There will no doubt be people out their willing to pay a pretty penny for those, hobbyists wanting to extend the life of some cherished old kit for instance. The problem for auction style selling (assuming you are thinking eBay) tends to be listing your items for sale when more than one of those people is passing by. The lot is either worth a fair bit or next to nothing. As you presumably have no use for them yourself, I'd go for it now and not have them lying around cluttering the place.
I'd have not chucked them unless they were _really_ old, or you only had a few.
I had a small pile of various DIMMs (and SIMMs though I doubt the buyer was really interested in them!) when I last cleared out all my old junk. Single auction on eBay for the whole lot (individually they aren't worth enough for the hassle of listing and dealing with idiots, but together they made a lot worth bothering with) and let someone else deal with finding uses for them (or splitting into smaller lots and reselling).
You'd be surprised how much you might make. Memory of older standards is often useful in printers (sometimes relatively new devices) and such which don't need the high falutin super sonic speeds of newer standards, not just for people looking to extend the life of very old kit on the cheap. And 4Gb DRR3 modules as mentioned here are definitely still worth something, especially in that sort of number. What my company tends to do when getting rid of old stuff like this is drop the money made into the social fund - the furniture sold on after our move to shiny new offices recently has paid for an upgraded Christmas dinner for us all this year!
Or like the guy above says: donate and someone else will deal with finding a use for them. Either way there is far less chance that it'll all just become toxic land-fill. From a company's PoV donating may provide a tax break.
I've not been on shared hosting for some time, but things always used to be this way. It is a combination of using default Apache/PHP/other configuration (as provided by the off-the-shelf hosting control panels), default file+directory permissions, and users not being educated to change the permissions on sensitive files (or better: being educated enough to know tweaking those perms is not enough so they should demand a more secure setup from their host).
If I'm reading between the lines well enough, I suspect the problem is that/home/ is globally readable (which is pretty much standard) which allows you to see what users exist as they all have a directory under/home/. If this is the case then the fix they applied was likely to simply change the read permission flag on/home so that you can not list the contents, which isn't really a fix at all: if you know a username either because of foreknowledge or by finding a list of users from elsewhere (/etc/passwd for instance, which usually globally readable) then you can just list/home/ and blocking reading of/home won't change that. Turning off global execute permission on/home would stop you, but because of the way many shared hosts are configured that would also break Apache. Yoiu can test this if you report the issue and it gets fixed the same way: remember one of the usernames you can find now and after the fix see if you can still read/home//public_html or similar.
If you host runs Apache as a single user then there is no way around this. You can mitigate it somewhat with carefully setting permissions on your own files and some obfuscation of file/directory names, but that isn't really a proper answer to the problem.
Apache can be configured to run scripts (via suexec, phpsuexec, and so forth) as a the owner of the script which allows you to lock down configuration files and others that contain sensitive information so other uses can't read them (only set them to -rw------- and only you can read them, and that includes scripts if Apache runs them as you) - but most hosts don't do this (or they didn't last time I was working in that arena) as it is more hassle to setup and/or because it requires more resources. And by "more hassle to setup" I simply mean that it means more than just the out-of-the-box configuration: the "leading" standard control panel back than was cPanel (it may still be, I've not kept an eye on the market recently) and seeing posts like http://www.linuxgo.net/howto-enable-suphpphpsuexec-on-a-cpanel-server/ indicates that it still does not offer an easy (from the point-and-click PoV most cheap hosts need as they are rarely Linux/Apache/other experts) route to using the more secure arrangement. Most hosts will consider the extra admin time of setting up the more secure options to not be worth keeping (or gaining) your custom - 99%+ of their target market don't care (or don't know any better) and spending time to satisfy the other 1% or less is not worth it to them.
tl;dr: You will probably find this is the standard setup on a great many shared hosts, possibly most, maybe even nearly all. To ensure you are getting a new host that does things more securely when you move, you need to ask some pre-sales questions that are fairly technical (in the sense that sales may not be able to help, unless the company is small enough that the sales and tech support teams are the same people).
I would suggest instead using a VPS provider or self-hosting, that way there are no other direct users of the machine (be it real or virtual) to worry about, but unfortunately both of those options put more administrative load (and cost, unless you are paying far too much for shared hosting) on yourself and can be a minefield of its own (as with shared hosting avoid the cheapest options and ask searching question
So let me get this straight: nasty criminals taking advantage of the security holes stopped them making and marketing glorious new products with glorious new security problems? Perhaps if security wasn't so bad to start with that would have been less of a problem. (yes, I know Windows security is pretty good these days, but it wan't then which is both my point and, essentially, his too)
Microsoft was basically the only company that had enough volume for it to be a target
Crap. Volume is not the only value of import here at all. Volume isn't insignificant, but the overall problem is more proportional to volume * ease-of-attack. If it were just volume then Apache would have been in the news for security problems more than IIS rather than the other way around.
Until a short while ago my netbook ran 10.04 and could have done a while longer (but I replaced the spinning metal will an SSD and reinstalled rather than transferring the system to the new drive so upgrading at that point made sense). It might be slightly different on a main PC/laptop that you do more on than my netbook's workload, but I didn't find 10.04 to be too out-of-date for anything much (Firefrox, but there was an easy PPA for faster updates to that, and IIRC installing Chrom{e|ium} was a manual job too) so there was no need to go for 10.10, 11.04 or 11.10as 10.04 was still supported for security updates and critical bugs. I doubt I'll upgrade gain until after 14.04 is out.
This is just a pissing match between media giants.
If it were just a simple pissing match then it would just be them vs Google not them+government vs Google.
They've already lost the pissing match. In fact they didn't even have it because the knew they would lose: they could tell Google "pay or stop indexing us" and Google would say "fairy enough" and stop indexing them.
What this is, is the spoilt kid who isn't used to not winning running home and getting Daddy involved.
The question isn't so much as if their business model is good. The question is if their business model is legal or ethical. After all, robbing someone's house is a great business model in terms of making money.
Fairy nuf. But their business model WRT news is identical to the business model of the people that are moaning about is: take freely available information, and make money by collating it and making it available in a way that people find useful.
What Google do to on the "collating the information" front is a bit different, but the core model is the same. The editorialising that papers and such do is part of their collating effort but is something that Google do not need to do directly: they provide that service by also having a search engine that can check other resources in easy reach (they don't need to add a map of the middle east in a story about territorial arguments in order to give me more context within which to understand the information as I can just look it up if I need it, which I can necessarily do while reading a paper on the train). The "making available" part is different too, but again just because of the different medium.
Despite those differences the base model is the same: take, collate, make available, profit. They are complaining about someone else using their business model but somehow making it work better.
You are not wrong that editorial content can be considered new material, or at least a new derived work, but if they don't want indexing sites to index that material all they have to do is use facilities already available to stop indexing sites indexing that material. You don't need new legislation to stop Google indexing your content if you don't want them too, and if you do want them to index your content (because people might not find it otherwise) you can't demand that Google pay you for providing free links to it any more than I can demand the local telephone directory pays me for including my name/address/number.
Google's Biz Model is to slap advertisements on content that other people create. Google makes a stink ton of money doing this.
And some are just plain green with envy that Google's business model is more-or-less working and theirs hasn't really done so for a while now. This isn't about creator's rights, this is playground-like cries of "not fair!".
Since the first news papers media outlets have taken freely available information then charged for it and wrapped adverts around it in order to pay for the distribution of that information (and making a profit too). Now someone else is playing their game and playing it better than them they are crying foul. Google's adverts are no more wrong then their adverts, issue prices or subscription costs: in both cases someone is profiting from the act of making information easier to access for those who pay (which to my mind is fair enough in both cases).
Just because Google has *indexed* the content doesn't some how give them the right to profit from that content (as they do)
Are you suggesting that they do all that work indexing the content and giving you easy access to it for free? They aren't a charity you know.
Are you saying that news papers should not carry adverts either? Or charge for each issue more than cost price for manufacture and distribution? After all, all they've done is collate a bunch of information and by the same argument that doesn't give them the right to expect to profit from it.
and not give the creators a cut. Google does not want to cut the creators a share of the money that Google earns by appropriating that original content.
With words like "appropriate" you talk like they are pulling a FunnyJunk and taking all the content, deliberately removing attribution & all other links to the original. Google present the headline and perhaps the first sentence or so, along with where they go the news from and a full link to the originating site.
As usual they'll scream about it "breaking the internet" - but paying creators part of the profit that Google makes from indexing the content that other people generated really does is break Google's biz model.
Even if it doesn't break the Internet, it is completely unnecessary and will just add complication and therefore cost. If the news outlets don't want Google to use their content in the manner that Google uses content then they should just ask to be de-listed, or use the facility that already exists in robots.txt to tell Google not to index the content that they wish to keep for themselves. Problem solved. The thing is, this is not what they want: they want to be in Google's index but on their terms, terms that would help them perpetuate their out-of-date business model.
EBooks were supposed to cost much less than physical books.
This is only true for books that are already in existence or new books that are not giong through the publishing system at all. For new works, especially large technical books/creating/reviewing/editing/... the material is a ot of the initial cost so while I'd expect an ebook to be cheaper than the dead-tree version I wouldn't expect it to be significantly cheaper upon first release. Even converting an existing older book to ebook formats (or an existing ebook to other ebook formats) is not free of work - someone needs to review the result of the conversion and make fixes as needed when parts come out badly. Of course some time after release I would expect the ebook versions to drop in price as the continue costs of making/storing/distributing them is not nearly as large as it is for physical units.
When you see an ebook more expensive than the paper version it is often that the paper version's price is being controlled by "heck, we need to shift these things out of the warehouse before they are worth even less and so we can make room for new stuff" which isn't a factor with non-physical items so the companies involved quietly forget about them and don't have any such reason to adjust the prices. In this instance the ebook price should be falling by that point too IMO, though I have no objection to physical books being cheaper under "fire sale" conditions (but if the condition lasts, especially if more dead tree editions are being produced, then the eBook price is a rip off being used to subsidise the paper version).
Of course this case isn't about how ebooks are prices compared to physical books (at least not directly). It is about the publishers and some distributors colluding to fix prices higher than they should be (irrespective of any ebook/physical differences).
I think he was meaning that they should not have joined the real-world group, an action that resulted in them being added by one of their contacts to the facebook group about the real world group.
The problem is people can associate you with things on fb and other people will believe it without question. In this case it was something true that people did not want announced at this time, in other cases it could be something fictitious but potentially damaging if people who see it do not see it for the lie/joke/what-ever that it is ("asdf is a member of I Fucking Love Rape Porn"). In the case of true information that people are being careful about distributing, like in this case, fb privacy issues are potentially affecting their real life choices not just online behaviour.
"If you don't want it know, don't post it" doesn't work when others can effectively post "it" to all your contacts for you. The obvious technical solution is for fb to verify all/em> links to you (in comments and responses, additions to groups,...) like they do when you are tagged in an image - though that may be clunky for many users so they'd just turn it off and still be exposed to the problem.
Deliberate griefing is generally much more specific and targeted. The harm caused is usually deliberate, or at least appreciated by the perpetrator. Bothering individual recipients (or groups) is the whole point.
Spam is more of a scatter-gun problem raising the noise/signal barrier. The sender usually doesn't see how each individual message could be a problem to the recipient even if they don't want it or simply doesn't care.
In my mind it is similar to the difference between littering (smokers flicking their dead butts on the floor) and deliberate damage (some prick using a cig to set light to a bin). One is a relatively careless action affecting many in a small way (but it soon adds up), the other is a deliberate attempt to bother a few people or damage something.
Deliberate griefing could be considered a sub-set of a larger spam problem I suppose.
(back on topic: this case seems to be neither really: from what I gather the original person told the joke on what should be a "private" page among friends (terrible and unoriginal as the joke is, that in itself should not be an offence - many of us share terrible and sometimes "over the line" jokes between friends), one of those "friends" chose to forward on a screenshot of the joke to people who would be upset by it - IMO that person should be arrested and the former just needs to be more careful who he "friend"s)
That is how it should be, yes. Though I'm careful not to post anything that I wouldn't say loudly to a friend while chatting in a the middle of a public place full of people I don't know. There are various ways for the things I post to be brought to the attention of people who might not like them despite my best efforts to keep my less savoury posts "friends only".
IIRC is was posted to a page intended for the dispersal of information/support for people affected by the ongoing case. If that is correct it wasn't just lacking in taste, it was a deliberate attempt to cause further pain to those already suffering.
I'll defend anyone's right to tell that sort of joke amongst their own friends (though I'd also defend their friends right to introduce them to a knuckle sandwich too!), but to put it in a public place, specifically a public place where people affected by the case are likely to be present, is a dick move that needs to be addressed - it is on a par with the deliberate offence the West Boro fuckwits set out to cause IMO.
It depends on the place it was posted. If it were posted in a private page then it is just a terrible joke between like minded people, no worse than a joke over a beer in a pub.
If it were posted on a known venue for sick jokes, then again I would consider it perfectly normal (on the basis that if you visit a venue for offensive jokes then you should expect to find jokes that might offend you) and any complaint should be handled by civil procedures.
If on the other hand it was posted on a public resource, the matter definitely comes under the pervue of the obscene publications act and similar legislation, and if posted to a public page relating in some way to the case in point then it is a deliberate attempt to cause mental harm and shoudl eb prosecuted appropriately.
Of course practically speaking your own facebook page is no less public than a support page for the victims, so that area is a bit more grey than my first statement suggests.
1. The site bothering to monitor its email with any regularity. Until they see your report, the fake review is still up where potential customers can see it.
2. The site taking your complaint at face value - you could be a genuinely bad business trying to silence genuine complaints by maknig shit up yourself. Until you can convince them of your case, the fake review may still be up where potential customers can see it. Conversly, if you made a genuine bad review it could go the other way and your views could be taken offline at the behest of the bad company until you prove them to be true so your warning won't reach potential customers.
3. The site carrying the bad review not being part of the scheme. Either through association by choice, by actually being the same people when you dig down to details, or by being coerced into co-operating with the criminals, the site could be taking a cut of the proceeds (or just being "protected" themselves).
So unfortunately that woudl not be a generally workable solution.
For reference, search for the many scandals over the years concerning the reviews on sites like TripAdviser, Yell, and their ilk.
I'm pretty sure I heared about this sort of thing happening many years ago, at least as far back in early years of this centurary. No one should be surprised that it is happening: it is basically a traditional protection racket like scheme. When-ever there is something of value to "protect" they will spring up sooner or later.
In fact I'm sure I read (probably here) about a case where someone traced the protection demand to a person in the same state and ended up in court for taking the law into his own hands (finding the perp and beating him to within in inch of his life, having first failed to get local law enforcement to do anything because they didn't understand what the crime actually was).
A single cookie used that way would simply be blocked by the advertisers so it would not pollute their database any more than just filtering out the cookie from your requests completely.
Another option would be to randomly distribute the cookies between users, but that would need some form of shared location to "trade" the cookie informtation which might have legal problems (as it would give the advertisers a nice juicy target to try prosecute for sabotage) and woudl be similarly easy to circumvent anywhere were there is some extra informtaion to check agains (if you are logged infor instance they can include some saltde hash of your accounts details in the cookie and check that before entering the data into their stores, and there may be easy ways to filter the bad data if not logged in too).
Basically trying to pollute the data is going to be a waste of time long term - the only useful thing you can do is simply not provide them with any data by filtering the HTTP(S) requests appropriately.
I'm still aiting to see "this content will be available to you when our ad server tells us you have clicked something" messages when ad servers fail. It can't be far away, we've already had reasonably high profile sites (The Escapist is one that springs to mind) banning users for mentioning AddBlock and similar tools.
I depends on both partner's attitude to poly-amorous relationships. If all are open and happy with the arrangement then it is a goo thing, but if you lead someone on to thinking you are just fucking them but are in fact fucking others too, then that is morally wrong.
There is nothing wrong with toys. But once they get cheap enough (and the raw materials for the printing do too) there are many people who could get good use out of one. Once they get cheap enough (maybe in a year or two at this rate) I'll have one, though I must admit that for me it will be a toy for the most part. I would use it for making customised gifts (for instance customised versions of http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:30487 and http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:22125 for my sister in law who is nuts on ducks and bats) and so forth as well as just "playing". If you consider what I've spent on computer equipment over the years when I don't need a fraction of that power, these things really aren't going to be that extravagant soon.
For more practical uses: Anyone who does art such as model-making and other crafting could make the device pay for itself easily for prototyping (you'd still need to get thing professionally made if you want the final version in bulk, of course). I have friends who pay far too much for figures for their wargames: if the output is high enough resolution to get reasonable detail and it doesn't need too much smoothing/sanding to get a good look then they could save a packet and get customised models as a free extra nice-to-have. Parents could no doubt find many things to do with one, for or with the kids, assuming the materials used are non-toxic enough. Most people don't need their own ink-on-paper printer, but most homes with a computer have one and make use of it - 3D printers may be in the same position in a few years time.
That only works if the hardware can cope with the new software. Firmware updates are usually intended to support bug fixes not major feature changes, so while a lot of hardware will have room for firmware a little larger than it is provided with (to support bug fixes and small new features) you'll not find a lot that has room for a whole new network stack, either in terms of non-volatile storage to hold the code and RAM needed while it is actually running. Much of that kit was bought years ago (for such amounts of money that it surviving a decade was part of the plan) and back then and memory of most sorts was far more expensive than it is now.
Slashdot Mirror
There will no doubt be people out their willing to pay a pretty penny for those, hobbyists wanting to extend the life of some cherished old kit for instance. The problem for auction style selling (assuming you are thinking eBay) tends to be listing your items for sale when more than one of those people is passing by. The lot is either worth a fair bit or next to nothing. As you presumably have no use for them yourself, I'd go for it now and not have them lying around cluttering the place.
I'd have not chucked them unless they were _really_ old, or you only had a few.
I had a small pile of various DIMMs (and SIMMs though I doubt the buyer was really interested in them!) when I last cleared out all my old junk. Single auction on eBay for the whole lot (individually they aren't worth enough for the hassle of listing and dealing with idiots, but together they made a lot worth bothering with) and let someone else deal with finding uses for them (or splitting into smaller lots and reselling).
You'd be surprised how much you might make. Memory of older standards is often useful in printers (sometimes relatively new devices) and such which don't need the high falutin super sonic speeds of newer standards, not just for people looking to extend the life of very old kit on the cheap. And 4Gb DRR3 modules as mentioned here are definitely still worth something, especially in that sort of number. What my company tends to do when getting rid of old stuff like this is drop the money made into the social fund - the furniture sold on after our move to shiny new offices recently has paid for an upgraded Christmas dinner for us all this year!
Or like the guy above says: donate and someone else will deal with finding a use for them. Either way there is far less chance that it'll all just become toxic land-fill. From a company's PoV donating may provide a tax break.
Actually I can't see why that secret prototype should ever have left the office.
Real world testing conditions.
I've not been on shared hosting for some time, but things always used to be this way. It is a combination of using default Apache/PHP/other configuration (as provided by the off-the-shelf hosting control panels), default file+directory permissions, and users not being educated to change the permissions on sensitive files (or better: being educated enough to know tweaking those perms is not enough so they should demand a more secure setup from their host).
/home/ is globally readable (which is pretty much standard) which allows you to see what users exist as they all have a directory under /home/. If this is the case then the fix they applied was likely to simply change the read permission flag on /home so that you can not list the contents, which isn't really a fix at all: if you know a username either because of foreknowledge or by finding a list of users from elsewhere (/etc/passwd for instance, which usually globally readable) then you can just list /home/ and blocking reading of /home won't change that. Turning off global execute permission on /home would stop you, but because of the way many shared hosts are configured that would also break Apache. Yoiu can test this if you report the issue and it gets fixed the same way: remember one of the usernames you can find now and after the fix see if you can still read /home//public_html or similar.
If I'm reading between the lines well enough, I suspect the problem is that
If you host runs Apache as a single user then there is no way around this. You can mitigate it somewhat with carefully setting permissions on your own files and some obfuscation of file/directory names, but that isn't really a proper answer to the problem.
Apache can be configured to run scripts (via suexec, phpsuexec, and so forth) as a the owner of the script which allows you to lock down configuration files and others that contain sensitive information so other uses can't read them (only set them to -rw------- and only you can read them, and that includes scripts if Apache runs them as you) - but most hosts don't do this (or they didn't last time I was working in that arena) as it is more hassle to setup and/or because it requires more resources. And by "more hassle to setup" I simply mean that it means more than just the out-of-the-box configuration: the "leading" standard control panel back than was cPanel (it may still be, I've not kept an eye on the market recently) and seeing posts like http://www.linuxgo.net/howto-enable-suphpphpsuexec-on-a-cpanel-server/ indicates that it still does not offer an easy (from the point-and-click PoV most cheap hosts need as they are rarely Linux/Apache/other experts) route to using the more secure arrangement. Most hosts will consider the extra admin time of setting up the more secure options to not be worth keeping (or gaining) your custom - 99%+ of their target market don't care (or don't know any better) and spending time to satisfy the other 1% or less is not worth it to them.
tl;dr: You will probably find this is the standard setup on a great many shared hosts, possibly most, maybe even nearly all. To ensure you are getting a new host that does things more securely when you move, you need to ask some pre-sales questions that are fairly technical (in the sense that sales may not be able to help, unless the company is small enough that the sales and tech support teams are the same people).
I would suggest instead using a VPS provider or self-hosting, that way there are no other direct users of the machine (be it real or virtual) to worry about, but unfortunately both of those options put more administrative load (and cost, unless you are paying far too much for shared hosting) on yourself and can be a minefield of its own (as with shared hosting avoid the cheapest options and ask searching question
Only real assholes use them instead of cuffs.
So, the sort of people this article about?
Microsoft was basically the only company that had enough volume for it to be a target
Crap. Volume is not the only value of import here at all. Volume isn't insignificant, but the overall problem is more proportional to volume * ease-of-attack. If it were just volume then Apache would have been in the news for security problems more than IIS rather than the other way around.
That is why the LTS releases exist.
Until a short while ago my netbook ran 10.04 and could have done a while longer (but I replaced the spinning metal will an SSD and reinstalled rather than transferring the system to the new drive so upgrading at that point made sense). It might be slightly different on a main PC/laptop that you do more on than my netbook's workload, but I didn't find 10.04 to be too out-of-date for anything much (Firefrox, but there was an easy PPA for faster updates to that, and IIRC installing Chrom{e|ium} was a manual job too) so there was no need to go for 10.10, 11.04 or 11.10as 10.04 was still supported for security updates and critical bugs. I doubt I'll upgrade gain until after 14.04 is out.
This is just a pissing match between media giants.
If it were just a simple pissing match then it would just be them vs Google not them+government vs Google.
They've already lost the pissing match. In fact they didn't even have it because the knew they would lose: they could tell Google "pay or stop indexing us" and Google would say "fairy enough" and stop indexing them.
What this is, is the spoilt kid who isn't used to not winning running home and getting Daddy involved.
Fairy nuf. But their business model WRT news is identical to the business model of the people that are moaning about is: take freely available information, and make money by collating it and making it available in a way that people find useful.
What Google do to on the "collating the information" front is a bit different, but the core model is the same. The editorialising that papers and such do is part of their collating effort but is something that Google do not need to do directly: they provide that service by also having a search engine that can check other resources in easy reach (they don't need to add a map of the middle east in a story about territorial arguments in order to give me more context within which to understand the information as I can just look it up if I need it, which I can necessarily do while reading a paper on the train). The "making available" part is different too, but again just because of the different medium.
Despite those differences the base model is the same: take, collate, make available, profit. They are complaining about someone else using their business model but somehow making it work better.
You are not wrong that editorial content can be considered new material, or at least a new derived work, but if they don't want indexing sites to index that material all they have to do is use facilities already available to stop indexing sites indexing that material. You don't need new legislation to stop Google indexing your content if you don't want them too, and if you do want them to index your content (because people might not find it otherwise) you can't demand that Google pay you for providing free links to it any more than I can demand the local telephone directory pays me for including my name/address/number.
Google's Biz Model is to slap advertisements on content that other people create. Google makes a stink ton of money doing this.
And some are just plain green with envy that Google's business model is more-or-less working and theirs hasn't really done so for a while now. This isn't about creator's rights, this is playground-like cries of "not fair!".
Since the first news papers media outlets have taken freely available information then charged for it and wrapped adverts around it in order to pay for the distribution of that information (and making a profit too). Now someone else is playing their game and playing it better than them they are crying foul. Google's adverts are no more wrong then their adverts, issue prices or subscription costs: in both cases someone is profiting from the act of making information easier to access for those who pay (which to my mind is fair enough in both cases).
Just because Google has *indexed* the content doesn't some how give them the right to profit from that content (as they do)
Are you suggesting that they do all that work indexing the content and giving you easy access to it for free? They aren't a charity you know.
Are you saying that news papers should not carry adverts either? Or charge for each issue more than cost price for manufacture and distribution? After all, all they've done is collate a bunch of information and by the same argument that doesn't give them the right to expect to profit from it.
and not give the creators a cut. Google does not want to cut the creators a share of the money that Google earns by appropriating that original content.
With words like "appropriate" you talk like they are pulling a FunnyJunk and taking all the content, deliberately removing attribution & all other links to the original. Google present the headline and perhaps the first sentence or so, along with where they go the news from and a full link to the originating site.
As usual they'll scream about it "breaking the internet" - but paying creators part of the profit that Google makes from indexing the content that other people generated really does is break Google's biz model.
Even if it doesn't break the Internet, it is completely unnecessary and will just add complication and therefore cost. If the news outlets don't want Google to use their content in the manner that Google uses content then they should just ask to be de-listed, or use the facility that already exists in robots.txt to tell Google not to index the content that they wish to keep for themselves. Problem solved. The thing is, this is not what they want: they want to be in Google's index but on their terms, terms that would help them perpetuate their out-of-date business model.
EBooks were supposed to cost much less than physical books.
This is only true for books that are already in existence or new books that are not giong through the publishing system at all. For new works, especially large technical books/creating/reviewing/editing/... the material is a ot of the initial cost so while I'd expect an ebook to be cheaper than the dead-tree version I wouldn't expect it to be significantly cheaper upon first release. Even converting an existing older book to ebook formats (or an existing ebook to other ebook formats) is not free of work - someone needs to review the result of the conversion and make fixes as needed when parts come out badly. Of course some time after release I would expect the ebook versions to drop in price as the continue costs of making/storing/distributing them is not nearly as large as it is for physical units.
When you see an ebook more expensive than the paper version it is often that the paper version's price is being controlled by "heck, we need to shift these things out of the warehouse before they are worth even less and so we can make room for new stuff" which isn't a factor with non-physical items so the companies involved quietly forget about them and don't have any such reason to adjust the prices. In this instance the ebook price should be falling by that point too IMO, though I have no objection to physical books being cheaper under "fire sale" conditions (but if the condition lasts, especially if more dead tree editions are being produced, then the eBook price is a rip off being used to subsidise the paper version).
Of course this case isn't about how ebooks are prices compared to physical books (at least not directly). It is about the publishers and some distributors colluding to fix prices higher than they should be (irrespective of any ebook/physical differences).
I think he was meaning that they should not have joined the real-world group, an action that resulted in them being added by one of their contacts to the facebook group about the real world group.
...) like they do when you are tagged in an image - though that may be clunky for many users so they'd just turn it off and still be exposed to the problem.
The problem is people can associate you with things on fb and other people will believe it without question. In this case it was something true that people did not want announced at this time, in other cases it could be something fictitious but potentially damaging if people who see it do not see it for the lie/joke/what-ever that it is ("asdf is a member of I Fucking Love Rape Porn"). In the case of true information that people are being careful about distributing, like in this case, fb privacy issues are potentially affecting their real life choices not just online behaviour.
"If you don't want it know, don't post it" doesn't work when others can effectively post "it" to all your contacts for you. The obvious technical solution is for fb to verify all/em> links to you (in comments and responses, additions to groups,
Deliberate griefing is generally much more specific and targeted. The harm caused is usually deliberate, or at least appreciated by the perpetrator. Bothering individual recipients (or groups) is the whole point.
Spam is more of a scatter-gun problem raising the noise/signal barrier. The sender usually doesn't see how each individual message could be a problem to the recipient even if they don't want it or simply doesn't care.
In my mind it is similar to the difference between littering (smokers flicking their dead butts on the floor) and deliberate damage (some prick using a cig to set light to a bin). One is a relatively careless action affecting many in a small way (but it soon adds up), the other is a deliberate attempt to bother a few people or damage something.
Deliberate griefing could be considered a sub-set of a larger spam problem I suppose.
(back on topic: this case seems to be neither really: from what I gather the original person told the joke on what should be a "private" page among friends (terrible and unoriginal as the joke is, that in itself should not be an offence - many of us share terrible and sometimes "over the line" jokes between friends), one of those "friends" chose to forward on a screenshot of the joke to people who would be upset by it - IMO that person should be arrested and the former just needs to be more careful who he "friend"s)
That is how it should be, yes. Though I'm careful not to post anything that I wouldn't say loudly to a friend while chatting in a the middle of a public place full of people I don't know. There are various ways for the things I post to be brought to the attention of people who might not like them despite my best efforts to keep my less savoury posts "friends only".
Deliberate griefing and spam are *not* the same thing.
IIRC is was posted to a page intended for the dispersal of information/support for people affected by the ongoing case. If that is correct it wasn't just lacking in taste, it was a deliberate attempt to cause further pain to those already suffering.
I'll defend anyone's right to tell that sort of joke amongst their own friends (though I'd also defend their friends right to introduce them to a knuckle sandwich too!), but to put it in a public place, specifically a public place where people affected by the case are likely to be present, is a dick move that needs to be addressed - it is on a par with the deliberate offence the West Boro fuckwits set out to cause IMO.
It depends on the place it was posted. If it were posted in a private page then it is just a terrible joke between like minded people, no worse than a joke over a beer in a pub.
If it were posted on a known venue for sick jokes, then again I would consider it perfectly normal (on the basis that if you visit a venue for offensive jokes then you should expect to find jokes that might offend you) and any complaint should be handled by civil procedures.
If on the other hand it was posted on a public resource, the matter definitely comes under the pervue of the obscene publications act and similar legislation, and if posted to a public page relating in some way to the case in point then it is a deliberate attempt to cause mental harm and shoudl eb prosecuted appropriately.
Of course practically speaking your own facebook page is no less public than a support page for the victims, so that area is a bit more grey than my first statement suggests.
You are banking on:
1. The site bothering to monitor its email with any regularity. Until they see your report, the fake review is still up where potential customers can see it.
2. The site taking your complaint at face value - you could be a genuinely bad business trying to silence genuine complaints by maknig shit up yourself. Until you can convince them of your case, the fake review may still be up where potential customers can see it. Conversly, if you made a genuine bad review it could go the other way and your views could be taken offline at the behest of the bad company until you prove them to be true so your warning won't reach potential customers.
3. The site carrying the bad review not being part of the scheme. Either through association by choice, by actually being the same people when you dig down to details, or by being coerced into co-operating with the criminals, the site could be taking a cut of the proceeds (or just being "protected" themselves).
So unfortunately that woudl not be a generally workable solution.
For reference, search for the many scandals over the years concerning the reviews on sites like TripAdviser, Yell, and their ilk.
I'm pretty sure I heared about this sort of thing happening many years ago, at least as far back in early years of this centurary. No one should be surprised that it is happening: it is basically a traditional protection racket like scheme. When-ever there is something of value to "protect" they will spring up sooner or later.
In fact I'm sure I read (probably here) about a case where someone traced the protection demand to a person in the same state and ended up in court for taking the law into his own hands (finding the perp and beating him to within in inch of his life, having first failed to get local law enforcement to do anything because they didn't understand what the crime actually was).
A single cookie used that way would simply be blocked by the advertisers so it would not pollute their database any more than just filtering out the cookie from your requests completely.
Another option would be to randomly distribute the cookies between users, but that would need some form of shared location to "trade" the cookie informtation which might have legal problems (as it would give the advertisers a nice juicy target to try prosecute for sabotage) and woudl be similarly easy to circumvent anywhere were there is some extra informtaion to check agains (if you are logged infor instance they can include some saltde hash of your accounts details in the cookie and check that before entering the data into their stores, and there may be easy ways to filter the bad data if not logged in too).
Basically trying to pollute the data is going to be a waste of time long term - the only useful thing you can do is simply not provide them with any data by filtering the HTTP(S) requests appropriately.
I'm still aiting to see "this content will be available to you when our ad server tells us you have clicked something" messages when ad servers fail. It can't be far away, we've already had reasonably high profile sites (The Escapist is one that springs to mind) banning users for mentioning AddBlock and similar tools.
He should have bought a 3D printer and made an extension...
I depends on both partner's attitude to poly-amorous relationships. If all are open and happy with the arrangement then it is a goo thing, but if you lead someone on to thinking you are just fucking them but are in fact fucking others too, then that is morally wrong.
There is nothing wrong with toys. But once they get cheap enough (and the raw materials for the printing do too) there are many people who could get good use out of one. Once they get cheap enough (maybe in a year or two at this rate) I'll have one, though I must admit that for me it will be a toy for the most part. I would use it for making customised gifts (for instance customised versions of http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:30487 and http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:22125 for my sister in law who is nuts on ducks and bats) and so forth as well as just "playing". If you consider what I've spent on computer equipment over the years when I don't need a fraction of that power, these things really aren't going to be that extravagant soon.
For more practical uses: Anyone who does art such as model-making and other crafting could make the device pay for itself easily for prototyping (you'd still need to get thing professionally made if you want the final version in bulk, of course). I have friends who pay far too much for figures for their wargames: if the output is high enough resolution to get reasonable detail and it doesn't need too much smoothing/sanding to get a good look then they could save a packet and get customised models as a free extra nice-to-have. Parents could no doubt find many things to do with one, for or with the kids, assuming the materials used are non-toxic enough. Most people don't need their own ink-on-paper printer, but most homes with a computer have one and make use of it - 3D printers may be in the same position in a few years time.
That only works if the hardware can cope with the new software. Firmware updates are usually intended to support bug fixes not major feature changes, so while a lot of hardware will have room for firmware a little larger than it is provided with (to support bug fixes and small new features) you'll not find a lot that has room for a whole new network stack, either in terms of non-volatile storage to hold the code and RAM needed while it is actually running. Much of that kit was bought years ago (for such amounts of money that it surviving a decade was part of the plan) and back then and memory of most sorts was far more expensive than it is now.
I suspect you have never been exposed to civil service bureaucracy.