He was forced to take down his original site (www.taubmansucks.com) which described in full detail, including court documents, the legal
battle ensuing when a big corporation forced him to take down another web site he had produced.
I like how Age of Empires provides an option for one computer to host a game and all others can connect to it directly by IP address instead of forcing you to rely on an always-overloaded external server like BattleNet.
If I have to purchase a business line to get
the specified bandwidth, then the advertising
for residential lines must be false, because
that advertising also specifies a bandwidth.
I am not a business, nor do I have the money
a business does. All I want is to receive
what I paid for. The advertising specified a
certain thing, and I paid for that. The
advertising in this case was for residential,
not business, lines. If they are unable or
unwilling to provide the promised bandwidth,
they should not advertise it.
I am not trying to get more than was promised;
I only want what was promised and paid for.
The promise is the advertisement, not the
legalese BS that almost invariably negates
everything in the advertisements. I do not
understand the language of legalese, and I
can not afford to pay a lawyer to interpret
it for me every time I run across it.
They told me a specific value for bandwidth
and I paid a specific amount of money for it.
If they can't provide the bandwidth they
agreed to provide, they should not have
agreed to the deal. Either state a lower
bandwidth or a higher price. Otherwise, the
advertising is false, and they should be
prosecuted for that.
And I don't care about the legalese and fine
print, and especially about the "we can change
this at any time we want without notice to
you, but you can't" clause they always put in.
I care about what the advertising and sales
people promised. I can understand the
advertisements; try as I might, I can not
understand the legalese. I certainly can not
afford a $100/hour lawyer to analyze those
stupid EULAs, and I would be surprised if
the ISPs would negotiate a contract with a
residential customer anyway.
I just want service where I pay a reasonable
amount for a reasonable service and am left
alone to do anything I want within what was
promised in the advertising (again, not
including the non-visible and unintelligible
fine print).
That's exactly what happened when I was in high
school 10 years ago. My math teachers all had HPs
and loved them. The next year, the school must
have made some deal with TI, because the teachers
were forced to use TI calculators, and they didn't
like them nearly as much. They kept their
personal HPs at their desk to use, and only used
the TI to demonstrate how to do something on it.
You mean we finally have a law to help us
get rid of all those companies filling up
my mailbox with pre-approved credit card
applicaitons, money-saver coupons (that
never match anything on my shopping lists),
"you may have already won" sweepstakes,
and other various letters to "resident".
Whoever is stuffing those envelopes
certainly has a huge quantity of them, and
they are not for any peaceful purpose
(and no, irritating people by adding yet
another envelope to carry into the house
just to throw away unopened is not
a peaceful purpose)?
They have the type (irritating) and quantity
(thousands, millions?) and non-peaceful
purpose. Can we somehow use this law to stop
them?
Option 1 would still be illegal, unless they
discussed, wrote, and shipped the non-SSSCA
version completely outside the U.S. All the
programmers would have to emigrate to another country and could never return to the U.S. for
fear of becoming Skylrov's cellmate.
If it had been made available in my area, I would have taken it. My *single* phone line and DSL bill
is more the ION's bill would have been for much higher bandwidth access and *two* phone lines.
In addition, I would have gotten a few static
IP addresses instead of a single DHCP / PPPOE
address. Unfortunately, every time I checked,
it wasn't available in my area.
I actually liked the internet time concept.
I hate dealing with time zones. One uniform
time for the whole world, where the time is
exactly the same everywhere, is a great idea.
The biggest problem is that the time zone
concept is very well entrenched and probably
won't be dislodged until we populate space
to such a degree that the Earth population
is only a small fraction of the human population.
I've got an extra one, still in its unopened bag. If you want it, I'll sell it to you for $50 now. If your prediction is right, you'll still make a good profit off it.:)
I've read a lot of comments about how companies
are callously refusing to support older products
because they have newer versions available and
insist that you upgrade to the newer version.
That they're only doing this to make more money.
That's not entirely true. One big consideration
in all this is that to provide support for the
older products, they must retain programmers who
know those older products. They must pay these
people to sit around and wait for a support
request to come in. If the volume of incoming
calls is low, how do you justify hanging on to
these people?
You find them something else to do. Probably,
since they are intimately familiar with the
product, you assign them to working on the
new version. When support requests start coming
in for the new version, who are you going to turn to? The people who worked on it.
So, now you have these people supporting both the
new and old versions. As call volume increases
for the new version, which has priority, the old
or the new?
At some point, these people are going to lose
skills in the old version because of spending so
much time with the new version. At some point,
you are going to have to decide to drop support
of the old version unless someone is willing to
pay an exorbitant fee so you can justify
retaining and/or training people to provide
support for the old version.
This is true for both usage and bug/defect support.
This is where Open Source really makes a difference.
How often does a company release the source code
to their software, even after they have decided
it's no longer commercially feasible to continue
providing support for it?
With Open Source software,
if you can't find someone to support the
software, you can hire and train someone to do
it for your company. You have the source code
available; you can fix it yourself.
One way or another, you're paying for the support.
The difference is who has access to the source,
and if they decide whether it is worth their
time to support it.
I've had a few places demand home and work
numbers, and eventually ended up arguing
with the manager about it. I work from
home, and only have one phone, and haven't
yet decided to just start making up
numbers to make these stores happy.
I'll never understand why these places
always want so much contact info on us;
the only thing they do by calling me is
convince me to avoid them in the future.
When you add the 1 it becomes a toll call.
How would you like to open your bill and find
a whole bunch of toll calls you thought were
local calls because you didn't dial the 1 and
it still went through?
The reason they are able to use the shrinkwrap license to stop sales is because
it hasn't been tested in court. Until someone
has the desire, time, and money to take them to
court over their enforcement of the shrinkwrap
license, and convince the court it is invalid,
they can do pretty much whatever they want.
Something like this would probably be a multiple-year-long process, through appeals and
counter appeals, all the way up to the supreme court. Do you have the desire, time, and money
to do this for all of us?
Oops. I missed that link when reading the first time. I see it now. Thanks.
I guess the big question is, what are the current laws that supposedly already allow them to hack/crack into peoples computers to do this?
This amendment is only intended to prevent the
anti-terrorism legislation from making their
current activity illegal. What are they doing now?
How is it legal? Can we do the same back to them
under the pretenses that we are making sure they
haven't copied any of our copyrighted materials?
For once, the RIAA may be doing something
(unintentionally) good for us. Since the
article didn't provide the actual proposal,
I am assuming its description was farily
accurate. To sum it up: anyone can hack
into any system anywhere for any reason
with complete immunitiy if they say they
were doing so to check for suspected
piracy of works for which they own the
copyright. This sounds like a blank check
for hackers.
Move to direct vote by the American people, say one day a month (or maybe even one day a week) to approve or reject any new proposed legislation. This could be done by some form of electronic voting, since the current method of paper voting
is way to cumbersome for this.
Reduce the function of Congress to drafting and proposing new legislation for the American people to vote on.
Create a way for someone not in Congress to
get a proposal considered for voting. Probably
something like requiring X number of signatures.
Benefits to this would include many people
regaining the feeling that their vote actually counts for something.
In Texas, a Texas driver's license is required
for the purchase of alcohol. A newcomer to the
state applying for a Texas driver's license
first has the previous state's license
confiscated and only then is told to expect the
new license in a few weeks. In the meantime, a
typed card is provided as a temporary license,
with NO photo. You can not purchase, alcohol,
cash checks, use a credit card (in the few stores
that actually demand a photo ID), or any of a
myriad other things that people demand photo IDs
for, even though that is my official, state-issued,
temporary ID and driver's license. I was even
afraid of being stopped for any reason for fear
the cop wouldn't accept it as valid ID.
Four weeks later, I received my new driver's
license in the mail!
I would love to have a national form of ID,
because no state should have the ability
or authority to so thoroughly wipe out my
identity, even on a temporary basis.
Maybe what you say may happen, if you did something wrong.
What he says may happen if it appears
he may have done something wrong.
Whether he actually did or did not do anything
wrong is irrelevant; it is the appearance that
counts.
Why don't they make some robots to mine
materials and make new robots, and the
new robots can make a lab, then use the
lab to analyze the rocks. That would be
better than shipping rocks back. And,
we wouldn't have to send more robots for
future missions, just send the existing
robot-building robots new instructions.
Yeah, it would probably be difficult to
find the needed materials. Either wait while
the robots explore and find what's needed
or redesign to use what gets found.
Power shouldn't be a problem; use solar power.
Okay, so maybe this isn't likely for another
10-20 years. It may be slow to start with,
but long-term, it would end up being a lot
faster than express-mailing more robots out
there every time we think of yet another
task to do.
Actually, to the point that I tune them out, for
all intents and purposes I really don't see
them.
In college, I worked for the school newspaper
and attended meetings with the editors and
management. Despite many ads in the paper, I
almost missed getting my senior yearbook picture
taken (what saved me was that the pictures were
being taken in the same room I was working in).
When some questions came up about it from other
people, and this was discussed at one of the
meetings, I had to say that even though I read
the paper every day I had never seen any of the
ads announcing the pictures.
The entire staff
at the meeting were flabbergasted, and the
advertising people were upset. Over a couple years, I had learned the general layout of the
paper, and knew where stories and ads were
located on the pages. I also completely skipped
entire sections because I could tell they were
not stories just from a glance. I don't know
what all happened with the paper as a result of that. I do know a couple makeup photo sessions
were scheduled.
Physically, yes I did "see" the ads; the light
reflecting off the ads did hit my retinas. I,
however, never "saw" them in any useful meaning
of the word. When I'm particularly bored, I occasionally
glance through the ads just to see if there's
anything interesting. Otherwise, they might as
well not even exist.
Online ads really aren't all that much different.
It's only when I'm suddenly having to close extra
windows or to click through ads to get to the
link I thought I was going directly to, or when
an ad loads immediately but the page waits 20
seconds to load,
that's when I begin to notice the ads.
When I notice the ads because of this behavior,
the companies and products being advertised
do get my attention, but as a negative
experience that in no way gets me thinking about
purchasing anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Your first machine had a hard drive?! Couldn't have been that old, then.
http://www.Taubman-Sucks.com/
http://www.giffordkrassgrohsprinklesucks.com/
He was forced to take down his original site (www.taubmansucks.com) which described in full detail, including court documents, the legal battle ensuing when a big corporation forced him to take down another web site he had produced.
I like how Age of Empires provides an option for one computer to host a game and all others can connect to it directly by IP address instead of forcing you to rely on an always-overloaded external server like BattleNet.
I am not a business, nor do I have the money a business does. All I want is to receive what I paid for. The advertising specified a certain thing, and I paid for that. The advertising in this case was for residential, not business, lines. If they are unable or unwilling to provide the promised bandwidth, they should not advertise it.
I am not trying to get more than was promised; I only want what was promised and paid for. The promise is the advertisement, not the legalese BS that almost invariably negates everything in the advertisements. I do not understand the language of legalese, and I can not afford to pay a lawyer to interpret it for me every time I run across it.
And I don't care about the legalese and fine print, and especially about the "we can change this at any time we want without notice to you, but you can't" clause they always put in. I care about what the advertising and sales people promised. I can understand the advertisements; try as I might, I can not understand the legalese. I certainly can not afford a $100/hour lawyer to analyze those stupid EULAs, and I would be surprised if the ISPs would negotiate a contract with a residential customer anyway.
I just want service where I pay a reasonable amount for a reasonable service and am left alone to do anything I want within what was promised in the advertising (again, not including the non-visible and unintelligible fine print).
That's exactly what happened when I was in high school 10 years ago. My math teachers all had HPs and loved them. The next year, the school must have made some deal with TI, because the teachers were forced to use TI calculators, and they didn't like them nearly as much. They kept their personal HPs at their desk to use, and only used the TI to demonstrate how to do something on it.
They have the type (irritating) and quantity (thousands, millions?) and non-peaceful purpose. Can we somehow use this law to stop them?
I remember listening to that song a lot when I was little. Do you know the name of the song and/or artist?
Option 1 would still be illegal, unless they discussed, wrote, and shipped the non-SSSCA version completely outside the U.S. All the programmers would have to emigrate to another country and could never return to the U.S. for fear of becoming Skylrov's cellmate.
If it had been made available in my area, I would have taken it. My *single* phone line and DSL bill is more the ION's bill would have been for much higher bandwidth access and *two* phone lines. In addition, I would have gotten a few static IP addresses instead of a single DHCP / PPPOE address. Unfortunately, every time I checked, it wasn't available in my area.
Yeah, but nobody uses it either. At least, not in everyday life.
I actually liked the internet time concept. I hate dealing with time zones. One uniform time for the whole world, where the time is exactly the same everywhere, is a great idea. The biggest problem is that the time zone concept is very well entrenched and probably won't be dislodged until we populate space to such a degree that the Earth population is only a small fraction of the human population.
I've got an extra one, still in its unopened bag. If you want it, I'll sell it to you for $50 now. If your prediction is right, you'll still make a good profit off it. :)
That's not entirely true. One big consideration in all this is that to provide support for the older products, they must retain programmers who know those older products. They must pay these people to sit around and wait for a support request to come in. If the volume of incoming calls is low, how do you justify hanging on to these people?
You find them something else to do. Probably, since they are intimately familiar with the product, you assign them to working on the new version. When support requests start coming in for the new version, who are you going to turn to? The people who worked on it.
So, now you have these people supporting both the new and old versions. As call volume increases for the new version, which has priority, the old or the new?
At some point, these people are going to lose skills in the old version because of spending so much time with the new version. At some point, you are going to have to decide to drop support of the old version unless someone is willing to pay an exorbitant fee so you can justify retaining and/or training people to provide support for the old version.
This is true for both usage and bug/defect support.
This is where Open Source really makes a difference. How often does a company release the source code to their software, even after they have decided it's no longer commercially feasible to continue providing support for it? With Open Source software, if you can't find someone to support the software, you can hire and train someone to do it for your company. You have the source code available; you can fix it yourself.
One way or another, you're paying for the support. The difference is who has access to the source, and if they decide whether it is worth their time to support it.
I've had a few places demand home and work numbers, and eventually ended up arguing with the manager about it. I work from home, and only have one phone, and haven't yet decided to just start making up numbers to make these stores happy. I'll never understand why these places always want so much contact info on us; the only thing they do by calling me is convince me to avoid them in the future.
When you add the 1 it becomes a toll call. How would you like to open your bill and find a whole bunch of toll calls you thought were local calls because you didn't dial the 1 and it still went through?
The reason they are able to use the shrinkwrap license to stop sales is because it hasn't been tested in court. Until someone has the desire, time, and money to take them to court over their enforcement of the shrinkwrap license, and convince the court it is invalid, they can do pretty much whatever they want. Something like this would probably be a multiple-year-long process, through appeals and counter appeals, all the way up to the supreme court. Do you have the desire, time, and money to do this for all of us?
I guess the big question is, what are the current laws that supposedly already allow them to hack/crack into peoples computers to do this? This amendment is only intended to prevent the anti-terrorism legislation from making their current activity illegal. What are they doing now? How is it legal? Can we do the same back to them under the pretenses that we are making sure they haven't copied any of our copyrighted materials?
For once, the RIAA may be doing something (unintentionally) good for us. Since the article didn't provide the actual proposal, I am assuming its description was farily accurate. To sum it up: anyone can hack into any system anywhere for any reason with complete immunitiy if they say they were doing so to check for suspected piracy of works for which they own the copyright. This sounds like a blank check for hackers.
- Move to direct vote by the American people, say one day a month (or maybe even one day a week) to approve or reject any new proposed legislation. This could be done by some form of electronic voting, since the current method of paper voting
is way to cumbersome for this.
- Reduce the function of Congress to drafting and proposing new legislation for the American people to vote on.
- Create a way for someone not in Congress to
get a proposal considered for voting. Probably
something like requiring X number of signatures.
Benefits to this would include many people regaining the feeling that their vote actually counts for something.I would love to have a national form of ID, because no state should have the ability or authority to so thoroughly wipe out my identity, even on a temporary basis.
Why release the oxygen? Bottle it, too. Tanked O2 is used all over the place.
What he says may happen if it appears he may have done something wrong. Whether he actually did or did not do anything wrong is irrelevant; it is the appearance that counts.
Yeah, it would probably be difficult to find the needed materials. Either wait while the robots explore and find what's needed or redesign to use what gets found. Power shouldn't be a problem; use solar power.
Okay, so maybe this isn't likely for another 10-20 years. It may be slow to start with, but long-term, it would end up being a lot faster than express-mailing more robots out there every time we think of yet another task to do.
Actually, to the point that I tune them out, for all intents and purposes I really don't see them.
In college, I worked for the school newspaper and attended meetings with the editors and management. Despite many ads in the paper, I almost missed getting my senior yearbook picture taken (what saved me was that the pictures were being taken in the same room I was working in). When some questions came up about it from other people, and this was discussed at one of the meetings, I had to say that even though I read the paper every day I had never seen any of the ads announcing the pictures.
The entire staff at the meeting were flabbergasted, and the advertising people were upset. Over a couple years, I had learned the general layout of the paper, and knew where stories and ads were located on the pages. I also completely skipped entire sections because I could tell they were not stories just from a glance. I don't know what all happened with the paper as a result of that. I do know a couple makeup photo sessions were scheduled.
Physically, yes I did "see" the ads; the light reflecting off the ads did hit my retinas. I, however, never "saw" them in any useful meaning of the word. When I'm particularly bored, I occasionally glance through the ads just to see if there's anything interesting. Otherwise, they might as well not even exist.
Online ads really aren't all that much different. It's only when I'm suddenly having to close extra windows or to click through ads to get to the link I thought I was going directly to, or when an ad loads immediately but the page waits 20 seconds to load, that's when I begin to notice the ads. When I notice the ads because of this behavior, the companies and products being advertised do get my attention, but as a negative experience that in no way gets me thinking about purchasing anything.