I just posted the following to the Toysmart Feedback Page. Feel free to copy/paste my message - let the departing officers of this failed business know that they will not get off the hook so easily. So, you think you can quietly sell of my private information just because your incompetence lead to your failure? I will not give any private information to any web sites or businesses with known associations to the following privacy policy violators, at anytime in the future: David N. Lord Mark S. Reese John Puckett Roy Liu Sincerely, A Former Customer CC: slashdot.org
Actually, by the power of the same court that will be involved in this case, you can.
If you violate Microsoft's license, you're liable for mostly civil penalties. The Federal Bankruptcy court can wipe out civil liability. So, you "agree" to not redistribute Win2000 Pro, then do so anyway. Get a greasy lawyer to deal with the criminal aspects, if any and then just sit stoicly through the civil damages trial. Upon losing, you emerge from the state civil trial and announce your impending bankruptcy. Poof! You're out of debt, including the debt recently acquired at the hands of a state Civil jury.
DISCLAIMER: I'M NOT A LAWYER. Consult a competent attorney before taking my advice, or, beter yet don't take my advice.
Can you really be sued for having your domain hijacked? I like the fact that these stories are posted, but it's really getting boring -- all of them ending with the same question, "Can you really be sued for X?" Come now, we're smarter than that... we know that there's a big difference between being sued and losing a suit. We are smart enough to know that anybody can be sued for anything. We are also smart enough to know that many lawsuits get thrown out because they are trivial or harrasing.
Nobody has said it yet, but this article comes close.
The Music industry has made billions because we have allowed them to. We were willing to pay $15 for a CD, not even knowing if we liked the music therein, because there was no other option.
The RIAA can't put this cat back in the bag. More and more people know that there is an alternative. I suggest that even if they could control the all of the potential current and future electronic pirating technologies (which they won't), an educated populace who *knows* that there's another way will no longer pay $15 for that CD.
The music is ours, and the Music Industry control has been at our approval all along, in the absense of any other acceptable media.
'Course, it might take a few years. :-)
Re:What's the best way to sell a high-value domain
on
UNIX.com On eBay?
·
· Score: 2
I've never done it, so I can't say for sure. However, I will say that in general cyber-squatters are seen as lower forms of life. The fact that you've owned & used your domain for some time will be lost on those who villify cyber-squatters.
I know that with my two domain names, dolnick.com and famille.org, I've had groups e-mail me accusing me of cyber-squatting (even though I run legit public web pages on them) simply because they wanted the name. Some French company even roundaboutly offered to open their wallet for famille.org.
Me, I probably wouldn't sell them. If I really had to sell them, I would probably try doing an e-bay auction and give the proceeds to charity, and clearly advertise that fact. Even if you need the money, you could say something like 50% of the proceeds go to charity. You get a nice tax write-off and then you can even post your auction on Slashdot with a good conscience! (Who knows, maybe Rob will post your story twice...:-)
) Never forget that you make money one sale at a time. Every sale and every customer counts. Unless you deliver customer service that is ABOVE AND BEYOND the ordinary, your customers will shop elsewhere.
You hit the nail right on the head. Our gung-ho economy has fostered a genre of companies that have no clue what customer service is. I can't say that one e-commerce company I've used had not fsked up at least once; none have ever responded with anything nearing an apology. BUY.COM apparently hasn't even figured out that I stopped buying from them yet because of their shoddy treatment. (And yes, I recognize that BUY is, ironically, one of the few e-commerce companies that has cut a profit.)
I wish you luck in your business. Unfortunately, you probably won't see dividends for your committment to customer service until the economy turns south, at which point consumers become much more picky about customer service.
I must say that aside from the comments others have made thus far pointing out the possible defects of such a program, I have to give Pinkerton some amount of credit for being extremely courageous.
(I can just feel the fingers flying on the keyboard-of-flame now...)
Police organizations are not public corporations, and thus are not exposed to (as much) liability with regard to invading a person's privacy. Certainly, if the police make a "bad arrest", they have to (a) let the person go, and (b) sometimes apologize, but by-and-large no multi-million dollar litigation awards are found against the police departments and Attorneys General offices of America.
I've always thought that American business stayed out of the law enforcement business (except for private law enforcement, the kind that Pinkerton pioneered) because of the threat of loss of viability that a bad call can make.
Pinkerton clearly is courageous enough to risk their stockholder's equity to buck this trend.
I await with much anticipation the first time that an otherwise harmless social outcast with deep pockets, such as you might find in the New Trier school district in Wilmette Illinois, hires his own tort lawyer after being fingered by Pinkerton, and subjects them to a legal ass whuppin' the likes of which they've never seen.
I'm proud of Pinkerton for having the courage to expose their stockholder's to the unlimited capital liability that one single screw-up can expose them to in the name of "saving high school." Good luck.
Fine, no problem, whatever reason they are doing it is out of fear of losing their market.
My point was that it's an obvious attempt to convince it's readers to abstain from making even their own copies of music, for personal use; and that they're argument to wit doesn't tell the whole story.
Right, and don't forget: the American legal system is not static. Laws get passed, then modified either by the same bodies that passed the original laws or by judicial actions and precedent.
I'll make the same disclaimer, I'm no lawyer. However, I seriously doubt that the RIAA will ever include the whole story on their propaganda page -- e.g. "Yeah, this Home Recording Act prohibits this action, but then such-and-such Superior or Federal court later effectively reversed this part of it, ruling that hard-drive copies are legal..."
Of course the RIAA would rather you not make computer / MP3 copies of your music, even for personal use: the potential is too great for you to share copies. Napster is out there, still. They're scared.
I agree with you on the Napster issue as well as just about every other point you make. I also don't believe that it's censorship more than it's trying to control bandwidth and legal exposure.
One place that I do have a problem is when public schools make sweetheart deals with long-distance carriers in return for kickbacks. They force their students to use one carrier from their dorm rooms under the auspices of cheaper rates, when in fact they are taking some of the savings themselves. Now, don't get me wrong -- I think that public schools should try to save money (or generate it) wherever possible to save both the taxpayers and the students money.
However, banning IP long distance phone calls is an active conflict of interest. It puts the school into a position of protecting their preferred long distance carrier's market by controlling their network.
What I suggest is not that schools should give up controlling their networks, but that they should be more careful in choosing who they make exclusive agreements with, or if they should at all. These agreements with LD carriers put them in an exposed position and tie their hands when they want to later control network bandwidth, and they are just plain no good.
In the last few years, it's almost been a free-for-all with schools making exclusive agreements with everyone from Microsoft to all the long distance carriers to Subway and even credit card companies. But these agreements come at a price that administrators don't yet realize: the integrity of their school's goal to provide education, not business relationships.
>It's one of the larger news items of the day, but >we've sorta avoided mentioning it here because it >is really 'just another Denial of Service >Attack'. But it's the biggest one ever Actually, it was one of the larger news items yesterday, today it's just old news. And, it was the biggest one ever yesterday as well, so why wait 'till today to fess up that you missed the boat on this one? Also, where's the YRO news about the UCITA story? Yeah, I know... it's not news until you think it's news, right?
>If the results had come from a Linux company and >indicated that 75% of Americans wanted Microsoft >to be broken up into Baby Bills, would anyone be >spouting claims of bias?
>I think the answer is that the average Solaris >admin comes from an NT background
I'd like to know where you came up with that.
Also -- if, as you assert, certain OS's attract various levels of competence then wouldn't an IS decision maker who wants the >best uptime still choose the OS with the best track record? After all, if BSD sysadmins are so much better than Solaris admins (who are clearly just washed-out NT admins) then why not deploy BSD and hire the technically superior BSD admins?
I can, with my limited knowlege of medicine and prescriptions, intimate from the press announcement *exactly* what harms it addresses. One, bad drugs from disreputable e-commerce firms can kill. Buy a book or toy or computer part from a shady e-commerce firm and the worst you get is ripped off. Buy your high blood pressure medication from a shady firm, and you could die. Big difference.
Second, I heard all manner of stories about Viagra being sold on the web to people who claimed prescriptions they did not have, or just plain didn't have to provide one at all. Viagra is a medication that has all kinds of warnings about it's use with heart medications and such, and even the megaconglomerate drug stores that are reputable keep a cross-reference of your other scripts to ensure that you don't take two scripts that are contra-indicated.
Finally, control over the distribution method just like they have in brick-and-mortar operations. Don't kid yourself, the DEA already spends plenty of resources keeping errant doctors and pharmacists in line. I know, my cousin is one of them. While pharmacies may be state regulated, they still need a DEA number to operate and are subject to DEA inspections and investigations. This has always been the case, it's not one of the Fed taking on new ground, just adapting to new technology.
My liberatarian background tends to shun fed involvement in state matters, but control of deadly substances is not one of them.
I'd like to think you're right, and since you work for Compaq I can hope!:-)
I'm a bit jaded by reading the MS FoF, and learning how Compaq gave in to MS on the browser war because they needed the "special" relationship with MS in order to maintain their (then) revenue leader, WinTel.
Maybe things have changed, and I'm glad for it if so. Also, I'm not criticizing Compaq for giving in to the market dominance of MS. I still wonder, tho, how much real energy they're putting into selling Alpha & Tru64 in the face of their relationship with MS (which by all accounts, is still valid now until April 2000.)
Compaq is many things, maybe too many: that's why their management has turned over so much in the last year and their stock price has suffered. On one front, they compete with Intel. On another, they compete with Microsoft. And on yet another (and probably their most lucrative / profitable) they are partners with both. Which one will win? Whichever one consumers vote for with their money.
Before we all get up in arms about what JC said about closed-source client/agents and ESR's response, let's keep something in mind: what's important to ESR and the Open Source world is, in this very case, different than what's important to Carmack.
Don't forget, it was Carmack who made the decision to move away from FPS's and into Arena, which is clearly an Internet-gaming gamble. So now the issue with cheats in Q1 probably doesn't affect his plans *today*, but what about later? Could the techniques developed in Q1 hacks become tomorrow's monsters that keep "everyone" from playing Arena online? That's gotta worry JC, I would think. That problem would adversely affect the (so far) enthusiastic yet also reserved acceptance of the gaming community to the changes in Arena.
So this is a problem that Carmack must now solve, it along with it's closed-source baggage that caused the problem to begin with. Is this our problem? Should we care?
I think ESR's saying, "I'm an open source advocate, and I will remain one. John Carmack's problems are his own." That's my read on it.
Hanukah fell early this year, so I did my shopping in November. Got almost all the gifts I ordered by Hanukah.
The only exception was LTD Commodities, which promised (in November) to deliver by X-Mas, and they still haven't on one item I ordered. But LTD is a B2B site, and I should have expected this looking at their web site.
Never believe promises that businesses make. The current climate of brisk sales and consumer confidence, companies can afford to make promises they can't keep. Hold them accountable, but plan ahead anyway. That's what I say.
I must admit, there's something about the tenor of the explanation that indicates that this ship was bound to sink eventually anyway.
I do stringer work for a tiny web hoster too. It's not really good money, for him or me. I basically get my site hosted for free plus some sweat equity "if it ever takes off" in return for doing the guy's virtual Apache admin stuff. Now he's mostly doing design & marketting. He never gets paid, and if everyone paid him on time he might eke out a slim margin. And if he makes one mistake, it could mean not being able to pay his upline at all this month.
My point is, I don't blame MassLinux but the bottom line is that someone made a mistake. Hey, mistakes happen. It's just not very conducive to profit in the slim world of hosting.
Sorry I might have over-reacted a >bit, your original post just sounded a bit more whiney.
I tried RH (forget the version) once, and found Mandrake to be orders of magnitude better. BUT, I also use TurboLinux, Debian and Solaris/Intel on other machines. They all have their plusses and minuses.
How many times do they have to say "Beta" in the press release? And with so many other stable, tested distros out there, why can't there be one on the bleeding edge with all the bells and whistles, that's clearly labelled NOT FOR PRODUCTION USE to play with?
Great, so you refuse to use 6.1. I'll alert the media. Meanwhile, what's the point? Why shouldn't I be able to use it?
I spoke to a former ISP employee, who shall remain nameless because he's also on Slashdot.
At it's peak, Slashdot would probably only add a few percentage points of volume to eToy's site. For your average, low-budget, low-availability server, this results in a temporary loss of responsiveness, AKA "Slashdot Effect."
For a redundant, possibly clustered dedicated site with fine-tuned web servers, this will have no perceivable impact at all.
There are too many right vs. wrongs here, and nobody (except maybe/. and etoy themselves with their legal counter action) is addressing this properly.
I recieved one of RTMark's e-mails; they clearly got my e-mail address off of/. because I responded to the earlier story about this. So, since I piped in with support of etoy (my post included simply options of other toy retailers to use, and my angle was that these other options are actually cheaper than eToys)
So, let's see... RTMark takes it upon themselves to harvest my e-mail address, send me Spam, and tries to enlist the spam's recipients to engage in an illegal DOS attack against eToys -- and they're the good guys?
The news article may not have been complete, (gee, Slashdot's never done that...) but they did get it right: this is an illegal attack that does nothing except make legitimate advocates for etoy look bad.
Slashdot Mirror
I just posted the following to the Toysmart Feedback Page. Feel free to copy/paste my message - let the departing officers of this failed business know that they will not get off the hook so easily. So, you think you can quietly sell of my private information just because your incompetence lead to your failure? I will not give any private information to any web sites or businesses with known associations to the following privacy policy violators, at anytime in the future: David N. Lord Mark S. Reese John Puckett Roy Liu Sincerely, A Former Customer CC: slashdot.org
Actually, by the power of the same court that will be involved in this case, you can.
If you violate Microsoft's license, you're liable for mostly civil penalties. The Federal Bankruptcy court can wipe out civil liability.
So, you "agree" to not redistribute Win2000 Pro, then do so anyway. Get a greasy lawyer to deal with the criminal aspects, if any and then just sit stoicly through the civil damages trial. Upon losing, you emerge from the state civil trial and announce your impending bankruptcy. Poof! You're out of debt, including the debt recently acquired at the hands of a state Civil jury.
DISCLAIMER: I'M NOT A LAWYER. Consult a competent attorney before taking my advice, or, beter yet don't take my advice.
Can you really be sued for having your domain hijacked? I like the fact that these stories are posted, but it's really getting boring -- all of them ending with the same question, "Can you really be sued for X?" Come now, we're smarter than that... we know that there's a big difference between being sued and losing a suit. We are smart enough to know that anybody can be sued for anything. We are also smart enough to know that many lawsuits get thrown out because they are trivial or harrasing.
Nobody has said it yet, but this article comes close.
The Music industry has made billions because we have allowed them to. We were willing to pay $15 for a CD, not even knowing if we liked the music therein, because there was no other option.
The RIAA can't put this cat back in the bag. More and more people know that there is an alternative. I suggest that even if they could control the all of the potential current and future electronic pirating technologies (which they won't), an educated populace who *knows* that there's another way will no longer pay $15 for that CD.
The music is ours, and the Music Industry control has been at our approval all along, in the absense of any other acceptable media.
'Course, it might take a few years.
:-)
I've never done it, so I can't say for sure. However, I will say that in general cyber-squatters are seen as lower forms of life. The fact that you've owned & used your domain for some time will be lost on those who villify cyber-squatters.
:-)
I know that with my two domain names, dolnick.com and famille.org, I've had groups e-mail me accusing me of cyber-squatting (even though I run legit public web pages on them) simply because they wanted the name. Some French company even roundaboutly offered to open their wallet for famille.org.
Me, I probably wouldn't sell them. If I really had to sell them, I would probably try doing an e-bay auction and give the proceeds to charity, and clearly advertise that fact. Even if you need the money, you could say something like 50% of the proceeds go to charity. You get a nice tax write-off and then you can even post your auction on Slashdot with a good conscience! (Who knows, maybe Rob will post your story twice...
You hit the nail right on the head. Our gung-ho economy has fostered a genre of companies that have no clue what customer service is. I can't say that one e-commerce company I've used had not fsked up at least once; none have ever responded with anything nearing an apology. BUY.COM apparently hasn't even figured out that I stopped buying from them yet because of their shoddy treatment. (And yes, I recognize that BUY is, ironically, one of the few e-commerce companies that has cut a profit.)
I wish you luck in your business. Unfortunately, you probably won't see dividends for your committment to customer service until the economy turns south, at which point consumers become much more picky about customer service.
I must say that aside from the comments others have made thus far pointing out the possible defects of such a program, I have to give Pinkerton some amount of credit for being extremely courageous.
(I can just feel the fingers flying on the keyboard-of-flame now...)
Police organizations are not public corporations, and thus are not exposed to (as much) liability with regard to invading a person's privacy. Certainly, if the police make a "bad arrest", they have to (a) let the person go, and (b) sometimes apologize, but by-and-large no multi-million dollar litigation awards are found against the police departments and Attorneys General offices of America.
I've always thought that American business stayed out of the law enforcement business (except for private law enforcement, the kind that Pinkerton pioneered) because of the threat of loss of viability that a bad call can make.
Pinkerton clearly is courageous enough to risk their stockholder's equity to buck this trend.
I await with much anticipation the first time that an otherwise harmless social outcast with deep pockets, such as you might find in the New Trier school district in Wilmette Illinois, hires his own tort lawyer after being fingered by Pinkerton, and subjects them to a legal ass whuppin' the likes of which they've never seen.
I'm proud of Pinkerton for having the courage to expose their stockholder's to the unlimited capital liability that one single screw-up can expose them to in the name of "saving high school." Good luck.
Fine, no problem, whatever reason they are doing it is out of fear of losing their market.
My point was that it's an obvious attempt to convince it's readers to abstain from making even their own copies of music, for personal use; and that they're argument to wit doesn't tell the whole story.
Right, and don't forget: the American legal system is not static. Laws get passed, then modified either by the same bodies that passed the original laws or by judicial actions and precedent.
I'll make the same disclaimer, I'm no lawyer. However, I seriously doubt that the RIAA will ever include the whole story on their propaganda page -- e.g. "Yeah, this Home Recording Act prohibits this action, but then such-and-such Superior or Federal court later effectively reversed this part of it, ruling that hard-drive copies are legal..."
Of course the RIAA would rather you not make computer / MP3 copies of your music, even for personal use: the potential is too great for you to share copies. Napster is out there, still. They're scared.
Take their page for what it is, one-sided.
I agree with you on the Napster issue as well as just about every other point you make. I also don't believe that it's censorship more than it's trying to control bandwidth and legal exposure.
One place that I do have a problem is when public schools make sweetheart deals with long-distance carriers in return for kickbacks. They force their students to use one carrier from their dorm rooms under the auspices of cheaper rates, when in fact they are taking some of the savings themselves. Now, don't get me wrong -- I think that public schools should try to save money (or generate it) wherever possible to save both the taxpayers and the students money.
However, banning IP long distance phone calls is an active conflict of interest. It puts the school into a position of protecting their preferred long distance carrier's market by controlling their network.
What I suggest is not that schools should give up controlling their networks, but that they should be more careful in choosing who they make exclusive agreements with, or if they should at all. These agreements with LD carriers put them in an exposed position and tie their hands when they want to later control network bandwidth, and they are just plain no good.
In the last few years, it's almost been a free-for-all with schools making exclusive agreements with everyone from Microsoft to all the long distance carriers to Subway and even credit card companies. But these agreements come at a price that administrators don't yet realize: the integrity of their school's goal to provide education, not business relationships.
>It's one of the larger news items of the day, but >we've sorta avoided mentioning it here because it >is really 'just another Denial of Service >Attack'. But it's the biggest one ever Actually, it was one of the larger news items yesterday, today it's just old news. And, it was the biggest one ever yesterday as well, so why wait 'till today to fess up that you missed the boat on this one? Also, where's the YRO news about the UCITA story? Yeah, I know... it's not news until you think it's news, right?
>If the results had come from a Linux company and
>indicated that 75% of Americans wanted Microsoft
>to be broken up into Baby Bills, would anyone be
>spouting claims of bias?
Probably at least you.
>I think the answer is that the average Solaris
>admin comes from an NT background
I'd like to know where you came up with that.
Also -- if, as you assert, certain OS's attract various levels of competence then wouldn't an IS decision maker who wants the >best uptime still choose the OS with the best track record? After all, if BSD sysadmins are so much better than Solaris admins (who are clearly just washed-out NT admins) then why not deploy BSD and hire the technically superior BSD admins?
[facetiousness intended]
I can, with my limited knowlege of medicine and prescriptions, intimate from the press announcement *exactly* what harms it addresses. One, bad drugs from disreputable e-commerce firms can kill. Buy a book or toy or computer part from a shady e-commerce firm and the worst you get is ripped off. Buy your high blood pressure medication from a shady firm, and you could die. Big difference.
Second, I heard all manner of stories about Viagra being sold on the web to people who claimed prescriptions they did not have, or just plain didn't have to provide one at all. Viagra is a medication that has all kinds of warnings about it's use with heart medications and such, and even the megaconglomerate drug stores that are reputable keep a cross-reference of your other scripts to ensure that you don't take two scripts that are contra-indicated.
Finally, control over the distribution method just like they have in brick-and-mortar operations. Don't kid yourself, the DEA already spends plenty of resources keeping errant doctors and pharmacists in line. I know, my cousin is one of them. While pharmacies may be state regulated, they still need a DEA number to operate and are subject to DEA inspections and investigations. This has always been the case, it's not one of the Fed taking on new ground, just adapting to new technology.
My liberatarian background tends to shun fed involvement in state matters, but control of deadly substances is not one of them.
I'd like to think you're right, and since you work for Compaq I can hope! :-)
I'm a bit jaded by reading the MS FoF, and learning how Compaq gave in to MS on the browser war because they needed the "special" relationship with MS in order to maintain their (then) revenue leader, WinTel.
Maybe things have changed, and I'm glad for it if so. Also, I'm not criticizing Compaq for giving in to the market dominance of MS. I still wonder, tho, how much real energy they're putting into selling Alpha & Tru64 in the face of their relationship with MS (which by all accounts, is still valid now until April 2000.)
Compaq is many things, maybe too many: that's why their management has turned over so much in the last year and their stock price has suffered. On one front, they compete with Intel. On another, they compete with Microsoft. And on yet another (and probably their most lucrative / profitable) they are partners with both. Which one will win? Whichever one consumers vote for with their money.
Before we all get up in arms about what JC said about closed-source client/agents and ESR's response, let's keep something in mind: what's important to ESR and the Open Source world is, in this very case, different than what's important to Carmack.
Don't forget, it was Carmack who made the decision to move away from FPS's and into Arena, which is clearly an Internet-gaming gamble. So now the issue with cheats in Q1 probably doesn't affect his plans *today*, but what about later? Could the techniques developed in Q1 hacks become tomorrow's monsters that keep "everyone" from playing Arena online? That's gotta worry JC, I would think. That problem would adversely affect the (so far) enthusiastic yet also reserved acceptance of the gaming community to the changes in Arena.
So this is a problem that Carmack must now solve, it along with it's closed-source baggage that caused the problem to begin with. Is this our problem? Should we care?
I think ESR's saying, "I'm an open source advocate, and I will remain one. John Carmack's problems are his own." That's my read on it.
The only exception was LTD Commodities, which promised (in November) to deliver by X-Mas, and they still haven't on one item I ordered. But LTD is a B2B site, and I should have expected this looking at their web site.
Never believe promises that businesses make. The current climate of brisk sales and consumer confidence, companies can afford to make promises they can't keep. Hold them accountable, but plan ahead anyway. That's what I say.
I must admit, there's something about the tenor of the explanation that indicates that this ship was bound to sink eventually anyway.
I do stringer work for a tiny web hoster too. It's not really good money, for him or me. I basically get my site hosted for free plus some sweat equity "if it ever takes off" in return for doing the guy's virtual Apache admin stuff. Now he's mostly doing design & marketting. He never gets paid, and if everyone paid him on time he might eke out a slim margin. And if he makes one mistake, it could mean not being able to pay his upline at all this month.
My point is, I don't blame MassLinux but the bottom line is that someone made a mistake. Hey, mistakes happen. It's just not very conducive to profit in the slim world of hosting.
Point taken, I'm Zen.
Sorry I might have over-reacted a >bit, your original post just sounded a bit more whiney.
I tried RH (forget the version) once, and found Mandrake to be orders of magnitude better. BUT, I also use TurboLinux, Debian and Solaris/Intel on other machines. They all have their plusses and minuses.
M:
Motley
aMent
moron
Or, if you want to ignore the "M", pick one of these adjectives:
beefheaded, beef-witted, beetleheaded, blear-eyed, blear-witted, blockheaded, blockish, chuckleheaded, dense, doltish, dull, dumb, duncical, fatheaded, goosey, hammerheaded, numskulled, pinhead, pinheaded, thick, thickheaded, thick-witted, asinine, fatuous, foolish, silly, simple; brute, brutish, dummel, lumbering, oafish, slow, slow-witted, sluggish; ||half-assed; crass; backward, half-witted, retarded; idiotic, imbecilic, dead above (or between)the ears, ||dead from the neck up, having a block for a head, having cotton between the ears, ||muscle-bund between the ears, LETHARGIC, comatose, dopey, heavy, hebetudinous, sluggish, slumberous, torpid.
How many times do they have to say "Beta" in the press release? And with so many other stable, tested distros out there, why can't there be one on the bleeding edge with all the bells and whistles, that's clearly labelled NOT FOR PRODUCTION USE to play with?
Great, so you refuse to use 6.1. I'll alert the media. Meanwhile, what's the point? Why shouldn't I be able to use it?
>So you posted something about etoys on slashdot
No, I posted something about alternatives to eToys on slashdot.
>and someone sent you an email in response to it
No, their response had nothing to do with my posting. It was spam.
>Would it have been different if Mr. RTMark had
>sent it to you personally?
No, it would still be impertinent to my posting. See above.
I spoke to a former ISP employee, who shall remain nameless because he's also on Slashdot.
At it's peak, Slashdot would probably only add a few percentage points of volume to eToy's site. For your average, low-budget, low-availability server, this results in a temporary loss of responsiveness, AKA "Slashdot Effect."
For a redundant, possibly clustered dedicated site with fine-tuned web servers, this will have no perceivable impact at all.
I recieved one of RTMark's e-mails; they clearly got my e-mail address off of /. because I responded to the earlier story about this. So, since I piped in with support of etoy (my post included simply options of other toy retailers to use, and my angle was that these other options are actually cheaper than eToys)
So, let's see... RTMark takes it upon themselves to harvest my e-mail address, send me Spam, and tries to enlist the spam's recipients to engage in an illegal DOS attack against eToys -- and they're the good guys?
The news article may not have been complete, (gee, Slashdot's never done that...) but they did get it right: this is an illegal attack that does nothing except make legitimate advocates for etoy look bad.