seem to be saying that any interface changes potentially disqualify it from further use? I'll grant that the developer tendency (not just Ubuntu) to equate "improved" with "changed" is annoying, but that's not a very big change.
Me, I'm annoyed because FF4.0 removes the "recent pages" button from beside the "forward" and 'back" buttons. But I'm not going to switch to IE because of it. Sooner or later, either I'll get used to it, or Toolbar Buttons (or some other addon) will fix it.
Why is this ridiculous sort of mob justice tolerated ?
Because, in cases like this, it's the only sort of justice that there is likely to be. It's not like a government that protects torturers will do anything, even if it wasn't that very government who recommended HBGary in the first place.
Now, that doesn't excuse "death threats". If there were in fact any (those might merely be a face-saving excuse for backing out of the conference).
An act of war against a falling dictator is quite a bit less risky.
It's always less risky to only attack people who are weak.
OTOH, in this age where we put (perhaps misplaced) value on "nation", that can often be the single thing that would reunite the people behind him. Attack from outside, real or staged, is a very old tactic to unite a nation. On 9/10, most people in the US knew Bush Jr. was a moron and was flying the economy into the ground (though they didn't yet know he had a penchant for thinking world events were scripted by a nutty religious script). On 9/12, they were willing to let Bush's secret police do anything he wanted.
The same could have happened in Egypt. In fact, Mubarak did try to blame the unrest on foreigners, but the the only foreigners he could show were news crews, and the Egyptian public by and large doesn't seem to have found that convincing.
Have you ever bought a SONY gadget on the internet?? How do you know it was not fake, inferior junk, knockoff from China? You do not, not unless you buy the product from an original, authorized seller. Deal with it.
Have you ever bought a SONY CD from an original, authorized seller, to discover that it's rootkitted your computer? Have you ever bought a digital picture frame at Target, to discover that the original-equipment virus lurking in it has infected your flash drives?
The fact is, buying original, genuine merchandise from reputable vendors does not in any way protect you from negligent (Target) or criminal (SONY) acts on the part of those in the manufacturing and distribution chain.
There is no honor among corporations, either. Buying from an original, authorized seller does not protect you. Deal with it.
One of the more serious problems with the military-industrial complex's development process, besides obvious little things like threatening to kill millions of people and possibly initiate nuclear winter, is that it takes a large number of scientists and engineers and diverts them away from useful civilian technology and diverts their talents to working on projects that ideally will never be used, and hides any parts of that work that could be useful away where the public can't use it.
A long time ago (perhaps in the 1960s) I saw a quote from the head of one of the major Japanese corporations. Might have been Sony, but I can't find it now. He said (something like) "American engineers are very good, American first-rate engineers are better than ours. But your first-rate engineers are working on military products. We're building consumer products, and win in the marketplace because our first-rate engineers are better than your second-rate engineers."
I'm trying to think of some government that is less likely than Iceland's to have interesting fodder for WikiLeaks.
Maybe I'm naive and Iceland is really a hotbed of corruption and intrigue, but somehow it seems unlikely that there's anything to leak, aside from political maneuvers and backbiting that would seem tame in almost any other country. The Icelandic financial institution scandal is pretty long in the tooth at this point. Bugging Iceland would probably be a sign of really poor judgment on the part of any aspiring scandal-monger.
Of course, every society probably has its quota of twits who are interested in eavesdropping on their colleagues. But with the new interest in Iceland evidenced by the US gummint, you do gotta wonder.
Titles are cheap. I always wanted to put "Supreme Overlord" as a title on a resume just as a joke. It has about as much meaning as some of the crap I have seen other people use.
I once ran a business where I had to fill out government forms daily. For a while, I put down a different title pretty much every day. Czar. Supreme Commander. Misanthrope. Peon in Charge of Forms. Chief Forms Officer. Prince (Second Class). Grand Panjandrum. Acting Queen. Whatever. Of course, it was a pretty safe bet that no one ever actually read the forms.
Eventually I started running out of ideas, and the game lost its fun. I think I was just "Employee" after that.
Further proof that both extremes are just as crazy.
You mean, on the one hand, the extreme that's packing heat so they can blow away people in Safeway parking lots, and on the other hand, the extreme that doesn't?
palaeopathology has confirmed that cancer was exceedingly rare in primates until the start of the industrial revolution.
Cancer tends to be an old person's disease. Not saying that the industrial revolution didn't introduce lots of new causes for cancer, but before then, primates who lived long enough to be chronologically old were pretty rare.
Is it reasonable to suspect people of murder just because they have in the past searched for, found, or viewed material, that might relate to methods used by the murderer?
Well, not just because. Though when a closely related person dies by an unusual means, and it turns out you've researched that particular means, it's not terribly surprising that the cop wonders if it's significant.
If you looked back into my search history far enough, you could probably find places where I searched for all those different things in the past.
I'm sure you could with mine. I run TrackMeNot (a Firefox extension) on all of my computers, which makes random searches. Even as I write this, several of them are making random searches (the last few searches seem to have been 'wonderful with many organic', '"just about every facet "', 'Historian Hampton Sides coming to Edwards', and 'everyone from pathology residents'. Ooh, there goes 'double hung white vinyl', followed by 'hung white'. Probably nothing incriminating there, unless they're investigating either a hate crime or the porn movie industry, but it goes on 24/7, and it's rare that I search for something that the search pulldown thingie doesn't think I've searched for before.
I figure this poisons the datamining well. If everybody did this, mining search strings would be worthless, whether they're looking to prove murder, or just to impose the new world order.
In Japan... You have densely-packed cities, a small land area, and a fairly homogeneous, tech-savvy society... Practical or feasible in the US? Not really, 1mbps is plenty BROADBAND for me. I have something like 15mbps, but that's 15 times excessive for what I need... FTTH at faster rates than my LAN is pointless.
While it's true that FTTH that's faster than your LAN is pointless, most of us have LANs that are faster than 1Mbps (most LANs these days are 100Mbps). Maybe it's time to upgrade that token ring hardware.
The population density argument is BS, if you're using national population density but looking at city dwellers. If population density was the key, the US would be ubiquitous 100Mbps in our cities. True, if you live in the boondocks your speed might be slow, but I'd bet that if you live in a rural area in the mountains of Japan, your speed isn't great either.
The claim to fame here is using multiple input devices, not just one. If it were just one, I'm sure iClicker would already have a patent on it. Does anyone have examples of an application where students can answer through iClickers, OneNote, etc. at the same time to answer a prompt thrown by a professor in an auditorium?
At least a decade ago, maybe longer, I participated in large (100 or more members, usually in a hotel convention room) market research focus groups that used similar technology. Each audience member had a keypad, they connected by radio with a base station. "Next slide.. this depicts a new product, underwear made of flavored yoghurt.. press 1 if you want some today, press 2 if you would be interested in hearing more, press 3 if you think it's ok for other people but not for you, press 4 if you think it's a stupid idea." Long pause.. "just a moment, we're tallying the results, it looks like one person didn't register a choice.." etc.
It was clearly off-the-shelf technology. Don't remember what the brand name on the boxes was, though.
And what is treason if it doesn't include releasing top secret military information in time of war?
Well, if it's "top secret military information" of somebody else's country, obviously it's not treason. Any more than publishing documents Al Quaida wants to keep secret would be treason.
And, of course, you're assuming that the documents are in fact "top secret military information". Which we won't know until we see them. (Unless you believe that the government would never lie to you.)
The world is a very big place, and most of it is not the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand how a company that sold the software has any choice but to supply the updates. It is their legally-binding obligation to do so unless specific terms of the agreement under which the goods were sold are violated.
Most of the software TOS I see say something like "we don't warrant this software to do anything, and have the right to change these terms whenever it strikes our fancy". So much for "legally-binding obligation".
But even leaving that aside, companies are under no obligation to accept a renewal order. "Sorry, sir, that serial number does not qualify for an update subscription."
number11
posting AC because I've moderated
But when are we going to get away from this Microsoft is "evil"? Are they any more "evil" tan any other corporation?
They're all evil. What's your point?
Also this idea that they weed out anyone with the slightest problem (or intelligence) is bunk. For extremely important cases, jurors get vetted pretty hard and there are a lot of challenges allowed by lawyers on both sides. For normal cases? Has to be a pretty good reason or the judge won't accept a challenge.
Maybe it's different where you are. Last time I was in a jury pool, the two cases I was assigned were a bar assault, and a shoplifting case. You wouldn't call either "extremely important", except maybe to the defendant. Something like 2/3 the pool was removed by lawyers from one side or the other in both cases. Both sides had a certain number of challenges (10?) that they didn't have to give any reason for. Jurors were questioned in public, and it was pretty obvious that they didn't want anyone who might introduce ideas of their own (and I think there is good legal reason for that) .
The demographics (large city) weren't "too stupid to get out of it", some were excused because they couldn't risk 2 weeks of absence from work, their English wasn't good enough, etc. It seemed like a pretty good cross section of the population, though retired people were over-represented and high-income types were under-represented.
If generals are held responsible for the actions of their troops during wartime, then surely we can hold the leadership of a corporation responsible for the actions of the corporation.
That's only if they're on a side that got conquered. No generals were held responsible for My Lai (hell, not even the gunmen who committed the crimes were held responsible.. their lowest-ranking officers did get a slap on the wrist).
And except for war, even the top dogs are usually exempt from punishment. Sometimes they'll sacrifice a subordinate.
The corporate liability shield does not (in theory) protect you if you knowingly perform illegal actions.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.
Suppose you were a hacker who rootkitted a million computers. We all know that would fall under computer crime statutes.
Now suppose your name is Sony.
Rule of law. All equal before the law. Feh. If you're employed by the government, it doesn't apply to you. If you're a large corporation, it rarely applies to you. At least, in the USA (doesn't seem like it's much different anywhere else). It's a nice concept, would be great to see some country try it.
The barrier to entry is the GOVERNMENT forbidding any other company but Comcast to run high-speed lines.
I very much doubt that the government forbids any other company but Comcast to run high-speed lines. Any company that wishes to run high-speed lines can do so, so long as they reach agreement with each property-owner on or over whose land those lines will go.
The municipal wireless in Minneapolis doesn't pull any of those stunts.
People should note that the "municipal" wireless in Minneapolis is really only sorta. It's a private company (USInternet) that got a franchise and that the city government is "anchor tenant" on for their (mostly wired) connection.
For the average user, the price is quite good (half what Comcast or Qwest will charge). Performance ranges from excellent to terrible, it's subject to all the effects that you'd expect an access point to be subject to: weather, leaves on trees, shared bandwidth and interference, and objects between you and the WAP (Minneapolis has lots of stucco houses, which is more or less concrete applied over wire mesh, an excellent shield against radio waves). It's also very location dependent.. often good at the corner, and poor in the middle of the block or on the 12th floor.
But it is nice to have that third choice. Well, fourth, I've seen Clearwire ads but don't know of anybody who actually uses it.
I dunno. I think you could pack quite a bit of power onto a truck that had an onboard or towed generator. Thousands of watts, easily. The antenna would probably be the most difficult bit, if you were going to operate while in motion.
Don't be silly. A 130-volt bulb has a higher resistance (for the same wattage rating) than a 120-volt bulb therefore at 120 volts pulls less current. It puts out less light, and runs at a lower temperature. And lasts longer. That's what most 'long life' bulbs are. The effect on lifetime is governed by the 12th power of the ratio of voltages, i.e. a 1500hr 130-volt bulb would last almost twice as long at 120 volts (1500e(130/120)).
The access was restored after 30 minutes or so. It says so in the article. It also says this was a new website. The system there is set to block all new websites until they are checked out. It doesn't matter what the web site is.
Yes, access was enabled, right after the shit hit the fan in national media. But I'm sure that was merely a coincidence.
You're saying that every single website that hasn't already been checked, has to be "checked out" by a government employee before granting access? For all the gazillions of constantly changing websites on the web, all around the world? If that is the case, they must have a large department of "checkers" who spend their long days doing nothing but vetting websites.
And the Governor wants to lay off workers who aren't necessary? Wow, there's the ones to start with.
Um.. so you seem to be saying that any interface changes potentially disqualify it from further use? I'll grant that the developer tendency (not just Ubuntu) to equate "improved" with "changed" is annoying, but that's not a very big change.
Me, I'm annoyed because FF4.0 removes the "recent pages" button from beside the "forward" and 'back" buttons. But I'm not going to switch to IE because of it. Sooner or later, either I'll get used to it, or Toolbar Buttons (or some other addon) will fix it.
Why is this ridiculous sort of mob justice tolerated ?
Because, in cases like this, it's the only sort of justice that there is likely to be. It's not like a government that protects torturers will do anything, even if it wasn't that very government who recommended HBGary in the first place.
Now, that doesn't excuse "death threats". If there were in fact any (those might merely be a face-saving excuse for backing out of the conference).
It's always less risky to only attack people who are weak.
OTOH, in this age where we put (perhaps misplaced) value on "nation", that can often be the single thing that would reunite the people behind him. Attack from outside, real or staged, is a very old tactic to unite a nation. On 9/10, most people in the US knew Bush Jr. was a moron and was flying the economy into the ground (though they didn't yet know he had a penchant for thinking world events were scripted by a nutty religious script). On 9/12, they were willing to let Bush's secret police do anything he wanted.
The same could have happened in Egypt. In fact, Mubarak did try to blame the unrest on foreigners, but the the only foreigners he could show were news crews, and the Egyptian public by and large doesn't seem to have found that convincing.
Usenet was great, even on 14K POTS modems, until :-(
people simply stopped running it. Can't get a
feed anymore.
eternal-september is pretty reliable and also free.
Of course, access is via the internet, so just being NNTP instead of HTML doesn't necessarily solve all possible Big Brother problems.
Have you ever bought a SONY gadget on the internet?? How do you know it was not fake, inferior junk, knockoff from China? You do not, not unless you buy the product from an original, authorized seller. Deal with it.
Have you ever bought a SONY CD from an original, authorized seller, to discover that it's rootkitted your computer? Have you ever bought a digital picture frame at Target, to discover that the original-equipment virus lurking in it has infected your flash drives?
The fact is, buying original, genuine merchandise from reputable vendors does not in any way protect you from negligent (Target) or criminal (SONY) acts on the part of those in the manufacturing and distribution chain.
There is no honor among corporations, either.
Buying from an original, authorized seller does not protect you.
Deal with it.
One of the more serious problems with the military-industrial complex's development process, besides obvious little things like threatening to kill millions of people and possibly initiate nuclear winter, is that it takes a large number of scientists and engineers and diverts them away from useful civilian technology and diverts their talents to working on projects that ideally will never be used, and hides any parts of that work that could be useful away where the public can't use it.
A long time ago (perhaps in the 1960s) I saw a quote from the head of one of the major Japanese corporations. Might have been Sony, but I can't find it now. He said (something like) "American engineers are very good, American first-rate engineers are better than ours. But your first-rate engineers are working on military products. We're building consumer products, and win in the marketplace because our first-rate engineers are better than your second-rate engineers."
I'm trying to think of some government that is less likely than Iceland's to have interesting fodder for WikiLeaks.
Maybe I'm naive and Iceland is really a hotbed of corruption and intrigue, but somehow it seems unlikely that there's anything to leak, aside from political maneuvers and backbiting that would seem tame in almost any other country. The Icelandic financial institution scandal is pretty long in the tooth at this point. Bugging Iceland would probably be a sign of really poor judgment on the part of any aspiring scandal-monger.
Of course, every society probably has its quota of twits who are interested in eavesdropping on their colleagues. But with the new interest in Iceland evidenced by the US gummint, you do gotta wonder.
Titles are cheap. I always wanted to put "Supreme Overlord" as a title on a resume just as a joke. It has about as much meaning as some of the crap I have seen other people use.
I once ran a business where I had to fill out government forms daily. For a while, I put down a different title pretty much every day. Czar. Supreme Commander. Misanthrope. Peon in Charge of Forms. Chief Forms Officer. Prince (Second Class). Grand Panjandrum. Acting Queen. Whatever. Of course, it was a pretty safe bet that no one ever actually read the forms.
Eventually I started running out of ideas, and the game lost its fun. I think I was just "Employee" after that.
Further proof that both extremes are just as crazy.
You mean, on the one hand, the extreme that's packing heat so they can blow away people in Safeway parking lots, and on the other hand, the extreme that doesn't?
palaeopathology has confirmed that cancer was exceedingly rare in primates until the start of the industrial revolution.
Cancer tends to be an old person's disease. Not saying that the industrial revolution didn't introduce lots of new causes for cancer, but before then, primates who lived long enough to be chronologically old were pretty rare.
Is it reasonable to suspect people of murder just because they have in the past searched for, found, or viewed material, that might relate to methods used by the murderer?
Well, not just because. Though when a closely related person dies by an unusual means, and it turns out you've researched that particular means, it's not terribly surprising that the cop wonders if it's significant.
If you looked back into my search history far enough, you could probably find places where I searched for all those different things in the past.
I'm sure you could with mine. I run TrackMeNot (a Firefox extension) on all of my computers, which makes random searches. Even as I write this, several of them are making random searches (the last few searches seem to have been 'wonderful with many organic', '"just about every facet "', 'Historian Hampton Sides coming to Edwards', and 'everyone from pathology residents'. Ooh, there goes 'double hung white vinyl', followed by 'hung white'. Probably nothing incriminating there, unless they're investigating either a hate crime or the porn movie industry, but it goes on 24/7, and it's rare that I search for something that the search pulldown thingie doesn't think I've searched for before.
I figure this poisons the datamining well. If everybody did this, mining search strings would be worthless, whether they're looking to prove murder, or just to impose the new world order.
In Japan... You have densely-packed cities, a small land area, and a fairly homogeneous, tech-savvy society... Practical or feasible in the US? Not really, 1mbps is plenty BROADBAND for me. I have something like 15mbps, but that's 15 times excessive for what I need...
FTTH at faster rates than my LAN is pointless.
While it's true that FTTH that's faster than your LAN is pointless, most of us have LANs that are faster than 1Mbps (most LANs these days are 100Mbps). Maybe it's time to upgrade that token ring hardware.
The population density argument is BS, if you're using national population density but looking at city dwellers. If population density was the key, the US would be ubiquitous 100Mbps in our cities. True, if you live in the boondocks your speed might be slow, but I'd bet that if you live in a rural area in the mountains of Japan, your speed isn't great either.
The claim to fame here is using multiple input devices, not just one. If it were just one, I'm sure iClicker would already have a patent on it. Does anyone have examples of an application where students can answer through iClickers, OneNote, etc. at the same time to answer a prompt thrown by a professor in an auditorium?
At least a decade ago, maybe longer, I participated in large (100 or more members, usually in a hotel convention room) market research focus groups that used similar technology. Each audience member had a keypad, they connected by radio with a base station. "Next slide.. this depicts a new product, underwear made of flavored yoghurt.. press 1 if you want some today, press 2 if you would be interested in hearing more, press 3 if you think it's ok for other people but not for you, press 4 if you think it's a stupid idea." Long pause.. "just a moment, we're tallying the results, it looks like one person didn't register a choice.." etc.
It was clearly off-the-shelf technology. Don't remember what the brand name on the boxes was, though.
And what is treason if it doesn't include releasing top secret military information in time of war?
Well, if it's "top secret military information" of somebody else's country, obviously it's not treason. Any more than publishing documents Al Quaida wants to keep secret would be treason.
And, of course, you're assuming that the documents are in fact "top secret military information". Which we won't know until we see them. (Unless you believe that the government would never lie to you.)
The world is a very big place, and most of it is not the United States.
Train your memory.
I'm older now, and...
what was that suggestion again?