I've had pretty good luck by politely requesting: "Add this number to your no-call list"; so far, every telemarketer has understood this request. Some of them have read me a warning that it will take X weeks to propagate.
Odd. I keep getting telemarkets calling on my cell phone, and as a college student, that gets expensive (relatively) quite quickly.
Usually, the "please put me on your do-not-call list" works well, but a few times, I've had to ask for supervisors, and deal with "please do what?" type questions. There was even one man who worked for a newspaper who called me four days in a row, and finally, I ended up cussing at both him and his manager. The calls stopped immediately after that.
No. Nor will I ever be. This site has very little quality news, little respect for journalistic integrity, horrible reliability, and the editors consistently insult their readers.
Uh, doesn't the fact that hotmail accounts that are unused get tons of spam suggest that they're not listening to their customers as much as they are selling their customer lists to spammers?
No, it's more an indication that the popularity of hotmail is such that spammers can generate usernames and guess correctly a sufficient percentage of the time to make random spamming worthwhile.
As a person with a username composed of firstinitial lastname randomnumber, seeing emails with To: headers containing firstinitial lastname 0-100 pretty much verifies that spammers are guessing what they perceive to be common usernames and allowing hotmail to reject any that don't exist (thus verifying their randomly generated list).
It'd suck if this caused a damaging blow to the porn industry. It's probably the best proof out there that the internet *is* a place where people can make money with content without having to use DRM.
Nice claim, but the porn industry does, to some extent, employ DRM in many of the video content they allow to be downloaded.
There are video (porn) files floating around that can only be played a certain number of times (Windows media, not MPEG or AVI), and can not be played after being burned.
and the following field names, that are entered by the user on the form
name address City State Zip Phone cc expi re Cvv2 Bank Name Bank # checking_account_number Routing_number ssn m mn dob dl# userid pass (password) submit (value=Sign In) keepMeSignInOption (checkbox, checked value=1)
This isn't insightful, regardless of what the moderators would like you to believe. This is childish and wrong.
The DMCA acknowledges that some software may be used to break protection measures, but targets those that have no legitimate uses. OCR and word processing suites have many, many legitimate uses, and this one example of an illegal use. The Elcomsoft program had one use: to break encryption. Indeed, there were other uses AFTER that step, but the first step is always illegal, and thus, has no redeeming qualities.
Regardless of the flaws of the DMCA, this type of software will ALWAYS be illegal (even if the DMCA is repealed and replaced with soemthing else), beacuse it's PRIMARY USE is to circumvent copyright protection measures. This is clearly wrong to anyone with a conscience*.
Realistically, Elcomsoft published code meant to illegally break copyright protection. This is unethical. Period.
*: Yes, I realize that some people will claim you must use this code to enable blind to read the Adobe ebooks, or to transfer certain material from reader to reader, but be realistic: a blind person will not buy material they can't use, and there's already transfer mechanisms built into most ebooks and ebook readers. This code was meant primarily to allow piracy, period.
It should be interesting to hear what the "legitimate uses" sited by these people are.
The same as uses that any company would need: when you have an employee who puts a password on something, and is then fired, the data needs to be recovered. It's actually quite common.
They're clearly upset that he performed simple editorial tasks to correct spelling and capitalization. Obviously those are things editors should do, but the slashdot editors are notorious for being unable to spell even trivial words correctly.
Yet another reason that this site will not make it past 2003.
Another useful strategy is to keep local caching nameservers. When shit hits the fan, the local DNS will still be OK until the TTL expires. Eventually it will requery the others, but hopefully that will give those in power time to clean up the mess.
Under the Pressplay deal, Gateway consumers can access the Pressplay service and features in several ways, including a 90-day free subscription to the service that contains 2,000 songs preloaded and available for streaming and downloading..
You get 90 days free when you purchase the system, and in those 90 days you'll be able to access any song PressPlay offers (access = listen to, not burn). The 2,000 on the drive are there to save you time.
Horrible "editing" on Michael's part. The actual article (which I'm sure he didn't read) says:
Under the Pressplay deal, Gateway consumers can access the Pressplay service and features in several ways, including a 90-day free subscription to the service that contains 2,000 songs preloaded and available for streaming and downloading.
So, you can listen to the songs free for 90 days (you probably can not burn them to CD, though), and after that time, you'll probably be locked out from them. Then you can delete them, or subscribe: your choice.
Under the Pressplay deal, Gateway consumers can access the Pressplay service and features in several ways, including a 90-day free subscription to the service that contains 2,000 songs preloaded and available for streaming and downloading.
and
After the free trials, consumers can get the Pressplay service, which provides more than 200,000 songs and additional features, with pricing options starting from $9.95 a month.
So basically, Gateway is allowing Vivendi to put music on the drives, and Vivendi allows users to play it for 90 days. After that time, I'm sure the assumption is that some of the users will like this way of downloading music (knowing that it's correct, that it's virus free, and that somehow the artists are probably benefiting from it) and will continue to use the service.
Yes, the users can access the data. No, they don't have to pay for the first three months.
Or better yet, allow users to moderate stories rather than just comments.
If they start getting a bunch of negative moderations, remove them from the front page, and allow them to show up only in the designated section areas.
I saw the subject of your post, and expected something totally different. Nobody else has said it yet, so here it goes:
So far this week, everyone's complained about the RIAA and the MPAA attempting to enforce their copyrights. The clear example of this is http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/24/20 10223&mode=nested&tid=103. Every time the MPAA and RIAA attempt to enforce their copyrights, the slashdot crew criticizes both: they're evil, monopolistic, capitalistic entities who care only for money rather than the art their businesses are founded on.
Then a movie comes out, and everything changes. The MPAA is evil, until they release Lord of the Rings, and then movies are great. Then the MPAA is evil again, until Harry Potter comes out, and then movies are the best thing ever. Then the MPAA enforces its copyrights, and they're evil. Now another movie comes out, and everyone flip-flops again.
I suppose consistency is too much to ask for on a site dominated by group think.
Maybe a '53 Corvette would be a more apt analogy in the car industry. But of course, no one would want one of those, since it's an idea whose time has passed.
A '53 vette can still drive on the roads, use normal gas from the pump, and hit speeds upwards of 100mph on the highway.
The PDP-8 simply isn't capable of competing with any current hardware; most Palms are more powerful.
Secondly, why the hell did the USNA agree to do this? Where did the orders come from, the commander of the Academy, or someone higher up? Did the RIAA orchestrate the raid, or was it solely the Academy's doing?
Lastly, while I am sure that owning pirated MP3's is against the honor code, why are students found guilty expelled?
The second paragraph is the answer to the first question: a midshipman without honor is of no use to the Navy. Yes, they'll probably be expelled: they broke a law, what else would you expect to happen?
Just because you don't agree with a law does not justify breaking it. If you break the law, and you're at an institution with an honor code, expect to be punished severely.
Many proponents of Open Source are employed by companies who support their ideology. Examples of this were Bruce Perens (formerly at HP) and Linus (employed by transmeta, but most of his work is still focused on the kernel).
Yes, even OSS advocates can have economic factors driving their beliefs.
Would you rather they simply post an "Ask Slashdot?". Would you want a group considering adopting DRM technologies to only hear speakers advocating DRM, or would you want anti-DRM speakers to be heard as well?
When you study things, you find pros and cons. Is there any better way to see two sides of a story than invite both advocates and opponents of a given issue? If Open Source is indeed superior, it will be shown through discussions from both sides. If the presence of MS representatives is sufficient to show disuade Japan from adopting Open Source, then there are obviously faults that need to be fixed.
You don't study technology by gathering together a bunch of advocates: you study technology by pitting advocates against opponents.
And equally important, what kind of computer skills are these kids going to leave the classroom with?
Facing the facts: 90% of those using these computers are not going to be software developers, engineers, or sysadmins. Most of these kids are going to go out and work for relatively little money. They're going to need basic computer skills, and for corporate america, this means familiarity with MS Office.
Putting "Familiarity with Open Office" on a resume is fine if you're a sysadmin, but it won't get you very far if you're trying to work for a company that uses MS software, as most do.
Many, many students will never program anything in their lives. They'll never want to, and they'll never need to.
They need word processing. They might need graphics tools. The vast majority do NOT need compilers, huge bloated developing environments, or editors with obscure keystrokes.
Did you read the article? It essentially states that people are being permanently (FOREVER!!!) banned from XBox live (which they paid for), using the Xbox, which they paid for, if it had a mod chip installed.
The only reason to install a mod chip is to play burned games. Burned games are illegal and cost all game makers a ton of money (remember, the companies LOSE money on the consoles and recover from the software licensing; no licensed software means no profit).
I see no problem with banning people who are breaking the law. Yes, pirating software is breaking the law, be it windows XP for a PC or Halo for the XBox.
Oddly enough, the installer isn't ncurses, it's a program called 'dialog'. It's a kludge that someone jkh beat into the system a while back, and everyone would like to see changed, although efforts have stalled at the moment.
There's thousands of people hammering their servers, costing them money for bandwidth and power, and all you can think about is bypassing their MAIN SOURCE OF REVENUE, because it inconveniences you? That's great.
Way to go mods, +5 for stealing advertising revenues.
Bayesian filters are not "nearly perfect." There are some technologies that are closer, such as support vector machines and LVQ., but bayes isn't going to cut it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had pretty good luck by politely requesting: "Add this number to your no-call list"; so far, every telemarketer has understood this request. Some of them have read me a warning that it will take X weeks to propagate.
Odd. I keep getting telemarkets calling on my cell phone, and as a college student, that gets expensive (relatively) quite quickly.
Usually, the "please put me on your do-not-call list" works well, but a few times, I've had to ask for supervisors, and deal with "please do what?" type questions. There was even one man who worked for a newspaper who called me four days in a row, and finally, I ended up cussing at both him and his manager. The calls stopped immediately after that.
I am a Slashdot subscriber. Are you?
No. Nor will I ever be. This site has very little quality news, little respect for journalistic integrity, horrible reliability, and the editors consistently insult their readers.
Why anyone would PAY for this site is beyond me.
Uh, doesn't the fact that hotmail accounts that are unused get tons of spam suggest that they're not listening to their customers as much as they are selling their customer lists to spammers?
No, it's more an indication that the popularity of hotmail is such that spammers can generate usernames and guess correctly a sufficient percentage of the time to make random spamming worthwhile.
As a person with a username composed of firstinitial lastname randomnumber, seeing emails with To: headers containing firstinitial lastname 0-100 pretty much verifies that spammers are guessing what they perceive to be common usernames and allowing hotmail to reject any that don't exist (thus verifying their randomly generated list).
Yet another reason to move to FreeBSD.
It'd suck if this caused a damaging blow to the porn industry. It's probably the best proof out there that the internet *is* a place where people can make money with content without having to use DRM.
Nice claim, but the porn industry does, to some extent, employ DRM in many of the video content they allow to be downloaded.
There are video (porn) files floating around that can only be played a certain number of times (Windows media, not MPEG or AVI), and can not be played after being burned.
To be fair, Yahoo did a good job of taking these jackasses offline quickly.
r oc essing/forms.pl
i re
m mn
This really isn't that new: it's been discussed on incidents@securiyfocus.com for the past few days. From that list:
The form posts to
http://www.cutandpastescripts.com/cgi-bin/formp
It has the following hidden fields, with the following values
activenumber 428283597791
username xacxac
MfcISAPICommand SingInWelcome
siteid 0
co_partnerId 2
UsingSSL 0
ru
pp
pa1
pa2
pa3
i1 -1
pageType -1
and the following field names, that are entered by the user on the form
name
address
City
State
Zip
Phone
cc
exp
Cvv2
Bank Name
Bank #
checking_account_number
Routing_number
ssn
dob
dl#
userid
pass (password)
submit (value=Sign In)
keepMeSignInOption (checkbox, checked value=1)
This isn't insightful, regardless of what the moderators would like you to believe. This is childish and wrong.
The DMCA acknowledges that some software may be used to break protection measures, but targets those that have no legitimate uses. OCR and word processing suites have many, many legitimate uses, and this one example of an illegal use. The Elcomsoft program had one use: to break encryption. Indeed, there were other uses AFTER that step, but the first step is always illegal, and thus, has no redeeming qualities.
Regardless of the flaws of the DMCA, this type of software will ALWAYS be illegal (even if the DMCA is repealed and replaced with soemthing else), beacuse it's PRIMARY USE is to circumvent copyright protection measures. This is clearly wrong to anyone with a conscience*.
Realistically, Elcomsoft published code meant to illegally break copyright protection. This is unethical. Period.
*: Yes, I realize that some people will claim you must use this code to enable blind to read the Adobe ebooks, or to transfer certain material from reader to reader, but be realistic: a blind person will not buy material they can't use, and there's already transfer mechanisms built into most ebooks and ebook readers. This code was meant primarily to allow piracy, period.
It should be interesting to hear what the "legitimate uses" sited by these people are.
The same as uses that any company would need: when you have an employee who puts a password on something, and is then fired, the data needs to be recovered. It's actually quite common.
They're clearly upset that he performed simple editorial tasks to correct spelling and capitalization. Obviously those are things editors should do, but the slashdot editors are notorious for being unable to spell even trivial words correctly.
Yet another reason that this site will not make it past 2003.
Another useful strategy is to keep local caching nameservers. When shit hits the fan, the local DNS will still be OK until the TTL expires. Eventually it will requery the others, but hopefully that will give those in power time to clean up the mess.
Your interpretation is wrong.
.
Under the Pressplay deal, Gateway consumers can access the Pressplay service and features in several ways, including a 90-day free subscription to the service that contains 2,000 songs preloaded and available for streaming and downloading.
You get 90 days free when you purchase the system, and in those 90 days you'll be able to access any song PressPlay offers (access = listen to, not burn). The 2,000 on the drive are there to save you time.
Horrible "editing" on Michael's part. The actual article (which I'm sure he didn't read) says:
Under the Pressplay deal, Gateway consumers can access the Pressplay service and features in several ways, including a 90-day free subscription to the service that contains 2,000 songs preloaded and available for streaming and downloading.
So, you can listen to the songs free for 90 days (you probably can not burn them to CD, though), and after that time, you'll probably be locked out from them. Then you can delete them, or subscribe: your choice.
Did YOU read the article?
Under the Pressplay deal, Gateway consumers can access the Pressplay service and features in several ways, including a 90-day free subscription to the service that contains 2,000 songs preloaded and available for streaming and downloading.
and
After the free trials, consumers can get the Pressplay service, which provides more than 200,000 songs and additional features, with pricing options starting from $9.95 a month.
So basically, Gateway is allowing Vivendi to put music on the drives, and Vivendi allows users to play it for 90 days. After that time, I'm sure the assumption is that some of the users will like this way of downloading music (knowing that it's correct, that it's virus free, and that somehow the artists are probably benefiting from it) and will continue to use the service.
Yes, the users can access the data. No, they don't have to pay for the first three months.
Or better yet, allow users to moderate stories rather than just comments.
If they start getting a bunch of negative moderations, remove them from the front page, and allow them to show up only in the designated section areas.
I saw the subject of your post, and expected something totally different. Nobody else has said it yet, so here it goes:
0 10223&mode=nested&tid=103. Every time the MPAA and RIAA attempt to enforce their copyrights, the slashdot crew criticizes both: they're evil, monopolistic, capitalistic entities who care only for money rather than the art their businesses are founded on.
So far this week, everyone's complained about the RIAA and the MPAA attempting to enforce their copyrights. The clear example of this is http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/24/2
Then a movie comes out, and everything changes. The MPAA is evil, until they release Lord of the Rings, and then movies are great. Then the MPAA is evil again, until Harry Potter comes out, and then movies are the best thing ever. Then the MPAA enforces its copyrights, and they're evil. Now another movie comes out, and everyone flip-flops again.
I suppose consistency is too much to ask for on a site dominated by group think.
Maybe a '53 Corvette would be a more apt analogy in the car industry. But of course, no one would want one of those, since it's an idea whose time has passed.
A '53 vette can still drive on the roads, use normal gas from the pump, and hit speeds upwards of 100mph on the highway.
The PDP-8 simply isn't capable of competing with any current hardware; most Palms are more powerful.
Secondly, why the hell did the USNA agree to do this? Where did the orders come from, the commander of the Academy, or someone higher up? Did the RIAA orchestrate the raid, or was it solely the Academy's doing?
Lastly, while I am sure that owning pirated MP3's is against the honor code, why are students found guilty expelled?
The second paragraph is the answer to the first question: a midshipman without honor is of no use to the Navy. Yes, they'll probably be expelled: they broke a law, what else would you expect to happen?
Just because you don't agree with a law does not justify breaking it. If you break the law, and you're at an institution with an honor code, expect to be punished severely.
Many proponents of Open Source are employed by companies who support their ideology. Examples of this were Bruce Perens (formerly at HP) and Linus (employed by transmeta, but most of his work is still focused on the kernel).
Yes, even OSS advocates can have economic factors driving their beliefs.
Would you rather they simply post an "Ask Slashdot?". Would you want a group considering adopting DRM technologies to only hear speakers advocating DRM, or would you want anti-DRM speakers to be heard as well?
When you study things, you find pros and cons. Is there any better way to see two sides of a story than invite both advocates and opponents of a given issue? If Open Source is indeed superior, it will be shown through discussions from both sides. If the presence of MS representatives is sufficient to show disuade Japan from adopting Open Source, then there are obviously faults that need to be fixed.
You don't study technology by gathering together a bunch of advocates: you study technology by pitting advocates against opponents.
And equally important, what kind of computer skills are these kids going to leave the classroom with?
Facing the facts: 90% of those using these computers are not going to be software developers, engineers, or sysadmins. Most of these kids are going to go out and work for relatively little money. They're going to need basic computer skills, and for corporate america, this means familiarity with MS Office.
Putting "Familiarity with Open Office" on a resume is fine if you're a sysadmin, but it won't get you very far if you're trying to work for a company that uses MS software, as most do.
Many, many students will never program anything in their lives. They'll never want to, and they'll never need to.
They need word processing. They might need graphics tools. The vast majority do NOT need compilers, huge bloated developing environments, or editors with obscure keystrokes.
Did you read the article? It essentially states that people are being permanently (FOREVER!!!) banned from XBox live (which they paid for), using the Xbox, which they paid for, if it had a mod chip installed.
The only reason to install a mod chip is to play burned games. Burned games are illegal and cost all game makers a ton of money (remember, the companies LOSE money on the consoles and recover from the software licensing; no licensed software means no profit).
I see no problem with banning people who are breaking the law. Yes, pirating software is breaking the law, be it windows XP for a PC or Halo for the XBox.
Oddly enough, the installer isn't ncurses, it's a program called 'dialog'. It's a kludge that someone jkh beat into the system a while back, and everyone would like to see changed, although efforts have stalled at the moment.
The history is here, for further reading.
That's nice of you.
There's thousands of people hammering their servers, costing them money for bandwidth and power, and all you can think about is bypassing their MAIN SOURCE OF REVENUE, because it inconveniences you? That's great.
Way to go mods, +5 for stealing advertising revenues.
Bayesian filters are not "nearly perfect." There are some technologies that are closer, such as support vector machines and LVQ., but bayes isn't going to cut it.