I signed up for that e-mail address when Yahoo first gave out e-mail addresses. It's a combination of my first and last name that is trivial to guess and has been posted a ton of places online. The spammers already flood my account with spam. I doubt this guy will make my e-mail situation much worse. To Yahoo's credit, they've been able to keep most of it flowing to my spam box lately. There was a time when I considered abandoning the account because all of the spam in my inbox made it difficult to find the valid e-mails.
Agreed. Signing up with a false name should only be fraud if one party can show financial harm or intent to cause damage.
Lori Drew signed onto MySpace under a false name (pretending to be a teenager named "Josh") with the intent to first pretend to be the friend of Megan Meier, then stab her in the back, getting other people online to gang up on her and torment her, even going so far as to tell her "the world would be a better place without you, and have a s**t rest of your life." After that last message, Megan hung herself.
I agree that charging Lori Drew with a felony simply for signing onto MySpace under a false name is reaching, but using a false name with the intent to harass someone should be illegal. If your harassment causes the person's death, then you should be liable for at least involuntary manslaughter.
I got a notice that I had signed up for "WeeWorld" which appears to be a MySpace type site with avatars or something. Honestly, I wasn't really interested in the site beyond the fact that, somehow, "I" was now a member. Not only that, but "I" apparently had already communicated with some of "my" friends on there. I quickly assessed the situation and determined that nothing in my e-mail account indicated any hacking there. In fact, the site didn't have any sort of e-mail confirmation. It just took an e-mail address, assumed that the person was giving their real address, and then sent e-mails to that user notifying them whenever someone sent them a message.
So it looked like someone just decided to use my e-mail address in the "e-mail address" line when they signed up. Since the service nicely sent me "my" password when "I" signed up, I used it to log in. Then, I decided to lock "other me" out, so I changed the password. Then I changed the name on the account to "DON'T USE E-MAIL ADDYS THAT AREN'T YOURS" (so all of "other me's" friends would see what he did). Next, I contacted WeeWorld to report the abuse. They offered to close the account. I waited for a few days in the hopes that "other me" would realize that he was now locked out of his profile and had his name changed. Then I had them close the account.
Part of me was satisfied that, perhaps, he learned his lesson. Of course, another part of me realizes that he probably just signed up again with someone else's e-mail address. A very simple e-mail confirmation would stop abuses like this from happening. Sure, an abuser could use a hacked into e-mail account, but it is a simple action that raises the bar above most of the would-be abusers' heads.
"FoxFire" is a pet peeve of mine for some reason. I set up my father-in-law's computer with FireFox (for increased security over IE and since I think it's just a better browser overall) and he insists on calling it "FoxFire." No matter how many times I correct him, he keeps mangling the name.
Of course, he also talks about sending us an "e-mail" while using Instant Messenger. When I try to correct him, he says "well, it's all the same." (*MUST... KEEP... FROM... LECTURING... FATHER-IN-LAW... ABOUT WHY THEY AREN'T!*)
Then again, I'm used to this sort of thing. Years back, I had a tape drive that I used to back up my system. (It used the parallel port to give you an idea of how long ago this was.) A friend of mine had a virus infection and asked to borrow the tape drive and a spare tape. My father insisted that I couldn't do this because the virus would infect the tape drive (not the tape, but the drive itself) and then spread to my computer. No amount of arguing dented his "absolute knowledge" that this is what would happen. Of course, since the drive was my own, bought with my own money, he couldn't stop me and I gave it to my friend to use. Oddly enough, I didn't get infected by the virus via the hardware transfer.
With Verizon Wireless, it is $5/month PER phone. My wife and I each have phones. If we want to text back and forth, we would need to pay $10 per month extra. We use text messaging extremely rarely, so the extra fee isn't worth it to us.
Interesting side note: That 20 cents per text is to send and receive. So if I text my wife, I pay 20 cents to send it and 20 cents to get it on my wife's phone. That means I pay double for each text between my wife and myself. The least they could do is give you unlimited texting between phones on the same account. It might even get us hooked on texting and lead to us paying for the extra $10 per month. As it stands now, though, we'll easily live without texting and will use our cell phones to (*gasp!*) call people.
That reminds me of a comic strip I once saw online titled "If all spam came true." It had various characters experiencing the wonders of spam come true with the last character looking down his pants and exclaiming "HEY!" Alas, I've since lost track of where I saw that comic. If anyone happens to know what comic that was and where to find it, I'd appreciate the pointer. (Google searches seem to lead nowhere due to so many results for "spam.")
Yup. I know all about those. Thanks for adding that point, though. The only bad thing about a freeze is the charge for freezing/unfreezing your credit. It should be free, but the credit agencies want to dissuade people from freezing their credit. If too many people froze their credit, the credit agencies would make less money from those in store credit cards ("get 10% off your purchase by opening a store card now!") and from selling people's credit info to other companies.
The scary thing is that you can be as suspicious and careful as possible and still have your identity stolen because someone in another city whom you've never met wasn't suspicious and careful or because some company that you've dealt with directly or indirectly has a security breach of some sort. And when that happens the company responsible for your identity being stolen isn't out any significant (to them) money, but you need to spend a lot of your time and energy to restore your good credit.
Yes, I'm speaking from experience. I was lucky enough to find out about it early when the unrequested credit card was "accidentally" sent to me instead of to the ID thieves. So I got an "easier" time than I could have had. I still have to look over my credit report constantly, though, as my information is out there now.
People post too much crap about themselves online.
My wife is always saying that she doesn't like how I post to many websites using my real name. (At some sites, with my real city/state of residence.) Of course, I've been posting to these sites for years and am unwilling to kill those accounts and re-register using a pseudonym. Meanwhile, my wife has a blog where she posts a lot of personal stuff, but she tries to keep it "anonymous" (in that she uses initials instead of names and never mentions where we live). The difference is that she started blogging about 2 years ago and always had a pseudonym as her online name. I started online interactions at some of the websites I frequent about 10 years ago. Ten years back, putting your real name out there didn't seem like such a big deal. Honestly, I still think it doesn't. However, if I could "rename" myself online without losing my history, I probably would.
My wife's grandfather had Parkinson's disease. As his disease progressed, his body gave out more and more. In addition to that, his mind slowly unwound as well. One day he would be perfectly lucid. The next, he would be talking to me about a "yesterday" that was really twenty years ago. It was sad to watch him slowly sink away physically and mentally. I'm still not sure which is worse, but I hope that I never have to experience that myself (or have any of my close loved ones go through that). I'd rather have a quick, painless death (at a ripe, old age, of course) than lingering for years losing everything that makes up "me".
I agree. Losing weight is a combination of genes (body metabolism, body chemistry, etc), food intake, and exercise.
I lost 60 pounds a couple of years back and it was all because of diet change. However, simply eating less isn't going to always help. If you try to starve yourself (which, according to the GP poster's logic, should be a great way to lose weight) your body will assume that the food supply is low and reduce metabolism to conserve resources and survive. It's a basic survival mechanism.
Losing weight isn't as easy as eating less. However, eating healthier definitely is a great way to begin a weight loss plan.
What right does the government have to say that an individual or company who violated your rights cannot be held accountable.
Nine Eleven (crowd mumers in approval)
Has the government gone so completely backwards that now they're endorsing rather than preventing rights violations?
Nine... (audience gasps)... Eleven! (audience roars in praise)
Oh, and Hitler is conspiring with the Legion of Doom to assassinate Jesus so toss me some money to stop them. Also, Darth Vader is trying to buy uranium from unwed teenagers.
(The "It Takes a Village Idiot, and I Married One" episode of Family Guy was on last night and it seemed appropriate.)
My wife's parents owned two cockatoos (unfortunately, one passed away a few years back, so it is down to one now). When both birds were in the midst of a screech-fest and the phone rang, my father-in-law would answer it "Hello, Jurassic Park!"
This was filed on July 25, 2006. So we need an example of a similar thing from July 25, 2005 or earlier to qualify for prior art. And this is so ridiculously simple that there's got to be some prior art somewhere. I don't think this would qualify since it is on an intranet, but my company's intranet has an internal policy editor that lets users set which affiliates get to see the policy. So if you want Policy X to be seen by A, B, and C, but not D, you check off those checkboxes and click OK. The database stores the permissions and the users searching for policies get the appropriate policies on their screens. I don't remember when we launched that, but I'm sure that it was before 2005. This should be a ridiculously easy patent to find prior art for.
No, it doesn't mean that Microsoft will make ODF the default format. It does mean, however, that I could send an Office 2007 user an ODF document that I made with OpenOffice.org and they would be able to open it. They, in turn, could save their file as ODF and send it over to me if I ask for all documents to be sent in ODF format. This represents a serious hole in the "must send everything DOC to ensure compatibility"* lock-in.
* Yes, I know that DOC had troubles across Office versions, but still sending DOC was your best bet if you wanted the party at the other end to be able to open and edit the document you were sending.
4. explain that those 999 people that will go out of their way to avoid trading with you might tell their friends and family not to trade with you also.
Businesses that spam are seen as less reputable to most people than businesses that don't. So yes, you might pick up one sale, but you'll wind up losing hundreds if not thousands of potential sales.
Oh but they are being held with just cause. To quote Senator Lindsey Graham.
"The court's ruling makes clear the legal rights given to al Qaida members today should exceed those provided to the Nazis during World War II," Graham said. "Our nation is at war. It's truly unfortunate the Supreme Court did not recognize and appreciate that fact."
You see? We're holding them because they're Al Qaida members. Our proof that they are Al Qaida members? Well, that's super secret stuff, but rest assured that we wouldn't be holding them if they weren't.
Of course, my entire post up until now was tongue in cheek. I'm amazed that this senator thinks that just because we happen to lock someone up it automatically means that they *MUST* be a member of Al Qaida and that anyone looking to set up trials for the people locked up just wants to set terrorists loose on American streets. Those in the opposition seem to see this as a Black and White issue. They seem to believe that our only options are 1) lock up anyone we suspect of being a threat no matter how flimsy the evidence or 2) let terrorists run around our streets blowing everything up. It is like they can't conceive of the possibility of actually gathering evidence on the people we seize and finding out whether they are *really* terrorists via a court of law where a third party (the judge or a jury) will decide what the truth is. Is it possible that a trial will set a terrorist free? Yes. But I'd rather set terrorists free by accident than purposefully keep an innocent man imprisoned with no legal recourse.
The simple explanation is this: the John McCain you knew died when his own party turned on him and sold him out in 2000. This is a man who staked his whole life on the Republican party, and was not willing to even entertain the notion of running as an independent because of that.
He was betrayed by those he trusted most... and it killed him. What you see now is a shell.
So what you're saying is that he's the first zombie to run for President. Vote Zombie McCain in 2008! He's the candidate with the (hunger for) BRAINS!!!!
Experience - Obama's lack of experience is a PLUS. Look at what experience has gotten us the past 7 years. We need someone who KNOWS they can't do it on their own. The president's job is to listen to his advisers and those around him, and based on the information given make a decision...his job is NOT to decide things for himself because he thinks he knows best.
And just to add to your point, take a look at who each has hired to help with their technical policies. McCain has Chuck Fish, a former Time Warner executive. Obama has Daniel Weitzner, an MIT computer scientist. In other words, McCain has brought on someone from big business, Obama has brought on someone who is very likely to know how tech stuff works. I prefer Obama's selection criteria to McCain's.
And just to go one further, I'm still convinced that, on his own, George W. Bush wouldn't have been a bad President. Not a good one by any stretch of the imagination, but probably not a bad one either. He would have likely been one of those Presidents that simply don't stand out in history. However, he surrounded himself with advisers (including Cheney) that took an extremely neo-conservative view of the world that favored mixing religion and politics, preemptive war, a theory of the executive branch as not having to answer to the other branches of government, a theory of the US being able to do anything it wants to do because "we're the US", etc. All of those views were entrenched in the organization and dissenting viewpoints weren't allowed. To disagree was to find yourself looking for another job (or worse).
President Bush early on admitted to not reading the papers and instead simply relying on his advisers. So he was surrounded from Day 1 with "Neo-Con News and World Report." As such, he only saw what his advisers wanted him to see and only did what his advisers wanted him to do. A good President will not only know how to seek out good advisers, but will know how to manage his administration so that it doesn't become a isolated bubble of opinion like the Bush Administration became. A good President will read outside sources of information, even if he disagrees with their opinions of world events.
I have more hope that Obama would wind up being that kind of President than I have that McCain would be that kind of President.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. The Internet will never hit any capacit......
*DING*
The Internet is full. Please shut down your computer to help free up space.
I signed up for that e-mail address when Yahoo first gave out e-mail addresses. It's a combination of my first and last name that is trivial to guess and has been posted a ton of places online. The spammers already flood my account with spam. I doubt this guy will make my e-mail situation much worse. To Yahoo's credit, they've been able to keep most of it flowing to my spam box lately. There was a time when I considered abandoning the account because all of the spam in my inbox made it difficult to find the valid e-mails.
Lori Drew signed onto MySpace under a false name (pretending to be a teenager named "Josh") with the intent to first pretend to be the friend of Megan Meier, then stab her in the back, getting other people online to gang up on her and torment her, even going so far as to tell her "the world would be a better place without you, and have a s**t rest of your life." After that last message, Megan hung herself.
I agree that charging Lori Drew with a felony simply for signing onto MySpace under a false name is reaching, but using a false name with the intent to harass someone should be illegal. If your harassment causes the person's death, then you should be liable for at least involuntary manslaughter.
I'm sure this is the question everyone wants to ask: What was your mother-in-law's name?
I got a notice that I had signed up for "WeeWorld" which appears to be a MySpace type site with avatars or something. Honestly, I wasn't really interested in the site beyond the fact that, somehow, "I" was now a member. Not only that, but "I" apparently had already communicated with some of "my" friends on there. I quickly assessed the situation and determined that nothing in my e-mail account indicated any hacking there. In fact, the site didn't have any sort of e-mail confirmation. It just took an e-mail address, assumed that the person was giving their real address, and then sent e-mails to that user notifying them whenever someone sent them a message.
So it looked like someone just decided to use my e-mail address in the "e-mail address" line when they signed up. Since the service nicely sent me "my" password when "I" signed up, I used it to log in. Then, I decided to lock "other me" out, so I changed the password. Then I changed the name on the account to "DON'T USE E-MAIL ADDYS THAT AREN'T YOURS" (so all of "other me's" friends would see what he did). Next, I contacted WeeWorld to report the abuse. They offered to close the account. I waited for a few days in the hopes that "other me" would realize that he was now locked out of his profile and had his name changed. Then I had them close the account.
Part of me was satisfied that, perhaps, he learned his lesson. Of course, another part of me realizes that he probably just signed up again with someone else's e-mail address. A very simple e-mail confirmation would stop abuses like this from happening. Sure, an abuser could use a hacked into e-mail account, but it is a simple action that raises the bar above most of the would-be abusers' heads.
"FoxFire" is a pet peeve of mine for some reason. I set up my father-in-law's computer with FireFox (for increased security over IE and since I think it's just a better browser overall) and he insists on calling it "FoxFire." No matter how many times I correct him, he keeps mangling the name.
Of course, he also talks about sending us an "e-mail" while using Instant Messenger. When I try to correct him, he says "well, it's all the same." (*MUST... KEEP... FROM... LECTURING... FATHER-IN-LAW... ABOUT WHY THEY AREN'T!*)
Then again, I'm used to this sort of thing. Years back, I had a tape drive that I used to back up my system. (It used the parallel port to give you an idea of how long ago this was.) A friend of mine had a virus infection and asked to borrow the tape drive and a spare tape. My father insisted that I couldn't do this because the virus would infect the tape drive (not the tape, but the drive itself) and then spread to my computer. No amount of arguing dented his "absolute knowledge" that this is what would happen. Of course, since the drive was my own, bought with my own money, he couldn't stop me and I gave it to my friend to use. Oddly enough, I didn't get infected by the virus via the hardware transfer.
With Verizon Wireless, it is $5/month PER phone. My wife and I each have phones. If we want to text back and forth, we would need to pay $10 per month extra. We use text messaging extremely rarely, so the extra fee isn't worth it to us.
Interesting side note: That 20 cents per text is to send and receive. So if I text my wife, I pay 20 cents to send it and 20 cents to get it on my wife's phone. That means I pay double for each text between my wife and myself. The least they could do is give you unlimited texting between phones on the same account. It might even get us hooked on texting and lead to us paying for the extra $10 per month. As it stands now, though, we'll easily live without texting and will use our cell phones to (*gasp!*) call people.
That reminds me of a comic strip I once saw online titled "If all spam came true." It had various characters experiencing the wonders of spam come true with the last character looking down his pants and exclaiming "HEY!" Alas, I've since lost track of where I saw that comic. If anyone happens to know what comic that was and where to find it, I'd appreciate the pointer. (Google searches seem to lead nowhere due to so many results for "spam.")
Yup. I know all about those. Thanks for adding that point, though. The only bad thing about a freeze is the charge for freezing/unfreezing your credit. It should be free, but the credit agencies want to dissuade people from freezing their credit. If too many people froze their credit, the credit agencies would make less money from those in store credit cards ("get 10% off your purchase by opening a store card now!") and from selling people's credit info to other companies.
The scary thing is that you can be as suspicious and careful as possible and still have your identity stolen because someone in another city whom you've never met wasn't suspicious and careful or because some company that you've dealt with directly or indirectly has a security breach of some sort. And when that happens the company responsible for your identity being stolen isn't out any significant (to them) money, but you need to spend a lot of your time and energy to restore your good credit.
Yes, I'm speaking from experience. I was lucky enough to find out about it early when the unrequested credit card was "accidentally" sent to me instead of to the ID thieves. So I got an "easier" time than I could have had. I still have to look over my credit report constantly, though, as my information is out there now.
My wife is always saying that she doesn't like how I post to many websites using my real name. (At some sites, with my real city/state of residence.) Of course, I've been posting to these sites for years and am unwilling to kill those accounts and re-register using a pseudonym. Meanwhile, my wife has a blog where she posts a lot of personal stuff, but she tries to keep it "anonymous" (in that she uses initials instead of names and never mentions where we live). The difference is that she started blogging about 2 years ago and always had a pseudonym as her online name. I started online interactions at some of the websites I frequent about 10 years ago. Ten years back, putting your real name out there didn't seem like such a big deal. Honestly, I still think it doesn't. However, if I could "rename" myself online without losing my history, I probably would.
According to http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=10 , 4.25%. Vista, meanwhile, has 15.26% and XP has 72.12% marketshare. Mac, Linux, and other operating systems make up the rest of the 8.37%.
No, no, no.
You bury the politicians up to their ankles. You did get the head first part right, though.
My wife's grandfather had Parkinson's disease. As his disease progressed, his body gave out more and more. In addition to that, his mind slowly unwound as well. One day he would be perfectly lucid. The next, he would be talking to me about a "yesterday" that was really twenty years ago. It was sad to watch him slowly sink away physically and mentally. I'm still not sure which is worse, but I hope that I never have to experience that myself (or have any of my close loved ones go through that). I'd rather have a quick, painless death (at a ripe, old age, of course) than lingering for years losing everything that makes up "me".
I agree. Losing weight is a combination of genes (body metabolism, body chemistry, etc), food intake, and exercise.
I lost 60 pounds a couple of years back and it was all because of diet change. However, simply eating less isn't going to always help. If you try to starve yourself (which, according to the GP poster's logic, should be a great way to lose weight) your body will assume that the food supply is low and reduce metabolism to conserve resources and survive. It's a basic survival mechanism.
Losing weight isn't as easy as eating less. However, eating healthier definitely is a great way to begin a weight loss plan.
Exactly. If you find yourself unable to express your political views on a subject in 140 characters or less then you should not be allowed t
Nine Eleven (crowd mumers in approval)
Nine... (audience gasps) ... Eleven! (audience roars in praise)
Oh, and Hitler is conspiring with the Legion of Doom to assassinate Jesus so toss me some money to stop them. Also, Darth Vader is trying to buy uranium from unwed teenagers.
(The "It Takes a Village Idiot, and I Married One" episode of Family Guy was on last night and it seemed appropriate.)
My wife's parents owned two cockatoos (unfortunately, one passed away a few years back, so it is down to one now). When both birds were in the midst of a screech-fest and the phone rang, my father-in-law would answer it "Hello, Jurassic Park!"
BTW, the current theory is that the chicken is the closest living relative of the T-Rex: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/apr/13/uknews.taxonomy
Imagine the drumsticks you could have eaten back in the Cretaceous! That is, if they didn't eat you first.
This was filed on July 25, 2006. So we need an example of a similar thing from July 25, 2005 or earlier to qualify for prior art. And this is so ridiculously simple that there's got to be some prior art somewhere. I don't think this would qualify since it is on an intranet, but my company's intranet has an internal policy editor that lets users set which affiliates get to see the policy. So if you want Policy X to be seen by A, B, and C, but not D, you check off those checkboxes and click OK. The database stores the permissions and the users searching for policies get the appropriate policies on their screens. I don't remember when we launched that, but I'm sure that it was before 2005. This should be a ridiculously easy patent to find prior art for.
No, it doesn't mean that Microsoft will make ODF the default format. It does mean, however, that I could send an Office 2007 user an ODF document that I made with OpenOffice.org and they would be able to open it. They, in turn, could save their file as ODF and send it over to me if I ask for all documents to be sent in ODF format. This represents a serious hole in the "must send everything DOC to ensure compatibility"* lock-in.
* Yes, I know that DOC had troubles across Office versions, but still sending DOC was your best bet if you wanted the party at the other end to be able to open and edit the document you were sending.
Good points. I'd also add:
4. explain that those 999 people that will go out of their way to avoid trading with you might tell their friends and family not to trade with you also.
Businesses that spam are seen as less reputable to most people than businesses that don't. So yes, you might pick up one sale, but you'll wind up losing hundreds if not thousands of potential sales.
Of course they are. They're the purist of the scientific fields.
You see? We're holding them because they're Al Qaida members. Our proof that they are Al Qaida members? Well, that's super secret stuff, but rest assured that we wouldn't be holding them if they weren't.
Of course, my entire post up until now was tongue in cheek. I'm amazed that this senator thinks that just because we happen to lock someone up it automatically means that they *MUST* be a member of Al Qaida and that anyone looking to set up trials for the people locked up just wants to set terrorists loose on American streets. Those in the opposition seem to see this as a Black and White issue. They seem to believe that our only options are 1) lock up anyone we suspect of being a threat no matter how flimsy the evidence or 2) let terrorists run around our streets blowing everything up. It is like they can't conceive of the possibility of actually gathering evidence on the people we seize and finding out whether they are *really* terrorists via a court of law where a third party (the judge or a jury) will decide what the truth is. Is it possible that a trial will set a terrorist free? Yes. But I'd rather set terrorists free by accident than purposefully keep an innocent man imprisoned with no legal recourse.
So what you're saying is that he's the first zombie to run for President. Vote Zombie McCain in 2008! He's the candidate with the (hunger for) BRAINS!!!!
And just to add to your point, take a look at who each has hired to help with their technical policies. McCain has Chuck Fish, a former Time Warner executive. Obama has Daniel Weitzner, an MIT computer scientist. In other words, McCain has brought on someone from big business, Obama has brought on someone who is very likely to know how tech stuff works. I prefer Obama's selection criteria to McCain's.
And just to go one further, I'm still convinced that, on his own, George W. Bush wouldn't have been a bad President. Not a good one by any stretch of the imagination, but probably not a bad one either. He would have likely been one of those Presidents that simply don't stand out in history. However, he surrounded himself with advisers (including Cheney) that took an extremely neo-conservative view of the world that favored mixing religion and politics, preemptive war, a theory of the executive branch as not having to answer to the other branches of government, a theory of the US being able to do anything it wants to do because "we're the US", etc. All of those views were entrenched in the organization and dissenting viewpoints weren't allowed. To disagree was to find yourself looking for another job (or worse).
President Bush early on admitted to not reading the papers and instead simply relying on his advisers. So he was surrounded from Day 1 with "Neo-Con News and World Report." As such, he only saw what his advisers wanted him to see and only did what his advisers wanted him to do. A good President will not only know how to seek out good advisers, but will know how to manage his administration so that it doesn't become a isolated bubble of opinion like the Bush Administration became. A good President will read outside sources of information, even if he disagrees with their opinions of world events.
I have more hope that Obama would wind up being that kind of President than I have that McCain would be that kind of President.