Quite clearly the only sane option is to not sign such a contract. Very few people really NEED a cell phone anyway. We should send a message to the phone companies by not getting one.
My reply expanded beyond just cellphones, which are only one application of this crazy legalese system. Now cellphones I can pardon, since I avoid contracts myself --a reason I have no Android is that if I skirt the contract, I must pay full price for the $500+ phone.
Now, for the ISPs and cable companies, in the United States, you cannot get internet service at all without contracts (you can't get broadband without indirectly accepting the clause saying it's illegal to run servers on port 80, for instance.) The word contract does not only mean "3 years and you get $X off" but the "binding" EULA tradition that American businesses use to shovel our "user rights to buy service without strings attached" away in exchange for the "right to get a service at all."
Everyone else is doing it, so why wouldn't they? Just like the bad old days ( for those that remember it ).
I still think this was the intent all along. Make it 'free' long enough for people to start relying on having data available, introducing even more bandwidth hog services, then after it will be hard for most to back off, start charging "per use" again. They are no better then drug dealers, except they get away with it.
I have included posts on how average filesizes are already going up due to blueray, HD on youtube and so on. Allow me to use borrow your insight to state that it makes perfect sense now. ISP's are probably actively lobbying to sell super-mega-pixel cameras, HD recording on everything and the slow disappearance of streaming content where low bandwidth was enough.
In return, hardware makers forcibly de-shelf perfectly good audio and video recorders every 12 months. Thus, "3... no, 5... no, 7! no, 8! no, 12 megapixels outta be enough for everybody!" hides the fact the highest-MP camera sells best to noobs who always think bigger is better. At $250 year after year, I'd rather be able to buy a cheap old, now unfindable 7MP camera and lower our average facebook upload times. Keep in mind that I know about batch resizing, camera settings and zipping files, but my friends still send huge multiscreenshot emails because they don't know better.
If your provider changes the terms of your service agreement, you have the option of discontinuing service instead.
They do this by sending you an explicit contract with the new terms and state that if you continue to pay, you auto-agree to the new terms. Credit card companies' standard M.O.
To change the terms, they are basically terminating your current agreement and starting a new one. If you chose to leave, you should not have to pay an early termination charge because the provider chose to terminate the agreement.
Nay. In the US, virtually all phone, isp and cable contracts I've signed include a clause stating that terms are subject to change without prior notice. A credit card handling money can't exactly get away with the same, but an ISP charge very little in comparison, and at fixed rates, so they don't lose much. Normally it's worthless to sue for the price of a few bucks tacked on your last few monthly bills due to court costs... but that is useless since contracts also wave away your rights as consumer by forcing you into arbitration. Your only other option is to wait for a greedy lawyer to mail you a letter stating a class action lawsuit entitles you to some near-worthless rewards if you decide to join them on pressing the fraud charges.
Solution? Playstation 2's and their games are now dirt-cheap and there are a lot of good ones, the Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid series being two examples.
When a platform is old, you also have the advantage of knowing if the game you're purchasing was good enough to become a "Greatest Hit." I've bought a few that say it on the box (like Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2.)
If the game is complex, you'll find hundreds of boards with hints and complete walkthroughs (curses, Wild Arms 5!) You can't really cheat if a brand new game that sucks is what ends up in your hands (Next Life for the PC was cryptic and has little "cheat" even 3 years after release.) The point is that cheating by using the internet is encouraged for gameplay and reviews these days, and the PS2 has an established library no tricky backward compatibility for PS1 classics.
Geeks often dismiss new technologies. Such as 3D TVs. 3D is here to stay and you will eventually be using it.
Funny this should be mentioned. I have some "valuable" property in the form of cold dead 1998 VRML 3D technology to sell you:) The reason for failure is that 3D televisions don't work without special glasses, and Sony's expensive screen comes with a single pair. That won't be practical for your wife, kids and friends watching the cool blurry 3D soccer game. Are we counting on unmarried, single-person residences to base the success of 3D market on? It will be as niche as 3D theaters unless something is done to avoid the glasses. Well, VRML didn't need them, and it still died along with almost all VR hopes back in the nineties.
Kinect is new VR, so I'm crossing my fingers for it to be a durable rebirth of VR. However, if the XBox ever needs me buy extra glasses in a future release, then forget it.
But anyone who was staying below the cap before it existed (probably most people) will not be negatively impacted and in fact will benefit from increased speeds.
Until entities like youtube go from 480 to HD on all their videos (either by forced upgrade or general collusion on part of the content makers.) Eventually you cannot find anyone producing low-bandwidth items. Think of how many 1megapixel portable cameras are sold today. Now compare to all those pesky, huge 12Megapixel photos people e-mail you un-resized.
The non-unlimited services that ISPs are moving towards will be increasing my monthly fees thanks to the collective ignorance of content creators. It all adds up to a smaller wallet if I'm a John Doe who can't tell 0.5 hours of his favorite non-HD series comes out to at least 100MB.
Chrome/Chromium still doesn't have an adblocker that actually blocks ads instead of just hiding them. [...]
Once THAT level of functionality in an adblocker arrives with Chrome/Chromium, only then will I consider switching.
I don't know if companies working on open source and individuals scratching an itch have started any project to *merge* FF and Chromium, but that would be the next logical step if we want official AdBlock+ support while keeping Chromium features.
Engines are complex, but so are hacks^Wcommunity efforts. The effort is "monumental" and all, but I've seen whole OS's get "merged" thanks to forks. Linux has VirtualBox and Windows has Portable ubuntu (co-linux)
Picking the one simpler codebase out of FF and Chromium and dumping extensions altogether... while hardcoding hooks for Adblock functionality sounds like a good first goal for proof-of-concept / purists. Look at smaller browsers like Midori, which don't care to only implement certain parts. AdBlock extension is smaller than the entire FF extension and / or HTML parsers, and supporting only AdBlock's functionality means your engine doesn't have to implement 100% of the crazy network / Direct2D / Firefox 4.0 beta stuff.
I Google myself from time to time and am shocked to find profiles on websites I haven't visited in ages.
I hate finding profiles on websites I have NEVER visited. Data miners like pipl, mylife, intelius, cogmap and spock have created profiles for me based on stuff as simple as a friend's blog containing my full name. It's annoying when you can't take the stuff down because technically you don't own the data. It's more annoying when I just want my cool stuff to float up so employers see my real-life achievements. Apparently the above crawlers don't give a hoot about factoring achievements in, so they just displace good stuff away while they put useless crap at the top. I've hidden data trying to float down old and irrelevant stuff (2003 friendster profile!) down into oblivion.
Oh, regarding the article, it's pointless to dump data in parts. Imagine the Feds running an investigation to solve a murder, but finding only an IP from Google because their policy were to "minimize trouble" to people they otherwise ruthlessly milked. I disagree with organized spying, but partial collection leads to dead-ends. Deadends cause otherwise assuring FBI documentaries to end in "killer is still at large":)
It's a widely held, yet wrong, belief that all NTSC transmission had to stop. Some still remains, for like 1% of the population.
As of December 2009 in New York City, the QVC station was still transmitting in analog. Pretty interesting since they are a shopping channel, so their programming is 100% ads (live infomercials you call to buy before the show ends.) The sad reality is that the shopping channel might still be working a 12 months after the legal lights-out. None of the other analog channels are trasmitting even the post-deadline loop for people who remained in... mental hibernation... how to get their digital act together so they can re-join our lucrative TV-ad based industry.
Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
I'm going all Freddy Krueger on whatever company ad I see when that happens. Or just scare Rakishi into patenting this so no company can implement it when the tech is ready;)
Hmm, maybe not all then, but Lexmark printers are also guilty of installing must-have services. My 3 year old Z1420 installs 2. It also goes fails if you disable those, or at least bidirectional printing (to allow the otherwise low-ink dialog from requiring a local click that kills the functionality of remote print-jobs.) My printer croaks up license agreements on the printer-connected PC whenever I add a remote PC, and like every USB printer in existance, randomly fails to be recognized as 'Connected'"
Anyway, the drivers aren't huge like HP's at least.
the way to deliver the printed ads is ONLY done by + overwriting your default HP test page image, which you won't care to waste ink for anyway + overwriting the annoying cartridge alignment page, which these days doesn't even need user feedback to align each new ink, so I have little idea why it's printed.
BTW: I won't be surprised when home routers start to be used to spew ads per wireless session, seeing how they already have an open connection and control over what your browser sees. Perhaps they'll use timed redirects, popups or frames. Ads are making their way into every form of media we use, including our self-produced stuff.
Sadly, ink itself dries up when stored, and we won't be able to stock it if HP just says "we no longer sell the non-ad printer ink, and our chip tech won't let you refill your old cartridges generically." Other than that, it's time to start a stockpile of "dumb" devices that will just leave us alone.
The patent excerpt even states "Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network" without immediately clarifying the single click. The patent probably clarifies the focus on the 1-click part and avoids otherwise obvious issues with the excerpts lack of precision.
A university where I worked had us under the VP of Administrative services. This included accounts payable, employee management and student-related departments like bursars offices.
I worked at a Fortune 500 providing stock exchange data to banks and trader firms via Unix servers and a Windows.NET front-end. Yet, our division was not separate from Sales, which was amusing. It meant we tried damn hard to keep clients happy and "their" sales reps informed of trouble.
If the antivirus reported suspicious activity that wasn't stopped, then UAC alone saved you. It is not the first time that the AV fails to "detect" malicious use of scripts, since it has no AI; just authenticating to allow UAC to run the command would have been enough to start the true system-rooting process which may or may not be blocked by the AV depending on what executables are chained to cmd.exe's work.
Well, it's aimed at people who already have a USB keyboard, a USB mouse and a USB microphone.
I even bought a USB adapter for my Model M. You might love you some PS/2, but you're about the only one left.
PS/2 is not a dead standard; it's sticky like IE6. I moved to USB less than a year ago, but not my microphone or speakers. Most PS2 un-necessary equipment from techs either gets stored nearby for emergency use, or handed to non-technical relatives along with our old PCs.
Repurposed file or print servers on Pentium IIIs near 1/2Ghz speeds make common cameos on/. comments. They are old enough to need PS/2 for BIOS configuration screens; and also lack USB boot support.
Seems to me that we used to start hearing rumblings about the next big thing about 3 or 4 years into a console. I haven't heard anything at all about a successor to any of these machines.
I'm sure those 2008-2009 US jobless claim bombs affected headcounts for project Natale's and Sony's Wii-killer. The worldwide recession has delayed the progress of plenty of "serious" research, let alone entertainment. Just like with everything else this past two years.
People who dont use twitter, you mean. What else would you call "the act of posting to twitter"?
The same as "the act of posting to slashdot";) Posts are posts here and on twitter, even if there they count more as updates to some mythical first post we're all born from.
You can do better than that. Tie the receipt with the temp code to the transaction that generated it. If they paid by credit card, you've got a name and identity.
Oh, my apologies. I was confused reading your post because I mis-interpreted receipt as something other than a business sales receipt log and moved to the home consumer perspective in my post.
You are right about the transaction logging. I just meant that mac address logging is pretty damn lacking in the home router front. I sometimes experiment removing all security so I can build blacklists instead of whitelists. I let my neighbors log in and can read their connected MAC addresses. If I am away from home and they log off, only IP's are recorded and I miss the chance to blacklist the MAC for some pesky blackberries, wireless printers, laptops and wireless motherboards, cell phones and portable videogame systems.
It was easier for me to just turn off WPA2 than to give my string or allow MAC addresses for some one-time guests the other day. Even WPS is a pain in the neck.
I think your idead of receipts is wonderful. What we need is for a company to put one Guest Button on every router, with a big juicy text LCD screen. You push the button and the LCD gives you a SHORT temp password (aiming 64-char keys would defeat the purpose) with its own LAN for the people in front of you. After a set period (configurable in your router) the lan disappears, and the MAC addresses are logged in case you want to add them to your security.
My DLink 825 is proof that companies trust users to do pretty complext stuff on consumer routers, down to IPv6 configuration, DHCP management and access rules. I'm suggesting just another feature that will sell your routers as user friendly.
Now would be a good time to have a quote on how much of flash out there is video (i.e: youtube), versus ads.
I would be willing to bet that ads win. Just look at your average non-text ads video site with plenty of performance-sapping animations and a single "target vid" payload that you actually came to watch. I don't think I've ever seen any ad asking me to "upgrade" from XP's OEM install of flash 6. But CNN and pr0n sites nag and certain Newgrounds animations fail silently till you get flash 7 or 8. Versions 9 and 10 only provide better performance and without them only the most elitist video sites boot you out.
Since broadband adoption via "unlimited service" lures was an industry success, companies have wanted this de-coupling from "unlimited" expectations for years. They only needed a strong business to take the first step before following suit.
Without any monthly fee reduction to us subscribers, ISP binary USENET was killed not long ago in a similar chain reaction. I know that a few ISP's have revealed caps and similar plans, but nobody is copying eagerly them yet. How long will it be till ISP's bring this cellphone initiative into our de-facto world of DSL and cable?
I think the interpretation of the law is wrong in that case because there are many situations where it is appropriate to append../../ to a URL. How is the person browsing the site expected to know the difference?
This is a very specific case, but your question's answer is: The GUI does not prevent them from entering the special string. However, the GUI discourages this by providing a perfectly usable Home/Forward/Back button [even "Up" in Konqueror]. For most non-savvy John Doe users like the convicted "criminal," pages have their own hyperlinks and pictures to navigate the site.
In dumbing down interfaces and savvy expectations, the UK and anyone else can criminalize and label as misuse what is technologically allowed by the system. Example? AT&T plus "illegal" iPhone tethering.
In other words, it's costing the company money and pissing people off.
Which is exactly what I'm trying to do.
Um, no. You're only exacting revenge that way, like any other irate customer... the company does not really "lose" money until you tie up someone other than minimum wage support monkeys located in india. WE are trying to force change for the better. Pissing people off at the low end of the totem pole isn't going to get someone a president like Steve Jobs on the line to fix your problem.
Parent has a point. From what I understand, the emails were obtained through simple URL rewriting. The information was already public. If this is criminal, so is anybody who edits the URL bar to go somewhere that the site owner did not explicitly link to.
Just a day ago someone posted about a UK conviction of a man for appending this to a URL:
../../
So, yes. The world can deem you a criminal for using features of technology that are supposed to be obscure; it doesn't make it any less of an attack for doing so. Getting caught with your hand in a cookie jar just is bad, but not necessarily for morally righteous reasons.
Knowledge of science doesn't mean the whole world is your playground (paraphrased from Fringe)
Slashdot Mirror
Quite clearly the only sane option is to not sign such a contract. Very few people really NEED a cell phone anyway. We should send a message to the phone companies by not getting one.
My reply expanded beyond just cellphones, which are only one application of this crazy legalese system. Now cellphones I can pardon, since I avoid contracts myself --a reason I have no Android is that if I skirt the contract, I must pay full price for the $500+ phone.
Now, for the ISPs and cable companies, in the United States, you cannot get internet service at all without contracts (you can't get broadband without indirectly accepting the clause saying it's illegal to run servers on port 80, for instance.) The word contract does not only mean "3 years and you get $X off" but the "binding" EULA tradition that American businesses use to shovel our "user rights to buy service without strings attached" away in exchange for the "right to get a service at all."
Everyone else is doing it, so why wouldn't they? Just like the bad old days ( for those that remember it ).
I still think this was the intent all along. Make it 'free' long enough for people to start relying on having data available, introducing even more bandwidth hog services, then after it will be hard for most to back off, start charging "per use" again. They are no better then drug dealers, except they get away with it.
I have included posts on how average filesizes are already going up due to blueray, HD on youtube and so on. Allow me to use borrow your insight to state that it makes perfect sense now. ISP's are probably actively lobbying to sell super-mega-pixel cameras, HD recording on everything and the slow disappearance of streaming content where low bandwidth was enough.
In return, hardware makers forcibly de-shelf perfectly good audio and video recorders every 12 months. Thus, "3... no, 5... no, 7! no, 8! no, 12 megapixels outta be enough for everybody!" hides the fact the highest-MP camera sells best to noobs who always think bigger is better. At $250 year after year, I'd rather be able to buy a cheap old, now unfindable 7MP camera and lower our average facebook upload times. Keep in mind that I know about batch resizing, camera settings and zipping files, but my friends still send huge multiscreenshot emails because they don't know better.
If your provider changes the terms of your service agreement, you have the option of discontinuing service instead.
They do this by sending you an explicit contract with the new terms and state that if you continue to pay, you auto-agree to the new terms. Credit card companies' standard M.O.
To change the terms, they are basically terminating your current agreement and starting a new one. If you chose to leave, you should not have to pay an early termination charge because the provider chose to terminate the agreement.
Nay. In the US, virtually all phone, isp and cable contracts I've signed include a clause stating that terms are subject to change without prior notice. A credit card handling money can't exactly get away with the same, but an ISP charge very little in comparison, and at fixed rates, so they don't lose much. Normally it's worthless to sue for the price of a few bucks tacked on your last few monthly bills due to court costs... but that is useless since contracts also wave away your rights as consumer by forcing you into arbitration. Your only other option is to wait for a greedy lawyer to mail you a letter stating a class action lawsuit entitles you to some near-worthless rewards if you decide to join them on pressing the fraud charges.
Solution? Playstation 2's and their games are now dirt-cheap and there are a lot of good ones, the Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid series being two examples.
When a platform is old, you also have the advantage of knowing if the game you're purchasing was good enough to become a "Greatest Hit." I've bought a few that say it on the box (like Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2.)
If the game is complex, you'll find hundreds of boards with hints and complete walkthroughs (curses, Wild Arms 5!) You can't really cheat if a brand new game that sucks is what ends up in your hands (Next Life for the PC was cryptic and has little "cheat" even 3 years after release.) The point is that cheating by using the internet is encouraged for gameplay and reviews these days, and the PS2 has an established library no tricky backward compatibility for PS1 classics.
Geeks often dismiss new technologies. Such as 3D TVs. 3D is here to stay and you will eventually be using it.
Funny this should be mentioned. I have some "valuable" property in the form of cold dead 1998 VRML 3D technology to sell you :)
The reason for failure is that 3D televisions don't work without special glasses, and Sony's expensive screen comes with a single pair. That won't be practical for your wife, kids and friends watching the cool blurry 3D soccer game. Are we counting on unmarried, single-person residences to base the success of 3D market on? It will be as niche as 3D theaters unless something is done to avoid the glasses. Well, VRML didn't need them, and it still died along with almost all VR hopes back in the nineties.
Kinect is new VR, so I'm crossing my fingers for it to be a durable rebirth of VR. However, if the XBox ever needs me buy extra glasses in a future release, then forget it.
But anyone who was staying below the cap before it existed (probably most people) will not be negatively impacted and in fact will benefit from increased speeds.
Until entities like youtube go from 480 to HD on all their videos (either by forced upgrade or general collusion on part of the content makers.) Eventually you cannot find anyone producing low-bandwidth items. Think of how many 1megapixel portable cameras are sold today. Now compare to all those pesky, huge 12Megapixel photos people e-mail you un-resized.
The non-unlimited services that ISPs are moving towards will be increasing my monthly fees thanks to the collective ignorance of content creators. It all adds up to a smaller wallet if I'm a John Doe who can't tell 0.5 hours of his favorite non-HD series comes out to at least 100MB.
Chrome/Chromium still doesn't have an adblocker that actually blocks ads instead of just hiding them. [...]
Once THAT level of functionality in an adblocker arrives with Chrome/Chromium, only then will I consider switching.
I don't know if companies working on open source and individuals scratching an itch have started any project to *merge* FF and Chromium, but that would be the next logical step if we want official AdBlock+ support while keeping Chromium features.
Engines are complex, but so are hacks^Wcommunity efforts. The effort is "monumental" and all, but I've seen whole OS's get "merged" thanks to forks. Linux has VirtualBox and Windows has Portable ubuntu (co-linux)
Picking the one simpler codebase out of FF and Chromium and dumping extensions altogether... while hardcoding hooks for Adblock functionality sounds like a good first goal for proof-of-concept / purists. Look at smaller browsers like Midori, which don't care to only implement certain parts. AdBlock extension is smaller than the entire FF extension and / or HTML parsers, and supporting only AdBlock's functionality means your engine doesn't have to implement 100% of the crazy network / Direct2D / Firefox 4.0 beta stuff.
I Google myself from time to time and am shocked to find profiles on websites I haven't visited in ages.
I hate finding profiles on websites I have NEVER visited. Data miners like pipl, mylife, intelius, cogmap and spock have created profiles for me based on stuff as simple as a friend's blog containing my full name. It's annoying when you can't take the stuff down because technically you don't own the data. It's more annoying when I just want my cool stuff to float up so employers see my real-life achievements. Apparently the above crawlers don't give a hoot about factoring achievements in, so they just displace good stuff away while they put useless crap at the top. I've hidden data trying to float down old and irrelevant stuff (2003 friendster profile!) down into oblivion.
Oh, regarding the article, it's pointless to dump data in parts. Imagine the Feds running an investigation to solve a murder, but finding only an IP from Google because their policy were to "minimize trouble" to people they otherwise ruthlessly milked. I disagree with organized spying, but partial collection leads to dead-ends. Deadends cause otherwise assuring FBI documentaries to end in "killer is still at large" :)
armanox is watching on a translator station, which still transmits analog?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_relay_station#Digital_transition
It's a widely held, yet wrong, belief that all NTSC transmission had to stop. Some still remains, for like 1% of the population.
As of December 2009 in New York City, the QVC station was still transmitting in analog. Pretty interesting since they are a shopping channel, so their programming is 100% ads (live infomercials you call to buy before the show ends.) The sad reality is that the shopping channel might still be working a 12 months after the legal lights-out. None of the other analog channels are trasmitting even the post-deadline loop for people who remained in ... mental hibernation... how to get their digital act together so they can re-join our lucrative TV-ad based industry.
Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
I'm going all Freddy Krueger on whatever company ad I see when that happens. Or just scare Rakishi into patenting this so no company can implement it when the tech is ready ;)
Hmm, maybe not all then, but Lexmark printers are also guilty of installing must-have services. My 3 year old Z1420 installs 2. It also goes fails if you disable those, or at least bidirectional printing (to allow the otherwise low-ink dialog from requiring a local click that kills the functionality of remote print-jobs.) My printer croaks up license agreements on the printer-connected PC whenever I add a remote PC, and like every USB printer in existance, randomly fails to be recognized as 'Connected'"
Anyway, the drivers aren't huge like HP's at least.
the way to deliver the printed ads is ONLY done by
+ overwriting your default HP test page image, which you won't care to waste ink for anyway
+ overwriting the annoying cartridge alignment page, which these days doesn't even need user feedback to align each new ink, so I have little idea why it's printed.
BTW: I won't be surprised when home routers start to be used to spew ads per wireless session, seeing how they already have an open connection and control over what your browser sees. Perhaps they'll use timed redirects, popups or frames. Ads are making their way into every form of media we use, including our self-produced stuff.
Sadly, ink itself dries up when stored, and we won't be able to stock it if HP just says "we no longer sell the non-ad printer ink, and our chip tech won't let you refill your old cartridges generically." Other than that, it's time to start a stockpile of "dumb" devices that will just leave us alone.
I for one applaud amazon's efforts at destroying the patent system by demonstrating the extent of its absurdity.
Those of you too young to be familiar with Amazon's 1999 One-Click ordering patent should have a look at the links.
The patent excerpt even states "Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network" without immediately clarifying the single click. The patent probably clarifies the focus on the 1-click part and avoids otherwise obvious issues with the excerpts lack of precision.
A university where I worked had us under the VP of Administrative services. This included accounts payable, employee management and student-related departments like bursars offices.
I worked at a Fortune 500 providing stock exchange data to banks and trader firms via Unix servers and a Windows .NET front-end. Yet, our division was not separate from Sales, which was amusing. It meant we tried damn hard to keep clients happy and "their" sales reps informed of trouble.
If the antivirus reported suspicious activity that wasn't stopped, then UAC alone saved you. It is not the first time that the AV fails to "detect" malicious use of scripts, since it has no AI; just authenticating to allow UAC to run the command would have been enough to start the true system-rooting process which may or may not be blocked by the AV depending on what executables are chained to cmd.exe's work.
Well, it's aimed at people who already have a USB keyboard, a USB mouse and a USB microphone.
I even bought a USB adapter for my Model M. You might love you some PS/2, but you're about the only one left.
PS/2 is not a dead standard; it's sticky like IE6. I moved to USB less than a year ago, but not my microphone or speakers. Most PS2 un-necessary equipment from techs either gets stored nearby for emergency use, or handed to non-technical relatives along with our old PCs.
Repurposed file or print servers on Pentium IIIs near 1/2Ghz speeds make common cameos on /. comments. They are old enough to need PS/2 for BIOS configuration screens; and also lack USB boot support.
Seems to me that we used to start hearing rumblings about the next big thing about 3 or 4 years into a console. I haven't heard anything at all about a successor to any of these machines.
I'm sure those 2008-2009 US jobless claim bombs affected headcounts for project Natale's and Sony's Wii-killer. The worldwide recession has delayed the progress of plenty of "serious" research, let alone entertainment. Just like with everything else this past two years.
People who dont use twitter, you mean. What else would you call "the act of posting to twitter"?
The same as "the act of posting to slashdot" ;)
Posts are posts here and on twitter, even if there they count more as updates to some mythical first post we're all born from.
You can do better than that. Tie the receipt with the temp code to the transaction that generated it. If they paid by credit card, you've got a name and identity.
Oh, my apologies. I was confused reading your post because I mis-interpreted receipt as something other than a business sales receipt log and moved to the home consumer perspective in my post.
You are right about the transaction logging. I just meant that mac address logging is pretty damn lacking in the home router front. I sometimes experiment removing all security so I can build blacklists instead of whitelists. I let my neighbors log in and can read their connected MAC addresses. If I am away from home and they log off, only IP's are recorded and I miss the chance to blacklist the MAC for some pesky blackberries, wireless printers, laptops and wireless motherboards, cell phones and portable videogame systems.
It was easier for me to just turn off WPA2 than to give my string or allow MAC addresses for some one-time guests the other day. Even WPS is a pain in the neck.
I think your idead of receipts is wonderful. What we need is for a company to put one Guest Button on every router, with a big juicy text LCD screen. You push the button and the LCD gives you a SHORT temp password (aiming 64-char keys would defeat the purpose) with its own LAN for the people in front of you. After a set period (configurable in your router) the lan disappears, and the MAC addresses are logged in case you want to add them to your security.
My DLink 825 is proof that companies trust users to do pretty complext stuff on consumer routers, down to IPv6 configuration, DHCP management and access rules. I'm suggesting just another feature that will sell your routers as user friendly.
Now would be a good time to have a quote on how much of flash out there is video (i.e: youtube), versus ads.
I would be willing to bet that ads win. Just look at your average non-text ads video site with plenty of performance-sapping animations and a single "target vid" payload that you actually came to watch. I don't think I've ever seen any ad asking me to "upgrade" from XP's OEM install of flash 6. But CNN and pr0n sites nag and certain Newgrounds animations fail silently till you get flash 7 or 8. Versions 9 and 10 only provide better performance and without them only the most elitist video sites boot you out.
Since broadband adoption via "unlimited service" lures was an industry success, companies have wanted this de-coupling from "unlimited" expectations for years. They only needed a strong business to take the first step before following suit.
Without any monthly fee reduction to us subscribers, ISP binary USENET was killed not long ago in a similar chain reaction. I know that a few ISP's have revealed caps and similar plans, but nobody is copying eagerly them yet. How long will it be till ISP's bring this cellphone initiative into our de-facto world of DSL and cable?
I think the interpretation of the law is wrong in that case because there are many situations where it is appropriate to append ../../ to a URL. How is the person browsing the site expected to know the difference?
This is a very specific case, but your question's answer is: The GUI does not prevent them from entering the special string. However, the GUI discourages this by providing a perfectly usable Home/Forward/Back button [even "Up" in Konqueror]. For most non-savvy John Doe users like the convicted "criminal," pages have their own hyperlinks and pictures to navigate the site.
In dumbing down interfaces and savvy expectations, the UK and anyone else can criminalize and label as misuse what is technologically allowed by the system. Example? AT&T plus "illegal" iPhone tethering.
In other words, it's costing the company money and pissing people off.
Which is exactly what I'm trying to do.
Um, no. You're only exacting revenge that way, like any other irate customer... the company does not really "lose" money until you tie up someone other than minimum wage support monkeys located in india.
WE are trying to force change for the better. Pissing people off at the low end of the totem pole isn't going to get someone a president like Steve Jobs on the line to fix your problem.
Parent has a point. From what I understand, the emails were obtained through simple URL rewriting. The information was already public. If this is criminal, so is anybody who edits the URL bar to go somewhere that the site owner did not explicitly link to.
Just a day ago someone posted about a UK conviction of a man for appending this to a URL:
So, yes. The world can deem you a criminal for using features of technology that are supposed to be obscure; it doesn't make it any less of an attack for doing so. Getting caught with your hand in a cookie jar just is bad, but not necessarily for morally righteous reasons.
Knowledge of science doesn't mean the whole world is your playground (paraphrased from Fringe)