The Dell Oregon call center was a consumer sales call center. With the new Walmart deal and some consolidation of other callcenters, it was unfortunately made redundant.
And J&J, even within your take, has every right to be pissed. The Red Cross is a non-profit organization, it should not be giving out permission to use a symbol that is trademarked for commercial use by another organization.
Except, how can a corporation trademark a symbol that's already in use by a non-profit, and has been in use for 23 years before said corporation was even founded? You know they had to have picked that symbol just because there were charities in Europe already using it.
As for dating the symbol, as you point out, it was in use well before the Red Cross came into existence and claimed the trademark, including national flags. So the Red Cross probably shouldn't have any claim to the symbol either, yet it is sending legal letters to commercial entities saying to stop using it, AND is producing commercial products using it.
Except... the Red Cross is who was originally using it. They renamed themselves the International Committee of the Red Cross after a few decades when they were officially reorganized and recognized by the Geneva Convention, but they were doing work and using the symbol long before then.
Not only that, their symbol is protected by international law, so they have every right -- some would say duty -- to stop people from using it inappropriately.
Not only THAT, but the only thing I've ever seen the Red Cross sell -- and only on redcross.org -- is stuff like First Aid kits and emergency kits for your car -- things that you would think that the Red Cross would be quite happy to sell for fundraising. It's not like they don't have a surplus. The way the J&J guys are making it sound you can just walk up to any Walmart and buy a box of "Red Cross brand Bandaids". That's not the case at all.
Non profits and charities CAN sell things. Just because you're not in it for the money doesn't mean money isn't useful.
To extend on this line of thought. I could actually see J&J seeing this as a defensive move. If the ARC has been going around and suing companies to make them 'license' their cross, I could EASILY see them going after J&J once they feel confidant enough.
Can anyone show me an instance of ARC demanding licenses for their cross symbol? As far as I can tell, J&J is pissed that the Red Cross is giving the go ahead on people saying "This emergancy first aid kit is officially recognized as complete by the Red Cross."
Not only that, the Red Cross was founded Internationally in 1881, FIVE YEARS before J&J was even founded. Not only that, the symbol was first used in the 1860s, 3 decades before J&J was founded.
I'm 99.9% sure they're not allowed to do that by international law, since the ARC is an international body, a non profit organization, and protected and founded by the first Geneva convention -- part of which specifically set aside the Red Cross symbol as a protected symbol according to international treaty.
In short, J&J are assholes and the whole "A US Medical Firm is suing the RED CROSS for using the... RED CROSS" is an excellent point for any Michael Moore-style pundits who might just think that corporations like J&J are getting a liiiitle too big.
Hmmm... that's a strange thing to criticize... this is a pretty standard practice in US criminal law - cooperate, forfeit your right to a trial, and you get off easy.
Except, is that legal in the UK?
I mean, yea, yeah, he's being tried in the US. But don't his rights as a UK citizen apply as well?
In case you have forgotten, the old lines are the better sellers. Among all the newer things like wii sports, and many others, Mario and Zelda still have a huge fan base and still sell. It is not a bad thing that Nintendo is moving for more lines, but they should still keep the old tried and true (and the better) series until sales begin to drop (which they never will, if the quality keeps up and only when fans become bored). I still play all the older sets, and my friends still do, and we all find enjoyment in things like Smash and Zelda and Starfox and mario party.
Um, pardon me if I'm wrong, but haven't the brain age and other games like that sold like a billion copies each? They're extremely popular if only cause they're targeting an untapped market.
Calling a $500 price "aggressive" may not be appropriate, really. Realistic, perhaps; it's still $200 pricier than an HD-DVD player or a basic XBox 360. I'd call it barely reasonable, but not aggressive.
Personally, I'd use the word "desperate" not "aggressive."
It's not really aggression when the entire game retail industry comes to you and says "either you drop the price on these pieces of crap or we will do it for you / or we're taking them off the shelves."
Extortion is a criminal offense, which occurs when a person either obtains money, property or services from another through coercion or intimidation or threatens one with physical or reputational harm unless they are paid money or property. Refraining from doing harm is sometimes euphemistically called protection. Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crime groups. The actual obtainment of money or property is not required to commit the offense. Making a threat of violence or a lawsuit which refers to a requirement of a payment of money or property to halt future violence or lawsuit is sufficient to commit the offense. The four simple words "pay up or else" are sufficient to constitute the crime of extortion. An extortionate threat made to another in jest is still extortion.
This is like a while back President Bush said he had the Beatles on his iPod, when there was no legal way to get them on there. Sure, It's funny, but thats this isn't gonna change anyone's minds and there is no way the RIAA is gonna after him. Policians and celebrities don't have to play by the same rules as you and I, whats new?
You can still rip your own CDs. That's format shifting, and is a protected consumer right, no matter what the RIAA would like to convince us otherwise.
The entire world would scale to match the level of your character. So as a 1st level character, you can go into the Arena and kill the reigning champion with the same amount of difficulty as you would at 20th level. Maybe even easier... if you leveled your character in non-optimal ways (especially if you didn't go through the mind-numbing process of repeating actions for 10 minutes to maximize your stat gains) your character would be less powerful at 20th than at 1st.
Except that the article (have it here in my hands) specifically states that this doesn't happen in Fallout, since there's no RubberbandAI scaling.
Although Bethesda has backtracked on that a touch since the article was leaked... I think what will ultimately end up happening is that areas will have a certain minimum or maximum level. Go run over to the supermutant caves at level 1, you'd better be REALLY GOOD at running away. Go over to the Radscoprion caves at level 20, even the Radscoprion Paragons won't do anything but annoy you.
If it's remotely anything like Oblivion, except for the fact that it's first person, it will have failed miserably as a Fallout game.
Oh no, it'll have failed as a small name computer RPG that's ten YEARS old this year.
My god, what will Bethesda do?!?
I guess they'll just have to, you know, make a really kickass modern CRPG, of which Oblivion is considered one of the best examples of. The guys at NMA-Fallout blubbering nonwithstanding.
THE HORROR! The next thing you'll know, Nintendo will start making THREE DEE Mario games!
We know that there are records of this activity by the FBI. Now it is just a matter of time until these records come to light. The beauty of computers and email and automatic logging is that this administrations actions will be very difficult to hide. It's really amazing that the FBI and other Gov't agencies went hog-wild on peoples civil rights, and that they thought somehow that this was OK, that they would get away with it. How blind to the future consequences of their actions are these people? Seriously it's like watching the stooges play gov't.
Well, they felt that they had fixed the process enough that they had a "permanent majority" starting about 6 years ago. Fixed via either hosting sessions with DOJ and other Government officials on how they can do their part to fix elections, or getting easily edited digital election machines, or just restricting our rights to the point that we can't do shit to stop them.
Ergo, why bother holding back anymore? They are "The Government" (Tm), now and forever, right? Right?
I fear we're going to find all too many abuses of power in the upcoming decades. I've heard tell of us using White Phosphorous as a chemical weapon on civilians in Iraq, of using siege tactics on civilian cities, of all sorts of horrid crap that the US Media just won't acknowledge -- but is easily available information in the European and Asian news.
Well, until the Democrats take full control in 2009 -- then suddenly the suddenly reformed US Media will "discover" all this bad stuff, just in time to find an excuse to blame it on President Obama.
Regardless if a user accepts a EULA, its actually against the law to unlawfully restrict their rights in tapping into some legal protection for sale of faulty goods. Well it is in Australia, I'm sure the US has similar laws to protect consumers.
Actually... given the brazen attitude of EULA writers, I don't think we do. I know that EULAs are changed to be more consumer friendly in the UK and Australia, simply because if they tried half the shit there that they try here they'd get sued by the government, but they keep trying it here, so it must be at least somewhat legal, right?
Yes please check dmesg | grep ERROR. Try saying that to someone who doesnt know what a shell is.
That's easy.
"Ok Ma'am, what I'd like you to do is type this exactly how I say it, ok? Since we're in the command line, we can't use the mouse, we have to type right on into the screen where the cursor lays.
What we're going to do is we're going to type in a command that will display all the error messages that have come up since the most recent time you turned on your computer. The Debug Messages file holds all these, and will let us know if there's any warnings popping up.
Ok, now what I want you to do is type D like in Debug. Oh, yes, we need this whole line to be lowercase unless I say different, ok? So, D like in Device or David. Then M E S G, that's short for Message. So Mary, Edward, Samuel, Gregory.
Then I want you to hit space, just one space. Ok, awesome. Now we have to type a pipe character. That's pretty easy, do you see the two slashes on your keyboard? Well, one has a question mark on top of it, the other has a pipe. Yup, that's what they call that. I donno either, 1970s computer geeks were a bit weird.
Ok, after the pipe, please hit spacebar again. Ok, now we have to type "grep". No, it's not a real word, it's spelled G for Greg, R for Rabbit, E for Edward, P for Poppa. No, I don't think it was the same 1970s geeks, but I do think they liked to email each other on the old internet.
Then hit space. Now here's where it gets fun, I need you to type ERROR in all caps. Big letters. Ok, can you read that back to me now? Great! Now go ahead and hit enter, and tell me what pops up on the screen."
Not that hard really, certainly no harder than, say "netsh int ip reset log.txt" or "Please go into the registry, we need to delete some things called the "Upper and Lower Filters", they're the Windows XP CD Burning Plugin systems are stored... the problem is they're ran every single time the CD is accessed, so if they're corrupt, the computer starts acting a little... weiiiiird."
(Said registry key is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} btw. It's usually smooth sailing until I have to explain the 4 David 3 6 Edward 9 6 5 dash Edward 3 2 5 bit...)
Where's the ATI or NVidia cards? All we have now is the Intel cards for the E1505N, and right now they're only good for 2D.
It's rather hard to get good 3d in ANY laptop. They're really not overwhelmingly designed for 3d applications, as a rule. Dell does sell the XPS Laptop line (the top of the line XPS is less of a "laptop" and more of a "portable desktop"), and the Precision Workstation Mobile line have a bit beefier cards.
Further compounding this is the fact that ATI and Ubuntu do not really work well together. I'm not sure about Nvidia's drivers, but I've never been able to install Ubuntu on a system with an ATI card in it -- it just locks up.
I doubt they'd have Ubuntu pre-installed. This reeks of a scam.
Walmart is huge, and putting cheap windows machines there will mean they will get bought by many. Then Dell can come back to sales figures and go, "See? We told you! Consumers just don't want Linux on their computers," and then discontinue the line. Microsoft leaves happy, Dell leaves happy, and the average customer doesn't even know what hit them.
I was WONDERING why Dell was getting so cozy with the idea of selling Linux machines without a lot of hoop-jumping.
What the heck. I heard this EXACT same argument, word for word, when HP announced Linux machines.
Yes, I'm sure Microsoft just has soooooo much pull with Dell that they could force Dell to make Linux machines, then partner with Walmart (changing their entire corporate strategy), just so they could intentionally fail just so Microsoft can create some new FUD.
Except that Dell has sold through 3rd parties before. They're just adding one more. Yes, this is a bit of a shift in strategy. But I seriously doubt that even Walmart is big enough to bring down Dell's direct business model.
Will Dell sell a lot of machines through Walmart? Who can say? Will Dell get their name out there right next to HP, bringing their online and phone stores business that they might not have gotten before? You bet.
I think that's the ultimate goal here. If the individual units sell at Walmart is irrelevant -- this is one giant free advertising campaign.
Slashdot Mirror
The Dell Oregon call center was a consumer sales call center. With the new Walmart deal and some consolidation of other callcenters, it was unfortunately made redundant.
Kinda sucks.
And J&J, even within your take, has every right to be pissed. The Red Cross is a non-profit organization, it should not be giving out permission to use a symbol that is trademarked for commercial use by another organization.
Except, how can a corporation trademark a symbol that's already in use by a non-profit, and has been in use for 23 years before said corporation was even founded? You know they had to have picked that symbol just because there were charities in Europe already using it.
As for dating the symbol, as you point out, it was in use well before the Red Cross came into existence and claimed the trademark, including national flags. So the Red Cross probably shouldn't have any claim to the symbol either, yet it is sending legal letters to commercial entities saying to stop using it, AND is producing commercial products using it.
Except... the Red Cross is who was originally using it. They renamed themselves the International Committee of the Red Cross after a few decades when they were officially reorganized and recognized by the Geneva Convention, but they were doing work and using the symbol long before then.
Not only that, their symbol is protected by international law, so they have every right -- some would say duty -- to stop people from using it inappropriately.
Not only THAT, but the only thing I've ever seen the Red Cross sell -- and only on redcross.org -- is stuff like First Aid kits and emergency kits for your car -- things that you would think that the Red Cross would be quite happy to sell for fundraising. It's not like they don't have a surplus. The way the J&J guys are making it sound you can just walk up to any Walmart and buy a box of "Red Cross brand Bandaids". That's not the case at all.
Non profits and charities CAN sell things. Just because you're not in it for the money doesn't mean money isn't useful.
To extend on this line of thought. I could actually see J&J seeing this as a defensive move. If the ARC has been going around and suing companies to make them 'license' their cross, I could EASILY see them going after J&J once they feel confidant enough.
Can anyone show me an instance of ARC demanding licenses for their cross symbol? As far as I can tell, J&J is pissed that the Red Cross is giving the go ahead on people saying "This emergancy first aid kit is officially recognized as complete by the Red Cross."
Not only that, the Red Cross was founded Internationally in 1881, FIVE YEARS before J&J was even founded. Not only that, the symbol was first used in the 1860s, 3 decades before J&J was founded.
I'm 99.9% sure they're not allowed to do that by international law, since the ARC is an international body, a non profit organization, and protected and founded by the first Geneva convention -- part of which specifically set aside the Red Cross symbol as a protected symbol according to international treaty.
In short, J&J are assholes and the whole "A US Medical Firm is suing the RED CROSS for using the... RED CROSS" is an excellent point for any Michael Moore-style pundits who might just think that corporations like J&J are getting a liiiitle too big.
Hmmm... that's a strange thing to criticize... this is a pretty standard practice in US criminal law - cooperate, forfeit your right to a trial, and you get off easy.
Except, is that legal in the UK?
I mean, yea, yeah, he's being tried in the US. But don't his rights as a UK citizen apply as well?
As to the "difficulty" of finding the information on Apple's site:
Main iPhone support page -> Battery Service: FAQ and iPhone Service: FAQ
and
Apple Batteries -> Apple iPhone Batteries
Wow. Difficult.
Not difficult NOW, but what about THEN?
The one in my area (First Federal) does 10s and 20s. One downtown does 5s, 10s, and 20s.
Looks like their site is up. This is probably FUD to generate blog hits.
Hanlon's Razor leads to an easier explanation -- the Slashdot editors took several hours to promote this from the inbox to the main site.
In case you have forgotten, the old lines are the better sellers. Among all the newer things like wii sports, and many others, Mario and Zelda still have a huge fan base and still sell. It is not a bad thing that Nintendo is moving for more lines, but they should still keep the old tried and true (and the better) series until sales begin to drop (which they never will, if the quality keeps up and only when fans become bored). I still play all the older sets, and my friends still do, and we all find enjoyment in things like Smash and Zelda and Starfox and mario party.
Um, pardon me if I'm wrong, but haven't the brain age and other games like that sold like a billion copies each? They're extremely popular if only cause they're targeting an untapped market.
What exactly makes it a "hacker's dream"?
It's cheap, for a HD PVR.
Calling a $500 price "aggressive" may not be appropriate, really. Realistic, perhaps; it's still $200 pricier than an HD-DVD player or a basic XBox 360. I'd call it barely reasonable, but not aggressive.
Personally, I'd use the word "desperate" not "aggressive."
It's not really aggression when the entire game retail industry comes to you and says "either you drop the price on these pieces of crap or we will do it for you / or we're taking them off the shelves."
It's the only game I need that's only for PS3. I might even wait until they port it though. $500 for one game is too expensive.
Unless they actually got them to sign a exclusivity contract, I would wager that MGS4 will hit the 360 or PC pretty quickly.
However, I could be wrong. It and FF13 are basically the only exclusives that the PS3 has now.
Can someone explain to me how this is any different than the prototype HVD format?
Isn't that bribery?
No, it's Extortion.
Extortion is a criminal offense, which occurs when a person either obtains money, property or services from another through coercion or intimidation or threatens one with physical or reputational harm unless they are paid money or property. Refraining from doing harm is sometimes euphemistically called protection. Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crime groups. The actual obtainment of money or property is not required to commit the offense. Making a threat of violence or a lawsuit which refers to a requirement of a payment of money or property to halt future violence or lawsuit is sufficient to commit the offense. The four simple words "pay up or else" are sufficient to constitute the crime of extortion. An extortionate threat made to another in jest is still extortion.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Extortion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extortion
This is like a while back President Bush said he had the Beatles on his iPod, when there was no legal way to get them on there. Sure, It's funny, but thats this isn't gonna change anyone's minds and there is no way the RIAA is gonna after him. Policians and celebrities don't have to play by the same rules as you and I, whats new?
You can still rip your own CDs. That's format shifting, and is a protected consumer right, no matter what the RIAA would like to convince us otherwise.
The entire world would scale to match the level of your character. So as a 1st level character, you can go into the Arena and kill the reigning champion with the same amount of difficulty as you would at 20th level. Maybe even easier... if you leveled your character in non-optimal ways (especially if you didn't go through the mind-numbing process of repeating actions for 10 minutes to maximize your stat gains) your character would be less powerful at 20th than at 1st.
Except that the article (have it here in my hands) specifically states that this doesn't happen in Fallout, since there's no RubberbandAI scaling.
Although Bethesda has backtracked on that a touch since the article was leaked... I think what will ultimately end up happening is that areas will have a certain minimum or maximum level. Go run over to the supermutant caves at level 1, you'd better be REALLY GOOD at running away. Go over to the Radscoprion caves at level 20, even the Radscoprion Paragons won't do anything but annoy you.
If it's remotely anything like Oblivion, except for the fact that it's first person, it will have failed miserably as a Fallout game.
Oh no, it'll have failed as a small name computer RPG that's ten YEARS old this year.
My god, what will Bethesda do?!?
I guess they'll just have to, you know, make a really kickass modern CRPG, of which Oblivion is considered one of the best examples of. The guys at NMA-Fallout blubbering nonwithstanding.
THE HORROR! The next thing you'll know, Nintendo will start making THREE DEE Mario games!
Anarchy in the streets, I tells ya!
We know that there are records of this activity by the FBI. Now it is just a matter of time until these records come to light. The beauty of computers and email and automatic logging is that this administrations actions will be very difficult to hide. It's really amazing that the FBI and other Gov't agencies went hog-wild on peoples civil rights, and that they thought somehow that this was OK, that they would get away with it. How blind to the future consequences of their actions are these people? Seriously it's like watching the stooges play gov't.
Well, they felt that they had fixed the process enough that they had a "permanent majority" starting about 6 years ago. Fixed via either hosting sessions with DOJ and other Government officials on how they can do their part to fix elections, or getting easily edited digital election machines, or just restricting our rights to the point that we can't do shit to stop them.
Ergo, why bother holding back anymore? They are "The Government" (Tm), now and forever, right? Right?
I fear we're going to find all too many abuses of power in the upcoming decades. I've heard tell of us using White Phosphorous as a chemical weapon on civilians in Iraq, of using siege tactics on civilian cities, of all sorts of horrid crap that the US Media just won't acknowledge -- but is easily available information in the European and Asian news.
Well, until the Democrats take full control in 2009 -- then suddenly the suddenly reformed US Media will "discover" all this bad stuff, just in time to find an excuse to blame it on President Obama.
Apple has an opportunity to help this happen, but it's not clear if they're interested in that outcome.
Or the same wireless carriers, which Apple has to go through, have flat out told them they're not ALLOWED to help create that outcome.
Regardless if a user accepts a EULA, its actually against the law to unlawfully restrict their rights in tapping into some legal protection for sale of faulty goods. Well it is in Australia, I'm sure the US has similar laws to protect consumers.
Actually... given the brazen attitude of EULA writers, I don't think we do. I know that EULAs are changed to be more consumer friendly in the UK and Australia, simply because if they tried half the shit there that they try here they'd get sued by the government, but they keep trying it here, so it must be at least somewhat legal, right?
Risk of injury! What, were they worried the children would all go blind or something?
No, no no. They were clearly worried about the cost of hair removal gel for their palms.
Yes please check dmesg | grep ERROR. Try saying that to someone who doesnt know what a shell is.
o l\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} btw. It's usually smooth sailing until I have to explain the 4 David 3 6 Edward 9 6 5 dash Edward 3 2 5 bit...)
That's easy.
"Ok Ma'am, what I'd like you to do is type this exactly how I say it, ok? Since we're in the command line, we can't use the mouse, we have to type right on into the screen where the cursor lays.
What we're going to do is we're going to type in a command that will display all the error messages that have come up since the most recent time you turned on your computer. The Debug Messages file holds all these, and will let us know if there's any warnings popping up.
Ok, now what I want you to do is type D like in Debug. Oh, yes, we need this whole line to be lowercase unless I say different, ok? So, D like in Device or David. Then M E S G, that's short for Message. So Mary, Edward, Samuel, Gregory.
Then I want you to hit space, just one space. Ok, awesome. Now we have to type a pipe character. That's pretty easy, do you see the two slashes on your keyboard? Well, one has a question mark on top of it, the other has a pipe. Yup, that's what they call that. I donno either, 1970s computer geeks were a bit weird.
Ok, after the pipe, please hit spacebar again. Ok, now we have to type "grep". No, it's not a real word, it's spelled G for Greg, R for Rabbit, E for Edward, P for Poppa. No, I don't think it was the same 1970s geeks, but I do think they liked to email each other on the old internet.
Then hit space. Now here's where it gets fun, I need you to type ERROR in all caps. Big letters. Ok, can you read that back to me now? Great! Now go ahead and hit enter, and tell me what pops up on the screen."
Not that hard really, certainly no harder than, say "netsh int ip reset log.txt" or "Please go into the registry, we need to delete some things called the "Upper and Lower Filters", they're the Windows XP CD Burning Plugin systems are stored... the problem is they're ran every single time the CD is accessed, so if they're corrupt, the computer starts acting a little... weiiiiird."
(Said registry key is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr
Does Blizzard have any real legal recourse here?
Violation of contract (EULA).
Digital Trespass (since they've been told not to come back).
Harassment
I'm sure a lawyer can find a better legal sounding way to say "being an obnoxious twit" than I can.
Where's the ATI or NVidia cards? All we have now is the Intel cards for the E1505N, and right now they're only good for 2D.
It's rather hard to get good 3d in ANY laptop. They're really not overwhelmingly designed for 3d applications, as a rule. Dell does sell the XPS Laptop line (the top of the line XPS is less of a "laptop" and more of a "portable desktop"), and the Precision Workstation Mobile line have a bit beefier cards.
Further compounding this is the fact that ATI and Ubuntu do not really work well together. I'm not sure about Nvidia's drivers, but I've never been able to install Ubuntu on a system with an ATI card in it -- it just locks up.
I doubt they'd have Ubuntu pre-installed. This reeks of a scam.
Walmart is huge, and putting cheap windows machines there will mean they will get bought by many. Then Dell can come back to sales figures and go, "See? We told you! Consumers just don't want Linux on their computers," and then discontinue the line. Microsoft leaves happy, Dell leaves happy, and the average customer doesn't even know what hit them.
I was WONDERING why Dell was getting so cozy with the idea of selling Linux machines without a lot of hoop-jumping.
What the heck. I heard this EXACT same argument, word for word, when HP announced Linux machines.
Yes, I'm sure Microsoft just has soooooo much pull with Dell that they could force Dell to make Linux machines, then partner with Walmart (changing their entire corporate strategy), just so they could intentionally fail just so Microsoft can create some new FUD.
My head hurts.
Except that Dell has sold through 3rd parties before. They're just adding one more. Yes, this is a bit of a shift in strategy. But I seriously doubt that even Walmart is big enough to bring down Dell's direct business model.
Will Dell sell a lot of machines through Walmart? Who can say? Will Dell get their name out there right next to HP, bringing their online and phone stores business that they might not have gotten before? You bet.
I think that's the ultimate goal here. If the individual units sell at Walmart is irrelevant -- this is one giant free advertising campaign.