Most of them operate from out of state. (The one that was bugging me was Merrick Bank, out of Utah. (I'm in California.)) I was suing for $3000 for multiple violations of the (Federal) TCPA. In order to sue them, you have to serve them, and there's no legal way to serve an out-of-state company with a small-claims suit.
I talked to a lawyer, and he said that really all I could do was file a claim in Federal court. This would involve heavy-duty lawyer's fees, and basically wouldn't be worth the time.
As far as the "they're only doing their job" argument...I don't buy it. Car thieves are "only doing their job" too...that doesn't mean I'm not happy to see them go to jail. Break out the wire brush.:)
The precedent is already set. The US has long since acknowledged that sometimes speech is more than just speech, sometimes it does something else also.
If I break into your house for the sole purpose of telling you why Dove soap is better than Ivory, it's illegal even though all I'm doing is speaking to you. I can't yell "Fire" in a crowded theater, because I am in effect causing the deaths of everyone who gets trampled.
So yes, I _do_ want the government to regulate spammers. If they want to stand out on a street corner and explain how to MAKE.MONEY.FAST, that's fine. But not in my house, not using my telephone, and not on my computer.
Why should we have to live with junk mail and cold calls either? I mean really, what social good does it serve to have some bozo call me in the middle of dinner to try to sell me insurance? If I want insurance, I can damn well look in the phone book.
My house is private; my telephone and emailbox and snailmail box should be also. It is not okay to harrass someone just because there's no law against it.
So I go get an account from AOL and spam a zillion people. They could then legally flood my mailbox with complaints, but that doesn't mean I have to read them.
No, that's not the problem. Why should I have to request removal at all? I don't have to ask to be protected from having people stand outside my bedroom window with a megaphone telling me to buy their stuff, why should I have to request it in this particular case? The default should be that you can't harrass someone without their permission.
From what I've heard from the encryption community, PGP is useless unless you encrypt your private key with something like a 15 character random sequence of characters that never gets stored in non-volatile memory. I don't want to type in a 15 character random sequence of characters every time I send an email, and quite frankly the only reason I would feel that I _need_ to encrypt mail, is simply to make it harder to detect encrypted messages which contain _real_ information.
Now I don't know if the above part about absolutely having to have a 15 character random password is correct, and frankly I sort of doubt it is. Can someone explain the _reason_ that such a password is required, as opposed to just asserting that anyone who doesn't use it is basically not using encryption at all?
Give each side $X, say $5000, with which to buy hardware and software for the test. Each side can use whatever hardware and software they want, as long as they pay retail for it. _Then_ see who comes out on top.
This more accurately mimics real-life situations: my boss doesn't say, "Here's a $20,000 platform, now put the best OS on it", he says, "I need a really fast rock-solid fileserver. How much will it cost?"
It now says that the sold advertisements will be clearly distinguished from the normal search results. Also, it says that the part about them wanting to keep it quiet couldn't be verified.
It doesn't sound so sinister anymore...they're simply using the search terms to return ads which they hope are relevant to the user, as opposed to, say, slashdot which (I assume) just throws any old ad at any old user.
Well, heck, if they have plant and animal life to make food, why not simply burn the food and use it to power a turbine? Humans are amazingly inefficient when it comes to fuel use.
Personally, I would have preferred it if the machines were using billions of networked human brains as a massively parallel supercomputer. Think about it: your CPU's grow themselves, the computer is highly modular (if a part breaks, throw it out and replace it).
Making sound and aerodynamic maneuvers are just "frosting" on the movie, not a major plot point. Besides, SW was science fantasy, not science fiction. They're allowed to bend the rules a bit.
So, when the fusion generators don't churn out quite enough, they make zillions of human beings and tap their body heat. To keep the humans going, they simply feed them to each other. Look, ma, perpetual motion.
The movie was fun, but I wish the writers had spent a little longer working on world building.
If I set my threshold to, say, 4, then I'm only going to see the "best" postings. But I want some context with those postings. How about automatically raising the score of articles whose replies get raised to a higher level? That way I don't see really insightful comments that are such non-sequiters that I can't understand them.
Slashdot Mirror
...at least, not for most telemarketers.
Most of them operate from out of state. (The one that was bugging me was Merrick Bank, out of Utah. (I'm in California.)) I was suing for $3000 for multiple violations of the (Federal) TCPA. In order to sue them, you have to serve them, and there's no legal way to serve an out-of-state company with a small-claims suit.
I talked to a lawyer, and he said that really all I could do was file a claim in Federal court. This would involve heavy-duty lawyer's fees, and basically wouldn't be worth the time.
As far as the "they're only doing their job" argument...I don't buy it. Car thieves are "only doing their job" too...that doesn't mean I'm not happy to see them go to jail. Break out the wire brush.
--joe
There are quite a few tricks you can use to avoid re-installing Windows 95.
...
That's right! Just a few I can name, off the top of my head, are Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, Slackware,
:)
The precedent is already set. The US has long since acknowledged that sometimes speech is more than just speech, sometimes it does something else also.
If I break into your house for the sole purpose of telling you why Dove soap is better than Ivory, it's illegal even though all I'm doing is speaking to you. I can't yell "Fire" in a crowded theater, because I am in effect causing the deaths of everyone who gets trampled.
So yes, I _do_ want the government to regulate spammers. If they want to stand out on a street corner and explain how to MAKE.MONEY.FAST, that's fine. But not in my house, not using my telephone, and not on my computer.
Why should we have to live with junk mail and cold calls either? I mean really, what social good does it serve to have some bozo call me in the middle of dinner to try to sell me insurance? If I want insurance, I can damn well look in the phone book.
My house is private; my telephone and emailbox and snailmail box should be also. It is not okay to harrass someone just because there's no law against it.
Get real.
So I go get an account from AOL and spam a zillion people. They could then legally flood my mailbox with complaints, but that doesn't mean I have to read them.
No, that's not the problem. Why should I have to request removal at all? I don't have to ask to be protected from having people stand outside my bedroom window with a megaphone telling me to buy their stuff, why should I have to request it in this particular case? The default should be that you can't harrass someone without their permission.
From what I've heard from the encryption community, PGP is useless unless you encrypt your private key with something like a 15 character random sequence of characters that never gets stored in non-volatile memory. I don't want to type in a 15 character random sequence of characters every time I send an email, and quite frankly the only reason I would feel that I _need_ to encrypt mail, is simply to make it harder to detect encrypted messages which contain _real_ information.
Now I don't know if the above part about absolutely having to have a 15 character random password is correct, and frankly I sort of doubt it is. Can someone explain the _reason_ that such a password is required, as opposed to just asserting that anyone who doesn't use it is basically not using encryption at all?
Give each side $X, say $5000, with which to buy hardware and software for the test. Each side can use whatever hardware and software they want, as long as they pay retail for it. _Then_ see who comes out on top.
This more accurately mimics real-life situations: my boss doesn't say, "Here's a $20,000 platform, now put the best OS on it", he says, "I need a really fast rock-solid fileserver. How much will it cost?"
--joe
It now says that the sold advertisements will be clearly distinguished from the normal search results. Also, it says that the part about them wanting to keep it quiet couldn't be verified.
It doesn't sound so sinister anymore...they're simply using the search terms to return ads which they hope are relevant to the user, as opposed to, say, slashdot which (I assume) just throws any old ad at any old user.
--joe
I guess it makes sense, then. But I wouldn't
buy an SGI server; who wants to run Irix if you
don't have to?
--joe
Well, heck, if they have plant and animal life to make food, why not simply burn the food and use it to power a turbine? Humans are amazingly inefficient when it comes to fuel use.
Personally, I would have preferred it if the machines were using billions of networked human brains as a massively parallel supercomputer. Think about it: your CPU's grow themselves, the computer is highly modular (if a part breaks, throw it out and replace it).
Making sound and aerodynamic maneuvers are just "frosting" on the movie, not a major plot point. Besides, SW was science fantasy, not science fiction. They're allowed to bend the rules a bit.
--joe
So, when the fusion generators don't churn out quite enough, they make zillions of human beings and tap their body heat. To keep the humans going, they simply feed them to each other. Look, ma, perpetual motion.
The movie was fun, but I wish the writers had spent a little longer working on world building.
--joe
If I set my threshold to, say, 4, then I'm only
going to see the "best" postings. But I want some
context with those postings. How about
automatically raising the score of articles whose
replies get raised to a higher level? That way
I don't see really insightful comments that are
such non-sequiters that I can't understand them.
--joe
Hmmm...What do you think 1% of MS's gross
receipts is?
;)