I'm finally connected to a Customer Care representative. [Pretty much each sentence in the following was interspersed with long, long times on hold.]
She looked up the call log to get the background info. She insists she doesn't have copies of the agreements, and that I'm supposed to go online and look them up myself. (?!) She says to use a public computer if I have to. I ask how to know what companies have software on my disk. She goes away for a bit, and says she doesn't have that information, and there's nothing they can do. [And there's no supervisor available.] She asks why I don't want to agree to the license. I explain I haven't *seen* it. She says "it just says you won't copyright any of the files". I ignore the mistake, and explain that licensing agreements are long, long documents that say much more than that, and that anyway, the screen says that I have to have *read* it.
Eventually she does manage to connect me to Alan Burley (Manager, Customer Service).
He said he installs things all the time without reading the license agreements. He says I should just do that. I ask if he's really telling me to lie and to agree to legal documents I haven't seen. He says I don't have to, but the only thing he can do is take the computer back. He says that it's the first time this issue has escalated. He does manage to tell me what software is on the system, and says I need to go to those companies' websites to get their agreements. [Never mind that I need the OEM version and that's unlikely to be there.] I ask _him_ what if this was my first computer. He said I would have to go to a library or a friend's house. He really couldn't send me the agreements that Dell insists I read and agree to before using the computer.
He said he couldn't give me his phone number or mailing address, and that he didn't have a boss who could talk to me.
So we've got nothing left to do but send it back. He says he'll send waybills, and will refund the cost of the computer, including the original shipping charge, and won't charge a restocking fee. We will have to pay for the shipping back to the Oakville depot. I figured we could just run it by there ourselves (it's not too far), but he said that that's not possible. (I don't understand why. We'll probably try, anyway.)
It's crazy that it came to this. If they had said *anything* reasonable, we would have been happy to just install Linux on the thing and be done with it. But they were saying that anyone who uses a Dell laptop (with this startup screen) *has* to just lie about having read the licenses, and just blindly agree to them. That's unacceptable enough that it's going back.
Q. What is the patented technology that was at issue in the case? A. The patented technology is a key component of the interactivity available on the Internet today. It allows web page developers to embed interactive programs in Web pages. A browser, equipped with the University of California's patented technology, is able to deliver that interactivity to the user. For example, the technology is used often with stock information, video players, games, virtual real estate tours and other interactive content on the Web. The patent allows the Web to be a platform for fully interactive embedded applications.
Sounds like this has broader implications for the Internet at large which the web community may regret. It is not patenting hyperlinks, but I think it gets close.
and how does this guy plan on marketing his new websites?
You obviously have not seen the late night informercials advertising how you can have your very own internet marketing business, where you can make money fast in only a few hours per day.
Hundreds of thousands of children prescribed the drug Ritalin for hyperactivity might simply be the victims of lax parenting, new evidence suggests. A British scientist has cast doubt on the existence of conditions such as attention deficit disorder (ADD), which will fuel the controversy over the increasing use of Ritalin.
But basically you have to push through whatever mental barrier it is that is hanging you up. but you can do this on some some of a baby step basis. so that it gets easier over time.
By getting the website of Evidence Eliminator linked to someplace in this thread, you know that the spammers site will get slashdotted, smoking his pitiful server, and driving the bandwidth bill into the obscene-osphere
I have visions of the site owner falling to the canyons below in a manner very much remindful of the wiley coyote when he figures this out.
a mix of a incorrectly spec'ed out transistor or something like that, and a bad ground circuit.
connected your PC (laptop) to external power,
you have disabled your phone line,
simultaneously being connected to a grounded peripheral,
(say a printer or an external monitor)
and you are touching a metal part of the PC,
and your phone rings"!
The metal case is obviously a ground, and the phone being disabled probably grounds the phone out. So if there is a probably with a ground, the phone ringer signal grounds out through the person holding the metal ground portion of the case.
these things are basically aluminum foil and balsa wood. and some wires with some pretty high voltage.
they are tethered down with fishing line so that the don't go shattering themselves, crashinfg high voltage lines into the operators. Otherwise there would be no control whatsoever.
The fishing line is usually not visible
the actual power supplies are kept out of sight, and are good old fashioned heavy as S*** high voltage generators with a plug to the wall. think a ten or twenty pound unit punching HV into a 2 or 3 oz "lifter"
Until they can overcome this need to have an external power unit that outweighs the "lifter" by a factor of at least a couple of hundred to one, this will not be a practical technology. Never mind the need for invisible tether strings for navigational control.
Lets face it, you throw enough voltage into something, and you can make almost anything flip.
The Diebold website is no longer up and running, but it
was open to the public and operating at the time of the
mid-term US elections in November 2002. Several stories
about this peculiar and insecure website can be found at:
there is a link where you can download the software files if you want to reverse engineer the software, and see what is going on....
There are a number of stories on this on the site:
Here are the essential link for the download files as seen at http://users.actrix.co.nz/dolly/
Please note the the story above gives links for zip file repair tools, as well as zip file password recovery tools. Use these tools witgh appropriate caution.
TO: Computer Security Experts and True Supporters of Democracy
For an explanation about what this is about... and how you can help see... README.txt
The content here arrived as 7 CDs and so this is how it is presented.
There's a lot of data contained on those CDs not all of it was readable.
The files on this site were copied from an open anonymous and open FTP site run by Diebold election systems.
Diebold - the board of which is made up of nine Republican donors - ran the election in Georgia in November 2002 during which sitting Democrat senatorial and gubernatorial candidates were unseated in a huge swing not shown up in pre election polling.
mostly health issues - specifically a back problem that left him not being able to do 5 hour shows 6 days a week with preps before and after.
I recal one show where he had stepped out the back door for a breath of fresh air, and forgot the construction pit that was out their in the dark. he was a sore puppy after that for a while.
The original back problem was from a fall when he slid off a telephone pole, and decided not to get a collection of very big splinters in his forearms and legs.
He occasionally does guest hosting every few months.
Noory doesn't seem to have the same sense of slighly evil play and the practical joke that Bell has. your milage may vary
Heck, I still have a Microsoft Bob t-shirt from when I worked in retail.
great for halloween, etc. I figure that at some point it will become desirable on ebay or something.
This place actually had a trademark dispute with Microsoft over the MS Bob smiley face because they had a similar trademark smiley face with glasses predating it. If I recall right, they won.
Another random thought: just what we need for saturday mornings: super clippy
No, we will not. The current IPv4 has approximately 4,300,000,000 (4.3 x 10^9) total addresses in its address space. IPv6, however, has 3.4 x 10^38 available addresses.
You know that all of those RFID tags will each be getting their owm IPv6 numbers, just because some idiot thinks it's a neat idea. Or come up with some other real big waste of resources.
Which means that we'll need IPv8 or IPv10 by 2016
Re:Don't be afraid of old age - you lazy @#$*#!!!!
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
As a business owner, a capatialst, this is absolutely fantastic. If you want to be mad, be mad at the person that hired the young buck that will have your job. Successful people aren't intimidated by other successful people. Do you think Bill Gates or George Bush is worried about the new intern?
The RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America. It is not the Recording Industry and Artists Association of America. It says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
are now discovering that they are much better paid when the print their own CDS. A person printing a few thousand CDS can take in all of the profit that used to go to the record companies. This makes it viable to be an independant artist.
5,000 music CDs printed at a cost of 5 bucks each, and sold for 15 dollars is 50,000 dollars profit. In record contracts, usually you have to sell millions before you see an equivalent amount of money. People pay as much for a band t-shirt.
The best act of revenge against the RIAA would be to encouraged this with every local band you know. This would choke them off. Best of all, a good band could grow the business to be really huge, they would just cut out the middle men every step of the way.
If most bands did this, the big record companies would to cut back to their own traditional staples, such as classical music. And even then...
Slashdot Mirror
see the close approach table here - note the the distances on this chart are typically in single digit earth radii.
See also this data on the NEODyS home page
It means that any space alien or mad scientist with a grudge could give it a nudge to do something nasty.
Note also that the orbit simulations link given above seems to be calculated with old data. showing no collision in 2014
-
I'm finally connected to a Customer Care representative. [Pretty much each sentence in the following was interspersed with long, long times on hold.]
I can imagine that all these smart people could probably find out something about mister burley, since people have been finding out things about government officials. Heck he probably even has an account on MSNShe looked up the call log to get the background info. She insists she doesn't have copies of the agreements, and that I'm supposed to go online and look them up myself. (?!) She says to use a public computer if I have to. I ask how to know what companies have software on my disk. She goes away for a bit, and says she doesn't have that information, and there's nothing they can do. [And there's no supervisor available.] She asks why I don't want to agree to the license. I explain I haven't *seen* it. She says "it just says you won't copyright any of the files". I ignore the mistake, and explain that licensing agreements are long, long documents that say much more than that, and that anyway, the screen says that I have to have *read* it.
Eventually she does manage to connect me to Alan Burley (Manager, Customer Service).
He said he installs things all the time without reading the license agreements. He says I should just do that. I ask if he's really telling me to lie and to agree to legal documents I haven't seen. He says I don't have to, but the only thing he can do is take the computer back. He says that it's the first time this issue has escalated. He does manage to tell me what software is on the system, and says I need to go to those companies' websites to get their agreements. [Never mind that I need the OEM version and that's unlikely to be there.] I ask _him_ what if this was my first computer. He said I would have to go to a library or a friend's house. He really couldn't send me the agreements that Dell insists I read and agree to before using the computer.
He said he couldn't give me his phone number or mailing address, and that he didn't have a boss who could talk to me.
So we've got nothing left to do but send it back. He says he'll send waybills, and will refund the cost of the computer, including the original shipping charge, and won't charge a restocking fee. We will have to pay for the shipping back to the Oakville depot. I figured we could just run it by there ourselves (it's not too far), but he said that that's not possible. (I don't understand why. We'll probably try, anyway.)
It's crazy that it came to this. If they had said *anything* reasonable, we would have been happy to just install Linux on the thing and be done with it. But they were saying that anyone who uses a Dell laptop (with this startup screen) *has* to just lie about having read the licenses, and just blindly agree to them. That's unacceptable enough that it's going back.
Maybe the proper person to speak to is Michael Dell
one of the answers is interesting.
Q. What is the patented technology that was at issue in the case?
A. The patented technology is a key component of the interactivity available on the Internet today. It allows web page developers to embed interactive programs in Web pages. A browser, equipped with the University of California's patented technology, is able to deliver that interactivity to the user. For example, the technology is used often with stock information, video players, games, virtual real estate tours and other interactive content on the Web. The patent allows the Web to be a platform for fully interactive embedded applications.
Sounds like this has broader implications for the Internet at large which the web community may regret. It is not patenting hyperlinks, but I think it gets close.
You obviously have not seen the late night informercials advertising how you can have your very own internet marketing business, where you can make money fast in only a few hours per day.
Yes, you can be a spammer - if you sign up todayu!
Scary, No?
August 12th 2003
August 14th, 2003
In that context, I think this qualifies as a really bad bug. [smile]
Ubersoft is a reasonable decent satire of MS, of course.
- Hundreds of thousands of children prescribed the drug Ritalin for hyperactivity might simply be the victims of lax parenting, new evidence suggests. A British scientist has cast doubt on the existence of conditions such as attention deficit disorder (ADD), which will fuel the controversy over the increasing use of Ritalin.
Stumbled across it at the psych watcg blogBut basically you have to push through whatever mental barrier it is that is hanging you up. but you can do this on some some of a baby step basis. so that it gets easier over time.
of course, YMMV
But hey, who am I to be insulted by someone with a lack of little grey cells?
[smile]
(now with configurable blink speed)
By getting the website of Evidence Eliminator linked to someplace in this thread, you know that the spammers site will get slashdotted, smoking his pitiful server, and driving the bandwidth bill into the obscene-osphere
I have visions of the site owner falling to the canyons below in a manner very much remindful of the wiley coyote when he figures this out.
check out the guy's patent: 6,587,846
Some of the diagrams are interesting.
Sort of leads you to the conclusion that you have to have a philosophical system in order to have ethics. your milage may vary.
(say a printer or an external monitor)
- to correctly identify spammers
- to make them pay for the damage they do
- to be compensated for the hassles they cause me and everyone else
- to take away the financial advantage of spamming
- to make an impression on them, preferably with some sort of heavy object
I had advocated spammer licensing in the past, complete with bright orange eartags. I'd probably even volunteer to work as a tagger.;)
- these things are basically aluminum foil and balsa wood. and some wires with some pretty high voltage.
- they are tethered down with fishing line so that the don't go shattering themselves, crashinfg high voltage lines into the operators. Otherwise there would be no control whatsoever.
- The fishing line is usually not visible
- the actual power supplies are kept out of sight, and are good old fashioned heavy as S*** high voltage generators with a plug to the wall. think a ten or twenty pound unit punching HV into a 2 or 3 oz "lifter"
Until they can overcome this need to have an external power unit that outweighs the "lifter" by a factor of at least a couple of hundred to one, this will not be a practical technology. Never mind the need for invisible tether strings for navigational control.Lets face it, you throw enough voltage into something, and you can make almost anything flip.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0302/S00052 .htm
with more horror stories to boot. note that the system was unsecured during the 2002 election cycle.
The Diebold website is no longer up and running, but it was open to the public and operating at the time of the mid-term US elections in November 2002. Several stories about this peculiar and insecure website can be found at:
http://www.blackboxvoting.com
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00064 .htm
there is a link where you can download the software files if you want to reverse engineer the software, and see what is going on....
There are a number of stories on this on the site: Here are the essential link for the download files as seen at http://users.actrix.co.nz/dolly/ Please note the the story above gives links for zip file repair tools, as well as zip file password recovery tools. Use these tools witgh appropriate caution.
TO: Computer Security Experts and True Supporters of Democracy
For an explanation about what this is about... and how you can help see... README.txt
The content here arrived as 7 CDs and so this is how it is presented.
There's a lot of data contained on those CDs not all of it was readable.
as the readme txt says,
Diebold - the board of which is made up of nine Republican donors - ran the election in Georgia in November 2002 during which sitting Democrat senatorial and gubernatorial candidates were unseated in a huge swing not shown up in pre election polling.
mostly health issues - specifically a back problem that left him not being able to do 5 hour shows 6 days a week with preps before and after.
I recal one show where he had stepped out the back door for a breath of fresh air, and forgot the construction pit that was out their in the dark. he was a sore puppy after that for a while.
The original back problem was from a fall when he slid off a telephone pole, and decided not to get a collection of very big splinters in his forearms and legs.
He occasionally does guest hosting every few months.
Noory doesn't seem to have the same sense of slighly evil play and the practical joke that Bell has. your milage may vary
great for halloween, etc. I figure that at some point it will become desirable on ebay or something.
This place actually had a trademark dispute with Microsoft over the MS Bob smiley face because they had a similar trademark smiley face with glasses predating it. If I recall right, they won.
Another random thought: just what we need for saturday mornings: super clippy
Microsoft Bob is not related to Microsoft Bill
No, we will not. The current IPv4 has approximately 4,300,000,000 (4.3 x 10^9) total addresses in its address space. IPv6, however, has 3.4 x 10^38 available addresses.
You know that all of those RFID tags will each be getting their owm IPv6 numbers, just because some idiot thinks it's a neat idea. Or come up with some other real big waste of resources.
Which means that we'll need IPv8 or IPv10 by 2016
[etc]
Congratulations.
Written like a true vampire.
The RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America. It is not the Recording Industry and Artists Association of America. It says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
sums it up nicely
If they continue to grow this market, then the RIAA market will continue to drop.
I was estimated high because YMMV, etc. Lower costs actually make the argument in favor of local artists.
Actually, someone could make money doing seminars on this sort of thing.
5,000 music CDs printed at a cost of 5 bucks each, and sold for 15 dollars is 50,000 dollars profit. In record contracts, usually you have to sell millions before you see an equivalent amount of money. People pay as much for a band t-shirt.
The best act of revenge against the RIAA would be to encouraged this with every local band you know. This would choke them off. Best of all, a good band could grow the business to be really huge, they would just cut out the middle men every step of the way.
If most bands did this, the big record companies would to cut back to their own traditional staples, such as classical music. And even then...
A worthy example to keep those pesky europe-ians in line.