I would never hire someone who questioned turnover rates and asked why the position was vacant.
I think this is one of the benefits of asking such questions. People who have something to hide won't be interested in you. For example, I've started asking about patent policies in advance. This could clearly upset some employers. They won't offer me a job. Still, I'm employed and doing fine. Basically this filters out the jobs that I would wish I hadn't taken.
...the company lacked standing as the newspapers — not Righthaven — maintained control of the material Righthaven was suing over.
[Creditors] also seized the copyrights it sued over...
Wait, what? Am I missing something here?
Sure; There is almost no limit to how badly your lawyers can screw up if they try to be too clever. The company was attempting to do something illegal. Get to act as the copyright holder without having the responsibilities of the copyright holder. Unfortunately, they screwed up completely, and ended up achieving the reverse of what they wanted. They failed to transfer the right to sue, but they managed to transfer the actual copyrights (though presumably still with a license back to the newspapers the articles came from).
Future lawsuits about this material may well be very very "interesting".
The pirates are stealing from them (from the whole industry), so what's wrong with stealing a little from pirates?
Well, apart from the fact that it's not stealing, it's unlicensed copying, nothing.
I guess these pirates can see how it feels now.
Probably: great; I would be laughing like hell if I had done this and Netflix took my subtitles.
However, you are completely missing the point here. There are some of us who think it's okay to "pirate" and do so. There are others, like myself, that feel that unlicensed copying should be allowed in many more circumstances but don't feel like breaking the law. Until now there's been a third group which is benefitting from the laws, but was following them. Finally there's been group, such as congressmen's children, which are breaking the law because they can get away with it.
What we are seeing now is that in fact, there's no third group. The RIAA "pirates" music for their ads. The big media distribution firms demand adverts on other people's YouTube videos because of some real or false positive fair rights use of their material. The media distribution companies, like Netflix, are completely happy to "steal" material from anywhere they feel like. These people do things that, if you did them, would end you up in jail or paying hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines. They pay nothing and rarely even apologise.
This is all about the Amercan corporate royalty and their "Droit de Seigneur" with your ideas, privacy and creations. This is not news because the copying is immoral; it is news because, it's yet another slip of the front and makes it 100% clear that you too are plebs and the only thing wrong is letting you know it.
This is a principle which probably needs to be revisited. There are lots of things that go wrong with that. For example, if I start sending anti-Islamic propaganda to computers in Saudia-Arabia, is it reasonable to treat it as a crime? What if I then go to Malaysia or somewhere else that has an extradition treaty with the Saudis?
Another example; if someone orders or is involved in child abuse in another country, that should be, and often is, a crime they can be punished for in their home country even if there is no extradition treaty. Otherwise people go looking for countries where they can get away with things.
There are lots of things going on here. Why should a victim have to travel far away to get justice? Why should a person have to answer for made up crimes in a far away country with high levels of corruption? How can a foreigner expect reasonable justice from a system he doesn't understand? Look at how the Americans cried and cried about a pretty girl being convicted in Italy and then it turned out she was probably innocent. Do you think you would get the same support in America?
There are a bunch of things which need to be guaranteed before this can work:
convictions should only be for crimes which are crimes in both places; (N.B. not extraditions)
proper legal defence, free or very cheap, should be guaranteed (and I don't mean US public defenders)
full compensation for time and costs for those found innocent
proper access to a proper and fair trial
access to a jury trial for people who have the right in either country
a local review about whether the trial could be more fairly handled in the defendant's home country.
There are probably many more I haven't thought of. Only when that happens should international extraditions be even considered.
Follow the money is definitely part of the way to go. There's still a problem in that, being criminals, the fraud callers probably have no problem using someone else's bank account to transfer through. Either captured ones or stooges hired through those "make $1000 a day from home" spam adverts. Having policemen capable of signing up for those jobs and running honey pots with honeypot bank account details would also help.
All of this requires real effort and computer expertise on a per case basis. Right now it seems much easier to just demand "we need to be able to monitor everything". The fact that they did catch people related to the the recent Indian call centre scam shows that that is beginning to happen. I think it will take a generation for the police to catch up and of course they will never catch up fully.
The Swiss government. Because their people can have specific referendums on almost any issue, they are always afraid of waking them up by doing something stupid.
This is exactly what does happen. Unfortunately it doesn't solve the problem because the fraud callers are willing to pay their VOIP provider (W) $.07 to put in a call without A number. They pay an intermediate provider who, for some reason, such as being from a neighbour country, has an agreement with Y to forward to Y. Y forwards the call without a number and/or with a fake number. Verizon get's it's cash. Verizon doesn't care (much).
If the call is going through, the phone company is billing it! That means there's a record.
Yes, but the record just says "call came in from India and lasted 10 minutes" They bill the Indian provider. The Indian provider just has a record which says "call came in from North Korea, lasted 10 minutes". North Korea doesn't give a damn.
Sorry; that's not the question; I was trying to respond to
The OP was talking about businesses, not people.If you're a legitimate business, there is no reason to obfuscate your phone number.
In that I understood that he wanted to impose number visibility on all business numbers. That doesn't work, however, because the business can just pretend to be a private subscriber in India in which case he doesn't have to show his number. You can't tell who he is so you can't do anything to punish him for going around the law. Unfortunately the business will be able to find someone in India willing to connect him to the phone network without verifying whether the registration is for private person or not.
People use phones to report drug dealers to the police; do you want this done to you when it turns out that the policeman is working for the cartel?
This argument seems bogus. If you hide the number, the police can't see it directly on their display, but I'm sure they could get it if they wanted to, by talking to the carriers, etc. It's just a bad idea to rely on a hidden number for anonymity in any case.
That wasn't my argument; I was simply replying to the statement from the original post that "I can't think of a single legitimate reason why a call should be anonymous." and arguing that there are situations where anonymity would be a good idea if it were possible.
You are completely right that, whilst the Indian call centre doing the bogus anti-virus aciton can't be traced, the policeman probably can track an informant back to whichever phone you used. For this reason I would not use a phone which could be connected to me to call to report about a Mexican drugs cartel. There are other safer ways.
I'll try to be clearer. The domestic US market is pretty clear, secure and sensible. It's the international one where the complexity arises. In the international market there are many reasons why there may be no A number. In fact, the original analogue telephone market, which still exists in many remote areas, simply did not support A numbers (A="calling party"; B="called party"). There's no reasonable way to exclude calls which lack the A number since that would cut off large parts of the phone network. Once you allow any calls without A numbers, any other call which can pretend to be one of those. This can be used as a bypass to almost any form of security.
Handoff fees are wierd and politically regulated. I would reject a call on one circuit if I knew that would mean I would get it on another circuit at a higher handoff fee.
I'm not able to guarantee that that's all right but it seems reasonable. If true then I really don't see that much difference with alcohol, though I have to admit that I always thought alcohol from some kind of biological system would be a likely way to go.
They can't hide their identity from the carrier connecting the call.
Not from the first carrier; but if the first (or nth) hides it from the next (or n+1th) then the ones after than have no way to trace it back. Unfortunately there are legitimate and not legitimate reasons for carriers to do this. This includes privacy regulations in some countries making it illegal to pass this on.
The carrier has to open a connection both ways.
The connection is always opened hop by hop; E.g. at one phone exchange you get told by your neighbour "open circuit 52" and then you get a voice connection in both directions on the same wire. This means that they can do the two directions without having any idea where the call originated.
I realize that this doesn't mean you've traced a call to its origin, but you would at least have the ANI information at the carrier side. You can't block that like you can block caller ID because it's used for actually billing the call.
That's likely true in the USA, but doesn't apply to international circuits (have a look on Google for "can't trace" scam call). All this was pretty well documented related to the Indian company doing Microsoft Windows virus scam calls that was covered here not so long ago on Slashdot. Unfortunately, even a US company can simply route their call out to India over VOIP and then back again, so that's a sufficient loophole to cover everyone.
How do you stop the businesses using the private lines where they aren't identified? This is a hard problem like stopping IP spoofing if you aren't allowed to use IPSEC.
Yes, but liquid is a really convenient way to transfer energy around the country and world.
It's much more than that, hydrocarbons, especially liquid hydrocarbons are really great ways to store energy. You just pour it into a tank and it stays there. Even a hydrocarbon gas like methane will stay put if you just seal it in. Until now we have heat (leaks away) hydrogen (leaks away even through metal) batteries (leak away gradually, very expensive, pretty rapid performance decay) kinetic energy in fast spinning things (gradually lost to friction, quite dangerous) pump storage (gradually evaporates; takes lots of space). The cost and difficulty of storing petrol is much lower than all of those and the technology is already widespread.
The best wind sources tend to be in areas with few people.
The other important factor is that transmission from those areas tends to be very expensive. If you build one of these plants at the end of the transmission line near the wind power you can then overbuild the Wind turbines so that they are almost always able fill the transmission lines. Spare capacity from the wind turbines goes into producing hydrocarbon fuel. On the other end of the transmission line, you can also build such a plant so you guarantee to run the transmission line at full capacity even during times when not much electricity is needed. If you can produce petrol, producing methane should be trivial, so you can also, at any point you want, pair hydrocarbon creation and storage with a rapid start up gas powered station which will then allow you to cope with peak demand.
Wind is already beating most other generation methods except for coal on cost. The main problem with it is that it's difficult to use for reliable base load supply. This is a perfect example of the kind of integrated interesting power solution which solves that and only becomes possible once there have been serious investment in building lots of alternative energy sources.
BAN anonymous calls or otherwise hiding their numbers and identities. I can't think of a single legitimate reason why a call should be anonymous.
People use phones to report drug dealers to the police; do you want this done to you when it turns out that the policeman is working for the cartel?
REQUIRE carriers to supply valid CID information or otherwise allow calls to be identified.
Apart from the above; carriers currently do some very bad tricks to block incoming VOIP calls. These would become much worse if they could always identify which were VOIP and which were non-VOIP calls.
REQUIRE carriers to have valid information that matches a phone number with a company.
Apart from all the above; many people go ex-directory in order to avoid their former spouses. There have been a number of cases where the compromise of the phone company's directory has lead to these people being killed or worse.
The problem is that most of the real difficult companies are hiding their numbers and identities. Any solution to that is going to reduce the usefulness of the phone system because it will allow unscrupulous bigger operators to block calls from certain origins (e.g. international calls routed through competing operators).
Probably the only solution is some kind of IVR administering an audio CAPTCHA before allowing a phone to ring.
Walmart, Best Buy, even online places... have... under $300
I've heard of people who don't read the article. I've seen people who don't read the summary; There have definitely been people who don't read the parent posting. However, this is a post which didn't even read his own post. I'd just like to put those two parts of the post next to each other to compare and contrast. I tried to emphasise the important word. This is the first time in ten years that I have felt a lack of the blink html tag. Awesome.
Have you actually confirmed that. I could find the developer switch information for the older ones, but that wasn't obviously stated on any of the pages about the new Chromebook. I will likely buy one if this is true.
Slashdot Mirror
I would never hire someone who questioned turnover rates and asked why the position was vacant.
I think this is one of the benefits of asking such questions. People who have something to hide won't be interested in you. For example, I've started asking about patent policies in advance. This could clearly upset some employers. They won't offer me a job. Still, I'm employed and doing fine. Basically this filters out the jobs that I would wish I hadn't taken.
Wait, what? Am I missing something here?
Sure; There is almost no limit to how badly your lawyers can screw up if they try to be too clever. The company was attempting to do something illegal. Get to act as the copyright holder without having the responsibilities of the copyright holder. Unfortunately, they screwed up completely, and ended up achieving the reverse of what they wanted. They failed to transfer the right to sue, but they managed to transfer the actual copyrights (though presumably still with a license back to the newspapers the articles came from).
Future lawsuits about this material may well be very very "interesting".
The pirates are stealing from them (from the whole industry), so what's wrong with stealing a little from pirates?
Well, apart from the fact that it's not stealing, it's unlicensed copying, nothing.
I guess these pirates can see how it feels now.
Probably: great; I would be laughing like hell if I had done this and Netflix took my subtitles.
However, you are completely missing the point here. There are some of us who think it's okay to "pirate" and do so. There are others, like myself, that feel that unlicensed copying should be allowed in many more circumstances but don't feel like breaking the law. Until now there's been a third group which is benefitting from the laws, but was following them. Finally there's been group, such as congressmen's children, which are breaking the law because they can get away with it.
What we are seeing now is that in fact, there's no third group. The RIAA "pirates" music for their ads. The big media distribution firms demand adverts on other people's YouTube videos because of some real or false positive fair rights use of their material. The media distribution companies, like Netflix, are completely happy to "steal" material from anywhere they feel like. These people do things that, if you did them, would end you up in jail or paying hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines. They pay nothing and rarely even apologise.
This is all about the Amercan corporate royalty and their "Droit de Seigneur" with your ideas, privacy and creations. This is not news because the copying is immoral; it is news because, it's yet another slip of the front and makes it 100% clear that you too are plebs and the only thing wrong is letting you know it.
This is a principle which probably needs to be revisited. There are lots of things that go wrong with that. For example, if I start sending anti-Islamic propaganda to computers in Saudia-Arabia, is it reasonable to treat it as a crime? What if I then go to Malaysia or somewhere else that has an extradition treaty with the Saudis?
Another example; if someone orders or is involved in child abuse in another country, that should be, and often is, a crime they can be punished for in their home country even if there is no extradition treaty. Otherwise people go looking for countries where they can get away with things.
There are lots of things going on here. Why should a victim have to travel far away to get justice? Why should a person have to answer for made up crimes in a far away country with high levels of corruption? How can a foreigner expect reasonable justice from a system he doesn't understand? Look at how the Americans cried and cried about a pretty girl being convicted in Italy and then it turned out she was probably innocent. Do you think you would get the same support in America?
There are a bunch of things which need to be guaranteed before this can work:
There are probably many more I haven't thought of. Only when that happens should international extraditions be even considered.
[China are] on their way to being a free country
Ah yes; with great actions like bringing in the Great Firewall of China. No doubt about it; just leaving the people to get on with their own business.
Follow the money is definitely part of the way to go. There's still a problem in that, being criminals, the fraud callers probably have no problem using someone else's bank account to transfer through. Either captured ones or stooges hired through those "make $1000 a day from home" spam adverts. Having policemen capable of signing up for those jobs and running honey pots with honeypot bank account details would also help.
All of this requires real effort and computer expertise on a per case basis. Right now it seems much easier to just demand "we need to be able to monitor everything". The fact that they did catch people related to the the recent Indian call centre scam shows that that is beginning to happen. I think it will take a generation for the police to catch up and of course they will never catch up fully.
The Swiss government. Because their people can have specific referendums on almost any issue, they are always afraid of waking them up by doing something stupid.
This is exactly what does happen. Unfortunately it doesn't solve the problem because the fraud callers are willing to pay their VOIP provider (W) $.07 to put in a call without A number. They pay an intermediate provider who, for some reason, such as being from a neighbour country, has an agreement with Y to forward to Y. Y forwards the call without a number and/or with a fake number. Verizon get's it's cash. Verizon doesn't care (much).
That does seem to be standard procedure. Look up anti-terror laws, for example.
If the call is going through, the phone company is billing it! That means there's a record.
Yes, but the record just says "call came in from India and lasted 10 minutes" They bill the Indian provider. The Indian provider just has a record which says "call came in from North Korea, lasted 10 minutes". North Korea doesn't give a damn.
In that I understood that he wanted to impose number visibility on all business numbers. That doesn't work, however, because the business can just pretend to be a private subscriber in India in which case he doesn't have to show his number. You can't tell who he is so you can't do anything to punish him for going around the law. Unfortunately the business will be able to find someone in India willing to connect him to the phone network without verifying whether the registration is for private person or not.
What you want already exists and may even be available to you
People use phones to report drug dealers to the police; do you want this done to you when it turns out that the policeman is working for the cartel?
This argument seems bogus. If you hide the number, the police can't see it directly on their display, but I'm sure they could get it if they wanted to, by talking to the carriers, etc. It's just a bad idea to rely on a hidden number for anonymity in any case.
That wasn't my argument; I was simply replying to the statement from the original post that "I can't think of a single legitimate reason why a call should be anonymous." and arguing that there are situations where anonymity would be a good idea if it were possible.
You are completely right that, whilst the Indian call centre doing the bogus anti-virus aciton can't be traced, the policeman probably can track an informant back to whichever phone you used. For this reason I would not use a phone which could be connected to me to call to report about a Mexican drugs cartel. There are other safer ways.
I'll try to be clearer. The domestic US market is pretty clear, secure and sensible. It's the international one where the complexity arises. In the international market there are many reasons why there may be no A number. In fact, the original analogue telephone market, which still exists in many remote areas, simply did not support A numbers (A="calling party"; B="called party"). There's no reasonable way to exclude calls which lack the A number since that would cut off large parts of the phone network. Once you allow any calls without A numbers, any other call which can pretend to be one of those. This can be used as a bypass to almost any form of security.
Handoff fees are wierd and politically regulated. I would reject a call on one circuit if I knew that would mean I would get it on another circuit at a higher handoff fee.
Hydrocarbons are a crap way to store energy if using that energy means burning it in a heat engine with typical efficiencies of 25 to 30%
Wikipedia claims that gas power stations have up to 60% efficiency, that a fuel cell is generally between 40-60% efficient (though heat capture can improve that), and that fuel cells can work for hydrocarbons as well.
I'm not able to guarantee that that's all right but it seems reasonable. If true then I really don't see that much difference with alcohol, though I have to admit that I always thought alcohol from some kind of biological system would be a likely way to go.
They can't hide their identity from the carrier connecting the call.
Not from the first carrier; but if the first (or nth) hides it from the next (or n+1th) then the ones after than have no way to trace it back. Unfortunately there are legitimate and not legitimate reasons for carriers to do this. This includes privacy regulations in some countries making it illegal to pass this on.
The carrier has to open a connection both ways.
The connection is always opened hop by hop; E.g. at one phone exchange you get told by your neighbour "open circuit 52" and then you get a voice connection in both directions on the same wire. This means that they can do the two directions without having any idea where the call originated.
I realize that this doesn't mean you've traced a call to its origin, but you would at least have the ANI information at the carrier side. You can't block that like you can block caller ID because it's used for actually billing the call.
That's likely true in the USA, but doesn't apply to international circuits (have a look on Google for "can't trace" scam call). All this was pretty well documented related to the Indian company doing Microsoft Windows virus scam calls that was covered here not so long ago on Slashdot. Unfortunately, even a US company can simply route their call out to India over VOIP and then back again, so that's a sufficient loophole to cover everyone.
How do you stop the businesses using the private lines where they aren't identified? This is a hard problem like stopping IP spoofing if you aren't allowed to use IPSEC.
Yes, but liquid is a really convenient way to transfer energy around the country and world.
It's much more than that, hydrocarbons, especially liquid hydrocarbons are really great ways to store energy. You just pour it into a tank and it stays there. Even a hydrocarbon gas like methane will stay put if you just seal it in. Until now we have heat (leaks away) hydrogen (leaks away even through metal) batteries (leak away gradually, very expensive, pretty rapid performance decay) kinetic energy in fast spinning things (gradually lost to friction, quite dangerous) pump storage (gradually evaporates; takes lots of space). The cost and difficulty of storing petrol is much lower than all of those and the technology is already widespread.
The best wind sources tend to be in areas with few people.
The other important factor is that transmission from those areas tends to be very expensive. If you build one of these plants at the end of the transmission line near the wind power you can then overbuild the Wind turbines so that they are almost always able fill the transmission lines. Spare capacity from the wind turbines goes into producing hydrocarbon fuel. On the other end of the transmission line, you can also build such a plant so you guarantee to run the transmission line at full capacity even during times when not much electricity is needed. If you can produce petrol, producing methane should be trivial, so you can also, at any point you want, pair hydrocarbon creation and storage with a rapid start up gas powered station which will then allow you to cope with peak demand.
Wind is already beating most other generation methods except for coal on cost. The main problem with it is that it's difficult to use for reliable base load supply. This is a perfect example of the kind of integrated interesting power solution which solves that and only becomes possible once there have been serious investment in building lots of alternative energy sources.
BAN anonymous calls or otherwise hiding their numbers and identities. I can't think of a single legitimate reason why a call should be anonymous.
People use phones to report drug dealers to the police; do you want this done to you when it turns out that the policeman is working for the cartel?
REQUIRE carriers to supply valid CID information or otherwise allow calls to be identified.
Apart from the above; carriers currently do some very bad tricks to block incoming VOIP calls. These would become much worse if they could always identify which were VOIP and which were non-VOIP calls.
REQUIRE carriers to have valid information that matches a phone number with a company.
Apart from all the above; many people go ex-directory in order to avoid their former spouses. There have been a number of cases where the compromise of the phone company's directory has lead to these people being killed or worse.
The problem is that most of the real difficult companies are hiding their numbers and identities. Any solution to that is going to reduce the usefulness of the phone system because it will allow unscrupulous bigger operators to block calls from certain origins (e.g. international calls routed through competing operators). Probably the only solution is some kind of IVR administering an audio CAPTCHA before allowing a phone to ring.
if your [sic] happy with reconditioned
that ... is ... not ... a ... list ... price.
Nor, for that matter, is any listing on any of the sites the great grandparent mentioned.
$249 LIST is a breakthrough
Walmart, Best Buy, even online places ... have ... under $300
I've heard of people who don't read the article. I've seen people who don't read the summary; There have definitely been people who don't read the parent posting. However, this is a post which didn't even read his own post. I'd just like to put those two parts of the post next to each other to compare and contrast. I tried to emphasise the important word. This is the first time in ten years that I have felt a lack of the blink html tag. Awesome.
Have you actually confirmed that. I could find the developer switch information for the older ones, but that wasn't obviously stated on any of the pages about the new Chromebook. I will likely buy one if this is true.
How the hell are you going to use a duck to tell if someone is a witch? I can't see it inflicting anything more than a flesh wound.