They are you to Amazon. They order stuff. It goes to the rightful owners door. They look at it, say 'hmmmm... this is not good'.. call up amazon, and instantly get 100% refund.
Thats not really insecure.
It's not insecure because Amazon has a return policy? Amazon has a "guaranteed safe shopping" policy, too. If Amazon accidentally publishes your credit card number, I order $2,000 worth of stuff with it, and Amazon eventually pays you back, does that mean your credit card number was secure?
merchant policy about this is fairly clear: the seller cannot "settle" on your card until the merchandise has shipped.
I think the key words there are "merchant policy." If I'm not mistaken, this is a policy matter that differs from merchant to merchant. If anybody knows otherwise, I would love some details.
I took particular interest in this recently because Amazon.com charged my credit card for a significant amount about three weeks before shipping an order I made (and when they said they shipped it, they were lying, which I found pretty shocking). I looked around, but I could not find anything to cite that said they didn't have the right to do this. The ABA runs a pretty helpful shoppers' rights site, but it did not speak to this issue.
This will, inevitably, be replaced by a futuristic version of anarchy.
We have that already. It's called Slashdot.
"And in other news tonight, President Portman urged voters once again to reject the Hot Grits Act of 2010, saying it went too far. She was immediately drowned out by Anonymous Cowards singing the praises of Penis Birds."
Can anybody cite a single interesting or important idea or argument that's emerged from the months of campaigning in the current U.S. presidential race?
No. Can you recall one from the last election? Or the one before that? Or the one before that?
Yes, American politics is in decline. Yes, it's less relevant than ever before. But this has a lot more to do with television, Watergate, and campaign finance than it does with anything that has a keyboard attached to it.
A lot of the posts so far (and whenever the subject of IT in developing countries comes up) are in the "how can we talk about IT when people are starving/at war/sick -- give them food/peacekeepers/medicine, not Linux" vein. Many of these are trolls, some are not.
Africa is not monolithic, but it's certainly true that there are basic and pressing problems in many parts of Africa. What is guaranteed not to solve those problems in the medium- to long-term is food and medical aid. In many cases such aid is necessary, but it is never sufficient. The roots of the problems need to be addressed, and the real roots of the problems are almost always economic. The long term answer can only be economic development, and in the early 21st century, IT has to be an important element of economic development.
Open source software has the potential to be a boon for IT in the developing world. Good development is about empowering people to solve their own problems, and so is open source. With open source, things like language localization are no longer the exclusive province of far-off Western software developers unconcerned with suboptimal markets -- local programmers can do it themselves. There are now Linux distributions aimed at the Thai and Russian/Ukranian markets, and I know there is an Arabic localization project going on now.
No, Linux is not going to feed a starving Somali kid today. But a bag of surplus Iowa wheat is not going to feed him tomorrow.
Africa Online provides decent service to a number of countries in Africa, and many countries have a number of indigenous ISPs. Obviously penetration is spotty when you get outside the cities and affordable broadband is out of the question in most places, but access is available.
And there are other ways to distribute Linux. If one university in Cote d'Ivoire has a good enough connection to download the latest distribution of Debian, they can burn copies for as many people as are interested. (And in the case of Debian, they'll only have to download a new distribution every two years or so.)
The free-as-in-beerness of Linux is something that is touted a lot by Linux advocates in developing countries, myself included. But I had an experience recently that made me wonder whether this would have any "selling" power at all.
I'm studying for my MCSE (don't all spit at once, OK guys?) and though I use NT 4.0 at work, I'm going straight for the Windows 2000 track since the NT 4.0 cert is being phased out. So I wanted a copy of Windows 2000 to play with. I went to every computer shop I knew in town, including the big CompuMall in Heliopolis. Nobody had a licensed copy of Windows 2000 -- or, indeed, any other version of Windows -- for sale. Actually, that's not entirely true; one shop had some OEM-only copies of Windows 95 Arabic they were willing to take out of a hardware box and sell me. Windows is so widely pirated here that nobody bothers trying to sell it.
More striking was the fact that many of the shop owners and clerks did not know that one could buy Windows. Several of them told me matter-of-factly that Windows is not something that is sold ("Windows is free"), but something that you hire a technician to come and install. The copies that technicians install, of course, are pirated.
Some time ago a columnist for PC World Egypt (yes, there is such a thing) wrote that he had seen more licensed software CD-ROMs hanging from the rear-view mirrors of taxicabs than in offices. It's not too hard to see why this is the case: a 25-client license copy of Small Business Server cost my office $2500, which is about the same as Egypt's annual per capita GDP. Not the per capita disposable income -- the per capita GDP.
In short, while I think there are many benefits Linux can offer developing countries, the price argument probably isn't likely to pull much weight.
On the contrary, they've already exposed themselves to a potential lawsuit, whereas complying would have left them in the clear. Several universities were named in the Metallica lawsuit; they all backed down and blocked access. These universities have refused to do that, even though on the surface they have nothing at stake.
"hey guys, this is your fight. Leave me out of it. I'm not fighting for either one of you. But if the police ask me questions, I will tell what I know."
Let's not confuse the issue here: if students can be shown to be using the technology to infringe, then the university has a responsibility to take action. Infringement is infringement, and for better or worse it is illegal. The issue is that these companies plus Metallica want to outlaw technology that can be used for infringement, which is ass-backwards. The business environment has changed, threatening to make them rethink their previously successful business models, and they're trying to get the legislature and the courts to change it back. It doesn't work that way.
"I'm disappointed in the attitude [the universities] have taken, which is 'we don't know anything, we don't have any responsibility unless we know anything, tell us who's infringing and then we'll take decisive steps,' " King said.
So you mean, they're actually holding you accountable to your claims and refusing to restrict access to a whole class of users? They're asking you to do the non-cost-effective job of policing your recently obsolescent copyright regime, rather than pushing that burden onto others? They're taking the stance that because they are not required by law to do this you can't intimidate them into it? And they're doing all this in the name of idealistic generalities like "academic freedom" and "access to information?"
Imagine.
"We're going to try to keep a dialogue with these universities, maybe point them to some authority that they've ignored or are not aware of, that tells them they have a higher responsibility than just putting their head in their sand," he said.
Somebody's got their head in the sand, pal, but surprisingly it is not these Universities.
Kudos to these Universities for recognizing there's a larger issue here rather than just whittling away at users' access just because it's the easier, less risky thing to do.
If the US cannot fulfill the expectations created in people who came here on H1B visas, there is no legal problem, but it certainly harms the reputation of the US as being trustworthy and welcoming to foreigners.
What about the H1B process creates expectations that permanent residency is just around the corner? It's quite clearly and explicitly a temporary work visa, and it always has been.
And where did you get the idea that the US has a "reputation... as being trustworthy and welcoming to foreigners?" Maybe it has that reputation among Americans, but it would be pretty hard for anybody who ever walked into a visa interview or INS office to walk out with such an impression.
Greetings from the year 2000! I'm writing you from my auto-piloted aircar on my way to work. Normally my wife, Claudia Schiffer, takes the aircar, but my jet pack is in the shop this week.
I just wanted to drop you a line to thank you for making the decision to major in Near Eastern Studies rather than Computer Science. Excellent idea. I now work for a multi-billion dollar Near Eastern Studies company while my Unix hacking friends beg for quarters in the street.
By the way, you should probably sell all that Cisco stock you've got. Networking is going nowhere. Invest in cold fusion.
I agree with the core idea of your comment, but...
Now, leaving aside the expenses that these changes will add to your gear (because like a good envionmentuhlists, we all believe that any cost is justified "even if it saves one chiiiyuld")
...
All that's changed in this wacky EU proposal is that the gummint gets to charge the company another ~10-20% as a penalty for making disposable crap - the company then passes the costs on to you.
Why should you be able to purchase a consumer good and pass off part of the real cost oof that good on those who did not consume the good? There's this self-righteous get-your-hands-off-my-consumer-goods attitude in America that assumes that people have a God-given right to "cheap" fuel and other "cheap" consumables when the real cost of the production, use, and disposal of those goods are not figured into the purchase price.
When the Dutch Government, as described in another post on this topic, forces manufacturers to add a recycling surcharge onto their goods, it is not as if a completely new cost is being added on to the good. It's a cost that already has to get paid one way or another; it's simply being charged to the actual consumer, rather than passed off on everyone else down the line.
Inclusive pricing goes a long way toward motivating people to make the rational use and reuse choices you advocate. If I have to pay $75 extra on that TV to cover the hidden costs of the manufacture and disposal of that TV, might I not consider buying a more reliable TV so that I don't have to pay that surcharge again? Might I not repair it rather than replace it? If I have to pay the actual costs of motor vehicle use -- infrastructure, law enforcement, pollution abatement, etc. -- every time I buy a gallon of gas, might I not make a rational choice not to purchase an SUV?
But instead we are shielded from the actual costs of this stuff, so it makes good market sense for manufacturers to make lousy, difficult-to-repair, disposable products covered in wads of packaging. And when the time comes to clean all this crap up, people whine and say, "you can't take my money! It's my money, not the Gummint's!"
Since the contractors do it rather than the government, and since most government contracts are silent on the issue of open source, the contractors own the code
But I can't imagine that Government contracts are silent on the issue. Government contracts are not silent about very much; they are regulated by the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FARs), which address issues like this in numbing detail. And in every contract I have worked on, all the IP products of the contract go into the public domain. This is not generally due to some clause in the text of the contract, but because the FARs are included by reference in the contract.
So what is specifically different about software contracts?
This would encourage innovation on the part of the authors without posing a threat to the patent holders' government-granted monopoly, since open software is not a commercial competitor in itself.
I work quite a bit with Government procurement but not related to software, so maybe someone with experience in this area can help me out.
When we write reports, analyses, or anything else paid for by the US Government, it goes directly into the public domain (obviously I'm talking about unclassified material). Does source code for software comissioned by the Government not go into the public domain? If not, why not?
Only you can see what is on your display, so sensitive documents stay confidential. Working on or viewing such material in public places is no longer a concern.
You don't suppose they're talking about porn, do you?
Actually, if most people think it is OK, it is OK. In a democracy, what is OK is decided by the people, not by the author of poltical texts such as this.
The United States is a republic, not a democracy. If most people think it's OK to lynch people because of their religion or the color of their skin, it's still not OK to do so, at least not without a major revision of the Constitution (which requires significantly more than a majority doing significantly more than thinking it's OK).
I actually used the beta of Eudora 5.0 for a while until I got sick of it crashing. It's not very stable yet.
The feature, in my opinion, is not very useful. In addition to evaluating email you send out, it also tags incoming email for offensiveness. I get (long story -- I was working on a book about televangelists in the Middle East, a project I have now largely abandoned) regular emails from Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. These were often marked with a flame or two, whereas the common "remember me? I'm Jenny and I'm hot for you!" spam never merited a peep.
It seems to me that human communication is not something that can be analysed well with current technology, and even if it could this application would be of questionable value.
I wonder, have there been pro-Napster demonstrations on campuses? When I went to school, people would demonstrate over any damn thing. Certainly stuff much less important than this (er, like sacking the basketball coach?).
Not that I think it would be a particularly intelligent thing to have a demonstration about, but some of the stuff people occupied buildings for at UMass/Amherst was a lot dumber.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not insecure because Amazon has a return policy? Amazon has a "guaranteed safe shopping" policy, too. If Amazon accidentally publishes your credit card number, I order $2,000 worth of stuff with it, and Amazon eventually pays you back, does that mean your credit card number was secure?
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And how's it working there so far?
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Does that make you an ICANN'T?
I'm really sorry, I had to. You can go ahead and mod me down, I deserve it.
When the new TLDs come out, do you think we'll see a slew of slogans like "Fred's Diner: The .fredsdiner People?"
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But if you take the tiresome twaddle off Slashdot, what's left?
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I think the key words there are "merchant policy." If I'm not mistaken, this is a policy matter that differs from merchant to merchant. If anybody knows otherwise, I would love some details.
I took particular interest in this recently because Amazon.com charged my credit card for a significant amount about three weeks before shipping an order I made (and when they said they shipped it, they were lying, which I found pretty shocking). I looked around, but I could not find anything to cite that said they didn't have the right to do this. The ABA runs a pretty helpful shoppers' rights site, but it did not speak to this issue.
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We have that already. It's called Slashdot.
"And in other news tonight, President Portman urged voters once again to reject the Hot Grits Act of 2010, saying it went too far. She was immediately drowned out by Anonymous Cowards singing the praises of Penis Birds."
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No. Can you recall one from the last election? Or the one before that? Or the one before that?
Yes, American politics is in decline. Yes, it's less relevant than ever before. But this has a lot more to do with television, Watergate, and campaign finance than it does with anything that has a keyboard attached to it.
-
A lot of the posts so far (and whenever the subject of IT in developing countries comes up) are in the "how can we talk about IT when people are starving/at war/sick -- give them food/peacekeepers/medicine, not Linux" vein. Many of these are trolls, some are not.
Africa is not monolithic, but it's certainly true that there are basic and pressing problems in many parts of Africa. What is guaranteed not to solve those problems in the medium- to long-term is food and medical aid. In many cases such aid is necessary, but it is never sufficient. The roots of the problems need to be addressed, and the real roots of the problems are almost always economic. The long term answer can only be economic development, and in the early 21st century, IT has to be an important element of economic development.
Open source software has the potential to be a boon for IT in the developing world. Good development is about empowering people to solve their own problems, and so is open source. With open source, things like language localization are no longer the exclusive province of far-off Western software developers unconcerned with suboptimal markets -- local programmers can do it themselves. There are now Linux distributions aimed at the Thai and Russian/Ukranian markets, and I know there is an Arabic localization project going on now.
No, Linux is not going to feed a starving Somali kid today. But a bag of surplus Iowa wheat is not going to feed him tomorrow.
-
Africa Online provides decent service to a number of countries in Africa, and many countries have a number of indigenous ISPs. Obviously penetration is spotty when you get outside the cities and affordable broadband is out of the question in most places, but access is available.
And there are other ways to distribute Linux. If one university in Cote d'Ivoire has a good enough connection to download the latest distribution of Debian, they can burn copies for as many people as are interested. (And in the case of Debian, they'll only have to download a new distribution every two years or so.)
-
The free-as-in-beerness of Linux is something that is touted a lot by Linux advocates in developing countries, myself included. But I had an experience recently that made me wonder whether this would have any "selling" power at all.
I'm studying for my MCSE (don't all spit at once, OK guys?) and though I use NT 4.0 at work, I'm going straight for the Windows 2000 track since the NT 4.0 cert is being phased out. So I wanted a copy of Windows 2000 to play with. I went to every computer shop I knew in town, including the big CompuMall in Heliopolis. Nobody had a licensed copy of Windows 2000 -- or, indeed, any other version of Windows -- for sale. Actually, that's not entirely true; one shop had some OEM-only copies of Windows 95 Arabic they were willing to take out of a hardware box and sell me. Windows is so widely pirated here that nobody bothers trying to sell it.
More striking was the fact that many of the shop owners and clerks did not know that one could buy Windows. Several of them told me matter-of-factly that Windows is not something that is sold ("Windows is free"), but something that you hire a technician to come and install. The copies that technicians install, of course, are pirated.
Some time ago a columnist for PC World Egypt (yes, there is such a thing) wrote that he had seen more licensed software CD-ROMs hanging from the rear-view mirrors of taxicabs than in offices. It's not too hard to see why this is the case: a 25-client license copy of Small Business Server cost my office $2500, which is about the same as Egypt's annual per capita GDP. Not the per capita disposable income -- the per capita GDP.
In short, while I think there are many benefits Linux can offer developing countries, the price argument probably isn't likely to pull much weight.
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On the contrary, they've already exposed themselves to a potential lawsuit, whereas complying would have left them in the clear. Several universities were named in the Metallica lawsuit; they all backed down and blocked access. These universities have refused to do that, even though on the surface they have nothing at stake.
Let's not confuse the issue here: if students can be shown to be using the technology to infringe, then the university has a responsibility to take action. Infringement is infringement, and for better or worse it is illegal. The issue is that these companies plus Metallica want to outlaw technology that can be used for infringement, which is ass-backwards. The business environment has changed, threatening to make them rethink their previously successful business models, and they're trying to get the legislature and the courts to change it back. It doesn't work that way.
-
So you mean, they're actually holding you accountable to your claims and refusing to restrict access to a whole class of users? They're asking you to do the non-cost-effective job of policing your recently obsolescent copyright regime, rather than pushing that burden onto others? They're taking the stance that because they are not required by law to do this you can't intimidate them into it? And they're doing all this in the name of idealistic generalities like "academic freedom" and "access to information?"
Imagine.
Somebody's got their head in the sand, pal, but surprisingly it is not these Universities.
Kudos to these Universities for recognizing there's a larger issue here rather than just whittling away at users' access just because it's the easier, less risky thing to do.
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What about the H1B process creates expectations that permanent residency is just around the corner? It's quite clearly and explicitly a temporary work visa, and it always has been.
And where did you get the idea that the US has a "reputation... as being trustworthy and welcoming to foreigners?" Maybe it has that reputation among Americans, but it would be pretty hard for anybody who ever walked into a visa interview or INS office to walk out with such an impression.
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Dear Elvis,
Greetings from the year 2000! I'm writing you from my auto-piloted aircar on my way to work. Normally my wife, Claudia Schiffer, takes the aircar, but my jet pack is in the shop this week.
I just wanted to drop you a line to thank you for making the decision to major in Near Eastern Studies rather than Computer Science. Excellent idea. I now work for a multi-billion dollar Near Eastern Studies company while my Unix hacking friends beg for quarters in the street.
By the way, you should probably sell all that Cisco stock you've got. Networking is going nowhere. Invest in cold fusion.
Sincerely,
You
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I agree with the core idea of your comment, but...
Why should you be able to purchase a consumer good and pass off part of the real cost oof that good on those who did not consume the good? There's this self-righteous get-your-hands-off-my-consumer-goods attitude in America that assumes that people have a God-given right to "cheap" fuel and other "cheap" consumables when the real cost of the production, use, and disposal of those goods are not figured into the purchase price.
When the Dutch Government, as described in another post on this topic, forces manufacturers to add a recycling surcharge onto their goods, it is not as if a completely new cost is being added on to the good. It's a cost that already has to get paid one way or another; it's simply being charged to the actual consumer, rather than passed off on everyone else down the line.
Inclusive pricing goes a long way toward motivating people to make the rational use and reuse choices you advocate. If I have to pay $75 extra on that TV to cover the hidden costs of the manufacture and disposal of that TV, might I not consider buying a more reliable TV so that I don't have to pay that surcharge again? Might I not repair it rather than replace it? If I have to pay the actual costs of motor vehicle use -- infrastructure, law enforcement, pollution abatement, etc. -- every time I buy a gallon of gas, might I not make a rational choice not to purchase an SUV?
But instead we are shielded from the actual costs of this stuff, so it makes good market sense for manufacturers to make lousy, difficult-to-repair, disposable products covered in wads of packaging. And when the time comes to clean all this crap up, people whine and say, "you can't take my money! It's my money, not the Gummint's!"
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But I can't imagine that Government contracts are silent on the issue. Government contracts are not silent about very much; they are regulated by the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FARs), which address issues like this in numbing detail. And in every contract I have worked on, all the IP products of the contract go into the public domain. This is not generally due to some clause in the text of the contract, but because the FARs are included by reference in the contract.
So what is specifically different about software contracts?
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You don't think Microsoft views Linux as a competitor?
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Only the GPL and BSD licenses are mentioned in the text of the report, though it does not explicitly exclude others.
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I work quite a bit with Government procurement but not related to software, so maybe someone with experience in this area can help me out.
When we write reports, analyses, or anything else paid for by the US Government, it goes directly into the public domain (obviously I'm talking about unclassified material). Does source code for software comissioned by the Government not go into the public domain? If not, why not?
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You don't suppose they're talking about porn, do you?
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Can we please have a filter that rejects any post that includes the spelling "copyrite" or "copywrite?"
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The United States is a republic, not a democracy. If most people think it's OK to lynch people because of their religion or the color of their skin, it's still not OK to do so, at least not without a major revision of the Constitution (which requires significantly more than a majority doing significantly more than thinking it's OK).
Good thing, too.
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I actually used the beta of Eudora 5.0 for a while until I got sick of it crashing. It's not very stable yet.
The feature, in my opinion, is not very useful. In addition to evaluating email you send out, it also tags incoming email for offensiveness. I get (long story -- I was working on a book about televangelists in the Middle East, a project I have now largely abandoned) regular emails from Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. These were often marked with a flame or two, whereas the common "remember me? I'm Jenny and I'm hot for you!" spam never merited a peep.
It seems to me that human communication is not something that can be analysed well with current technology, and even if it could this application would be of questionable value.
-
I wonder, have there been pro-Napster demonstrations on campuses? When I went to school, people would demonstrate over any damn thing. Certainly stuff much less important than this (er, like sacking the basketball coach?).
Not that I think it would be a particularly intelligent thing to have a demonstration about, but some of the stuff people occupied buildings for at UMass/Amherst was a lot dumber.
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Careful what you wish for.
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