Well, I'd probably take them to small claims court rather than sit around with a big sign, looking like some kind of a crackpot. Yes, I'll admit it, the fellow did scare me.
The nice thing about Circuit City is that, at least here in Springfield, they will match prices for Best Buy including rebates. So if something is $30 with a $10 rebate at B'Buy, C.C. will sell it to you for $20 (well, actually for $19, since they price-match by 110%) with no wait for mail-sending.
Almost makes me want to forgive them for trying to shove DIVX down our throats. Almost.
In all fairness, the article linked to that prior Slashdot interview said expressly that they would not fire customers:
Best Buy executive vice president Philip Schoonover said the idea of "firing" some customers is one place where Best Buy disagrees with Selden. The company will try to find ways to make money-losing customers profitable, he said.
The ones who "fired" customers were other businesses that the same consultant consulted for. Not Best Buy.
This kind of reminds me of a fellow often sighted on the outskirts of the parking lot of the shopping center that houses the Best Buy here in Springfield, Missouri, particularly during big sales. There's a landscaped border to the lot, with small grassy ridges and trees and things, and this fellow will bring a lawnchair, thermos mug, perhaps a parasol for shade, and set up right there on the hill overlooking the entrance with a big posterboard protest sign. I can't remember exactly what the sign said--I'm sure he had different ones on different occasions--but it was basically warnings like not to trust Best Buy's warranty plans, don't shop at Best Buy, etc.
I never quite worked up the nerve to approach him and ask him about it, but I did ask a couple of Best Buy servicepeons I happened to encounter while eating in the nearby Subway one day. Apparently the fellow had bought a video camera, damaged it in a fashion not covered under warranty (apparently dropped it over the side of a boat into a lake or something, I can't remember exactly now) and then got upset when Best Buy refused to honor the service plan.
So now he's getting his money's worth back by carrying out this oddball protest. Takes all kinds, I suppose.
...and then I see the first page of the article, with two or three other free iPod referral links on it that appear well in front of mine, and realize I might as well not have bothered disclaiming anything...:P
I think what we can take from this is that people are becoming "immunized" to ordinary advertisements...they just aren't clicking. So advertisers have to turn to other methods to try to pull in those dollars. One thing you can say for the ad-words thing is that at least it's not intrusive. Who normally runs their mouse over text in a news article anyway? And at least when reading a printed media article you're expecting to be advertised to, unlike with the DejaNews ad-words flap of a few years back.
Something I found interesting in the same vein was another Wired story the other day, about FreeiPods.com--an advertising site where, if you complete a trial offer from one of an assortment of merchants and get five other people to complete one too, they send you an advertiser-paid-for iPod (or $250 iTMS gift certificate). I've searched the web for stories about these people and everything I find suggests they're legitimate.
The whole thing seems to me to suggest that the advertisers participating in that program are finally starting to get the idea that if they want to advertise to us, they need to make it worth our while.
(Full disclosure: okay, so the FreeiPods link is a referral link for me. I was going to compare and contrast its advertising model anyway, and given that I was going to mention it anyway, it would be dumb not to include the referral link instead of just a plain-vanilla one, given that they both pull up the website just the same and I might as well benefit from the traffic as not. So don't accuse me of trying to sneak something by you.)
Has anyone snagged this yet and put it up on BitTorrent somewhere? The best download rate I can get off the links is around 15K/sec...meaning it'll be about five hours before it finishes.
SEC. 202. AUTHORITY TO INTERCEPT WIRE, ORAL, AND ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS RELATING TO COMPUTER FRAUD AND ABUSE OFFENSES.
Section 2516(1)(c) of title 18, United States Code, is amended by striking `and section 1341 (relating to mail fraud),' and inserting `section 1341 (relating to mail fraud), a felony violation of section 1030 (relating to computer fraud and abuse),'.
I don't know if this is the provision of the PATRIOT Act that was used in this particular case, but mail and wire fraud (and if it was related to an Internet site, then it's actually wire fraud, not mail fraud as that poster indicated) are mentioned in the Act, so it can be used in cases of such fraud.
Waving that flag around is just a misunderstanding of the Act.
Which just goes to show that the act's promoters were basically lying, since that's the flag under which they sold it.Then you'd have to accuse Congress of lying about just about every law they pass, given how many riders that are completely unrelated to the main thrust of the act get slapped onto bills of all kinds these days.
Firstly, as one of the comments on the MetaFilter page on the article points out,
The Patriot Act amended many laws that were already on the books that were not directly related to "national security." (Amendements to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act are just one example.) Waving that flag around is just a misunderstanding of the Act.
Secondly, other comments on that same page (as well as the US DOJ press release) point out what the somewhat self-serving press release does not: sg1archive was hosting copies of Stargate episodes for download. Directly; apparently Mr. McGaughey wasn't even smart enough to use an peer-to-peer intermediary so he could claim he was just linking, not hosting.They were apparently low-rez rips intended to allow fans to catch up on missed episodes but not something you'd want to keep, but I'm afraid that's not a positive defense to copyright infringement. Neither is "But we were helping sell the DVDs" (despite what peer-to-peer folks would have you believe) or "Gee, but the people who made the show liked my site, really!"
It's a shame that his computer equipment got trashed, but the FBI (and other law-enforcement agencies) are somewhat prone to do that over the course of an investigation. If you don't even check online FAQs about what constitutes copyright infringement (anime fansub and fanfic FAQs were doing an adequate job of covering that more than ten years ago; I'm sure there are even more comprehensive ones out there by now that would have told him this was Not a Good Idea) before you go ahead and do it anyway, you deserve what you get. This is not another Steve Jackson affair, folks.
And I won't even go into what a Google Groups search on Mr. McGaughey turns up...though if you click on that link, the blurbs from the posts it displays are fairly instructive without even clicking on any of the articles to display the full text.
I only wish I hadn't kicked in $5 to the guy's legal defense fund before I found out about all this. Oh well, it'll teach me to do a little research first next time.
Funny thing...not long after reading the original article about this PDA, I was at the city bus transfer station waiting for the bus...and I happened to see a fellow fiddling with something that looked a lot like that Jackito PDA illustration. At least, it had a similar form factor and the braille strip in the same place, even though it wasn't identical. So, I can't speak for the Jackito PDA--heck, I'm not even entirely sure that what the guy was fiddling with was a PDA--but I can say I've seen someone using something that looked a lot like the picture of that thing. Didn't get to ask him about it, because he put it away and went to catch the bus I got off of.
You mean the estate that commissioned sequels to the Foundation series? The estate that slaps "Isaac Asimov's..." on various book series that might have some vague something-or-other to do with robots or something?
Speaking as a customer service worker at a CLEC phone company with a name that resolves in roman numerals, it'll also mean that CLEC orders in the SBC area--for new telephone lines, moves, or even migrations--and also phone repairs will also be delayed, since it's SBC's workers who actually do the switching and fixing.
Boy, I'm glad the CLEC is laying me off at the end of June, otherwise I might have to keep working there. I've had enough phone CS to last a lifetime.
I see "levelling service" auctions on eBay for City of Heroes now. Is it just me, or does anyone else find the concept of paying to be able to play a game, then paying someone else to play it for you too hilarious for words?
Maybe at some point I might do a "levelling service" auction on eBay myself, but if I do it it'll be an auction of my time to nursemaid a newbie around helping him level himself up.
I don't even think it's necessary for the currency to be directly convertible, anyway.
During the Cold War years, Pepsi did business with the Soviet Union, whose rubles could not be converted directly into dollars, by selling Pepsi for rubles, buying vodka with the rubles, then exporting the vodka and selling it in America for dollars. Seems to me this is a similar principle.
Uhm...Miyazaki-san himself has said that he wrote Spirited Away for 12-year-old girls. You're confusing the cultural disconnect with audience. Granted, Japanese animated films in general tend to have a higher degree of maturity than American ones do...but that doesn't mean they're for an older audience.
And even if that weren't the case, Miyazaki has made quite a few movies "written for kids" himself. For instance, look at My Neighbor Totoro or Panda, Go Panda. Enjoyable by adults (just as Pixar's films are), but clearly aimed right squarely at the little kid market.
Another thing you could do would be to copy and paste this text into Word and make it into a snail letter. Then send it to the offices of those 27...or, if nothing else, the office of the committee itself (which you can find on the page to which he linked). It can't hurt anything.
I don't think congresspeople have ever handled their own mail...they get so much of it, they have staff to do it for them. And even the staff doesn't necessarily read it in depth...they'll note the issue and pro or con stance, and digest it down to tell the congresscritter "85% of the constituents who care enough to take the time and effort to sit down and write you a letter instead of just zinging a couple of keys and making phosphors glow on a screen support this bill. Given that people who care enough to go to all that extra effort and to spend almost 40 cents of their hard-earned money on top of that are more likely to care enough to rouse themselves from their comfy chair (no! not the Comfy Chair!) and go down to vote for you come election day instead of just thinking favorable thoughts toward you, how do you want to play this one, boss?"
Well, okay, they don't say all that, most of it would be taken as read. But the point is, it takes more effort to write an actual letter (though with computers these days, not as much as it used to), not to mention stamp money. It shows you're the sort of person who makes an effort, and thus would be more likely to vote. If most of their emails are pro but most of the letters they get are con, which do you think will carry the day? Not to mention letters provide a physical artifact which, psychologically, will tend to carry more impact than phosphors on a screen.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'd probably take them to small claims court rather than sit around with a big sign, looking like some kind of a crackpot. Yes, I'll admit it, the fellow did scare me.
The nice thing about Circuit City is that, at least here in Springfield, they will match prices for Best Buy including rebates. So if something is $30 with a $10 rebate at B'Buy, C.C. will sell it to you for $20 (well, actually for $19, since they price-match by 110%) with no wait for mail-sending.
Almost makes me want to forgive them for trying to shove DIVX down our throats. Almost.
This kind of reminds me of a fellow often sighted on the outskirts of the parking lot of the shopping center that houses the Best Buy here in Springfield, Missouri, particularly during big sales. There's a landscaped border to the lot, with small grassy ridges and trees and things, and this fellow will bring a lawnchair, thermos mug, perhaps a parasol for shade, and set up right there on the hill overlooking the entrance with a big posterboard protest sign. I can't remember exactly what the sign said--I'm sure he had different ones on different occasions--but it was basically warnings like not to trust Best Buy's warranty plans, don't shop at Best Buy, etc.
I never quite worked up the nerve to approach him and ask him about it, but I did ask a couple of Best Buy servicepeons I happened to encounter while eating in the nearby Subway one day. Apparently the fellow had bought a video camera, damaged it in a fashion not covered under warranty (apparently dropped it over the side of a boat into a lake or something, I can't remember exactly now) and then got upset when Best Buy refused to honor the service plan.
So now he's getting his money's worth back by carrying out this oddball protest. Takes all kinds, I suppose.
whoops. didn't even paste the right URL in that last comment. Darn this copy paste buffer anyway.
...and then I see the first page of the article, with two or three other free iPod referral links on it that appear well in front of mine, and realize I might as well not have bothered disclaiming anything... :P
I think what we can take from this is that people are becoming "immunized" to ordinary advertisements...they just aren't clicking. So advertisers have to turn to other methods to try to pull in those dollars. One thing you can say for the ad-words thing is that at least it's not intrusive. Who normally runs their mouse over text in a news article anyway? And at least when reading a printed media article you're expecting to be advertised to, unlike with the DejaNews ad-words flap of a few years back.
Something I found interesting in the same vein was another Wired story the other day, about FreeiPods.com--an advertising site where, if you complete a trial offer from one of an assortment of merchants and get five other people to complete one too, they send you an advertiser-paid-for iPod (or $250 iTMS gift certificate). I've searched the web for stories about these people and everything I find suggests they're legitimate.
The whole thing seems to me to suggest that the advertisers participating in that program are finally starting to get the idea that if they want to advertise to us, they need to make it worth our while.
(Full disclosure: okay, so the FreeiPods link is a referral link for me. I was going to compare and contrast its advertising model anyway, and given that I was going to mention it anyway, it would be dumb not to include the referral link instead of just a plain-vanilla one, given that they both pull up the website just the same and I might as well benefit from the traffic as not. So don't accuse me of trying to sneak something by you.)
To paraphrase Steven Wright, "I put an ad-bar and an ad-blocker on the same browser and let them fight it out."
Has anyone snagged this yet and put it up on BitTorrent somewhere? The best download rate I can get off the links is around 15K/sec...meaning it'll be about five hours before it finishes.
From the full text of the PATRIOT Act:I don't know if this is the provision of the PATRIOT Act that was used in this particular case, but mail and wire fraud (and if it was related to an Internet site, then it's actually wire fraud, not mail fraud as that poster indicated) are mentioned in the Act, so it can be used in cases of such fraud.
Complete text of the PATRIOT Act available here, BTW.
Firstly, as one of the comments on the MetaFilter page on the article points out, Secondly, other comments on that same page (as well as the US DOJ press release) point out what the somewhat self-serving press release does not: sg1archive was hosting copies of Stargate episodes for download. Directly; apparently Mr. McGaughey wasn't even smart enough to use an peer-to-peer intermediary so he could claim he was just linking, not hosting.They were apparently low-rez rips intended to allow fans to catch up on missed episodes but not something you'd want to keep, but I'm afraid that's not a positive defense to copyright infringement. Neither is "But we were helping sell the DVDs" (despite what peer-to-peer folks would have you believe) or "Gee, but the people who made the show liked my site, really!"
It's a shame that his computer equipment got trashed, but the FBI (and other law-enforcement agencies) are somewhat prone to do that over the course of an investigation. If you don't even check online FAQs about what constitutes copyright infringement (anime fansub and fanfic FAQs were doing an adequate job of covering that more than ten years ago; I'm sure there are even more comprehensive ones out there by now that would have told him this was Not a Good Idea) before you go ahead and do it anyway, you deserve what you get. This is not another Steve Jackson affair, folks.
And I won't even go into what a Google Groups search on Mr. McGaughey turns up...though if you click on that link, the blurbs from the posts it displays are fairly instructive without even clicking on any of the articles to display the full text.
I only wish I hadn't kicked in $5 to the guy's legal defense fund before I found out about all this. Oh well, it'll teach me to do a little research first next time.
Not to mention Speed Buggy. (Was that the right name?) Vrooom-a-zoom-zoom!
...would Herbie the Love Bug count as prior art?
No...it didn't actually have a screen at all. Just a braille strip, and those finger controls.
Funny thing...not long after reading the original article about this PDA, I was at the city bus transfer station waiting for the bus...and I happened to see a fellow fiddling with something that looked a lot like that Jackito PDA illustration. At least, it had a similar form factor and the braille strip in the same place, even though it wasn't identical. So, I can't speak for the Jackito PDA--heck, I'm not even entirely sure that what the guy was fiddling with was a PDA--but I can say I've seen someone using something that looked a lot like the picture of that thing. Didn't get to ask him about it, because he put it away and went to catch the bus I got off of.
You mean the estate that commissioned sequels to the Foundation series? The estate that slaps "Isaac Asimov's..." on various book series that might have some vague something-or-other to do with robots or something?
Gee, I wonder.
(Hint: BASIC string variable symbol.)
"Who's 'There May Be Giants'"
Speaking as a customer service worker at a CLEC phone company with a name that resolves in roman numerals, it'll also mean that CLEC orders in the SBC area--for new telephone lines, moves, or even migrations--and also phone repairs will also be delayed, since it's SBC's workers who actually do the switching and fixing.
Boy, I'm glad the CLEC is laying me off at the end of June, otherwise I might have to keep working there. I've had enough phone CS to last a lifetime.
I see "levelling service" auctions on eBay for City of Heroes now. Is it just me, or does anyone else find the concept of paying to be able to play a game, then paying someone else to play it for you too hilarious for words?
Maybe at some point I might do a "levelling service" auction on eBay myself, but if I do it it'll be an auction of my time to nursemaid a newbie around helping him level himself up.
I don't even think it's necessary for the currency to be directly convertible, anyway.
During the Cold War years, Pepsi did business with the Soviet Union, whose rubles could not be converted directly into dollars, by selling Pepsi for rubles, buying vodka with the rubles, then exporting the vodka and selling it in America for dollars. Seems to me this is a similar principle.
Uhm...Miyazaki-san himself has said that he wrote Spirited Away for 12-year-old girls. You're confusing the cultural disconnect with audience. Granted, Japanese animated films in general tend to have a higher degree of maturity than American ones do...but that doesn't mean they're for an older audience.
And even if that weren't the case, Miyazaki has made quite a few movies "written for kids" himself. For instance, look at My Neighbor Totoro or Panda, Go Panda. Enjoyable by adults (just as Pixar's films are), but clearly aimed right squarely at the little kid market.
Another thing you could do would be to copy and paste this text into Word and make it into a snail letter. Then send it to the offices of those 27...or, if nothing else, the office of the committee itself (which you can find on the page to which he linked). It can't hurt anything.
I don't think congresspeople have ever handled their own mail...they get so much of it, they have staff to do it for them. And even the staff doesn't necessarily read it in depth...they'll note the issue and pro or con stance, and digest it down to tell the congresscritter "85% of the constituents who care enough to take the time and effort to sit down and write you a letter instead of just zinging a couple of keys and making phosphors glow on a screen support this bill. Given that people who care enough to go to all that extra effort and to spend almost 40 cents of their hard-earned money on top of that are more likely to care enough to rouse themselves from their comfy chair (no! not the Comfy Chair!) and go down to vote for you come election day instead of just thinking favorable thoughts toward you, how do you want to play this one, boss?"
Well, okay, they don't say all that, most of it would be taken as read. But the point is, it takes more effort to write an actual letter (though with computers these days, not as much as it used to), not to mention stamp money. It shows you're the sort of person who makes an effort, and thus would be more likely to vote. If most of their emails are pro but most of the letters they get are con, which do you think will carry the day? Not to mention letters provide a physical artifact which, psychologically, will tend to carry more impact than phosphors on a screen.