Yeah, that group's pretty much screwed. They've got 2 choices:
1) Get groped by a stranger. 2) Strike a submissive pose while some unseen stranger in another room looks at a very revealing image of their body. Plus they might still get groped if the unseen person decides they see something suspicious.
OMG, you just gave me a good idea. As soon as the screener's hand "meets resistance", curl up in a ball and start crying, "No, Father Jim, no!" Probably get a meal voucher and a free flight.
It's my opinion that the item belongs to the receiver once Auntie has submitted the order. At that point, I believe it could be argued that the item belongs to the recipient regardless of its physical location. The only hitch I see (with less than 5 minutes of thought) is that Auntie may have paid for delivery and gift wrapping. Refund those charges and that should take care of the issue. They could add wording to their gift purchase process that informs the purchaser that the recipient will have the option of substituting the item for another item or for store credit unless the purchaser opts out of the substitution program. Or make the substitution program opt-in.
How is it any different than returning a crappy gift for store credit?
Essentially, what Amazon is proposing is that they check with the receiver before they go to the trouble of lugging a package all the way to the customer's door. The customer is authorizing a third party (in this case, Amazon) to perform specific actions before making any delivery. If item=clothing, then confirm size, else if item=DVD, then substitute BR, else if item=paper book, substitute kindle book, else if item=gift from Aunt Mildred, then convert to gift certificate, else ship as ordered by purchaser.
Aunt Mildred doesn't have the right to force a specific item on you. Once she's sent the gift, relinquishes her interest in the item. Amazon could provide a "no substitutions" option which would nullify the sale and refund her money if she wants to be a stick in the mud but, really, once she's submitted the order, it's up to the recipient to decide whether they want it or not.
My grandparents gave up on trying to shop for me a long time ago because anything I really need, I've already bought for myself and any geek stuff I might want (but can't justify purchasing) would be beyond their ability to evaluate. So they give me checks and I promise to use the money to buy something I really want but wouldn't buy if I was spending my own money. Everyone's happy because they know I'm getting something I really want that I wouldn't otherwise have and I get something I wouldn't normally buy for myself.
Of course I pulled the numbers out of my ass. The amount of time it took to type that is the amount of time I spent considering it. $50 max for a single item would have an interesting effect, though. It would give Joe User the ability to make a kind of statement. Get 100,000 people each to share one single title knowing that each individual could never be liable for more than $50. EVERYONE can afford to risk $50. Tho it wouldn't be much of a risk because it wouldn't be worth the effort of trying to collect that $50. It's a token.
And $50,000 isn't going to destroy any 1st-worlder's life. It may cost them a hundred bucks a month for half a lifetime but it won't put them out on the street.
As for the amount of data, it's not difficult for an ISP to detect P2P traffic. Even if it's encrypted and/or run through a VPN, the very nature of the data flow is a giveaway. Just the volume alone would be enough to provide ballpark estimates. If a customer's pipe goes from 10 gigs a month of outgoing traffic to 20 gigs a day then drops back to 10 gigs a month when the bittorrent client is rooted out...well, do the math. Remember, civil cases aren't "beyond a reasonable doubt" level of proof. They're "preponderance of the evidence".
While I think 7-figure judgments against an individual for sharing a handful of items is unquestionably cruel and unusual, I don't think it's out of line to face a penalty of _some_ sort for illegally distributing something that isn't yours to distribute. While intent should factor into the punishment, ignorance is not an excuse. Also, just to point it out, I don't know if the "cruel and unusual punishment" concept applies to civil judgments.
The bottom line is this: The staggering range of the judgments and settlement offer in this single case shows that guidelines of some sort are needed.
Maximum of $50/song with a maximum total cap of $50,000. And there should be a sliding scale based on the actual amount of data transferred. So someone who accidentally shares their music library for a couple days doesn't get the same penalty as someone who seeds torrents on their company's 100mbit tube for a year.
Set the whole damn world to Zulu time and leave it the Hell alone!!!
No time zones, no dateline, no nothing. So when I have a conference call scheduled for 03:00 on Thursday, there's no question about when it's really going to take place. None of this "my time/your time" crap.
My fault-tolerant array is up to 12tb (14 if you count parity) with room to add another 14tb before I run out of ports and drive bays. On the one hand, it's nice to be able to grab most of my content off the Tivo and store it exactly as it was streamed by the cable company. On the other hand, 6+ gigs per hour really adds up fast.
I've seen two switches die in 16 years. Both after running for 5-10 years in network closets with no air conditioning. The second one was tough to spot because it was intermittent and only half a dozen ports were in use. I just happened to be looking right at it when it blinked dark then came back on.
And I don't see a 2-3 hour downtime to find and replace a bad switch (unless it's intermittent and only drops out for less than a second at a time). Send Tibor to the storage closet to get a spare while you remove the old one. By the time Tibor's back with the replacement, you've got that spot open. Slide it in, plug it in, good to go. Mabye 20-30 minutes depending on the number of ports.
$1000 for mediocre PCs? Does nobody have a bullshit filter any more? Something that says, "That price can't possibly be right." My company buys new Dell systems in batches of 4-6 at a time. We get mediocre systems for about half that. Complete systems with 17-19" monitors (depending on what's being bundled that week). Dual cores with 4 gigs and Win7 pro.
If someone told me I'd have to pay $1000 for one of those computers, I'd LMAO. Hell, looking at the website, they're selling the last system we bought for about $520 individually to Joe Sixpack off the street so our price would probably be $500/unit delivered.
And what's this 18 months crap? I've been using the same workstation at the office for 4 years and I expect to keep using it as long as Microsoft keeps cranking out security patches for XP or until I need to upgrade to Win7. (Not likely since I can run Office 2010 in XP.) It does everything I need and more. We hit a plateau years ago when increased processing power became worthless for cube monkeys. People running word processors, spreadsheets, email, web browsers, etc. simply don't need any more power than a 2-3ghz P4.
Christ, this guy's spending twice the going rate for equipment and planning to toss it waaaaay before EOL. No wonder our government is bankrupt.
It's not JUST a sex crime issue. There's invasion of privacy. There's wiretapping (some variation of it). Plenty of crap. What they did is wrong on so many levels that more than just one class of crime was committed in my opinion. I'm no law-talking guy but the things they did MUST be illegal. You can't just set up a camera in someone's house and take pictures of them. Even the cops can't do that without a warrant.
I think they tell that porta-potty story to every group. I went on a tour a while back and we went inside the Ice Cap tower. It was a bit spooky. The whole rig's just been hanging there since 1993 (minus the warhead, of course). I couldn't resist giving the rig a slight shove to make it swing.
Now I want to go again and see if I can spot one of the surveillance units. I imagine they'd be cruising around the perimeter of the waste disposal area.
This is exactly what I want to know. What the hell is going on?!? They were using cameras to spy on children in their bedrooms! I don't care what their motivations were. Private citizens do not have the authority to do the things they did. And the way they talked about the spying software shows that they thought of it as entertainment. If I could post a pic here, I'd post the "This is an outrage!" guy.
I was in the same boat. I was very close to buying a RAT-7 then remembered my Cyborg joystick. It also is very configurable. You can move the hand-rest around, tilt the top forward or back, left or right, adjust the trigger angle, switch it around for lefty or righty, etc. But all those points of adjustment are just future points of failure. I never made a single adjustment after the first day I had it but now the head ratchets back and forth under anything but the lightest touch. And I'm hardly a power-gamer. It's got maybe a hundred hours of use over the course of 3 years.
Once I remembered that joystick, I decided to pass on the mouse. No way was I going to spend a hundred bucks on a mouse that might start getting creaky and slip out of adjustment after a year or two. I bought a Mionix NAOS-5000 instead. It doesn't provide as much pinky support but it's a large, solid mouse that looks and feels like it'll hold up well for years.
Actually, very few monitors can be rotated out of the box. You need to buy a new mount which often costs half as much as the monitor. The SOFTWARE (OS and drivers) is the part of the equation that's already in place. A few clicks and my desktop is rotated but I'd have to prop the monitor against a stack of books or something. I've actually had this conversation several times recently and it it's very annoying that most monitor manufacturers put standard VESA mount points on their monitors then attach their own proprietary, single-position stands. For the same amount of money, they could design their stands to use the mount points and allow for either horizontal or vertical mounting. Hell, I have a bunch of Dell monitors which have stands that snap into a square indentation right over the VESA mount points. Two inches higher, a couple notches and a second snap-lock and they'd be rotateable. But I guess they wanted to save $0.04/unit. [sigh]
The upgrade path is key. I hemmed and hawed when I built a new gaming rig about 3 years ago. There was a some fairly convincing hype about how this new AM2 socket was the wave of the future and the key to a long upgrade path. I was skeptical but ended up going that way. I bought a top of the line motherboard with true dual 16 lane PCIe slots. I'm still using that board two processors and three video cards later. And I can still upgrade to the latest class of CPU because Asus keeps cranking out BIOS updates. I could even put a six-core CPU in there, tho I'd only be able to use 4. But that means I could upgrade the CPU now, save up some more money, then upgrade the motherboard and memory later. And, if I'm building a new system with an AM3 socket, I can put any CPU in there from a single-core Sempron to the best six-core they've got.
AMD's management of the AM2/AM2+/AM3 socket progression has sold me on their commitment to system builders.
Meanwhile, I look at Intel and they have THREE current sockets in the consumer market. What a mess.
"Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through."
You mean like how Outlook 2003 had half-assed, crippled IMAP support that languished for 4 years until Outlook 2007 came out? Which still left out a few important details that were kinda addressed in Outlook 2010? And you got to pay $$$ for each incremental improvement?
I almost like Outlook 2010 but it took them 7 freakin' years to get IMAP right enough not to suck. Actually, it took MORE than 7 years. I'm pretty sure it was part of LookOut 97.
The whole idea that money must be involved to create a quality product really grinds my gears. Back when OpenOffice hit 2.0, one of our mucky-mucks took up the challenge to do all of his office tasks with OO. Several months later, he declared that he hadn't touched an Office product once, the learning curve wasn't bad, and he was able to do everything he needed with OO and several things that Office couldn't do. So we're sticking with M$ Office because it must be better because we pay for it. Sigh. Before I could even open my mouth, he came right out and said that there was no rational basis for the decision. Free software just doesn't feel right.
That attitude is starting to change but it's sooooo sssssllllloooooowwwww in an industry that moves so fast.
No shit. If you don't assume that everything you do on company equipment is monitored, you're an ID10T. Hell, I'm in IT and I bring my own laptop and entartube connection for personal email/banking/chat even though I know we don't actively monitor any of that. The fact that we don't monitor it today doesn't mean we won't start tomorrow.
No kidding. My youth is not retro, damnit!!! And I never avoided the 8088 workstation in the corner because it was at the end of the coax and tended to drop off the network from time to time. And I never nerdgasmed over the campus' first black and white X terminals.
Add to that the fact that most people are stupid and it gets really ugly. I'd never be able to get a jury of my peers because my peers would be smart enough to get out of jury duty. Unless they were bored and just wanted something to do for a day or three.
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Yeah, that group's pretty much screwed. They've got 2 choices:
1) Get groped by a stranger.
2) Strike a submissive pose while some unseen stranger in another room looks at a very revealing image of their body. Plus they might still get groped if the unseen person decides they see something suspicious.
OMG, you just gave me a good idea. As soon as the screener's hand "meets resistance", curl up in a ball and start crying, "No, Father Jim, no!" Probably get a meal voucher and a free flight.
Well that's, like, your opinion, man.
It's my opinion that the item belongs to the receiver once Auntie has submitted the order. At that point, I believe it could be argued that the item belongs to the recipient regardless of its physical location. The only hitch I see (with less than 5 minutes of thought) is that Auntie may have paid for delivery and gift wrapping. Refund those charges and that should take care of the issue. They could add wording to their gift purchase process that informs the purchaser that the recipient will have the option of substituting the item for another item or for store credit unless the purchaser opts out of the substitution program. Or make the substitution program opt-in.
Lots of ways to make it legal.
How is it any different than returning a crappy gift for store credit?
Essentially, what Amazon is proposing is that they check with the receiver before they go to the trouble of lugging a package all the way to the customer's door. The customer is authorizing a third party (in this case, Amazon) to perform specific actions before making any delivery. If item=clothing, then confirm size, else if item=DVD, then substitute BR, else if item=paper book, substitute kindle book, else if item=gift from Aunt Mildred, then convert to gift certificate, else ship as ordered by purchaser.
Aunt Mildred doesn't have the right to force a specific item on you. Once she's sent the gift, relinquishes her interest in the item. Amazon could provide a "no substitutions" option which would nullify the sale and refund her money if she wants to be a stick in the mud but, really, once she's submitted the order, it's up to the recipient to decide whether they want it or not.
My grandparents gave up on trying to shop for me a long time ago because anything I really need, I've already bought for myself and any geek stuff I might want (but can't justify purchasing) would be beyond their ability to evaluate. So they give me checks and I promise to use the money to buy something I really want but wouldn't buy if I was spending my own money. Everyone's happy because they know I'm getting something I really want that I wouldn't otherwise have and I get something I wouldn't normally buy for myself.
I'm pretty sure intelligence has a similar distribution pattern. But, obviously, not necessarily distributed amongst the same people.
Of course I pulled the numbers out of my ass. The amount of time it took to type that is the amount of time I spent considering it. $50 max for a single item would have an interesting effect, though. It would give Joe User the ability to make a kind of statement. Get 100,000 people each to share one single title knowing that each individual could never be liable for more than $50. EVERYONE can afford to risk $50. Tho it wouldn't be much of a risk because it wouldn't be worth the effort of trying to collect that $50. It's a token.
And $50,000 isn't going to destroy any 1st-worlder's life. It may cost them a hundred bucks a month for half a lifetime but it won't put them out on the street.
As for the amount of data, it's not difficult for an ISP to detect P2P traffic. Even if it's encrypted and/or run through a VPN, the very nature of the data flow is a giveaway. Just the volume alone would be enough to provide ballpark estimates. If a customer's pipe goes from 10 gigs a month of outgoing traffic to 20 gigs a day then drops back to 10 gigs a month when the bittorrent client is rooted out...well, do the math. Remember, civil cases aren't "beyond a reasonable doubt" level of proof. They're "preponderance of the evidence".
While I think 7-figure judgments against an individual for sharing a handful of items is unquestionably cruel and unusual, I don't think it's out of line to face a penalty of _some_ sort for illegally distributing something that isn't yours to distribute. While intent should factor into the punishment, ignorance is not an excuse. Also, just to point it out, I don't know if the "cruel and unusual punishment" concept applies to civil judgments.
The bottom line is this: The staggering range of the judgments and settlement offer in this single case shows that guidelines of some sort are needed.
Maximum of $50/song with a maximum total cap of $50,000. And there should be a sliding scale based on the actual amount of data transferred. So someone who accidentally shares their music library for a couple days doesn't get the same penalty as someone who seeds torrents on their company's 100mbit tube for a year.
Set the whole damn world to Zulu time and leave it the Hell alone!!!
No time zones, no dateline, no nothing. So when I have a conference call scheduled for 03:00 on Thursday, there's no question about when it's really going to take place. None of this "my time/your time" crap.
Amateur. :)
My fault-tolerant array is up to 12tb (14 if you count parity) with room to add another 14tb before I run out of ports and drive bays. On the one hand, it's nice to be able to grab most of my content off the Tivo and store it exactly as it was streamed by the cable company. On the other hand, 6+ gigs per hour really adds up fast.
I've seen two switches die in 16 years. Both after running for 5-10 years in network closets with no air conditioning. The second one was tough to spot because it was intermittent and only half a dozen ports were in use. I just happened to be looking right at it when it blinked dark then came back on.
And I don't see a 2-3 hour downtime to find and replace a bad switch (unless it's intermittent and only drops out for less than a second at a time). Send Tibor to the storage closet to get a spare while you remove the old one. By the time Tibor's back with the replacement, you've got that spot open. Slide it in, plug it in, good to go. Mabye 20-30 minutes depending on the number of ports.
$1000 for mediocre PCs? Does nobody have a bullshit filter any more? Something that says, "That price can't possibly be right." My company buys new Dell systems in batches of 4-6 at a time. We get mediocre systems for about half that. Complete systems with 17-19" monitors (depending on what's being bundled that week). Dual cores with 4 gigs and Win7 pro.
If someone told me I'd have to pay $1000 for one of those computers, I'd LMAO. Hell, looking at the website, they're selling the last system we bought for about $520 individually to Joe Sixpack off the street so our price would probably be $500/unit delivered.
And what's this 18 months crap? I've been using the same workstation at the office for 4 years and I expect to keep using it as long as Microsoft keeps cranking out security patches for XP or until I need to upgrade to Win7. (Not likely since I can run Office 2010 in XP.) It does everything I need and more. We hit a plateau years ago when increased processing power became worthless for cube monkeys. People running word processors, spreadsheets, email, web browsers, etc. simply don't need any more power than a 2-3ghz P4.
Christ, this guy's spending twice the going rate for equipment and planning to toss it waaaaay before EOL. No wonder our government is bankrupt.
It's not JUST a sex crime issue. There's invasion of privacy. There's wiretapping (some variation of it). Plenty of crap. What they did is wrong on so many levels that more than just one class of crime was committed in my opinion. I'm no law-talking guy but the things they did MUST be illegal. You can't just set up a camera in someone's house and take pictures of them. Even the cops can't do that without a warrant.
I think they tell that porta-potty story to every group. I went on a tour a while back and we went inside the Ice Cap tower. It was a bit spooky. The whole rig's just been hanging there since 1993 (minus the warhead, of course). I couldn't resist giving the rig a slight shove to make it swing.
Now I want to go again and see if I can spot one of the surveillance units. I imagine they'd be cruising around the perimeter of the waste disposal area.
This is exactly what I want to know. What the hell is going on?!? They were using cameras to spy on children in their bedrooms! I don't care what their motivations were. Private citizens do not have the authority to do the things they did. And the way they talked about the spying software shows that they thought of it as entertainment. If I could post a pic here, I'd post the "This is an outrage!" guy.
I was in the same boat. I was very close to buying a RAT-7 then remembered my Cyborg joystick. It also is very configurable. You can move the hand-rest around, tilt the top forward or back, left or right, adjust the trigger angle, switch it around for lefty or righty, etc. But all those points of adjustment are just future points of failure. I never made a single adjustment after the first day I had it but now the head ratchets back and forth under anything but the lightest touch. And I'm hardly a power-gamer. It's got maybe a hundred hours of use over the course of 3 years.
Once I remembered that joystick, I decided to pass on the mouse. No way was I going to spend a hundred bucks on a mouse that might start getting creaky and slip out of adjustment after a year or two. I bought a Mionix NAOS-5000 instead. It doesn't provide as much pinky support but it's a large, solid mouse that looks and feels like it'll hold up well for years.
Actually, very few monitors can be rotated out of the box. You need to buy a new mount which often costs half as much as the monitor. The SOFTWARE (OS and drivers) is the part of the equation that's already in place. A few clicks and my desktop is rotated but I'd have to prop the monitor against a stack of books or something. I've actually had this conversation several times recently and it it's very annoying that most monitor manufacturers put standard VESA mount points on their monitors then attach their own proprietary, single-position stands. For the same amount of money, they could design their stands to use the mount points and allow for either horizontal or vertical mounting. Hell, I have a bunch of Dell monitors which have stands that snap into a square indentation right over the VESA mount points. Two inches higher, a couple notches and a second snap-lock and they'd be rotateable. But I guess they wanted to save $0.04/unit. [sigh]
The upgrade path is key. I hemmed and hawed when I built a new gaming rig about 3 years ago. There was a some fairly convincing hype about how this new AM2 socket was the wave of the future and the key to a long upgrade path. I was skeptical but ended up going that way. I bought a top of the line motherboard with true dual 16 lane PCIe slots. I'm still using that board two processors and three video cards later. And I can still upgrade to the latest class of CPU because Asus keeps cranking out BIOS updates. I could even put a six-core CPU in there, tho I'd only be able to use 4. But that means I could upgrade the CPU now, save up some more money, then upgrade the motherboard and memory later. And, if I'm building a new system with an AM3 socket, I can put any CPU in there from a single-core Sempron to the best six-core they've got.
AMD's management of the AM2/AM2+/AM3 socket progression has sold me on their commitment to system builders.
Meanwhile, I look at Intel and they have THREE current sockets in the consumer market. What a mess.
"Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through."
You mean like how Outlook 2003 had half-assed, crippled IMAP support that languished for 4 years until Outlook 2007 came out? Which still left out a few important details that were kinda addressed in Outlook 2010? And you got to pay $$$ for each incremental improvement?
I almost like Outlook 2010 but it took them 7 freakin' years to get IMAP right enough not to suck. Actually, it took MORE than 7 years. I'm pretty sure it was part of LookOut 97.
The whole idea that money must be involved to create a quality product really grinds my gears. Back when OpenOffice hit 2.0, one of our mucky-mucks took up the challenge to do all of his office tasks with OO. Several months later, he declared that he hadn't touched an Office product once, the learning curve wasn't bad, and he was able to do everything he needed with OO and several things that Office couldn't do. So we're sticking with M$ Office because it must be better because we pay for it. Sigh. Before I could even open my mouth, he came right out and said that there was no rational basis for the decision. Free software just doesn't feel right.
That attitude is starting to change but it's sooooo sssssllllloooooowwwww in an industry that moves so fast.
No shit. If you don't assume that everything you do on company equipment is monitored, you're an ID10T. Hell, I'm in IT and I bring my own laptop and entartube connection for personal email/banking/chat even though I know we don't actively monitor any of that. The fact that we don't monitor it today doesn't mean we won't start tomorrow.
That trick NEVER works.
Let's all chip in, buy the whole mess, release anything of value to the public domain, then burn the rest.
I'll kick in $20 for that. Heck, I might be persuaded to donate a Bennie.
How much would it cost to insure something like that?
No kidding. My youth is not retro, damnit!!! And I never avoided the 8088 workstation in the corner because it was at the end of the coax and tended to drop off the network from time to time. And I never nerdgasmed over the campus' first black and white X terminals.
Add to that the fact that most people are stupid and it gets really ugly. I'd never be able to get a jury of my peers because my peers would be smart enough to get out of jury duty. Unless they were bored and just wanted something to do for a day or three.
I would have gone with a Barb Wire reference. Gun's version of Word Up playing in my head...