$6 to see a movie that cost $1e8 to make strikes me as an incredibly good deal. What I don't like is paying $1.50 for carbonated sugar water or $3.00 for grease-covered puffed grain.
They sold him a web site that certain customers choose not to visit. At some point, the ISP became aware of the fact that ALL their customer's web sites were categorized as adult sites by a popular brand of censorware. They failed to inform their customers of this fact, though it would have been trivial to do so (assuming the ISP is not run by morons). Those are the facts, as I understand them. My judgement of the situation is that the ISP was dishonest in withholding information, and they did it so they could get more money from people. I call that fraud.
If I buy a car... I rent you a house. It has a septic system (redone just before you start renting the place) and a well. You rent for several years, and one day I realize that septic system is blocked and all the nasty fluid from the septic tank is seeping into the well. I don't tell you, but I keep collecting the same amount of rent from you. It's not MY fault the septic system is bad - the contractors I hired to redo the system obviously did a bad job. Or maybe you were flushing socks. Or maybe the neighbor's tree has roots growing into it. Regardless, the problem is the result of a third party's activities, and I don't tell you.
In both cases (reality and analogy) part of what I'm renting to you (internet acount / house) becomes less valuable (web space / septic system). I don't tell you because that will make you either renegotiate the rates or go somewhere else. Or maybe I figure you know, or should know, so I don't have to tell you. Either way, I am implicitly representing to you that what I am renting to you today is the same as what I rented to you at the first, when I know that is not the case, and my reason for doing so is to keep taking your money. Fraud.
But it would be a completely spurious one. I don't think so. I think sellers (or rentors) are responsible for disclosing nonobvious flaws to buyers (or rentees).
Rather interestingly, the only one of those that has a legal requirement for notification is the Electrical one. In my area, the water utility regularly sends out literature detailing the quantities of a number of chemicals that are in the water. This is required by (I believe) state law.
Anyway, my point is that there are so many nonobvious potential problems with ANYTHING that we buy that we generally have to trust the seller. Why would they make their product less desirable? Because it's the decent, honest thing to do. And dishonesty used to gain money is what I call fraud.
Hmmm...an interesting exercise, and something to add my "How to be annoying" list. For some product you are planning to buy (anything from groceries to gasoline), compile a list of all its possible flaws. Ask the seller about each of them. Demand proof of their claims.
It is not the ISP's responsibility to tell you that random private company 'A' is blocking them. I believe it is every seller's responsibility to disclose known nonobvious flaws in their product. When someone is renting something to me (which is a more apt description - you "rent" part of their internet connection), I expect that nonobivous flaws which develop over time will be disclosed to me as well.
The ISP's site is perfectly open-- if someone else chooses to block it, your problem is with the blocker, not the ISP. My problem is with the ISP misrepresenting their product. The blocker is doing exactly what they said they'd do.
Did the ISP block it? My point was NOT that the ISP was responsible for the blocking; they were not. The ISP was responsible for withholding information from its customers.
If a backhoe cuts the ISP's upstream link and the telco is unable to fix it for three months, that's not the ISP's fault either. By your reasoning, the ISP would be justified in keeping customers in the dark and continuing to collect money from them.
in the Netherlands I freely admit my ignorance of what is appropriate in other jurisdictions. I'd file a civil suit because the criminal justice system is too swamped to handle fraud cases like this one.
...a company had blacklisted our mail-servers... Agreed, this is not the ISP's fault, though the spammers were hopefully hounded to the ends of the earth and forced to consum printouts of every email they sent. HOWEVER, the ISP should notify its customers when they can't provide the service they promised to provide. Otherwise, it's fraud.
...most ISPs have themselves covered... I'm sure there's a provision in my service agreement that says "In case of fraud, you can't sue us." I'm sure it would stand up in court, too.
The phone company makes money by selling directory info. They count on this income when they determine prices. If you deny them this income, then they will set their prices accordingly. It is no different than if they offered you a $3 discount for the privilege of listing your information.
I will take you up on that bet. I will bet my house against a can of coke from you. And I will win, because Red Hat 6.0 did NOT outsell any other OS on the market. If it had, don't you think the business/marketing-savvy people at soon-to-IPO Red Hat Inc would have trumpeted it.
You're right about the derivative, though. Divide the time into picoseconds, and I'll bet there's a picosecond when a copy of Red Hat was being paid for and no copy of Windows was being paid for.
40 hours of "work" is 40 hours of work instead of 70 hours of "work" being evenly split between real work and play.
I'd also suggest that if you know how to do the job right the first time, you don't have to stay until 2:00 am debugging it. I've been on both sides of this. Of course, the boss sees the guy working when he leaves and still there when he comes back the next morning and thinks "what dedication!" Then he sees the guy who is strictly 9-5 and thinks "Here for the paycheck..." Never mind the fact that the all-nighter barely gets working code in by the deadline while the 9-5er codes, tests, debugs, is done with the days work by noon, and spends the rest of the day telling the all-nighter what he did wrong the night before.
Of course, there are those who know what they're doing, have been doing it since they were nine, and STILL stay until 5:00 am. Double these peoples' salary and make them take off two weeks three times a year. Get them any training they want, and find projects for them that will challenge them. Whatever you do, don't let them get away...
I don't think its reasonable for the ISP to tell you though, as there could possibly be hundreds of unknown filters blocking your site, making it impossible for them to know whether you were connected or not
You can't hold the ISP responsible for what they don't know, agreed. But if the ISP knows that its customer's sites will be blocked by a popular brand of censorware, I think that failing to inform customers of that is fraud.
Think about it. All ISPs have the email address of all their customers. They generally have a list set up to inform people of scheduled outages or special offers or whatever. It would have been EASY to send a mass eamil out and say "Your site is probably blocked." Why did they not do so? Because they believed they would lose customers and money. Taking money under false pretenses is fraud, in my book.
Do you ask the water company if their water is free of carcinogens? Do you ask the electrical company if they make their electricity available all the time? Do you ask car dealers if the car they sell you will explode when rear-ended? Do you ask your grocer if their produce has been spit on?
it's not even the isp's fault. The blocking is not the ISP's fault. Failing to inform customers of the it IS the ISP's fault. It's a form of lying, and lying to take someone's money away is fraud.
he could have just faxed the resume to the headhunte Or he could have mailed it, or asked the pony express to deliver it, or used smoke signals, or semaphores. Get a clue. The fact that you had to think up a workaround is evidence that there was a problem. And by your logic, Rob shouldn't worry about it when his server goes down, he should just fax/. to people who request it.
The rest of us are moving into the next century. Hope you like living in the past
But the idea that somebody owes you something because of this is simply ludicrous. The ISP owes him at least part of his money back. He defrauded him in selling him a limited-access web site without telling him it was limited access. And how do you think it would look if the headhunter figured out "Oh, this guy's resume is on an adult site!"
In the past I've had the sterotypical "Here's me, here's my wife and kids, here's what we did last week" site for my extended family to see. That's the only reason I got an account with web space, which cost more than a simple dial-up account. My family uses blocking software. If this same thing had happened to me, it would have defeated the purpose of the web site. If I found out that the ISP was aware of the situation, and that they wouldn't refund part of my money (the cost above a dial-up-only), I would have filed a class action suit on behalf of the customers.
Basically, if somebody's honest and up front and (what a concept) HONORABLE, I have no problem with them. But when they lie or withhold important information to take away my money, I would happily teach them a lesson.
That's not the point. If I have to ask you for your permission to distribute your software, then it is -=*NOT*=- free. Software which is not free can become quite a burden. I could probably buy the rights to the software in question from the original programmer for $100,000 - he gets the money, and I get to be the person that people have to ask for permission. Then I file a lawsuit against EVERYONE who has distributed this software without permission. I would get my $100K back in a hurry - for example, what do you think Red Hat would pay me if I threatened to publicize my lawsuit a day before their IPO?
I know this is not a real likely scenario, but I use it to make the point that software is either free or it isn't, and non-free software has the potential to bite you in the butt if you don't treat it like non-free software.
Obviously I wasn't clear. In replying to the previous poster, I simply meant to point out an error in the previous poster's logic, who said something to the effect that BO2K is inherently bad because it lets you damage a computer. My point was that file sharing also lets you damage a computer. BO2K is just a tool. A powerful, potentially dangerous tool, one that can be used for illegal and unethical purposes, but still a tool.
The simple act of sitting at someone else's computer and deleting a file without permission is potentially a crime and could certainly subject you to civil penalties.
Several posts poke fun at the interviewer's apparent ignorance. I'm convinced that the opposite is true; note how the interviewer seems to "get" Cox's responses pretty quickly. For example, note this exchange:
Q: What's your title with Linux?
A: Um, it doesn't really work that way. We're not organized along corporate lines. We don't have titles.
Q: OK. How should one reference you in terms of your role in the Linux community?
So we go from the "ssumption that Linux is a single hierarchical entity to the understanding that there is a Linux community that refers to itself as such. This looks a lot more to me like the interviewer know's what's up, but is writing for a target audience of Linux-ignorant readers. As far as I can tell, the Ottawa Citizen is not a technical publication...
The interview also seemed pretty Linux-friendly to me. (Paraphrasing) "When will you have a GUI? You have one ALREADY?" Surely you've seen infomercials that use this technique. "If only these Ginsu (tm) knives came with a built-in umbrella... but wait! They do!" I see this throughout the article; the interviewer is asking questions that are the perfect setup to quash some persistent myths about Linux.
OK, kid, before you get too carried away with your own brilliance, tell me why practical geneticists - the people who develop new breeds of animals and new varieties of plants - cross offspring with parents and with each other when trying to get a trait to breed true. I took the original poster to mean "They are increasing one trait, but they are doing it through inbreeding, so eventuallky they will be a bunch of musclebound hemophiliac morons".
...Outlook can't crash NT... It's funny because it's true. Ahahaha.
[Actually Outlook CAN crash NT. But it's funny because most MS nerds THINK it's true!]
P.S. Outlook can't crash NT the same way that a cat can't crash your car. Put a cat into a box to take it to the vet to be neutered and then don't tape the lid down and drive down the road at 55 mph and tell me Outlook can't crash NT.
So the evil terrorist could use the good.22 if he didn't have the evil"AK-47? The intention of the creator determines whether a tool is good"or evil? Liquid fuel rockets (the V2) were invented to kill Londoners - that would make the Saturn V evil. Tracked vehicles (tanks) were invented to kill people - that would make bulldozers evil. Nuclear bombs were invented to prevent a million American soldiers from dying - that would make them good.
A tool is a tool. Good people do good things with them. Bad people do bad things with them.
Right. That difference is that one group says "Here's this powerful tool - but be careful cause hackers could use it against you!" The other group says "Here's this easy-to-use tool. Nobody can use it against you!" As a result, you can defend against BO2K; you can't defend against SMS. Does Norton bother to check that SMS is running on your machine? How about McAfee? Funny, isn't it...
I know this because I worked on the SMS team for 3.5 years from well before 1.0 shipped to a year before 2.0 shipped. They were very concerned about admins using the software to do things the user did not want them to do.
If what you say is true, then the SMS team is TRULY one messed up group. The WHOLE POINT of being a sysadmin is that I am responsible for the network. It goes down, I get nailed. It stays up 24/7/52, I get a nice bonus. My job - my paycheck - my ability to feed my family depends on my control of the network . If SMS were TRULY an admin tool, its programmers would be concerned not with users, but that maybe I can't do everything I want to on my network. They'd put a menu option somewhere labeled "Wipe MBR of and reboot remote system NOW!"
Real power tools don't have blade guards and safety locks. They assume that trained professionals will use them and will be responsible for their use. A chainsaw can be used to murder people, but that doesn't make lumberjacks murderers. Unless you're a tree-hugger:)
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$6 to see a movie that cost $1e8 to make strikes me as an incredibly good deal. What I don't like is paying $1.50 for carbonated sugar water or $3.00 for grease-covered puffed grain.
capacity is not the issue. Bandwidth is.
They sold him a web site that certain customers choose not to visit.
At some point, the ISP became aware of the fact that ALL their customer's web sites were categorized as adult sites by a popular brand of censorware. They failed to inform their customers of this fact, though it would have been trivial to do so (assuming the ISP is not run by morons). Those are the facts, as I understand them. My judgement of the situation is that the ISP was dishonest in withholding information, and they did it so they could get more money from people. I call that fraud.
If I buy a car...
I rent you a house. It has a septic system (redone just before you start renting the place) and a well. You rent for several years, and one day I realize that septic system is blocked and all the nasty fluid from the septic tank is seeping into the well. I don't tell you, but I keep collecting the same amount of rent from you. It's not MY fault the septic system is bad - the contractors I hired to redo the system obviously did a bad job. Or maybe you were flushing socks. Or maybe the neighbor's tree has roots growing into it. Regardless, the problem is the result of a third party's activities, and I don't tell you.
In both cases (reality and analogy) part of what I'm renting to you (internet acount / house) becomes less valuable (web space / septic system). I don't tell you because that will make you either renegotiate the rates or go somewhere else. Or maybe I figure you know, or should know, so I don't have to tell you. Either way, I am implicitly representing to you that what I am renting to you today is the same as what I rented to you at the first, when I know that is not the case, and my reason for doing so is to keep taking your money. Fraud.
But it would be a completely spurious one.
I don't think so. I think sellers (or rentors) are responsible for disclosing nonobvious flaws to buyers (or rentees).
Rather interestingly, the only one of those that has a legal requirement for notification is the Electrical one.
In my area, the water utility regularly sends out literature detailing the quantities of a number of chemicals that are in the water. This is required by (I believe) state law.
Anyway, my point is that there are so many nonobvious potential problems with ANYTHING that we buy that we generally have to trust the seller. Why would they make their product less desirable? Because it's the decent, honest thing to do. And dishonesty used to gain money is what I call fraud.
Hmmm...an interesting exercise, and something to add my "How to be annoying" list. For some product you are planning to buy (anything from groceries to gasoline), compile a list of all its possible flaws. Ask the seller about each of them. Demand proof of their claims.
It is not the ISP's responsibility to tell you that random private company 'A' is blocking them.
I believe it is every seller's responsibility to disclose known nonobvious flaws in their product. When someone is renting something to me (which is a more apt description - you "rent" part of their internet connection), I expect that nonobivous flaws which develop over time will be disclosed to me as well.
The ISP's site is perfectly open-- if someone else chooses to block it, your problem is with the blocker, not the ISP.
My problem is with the ISP misrepresenting their product. The blocker is doing exactly what they said they'd do.
Did the ISP block it?
...a company had blacklisted our mail-servers...
...most ISPs have themselves covered...
My point was NOT that the ISP was responsible for the blocking; they were not. The ISP was responsible for withholding information from its customers.
If a backhoe cuts the ISP's upstream link and the telco is unable to fix it for three months, that's not the ISP's fault either. By your reasoning, the ISP would be justified in keeping customers in the dark and continuing to collect money from them.
in the Netherlands
I freely admit my ignorance of what is appropriate in other jurisdictions. I'd file a civil suit because the criminal justice system is too swamped to handle fraud cases like this one.
Agreed, this is not the ISP's fault, though the spammers were hopefully hounded to the ends of the earth and forced to consum printouts of every email they sent. HOWEVER, the ISP should notify its customers when they can't provide the service they promised to provide. Otherwise, it's fraud.
I'm sure there's a provision in my service agreement that says "In case of fraud, you can't sue us." I'm sure it would stand up in court, too.
Big, bad, evil, internet-using, lawyer-hiring telco employee,
D.R.
The phone company makes money by selling directory info. They count on this income when they determine prices. If you deny them this income, then they will set their prices accordingly. It is no different than if they offered you a $3 discount for the privilege of listing your information.
I will take you up on that bet. I will bet my house against a can of coke from you. And I will win, because Red Hat 6.0 did NOT outsell any other OS on the market. If it had, don't you think the business/marketing-savvy people at soon-to-IPO Red Hat Inc would have trumpeted it.
You're right about the derivative, though. Divide the time into picoseconds, and I'll bet there's a picosecond when a copy of Red Hat was being paid for and no copy of Windows was being paid for.
The enemy of my enemy is my ally.
40 hours of "work" is 40 hours of work instead of 70 hours of "work" being evenly split between real work and play.
I'd also suggest that if you know how to do the job right the first time, you don't have to stay until 2:00 am debugging it. I've been on both sides of this. Of course, the boss sees the guy working when he leaves and still there when he comes back the next morning and thinks "what dedication!" Then he sees the guy who is strictly 9-5 and thinks "Here for the paycheck..." Never mind the fact that the all-nighter barely gets working code in by the deadline while the 9-5er codes, tests, debugs, is done with the days work by noon, and spends the rest of the day telling the all-nighter what he did wrong the night before.
Of course, there are those who know what they're doing, have been doing it since they were nine, and STILL stay until 5:00 am. Double these peoples' salary and make them take off two weeks three times a year. Get them any training they want, and find projects for them that will challenge them. Whatever you do, don't let them get away...
I don't think its reasonable for the ISP to tell you though, as there could possibly be hundreds of unknown filters blocking your site, making it impossible for them to know whether you were connected or not
You can't hold the ISP responsible for what they don't know, agreed. But if the ISP knows that its customer's sites will be blocked by a popular brand of censorware, I think that failing to inform customers of that is fraud.
Think about it. All ISPs have the email address of all their customers. They generally have a list set up to inform people of scheduled outages or special offers or whatever. It would have been EASY to send a mass eamil out and say "Your site is probably blocked." Why did they not do so? Because they believed they would lose customers and money. Taking money under false pretenses is fraud, in my book.
Do you ask the water company if their water is free of carcinogens? Do you ask the electrical company if they make their electricity available all the time? Do you ask car dealers if the car they sell you will explode when rear-ended? Do you ask your grocer if their produce has been spit on?
it's not even the isp's fault.
/. to people who request it.
The blocking is not the ISP's fault. Failing to inform customers of the it IS the ISP's fault. It's a form of lying, and lying to take someone's money away is fraud.
he could have just faxed the resume to the headhunte
Or he could have mailed it, or asked the pony express to deliver it, or used smoke signals, or semaphores. Get a clue. The fact that you had to think up a workaround is evidence that there was a problem. And by your logic, Rob shouldn't worry about it when his server goes down, he should just fax
The rest of us are moving into the next century. Hope you like living in the past
But the idea that somebody owes you something because of this is simply ludicrous.
The ISP owes him at least part of his money back. He defrauded him in selling him a limited-access web site without telling him it was limited access. And how do you think it would look if the headhunter figured out "Oh, this guy's resume is on an adult site!"
In the past I've had the sterotypical "Here's me, here's my wife and kids, here's what we did last week" site for my extended family to see. That's the only reason I got an account with web space, which cost more than a simple dial-up account. My family uses blocking software. If this same thing had happened to me, it would have defeated the purpose of the web site. If I found out that the ISP was aware of the situation, and that they wouldn't refund part of my money (the cost above a dial-up-only), I would have filed a class action suit on behalf of the customers.
Basically, if somebody's honest and up front and (what a concept) HONORABLE, I have no problem with them. But when they lie or withhold important information to take away my money, I would happily teach them a lesson.
That's not the point. If I have to ask you for your permission to distribute your software, then it is -=*NOT*=- free. Software which is not free can become quite a burden. I could probably buy the rights to the software in question from the original programmer for $100,000 - he gets the money, and I get to be the person that people have to ask for permission. Then I file a lawsuit against EVERYONE who has distributed this software without permission. I would get my $100K back in a hurry - for example, what do you think Red Hat would pay me if I threatened to publicize my lawsuit a day before their IPO?
I know this is not a real likely scenario, but I use it to make the point that software is either free or it isn't, and non-free software has the potential to bite you in the butt if you don't treat it like non-free software.
Obviously I wasn't clear. In replying to the previous poster, I simply meant to point out an error in the previous poster's logic, who said something to the effect that BO2K is inherently bad because it lets you damage a computer. My point was that file sharing also lets you damage a computer. BO2K is just a tool. A powerful, potentially dangerous tool, one that can be used for illegal and unethical purposes, but still a tool.
The simple act of sitting at someone else's computer and deleting a file without permission is potentially a crime and could certainly subject you to civil penalties.
Several posts poke fun at the interviewer's apparent ignorance. I'm convinced that the opposite is true; note how the interviewer seems to "get" Cox's responses pretty quickly. For example, note this exchange:
... but wait! They do!" I see this throughout the article; the interviewer is asking questions that are the perfect setup to quash some persistent myths about Linux.
Q: What's your title with
Linux?
A: Um, it doesn't really work
that way. We're not organized
along corporate lines. We
don't have titles.
Q: OK. How should one
reference you in terms of your
role in the Linux community?
So we go from the "ssumption that Linux is a single hierarchical entity to the understanding that there is a Linux community that refers to itself as such. This looks a lot more to me like the interviewer know's what's up, but is writing for a target audience of Linux-ignorant readers. As far as I can tell, the Ottawa Citizen is not a technical publication...
The interview also seemed pretty Linux-friendly to me. (Paraphrasing) "When will you have a GUI? You have one ALREADY?" Surely you've seen infomercials that use this technique. "If only these Ginsu (tm) knives came with a built-in umbrella
OK, kid, before you get too carried away with your own brilliance, tell me why practical geneticists - the people who develop new breeds of animals and new varieties of plants - cross offspring with parents and with each other when trying to get a trait to breed true. I took the original poster to mean "They are increasing one trait, but they are doing it through inbreeding, so eventuallky they will be a bunch of musclebound hemophiliac morons".
yeah - that's like ignoring cancer until it goes away - it happens eventually - you die...
...Outlook can't crash NT...
It's funny because it's true. Ahahaha.
[Actually Outlook CAN crash NT. But it's funny because most MS nerds THINK it's true!]
P.S. Outlook can't crash NT the same way that a cat can't crash your car. Put a cat into a box to take it to the vet to be neutered and then don't tape the lid down and drive down the road at 55 mph and tell me Outlook can't crash NT.
What's your metric for size? Assets, number of employees, annual sales, annual revenues, physical size of buildings, what?
The cDc people are hard-core hackers, creating tools for crackers, and covering all their legal bases.
So the evil terrorist could use the good .22 if he didn't have the evil"AK-47?
The intention of the creator determines whether a tool is good"or evil? Liquid fuel rockets (the V2) were invented to kill Londoners - that would make the Saturn V evil. Tracked vehicles (tanks) were invented to kill people - that would make bulldozers evil. Nuclear bombs were invented to prevent a million American soldiers from dying - that would make them good.
A tool is a tool. Good people do good things with them. Bad people do bad things with them.
Despite similarities, there is a BIG difference.
Right. That difference is that one group says "Here's this powerful tool - but be careful cause hackers could use it against you!" The other group says "Here's this easy-to-use tool. Nobody can use it against you!" As a result, you can defend against BO2K; you can't defend against SMS. Does Norton bother to check that SMS is running on your machine? How about McAfee? Funny, isn't it...
I know this because I worked on the SMS team for 3.5 years from well before 1.0 shipped to a year before 2.0 shipped. They were very concerned about admins using the software to do things the user did not want them to do.
:)
If what you say is true, then the SMS team is TRULY one messed up group. The WHOLE POINT of being a sysadmin is that I am responsible for the network. It goes down, I get nailed. It stays up 24/7/52, I get a nice bonus. My job - my paycheck - my ability to feed my family depends on my control of the network . If SMS were TRULY an admin tool, its programmers would be concerned not with users, but that maybe I can't do everything I want to on my network. They'd put a menu option somewhere labeled "Wipe MBR of and reboot remote system NOW!"
Real power tools don't have blade guards and safety locks. They assume that trained professionals will use them and will be responsible for their use. A chainsaw can be used to murder people, but that doesn't make lumberjacks murderers. Unless you're a tree-hugger