Re:Disconnection is EASY for me.
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Disconnecting
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· Score: 2
Well... my isp plays it fair. I pay for a month of service, they activate my account for a month, then if they haven't received the next month's payment, service gets cut off. They have no need to report anything, as I don't owe them anything.
They hire new people every week. And believe it or not, half the people they hire will be gone in less than a month. The turnover is horrible. And anyone with half a clue will have the opportunity to get promoted into management in a few months or less. They don't care very much if you're "over" qualified, as long as you can pick up a box and show up to work everyday. If you do have potential beyond the typical grunt worker, they have an almost endless supply of opportunities, even tech related jobs.
They go out of their way to find and keep competant workers. They won't hold too much experience against you. And if you're worried that they will, just tell them you're there to take advantage of the college refund program. Even if you're not, that will at least tell them you plan to stay several months. And in the summer months (especially in Texas), they simply cannot get enough people. Its not possible.
Although, I'm not sure what its like in other states. There are hubs in certain states that only hire new people when they lose someone, and the only time they lose people is when one someone retires after 25-30 years. Local economy might make a difference.
Good luck in any event.
-Restil
-Rstil
Disconnection is EASY for me.
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Disconnecting
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· Score: 4, Funny
They disconnect me practically every month, until I go pay the bill. It occurs to me, that if I simply stopped paying the bills, they would gradually get the hint I was gone.
Of course, you gave them your credit card number, which makes billing easy for you (and for them) but that puts all the effort on you to get it disconnected. If you pay cash or check, and you simply stop making payments, you'll be disconnected faster with no intervention on your part at all.
I just get done reading "The case for the Empire" and I took at the headline of this article and when I see the word "Senate" I immediately think of the Starwars Republic senate, not our own. I think I've had enough starwars now, time to return to reality.:)
I suppose the delaration of independance, the constitution, the federalist papers, etc, those were just random scribblings, not any type of foundatation for a new government.
If you spend your own money to get a ton of equipment up into space, if you're mining in space, and everything you build is in space, and it stays in space, exactly what country do you owe ANY taxes too? You could set up shop on earth in practically any country you wanted to and run your space business from there, or space. Unless you have a satellite (no pun intended) office in a country that has taxes, you shouldn't have to pay any to anyone. In time, simply fork off the space based enterprise as its own entity, or even have it declare itself its own country. You can then trade with that country as you see fit, barring any embargos. I would have a difficult time declaring my independance in the USA, since no matter how strong I am, I have to be able to fend off the entire US military. And frankly, thats not going to happen. But in space, what is anybody going to be able to do about it? Nobody will support spending hundreds of millions of dollars to shoot something out of deep space simply because they're not paying thier taxes.
You don't give up on your old customers, you just "encourage" them to upgrade, but not in a way that actually hurts them.
5 1/4 users have large quantities of 5 1/4 disks. They're not going to want to replace all of those with 3 1/2 even though they can store twice, 4x, or 8x (depending on the drive and media) the amount of data. They want you to continue supporting them, and they will continue to buy products, even though they're inferior to a better product at the same price.
And that's where you get them. Keep selling the old products, but market your new products at a lower price. Encorage your customers to see that in the long run, it would be cheaper if they upgraded, or at least started migrating. It only makes sense. If they want to stay behind the times, then you'll still be there to support them, but by the time you finally close the door on your own manufaturing process, if you've marketed your products well, that old company will either have converted, or gone belly up.
If they decide not to upgrade, even after you've long since quit supporting them, there IS always that market of old working, but useless junk that nobody wants anymore and will pay people to take away. This company will just have to seek out those sources.
Now THERE'S a line I gotta use to shut up nosy neighbors.
Not that I have nosy neighbors. They only seem to notice I exist about once every three years or so when I throw a party. They then respond by promptly calling the police as if I'd been bothering them all the time and they just finally got tired of putting up with it.
Granted, when I'm in a typical movie theatre, I kindof expect that everyone won't have thier cellphones out and their laptops running.
However, when I go to a wireless, geek based theatre, I DO expect it, and SHOULD expect it and should not be surprised in the slightest when everyone, INCLUDING ME, has this equipment running. The theatre can set the policy. Obviously they saw a market for a theatre that actually ALLOWED those very "distractions" since so many people seemed compelled to distract others. This is actually a perfect idea. Give these people a place they can go that this activity is welcome and they'll leave the rest of us alone.
The reason the cable providers got their pooch screwed was based primarily on two flawed assumptions. One, that people would use the same total bandwidth that they used over 56K, only in shorter bursts. And secondly, that the market was infinite and exponential growth would continue indefinitely.
Of course, the average person was using more than their allocated amount of bandwidth, but due to a massive influx of users, new lines were being laid all the time, so there was always more bandwidth than was needed. Until they slowed down with the infrastructure development that is. Then the overbooking of bandwidth came back to bite them in the ass and left them with little choice, either raise the prices, or restrict the bandwidth.
From their point of view, restricting the bandwidth, especially upstream, made more sense. Of all of their customers 95% of them probably used the service as expected. A little email here, a little web surfing there. Download the occasional mp3 and keep it connected all the time. Its the remaining 5% that created all the problems. And we know who they are. The bandwidth caps and other restrictions probably didn't even affect most of the other 95%, so if they lost some customers, better the 5% that were more or less abusing the network rather than lose over 50% of their customers due to a price hike to afford 5% of the users.
Yes, they probably should have assumed that this abuse would have taken place. And it would have made even more sense from their point of view to simply track down and kick off the worst abusers.
The REASON the average "sexual predator" has moved online is because its EASIER. Not so much because chatting online is inherently dangerous, but because parents, in all their infinite wisdom, have decided that while walking around in public presents a certain danger, and have warned their children accordingly, have also decided that while their child is ploped down in front of a computer that no harm could possibly come to them.
The world is full of rapists, child molesters, murderers, speeding drivers, drug dealers, gangs, bullies, rabid dogs, and D&D players, all of whom are waiting around the nearest corner to pounce on your child the minute they wander outside into that cold cruel world. Its just SO MUCH SAFER to leave them inside. They might be vegging out in front of the TV set, but at least they're safe. And what is the computer but a glorified TV, right?
In many cases, children feel isolated. If they can't find friends in school or in the neighborhood, they will reach out wherever they can, and chat rooms are the perfect way. Parents NEED to realize this. The biggest problem with chat rooms, assuming there is one, is that there is the illusion of anonynimity. This person doesn't know me. They don't know what I look like. They don't know I have a hard time talking in public. They don't know I have no friends. All they see is words on a screen. I can feel comfortable with these people. And some of them know how to take advantage of that fact.
Even giving out personal information isn't the big problem. The problem is agreeing to do things with someone online that you would never do with someone in real life. A child might never feel the need to lie to his/her parents about meeting some other person that they met in real life, but would do so when compelled by someone online that they've never even met. Children are not yet the greatest judge of character. Its even more difficult when facing someone with significant experience in life and some degree of skill with manipulation. That's the entire reason why statuatory rape laws exist. Not so much because the child doesn't know how to say no, but because its really easy to convince them to say yes (at least as far as the law is concerned).
However, no matter how easily manipulated a child may be, they understand well enough to avoid taking candy from strangers in public. Why? Because parents have instilled in them the fear of doing so. They could easily do so with people online. Make sure they understand that until they've met someone in person, with the parent's approval, they should assume that nobody is what they appear or claim to be. A child can understand this concept with little difficulty, but not if nobody bothers to explain it to them.
Most abuse, online or off, is committed by people that the victim knows and trusts. It's important that trust isn't given out lightly.
The ISP is being served the warrant, but they are not a suspect in the case. That is the difference here. Law enforcement is well aware that Yahoo is not in any way involved in the illegal activity, but they have information required by law enforcement. When they are served a warrant for information on clients, they cooperate every time by forwarding the requested information. There is no REASON for a police officer to be there, especially since they probably wouldn't know what was going on anyway. They'd be hanging around waiting for someone familiar with the system to call up the requested information, and it would then be faxed on, just as if the police officer wasn't there.
Where police presence IS needed is when the company/individual being served the warrant is suspected of illegal activity. If Yahoo as a company was actually intentionally distributing child porn, law enforcement could not expect them to voluntarily turn over all evidence of their illegal involvement in this regard.
As far as the 4th ammendment rights go, Yahoo has a privacy policy (as far as that goes) that states that they won't blindly hand over customer information without the customer's permission or a search warrant. If yahoo were to discover illegal activity, they could still turn over that information to the police without first being contacted by them. The 4th ammendment doesn't apply here at all. In fact, they could turn it over WITHOUT a search warrant if they wanted to. They could possibly get sued for contract violations, but it wouldn't/shouldn't save the ass of someone using their services illegally.
Does this apply only to the RR usenet servers? Or does this apply to ANY usenet server that a RR customer is using?
Big difference. IF RR owns the server and provides it as part of a package, yes it might suck, but its their server and if they want to alter information, I suppose its their right to do so. You don't HAVE to use it. In fact, most ISP based newsservers suck anyways. It wouldn't be a great loss.
A lot of companies do things behind the scenes without putting into their terms of service. A great many isps will run httpd traffic through a cacheing proxy to either save on upstream bandwidth or to record information. One of these schemes makes perfect sense, the other is slimy.
Ok, so they're changing your organization field. Whether this matters or not, you know about it now. If its a problem, use a different news server. However, if they're hijacking nttp packets and "fixing" that information, then you have a BIG problem. At NO point should ANY information I send out be modified. If they want to play games to save bandwidth, fine. But I better get the exact data I request, and the other end better get the same data I send, with no modifications. THAT would be entering into the realm of arbitrary censorship without permission.
They might STILL be within their rights to do that, but if I were a customer of theirs, I would start shopping around.
Its getting to the point where the open source movement will move further and further underground. All the benefits of the open source would still remain if the lead developers remained anonymous (except maybe for ego purposes). Nobody ever has, and probably won't challenge the majority of open source software, but why risk it anymore. Let the software companies and the movie industry waste a large sum of money trying to silence the small insignificant factions. If those factions ever do rise to power and the power bases lose their market as a result, then in time, most of this won't even matter.
Take Microsoft and the northwest schools. It is not just ONE school district talking about mass migration here. If they do it, and pull it off, other districts will notice. They'll see that it actually CAN be done. They'll see that there really IS support available, and they'll see that it IS saving a lot of money, and they can safely tell the BSA to fuck off. They'll switch too. One at a time, one after another. Microsoft will lose them all. Now you have a whole bunch of high school students, ALL of them trained on linux or whatever open source suite appealed to the districts. They go off to college. You will now see the same movement there. And once that wave is done sweeping through, the corporate world is next. It really COULD start with one school district, and in 10 years, Microsoft will have completely lost their grip on the market, never to regain it.
The point is, after a few years of this, everyone will be using open source software to some degree. People will EXPECT software to be free. And when Blizzard, or the movie industry or anyone comes along and sends out letters saying "you can't use that software" a whole lot of regular non-geek people will turn around and say "up yours!" to the respective finger pointer and tell them where they can shove it and take their money elsewhere.
The music industry is already learning the hard way on this. They had their chance. They could have completely cornered the online market for years had they put in place a simple, inexpensive, non-intrusive music distribution system YEARS ago when they had the chance. But no, they were so concerned about rampant piracy and how it might affect their bottom line, they instead played stupid legal games to attempt to stifle the music trading. And for all the court cases, and all the laws that passed, trading has increased to massive proportions. They sue napster into the ground, 10 others pop up to take its place, only non-centralized and no way to easily shut them down. Who do you go after now? the programmers??
Well, you can't if you don't know who they are.
So undergound all this even potentially murky legal stuff. Wait a few years. All those who would threaten you will be overcome by the wave, and afterwards, they wouldn't dare.
Practically everything that works in win 3.1 will work perfectly under Wine. They got that ironed out years ago. Its the 32 bit applications that there is still work to be done.
Someone violates his TOS by uncapping his modem for the purpose of abusing his connection, gets caught in short order, and is banned from every abusing that internet provider again. I fail to see the problem here. The REASON these modems are capped in the first place are because of these very abusers. Granted, AT&T as well as other cable providers probably don't want to lose a bunch of customers, but the heavy warez/movie trading crowd they would happily do without as they tend to overuse their bandwidth allocation regardless, as well as creating potential legal liabilities.
This gives them an easy out. If they're able to detect an uncapped cable modem in a matter of hours after its been uncapped, then this is a great way to relieve yourself of a bunch of unwanted customers. And they don't even have to monitor bandwidth content. Just have to check the speed going over the physical maximum.
This should also be a wakeup call for parents who "share" their internet connection with their kids. Better let your children be aware that if ever they do something this foolish there will be serious hell to pay. PAY ATTENTION to what your children are doing. You don't know?? Then don't let them have internet access. When they turn 18, let them get their own account, and they can use or abuse it as they see fit.
Or if you REALLY need that extra bandwidth, pay for an account that provides for it. MOST companies, even cable providers have accounts that provide greater upstream bandwidth, but they don't cost $49, and they're rarely parts of a promotional deal.
So that the more relaxed you are, the stronger your armor and weapons are. So to become a more efficient killer, you need to be extremely calm while doing so. Imagine the fallout from this.
Instead of having kids walk into a school armed with guns and shooting the whole place up in a violent rage, they'll walk in calmly, casually without any rasied emotion whatsoever, and silently stab someone in the back, and keep going as if nothing happened.
Another fun possibility is a game called "Lie detector trainer" where you can "practice" lying to the computer without generating the appropriate emotional response. And how you proceed in the game is dependant on how well you can lie. Of course, people might cheat and tell the truth. There's always an exploit.
I liked the suggestion of throttling the bandwidth on the ports in use. But make it more gradual. When you start, throttle it to about 1/4 of the total bandwidth, then decrease it by a rather sizeable percentage every few days until you're at the bandwidth that ping uses.
The network is already running slowly as it is, so the teachers and other abusers already are expecting it to run somewhat slowly. If someone DOES complain about it, draft a well written proposal to your supervisors or the school board or both, claiming that more money is needed for additional bandwidth because the teachers (and include the names of those who complain) NEED these programs so they can trade music, illegally copied programs, and porn while at work. Specify that you don't see any legitimate use for these programs at school, but since their policy doesn't forbid them, you need the bandwidth increase so the teachers can continue to use them.
I'm guessing that anyone with half a brain will take a look at that and you will have your broad policy change that's needed.
"The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves"
Yes, the whole cause and effect problem aside, there was a REASON Arnie had to lower himself into the steel. He ALSO had a chip, and there is a fairly reasonable chance that at some point in the future THAT chip could be captured and analyzed, and since its in perfectly working order, it would take a lot less time for some other Cyberdyne systems to pick up where the original left off, or even start from scratch, in order to hit the 1997 deadline for nuclear war.
And since it was the original Terminator that created the future in the first place, that in and of itself creates an interesting paradox, since without the future already in place, there was no possibility of sending a Terminator back in time. UNLESS of course, the pattern started in the future not ravaged by war, but instead by someone else with other motives, who sent back both the first Terminator and Reese to cause the change in history. What that motive might have been, is difficult to say.
The simple fact that they've always refered to it as "warp" speed and not "light" speed is testamount to a potential loophole in general relativity, that a bubble of space could potentially move faster than light, even though no object in that space can, relative to the bubble itself.
The only problem with this is, assuming that its possible, and it might be, the numerous plot elements involved that allow weapons fire, transporting, and other fun activities while in warp.
At least the new Enterprise show has a possibility of correcting some bad errors since most of these magical technologies either don't exist yet, or are in their infant stages. They don't yet have shields, force fields were just introduced last episode and are a buggy contraption at this point. Everyone except Malcolm is too scared to use the transporter, so we don't have any transporter based plot elements to screw up yet. They seem to be spending a lot less time on the technical aspects of interstellar space travel and more on the social and politcal aspects of it. Which really isn't a bad thing. Its a lot harder to screw that up.
Of course, in the pilot they go the Klingon homeworld's location all wrong. But they gotta screw up SOMETHING... hehe
All four travellers using the time machine in the terminator movies were naked. Kyle gave the reasoning that nothing non-living can get through, although anything non-living encased in living tissue can.
Although, if this was true, then they should have all come through hairless and without fingernails, since mostly these parts of the human body are dead.
I think the time machine only works with something thats exterior is composed of a cellular structure. Say the time displacement fields cause some degree of matter displacement to the outer centemeter or so of anything passing through it. If it's composed of a cellular structure, which humans and the T1000 are, then it can pass through since while the exterior might be disrupted, it would also be reorganized. A mechanical device however, composed of parts made from solid metal, might be sufficently deformed as to be useless by the time it reaches its destination. It would make it, but would be inoperable. The Arnie Terminator got away with it, since it only affects the outer shell of whatever passes through the machine, and since that part of him IS living tissue, and therefore cellular, he gets away with it.
People first discovered the virus when they noticed crashing and instability in their systems. So THAT'S what causes it. And all this time I just thought it was crappy software.
Yes.. I know... this is Microsoft Bashing. Mod me down.
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Well... my isp plays it fair. I pay for a month of service, they activate my account for a month, then if they haven't received the next month's payment, service gets cut off. They have no need to report anything, as I don't owe them anything.
-Restil
They hire new people every week. And believe it or not, half the people they hire will be gone in less than a month. The turnover is horrible. And anyone with half a clue will have the opportunity to get promoted into management in a few months or less. They don't care very much if you're "over" qualified, as long as you can pick up a box and show up to work everyday. If you do have potential beyond the typical grunt worker, they have an almost endless supply of opportunities, even tech related jobs.
They go out of their way to find and keep competant workers. They won't hold too much experience against you. And if you're worried that they will, just tell them you're there to take advantage of the college refund program. Even if you're not, that will at least tell them you plan to stay several months. And in the summer months (especially in Texas), they simply cannot get enough people. Its not possible.
Although, I'm not sure what its like in other states. There are hubs in certain states that only hire new people when they lose someone, and the only time they lose people is when one someone retires after 25-30 years. Local economy
might make a difference.
Good luck in any event.
-Restil
-Rstil
They disconnect me practically every month, until I go pay the bill. It occurs to me, that if I simply stopped paying the bills, they would gradually get the hint I was gone.
Of course, you gave them your credit card number, which makes billing easy for you (and for them) but that puts all the effort on you to get it disconnected. If you pay cash or check, and you simply stop making payments, you'll be disconnected faster with no intervention on your part at all.
-Restil
I just get done reading "The case for the Empire" and I took at the headline of this article and when I see the word "Senate" I immediately think of the Starwars Republic senate, not our own. I :)
think I've had enough starwars now, time to return to reality.
-Restil
I suppose the delaration of independance, the constitution, the federalist papers, etc, those were just random scribblings, not any type of foundatation for a new government.
-Restil
(If you're a user, login, go to Options > Personal Profile, and un-check the boxes at the bottom of that page.)
Shouldn't that read something like...
"If you're a user, then the preference to change is your email provider."
-Restil
Uh... WHAT taxes?
If you spend your own money to get a ton of equipment up into space, if you're mining in space, and everything you build is in space, and it stays in space, exactly what country do you owe ANY taxes too? You could set up shop on earth in practically any country you wanted to and run your space business from there, or space. Unless you have a satellite (no pun intended) office in a country that has taxes, you shouldn't have to pay any to anyone. In time, simply fork off the space based enterprise as its own entity, or even have it declare itself its own country. You can then trade with that country as you see fit, barring any embargos. I would have a difficult time declaring my independance in the USA, since no matter how strong I am, I have to be able to fend off the entire US military. And frankly, thats not going to happen. But in space, what is anybody going to be able to do about it? Nobody will support spending hundreds of millions of dollars to shoot something out of deep space simply because they're not paying thier taxes.
Or maybe they would. Who knows.
-Restil
Well, at least someone is throwing their hat over the wall for the good of mankind.
:)
They've given a deadline.
-Restil
You don't give up on your old customers, you just "encourage" them to upgrade, but not in a way that actually hurts them.
5 1/4 users have large quantities of 5 1/4 disks. They're not going to want to replace all of those with 3 1/2 even though they can store twice, 4x, or 8x (depending on the drive and media) the amount of data. They want you to continue supporting them, and they will continue to buy products, even though they're inferior to a better product at the same price.
And that's where you get them. Keep selling the old products, but market your new products at a lower price. Encorage your customers to see that in the long run, it would be cheaper if they upgraded, or at least started migrating. It only makes sense. If they want to stay behind the times, then you'll still be there to support them, but by the time you finally close the door on your own manufaturing process, if you've marketed your products well, that old company will either have converted, or gone belly up.
If they decide not to upgrade, even after you've long since quit supporting them, there IS always that market of old working, but useless junk that nobody wants anymore and will pay people to take away. This company will just have to seek out those sources.
-Restil
Now THERE'S a line I gotta use to shut up nosy neighbors.
Not that I have nosy neighbors. They only seem to notice I exist about once every three years or so when I throw a party. They then respond by promptly calling the police as if I'd been bothering them all the time and they just finally got tired of putting up with it.
-Restil
Granted, when I'm in a typical movie theatre, I kindof expect that everyone won't have thier cellphones out and their laptops running.
However, when I go to a wireless, geek based theatre, I DO expect it, and SHOULD expect it and should not be surprised in the slightest when everyone, INCLUDING ME, has this equipment running. The theatre can set the policy. Obviously they saw a market for a theatre that actually ALLOWED those very "distractions" since so many people seemed compelled to distract others. This is actually a perfect idea. Give these people a place they can go that this activity is welcome and they'll leave the rest of us alone.
Alas, apparently all is not what it seems to be.
-Restil
The reason the cable providers got their pooch screwed was based primarily on two flawed assumptions. One, that people would use the same total bandwidth that they used over 56K, only in shorter bursts. And secondly, that the market was infinite and exponential growth would continue indefinitely.
Of course, the average person was using more than their allocated amount of bandwidth, but due to a massive influx of users, new lines were being laid all the time, so there was always more bandwidth than was needed. Until they slowed down with the infrastructure development that is. Then the overbooking of bandwidth came back to bite them in the ass and left them with little choice, either raise the prices, or restrict the bandwidth.
From their point of view, restricting the bandwidth, especially upstream, made more sense. Of all of their customers 95% of them probably used the service as expected. A little email here, a little web surfing there. Download the occasional mp3 and keep it connected all the time. Its the remaining 5% that created all the problems. And we know who they are. The bandwidth caps and other restrictions probably didn't even affect most of the other 95%, so if they lost some customers, better the 5% that were more or less abusing the network rather than lose over 50% of their customers due to a price hike to afford 5% of the users.
Yes, they probably should have assumed that this abuse would have taken place. And it would have made even more sense from their point of view to simply track down and kick off the worst abusers.
-Restil
The REASON the average "sexual predator" has moved online is because its EASIER. Not so much because chatting online is inherently dangerous, but because parents, in all their infinite wisdom, have decided that while walking around in public presents a certain danger, and have warned their children accordingly, have also decided that while their child is ploped down in front of a computer that no harm could possibly come to them.
The world is full of rapists, child molesters, murderers, speeding drivers, drug dealers, gangs, bullies, rabid dogs, and D&D players, all of whom are waiting around the nearest corner to pounce on your child the minute they wander outside into that cold cruel world. Its just SO MUCH SAFER to leave them inside. They might be vegging out in front of the TV set, but at least they're safe. And what is the computer but a glorified TV, right?
In many cases, children feel isolated. If they can't find friends in school or in the neighborhood, they will reach out wherever they can, and chat rooms are the perfect way. Parents NEED to realize this. The biggest problem with chat rooms, assuming there is one, is that there is the illusion of anonynimity. This person doesn't know me. They don't know what I look like. They don't know I have a hard time talking in public. They don't know I have no friends. All they see is words on a screen. I can feel comfortable with these people. And some of them know how to take advantage of that fact.
Even giving out personal information isn't the big problem. The problem is agreeing to do things with someone online that you would never do with someone in real life. A child might never feel the need to lie to his/her parents about meeting some other person that they met in real life, but would do so when compelled by someone online that they've never even met. Children are not yet the greatest judge of character. Its even more difficult when facing someone with significant experience in life and some degree of skill with manipulation. That's the entire reason why statuatory rape laws exist. Not so much because the child doesn't know how to say no, but because its really easy to convince them to say yes (at least as far as the law is concerned).
However, no matter how easily manipulated a child may be, they understand well enough to avoid taking candy from strangers in public. Why? Because parents have instilled in them the fear of doing so. They could easily do so with people online. Make sure they understand that until they've met someone in person, with the parent's approval, they should assume that nobody is what they appear or claim to be. A child can understand this concept with little difficulty, but not if nobody bothers to explain it to them.
Most abuse, online or off, is committed by people that the victim knows and trusts. It's important that trust isn't given out lightly.
-Restil
The ISP is being served the warrant, but they are not a suspect in the case. That is the difference here. Law enforcement is well aware that Yahoo is not in any way involved in the illegal activity, but they have information required by law enforcement. When they are served a warrant for information on clients, they cooperate every time by forwarding the requested information. There is no REASON for a police officer to be there, especially since they probably wouldn't know what was going on anyway. They'd be hanging around waiting for someone familiar with the system to call up the requested information, and it would then be faxed on, just as if the police officer wasn't there.
Where police presence IS needed is when the company/individual being served the warrant is suspected of illegal activity. If Yahoo as a company was actually intentionally distributing child porn, law enforcement could not expect them to voluntarily turn over all evidence of their illegal involvement in this regard.
As far as the 4th ammendment rights go, Yahoo has a privacy policy (as far as that goes) that states that they won't blindly hand over customer information without the customer's permission or a search warrant. If yahoo were to discover illegal activity, they could still turn over that information to the police without first being contacted by them. The 4th ammendment doesn't apply here at all. In fact, they could turn it over WITHOUT a search warrant if they wanted to. They could possibly get sued for contract violations, but it wouldn't/shouldn't save the ass of someone using their services illegally.
-Restil
Does this apply only to the RR usenet servers? Or does this apply to ANY usenet server that a RR customer is using?
Big difference. IF RR owns the server and provides it as part of a package, yes it might suck, but its their server and if they want to alter information, I suppose its their right to do so. You don't HAVE to use it. In fact, most ISP based newsservers suck anyways. It wouldn't be a great loss.
A lot of companies do things behind the scenes without putting into their terms of service. A great many isps will run httpd traffic through a cacheing proxy to either save on upstream bandwidth or to record information. One of these schemes makes perfect sense, the other is slimy.
Ok, so they're changing your organization field. Whether this matters or not, you know about it now. If its a problem, use a different news server. However, if they're hijacking nttp packets and "fixing" that information, then you have a BIG problem. At NO point should ANY information I send out be modified. If they want to play games to save bandwidth, fine. But I better get the exact data I request, and the other end better get the same data I send, with no
modifications. THAT would be entering into the realm of arbitrary censorship without permission.
They might STILL be within their rights to do that, but if I were a customer of theirs, I would start shopping around.
-Restil
Its getting to the point where the open source movement will move further and further underground. All the benefits of the open source would still remain if the lead developers remained anonymous (except maybe for ego purposes). Nobody ever has, and probably won't challenge the majority of open source software, but why risk it anymore. Let the software companies and the movie industry waste a large sum of money trying to silence the small insignificant factions. If those factions ever do rise to power and the power bases lose their market as a result, then in time, most of this won't even matter.
Take Microsoft and the northwest schools. It is not just ONE school district talking about mass migration here. If they do it, and pull it off, other districts will notice. They'll see that it actually CAN be done. They'll see that there really IS support available, and they'll see that it IS saving a lot of money, and they can safely tell the BSA to fuck off. They'll switch too. One at a time, one after another. Microsoft will lose them all. Now you have a whole bunch of high school students, ALL of them trained on linux or whatever open source suite appealed to the districts. They go off to college. You will now see the same movement there. And once that wave is done sweeping through, the corporate world is next. It really COULD start with one school district, and in 10 years, Microsoft will have completely lost their grip on the market, never to regain it.
The point is, after a few years of this, everyone will be using open source software to some degree. People will EXPECT software to be free. And when Blizzard, or the movie industry or anyone comes along and sends out letters saying "you can't use that software" a whole lot of regular non-geek people will turn around and say "up yours!" to the respective finger pointer and tell them where they can shove it and take their money elsewhere.
The music industry is already learning the hard way on this. They had their chance. They could have completely cornered the online market for years had they put in place a simple, inexpensive, non-intrusive music distribution system YEARS ago when they had the chance. But no, they were so concerned about rampant piracy and how it might affect their bottom line, they instead played stupid legal games to attempt to stifle the music trading. And for all the court cases, and all the laws that passed, trading has increased to massive proportions. They sue napster into the ground, 10 others pop up to take its place, only non-centralized and no way to easily shut them down. Who do you go after now? the programmers??
Well, you can't if you don't know who they are.
So undergound all this even potentially murky legal stuff. Wait a few years. All those who would threaten you will be overcome by the wave, and afterwards, they wouldn't dare.
-Restil
Someone ships a piece of equipment to you.
Due to improper shipping, there's a "possibility" of shock damage.
The shipper is happy to cooperate with you on marking the shipment as damaged.
The company agrees to send you a replacement and pick up the "potentially damaged" merchandise.
Hope you didn't lose TOO much sleep over it.
-Restil
Practically everything that works in win 3.1 will work perfectly under Wine. They got that ironed out years ago. Its the 32 bit applications that there is still work to be done.
-Restil
Someone violates his TOS by uncapping his modem for the purpose of abusing his connection, gets caught in short order, and is banned from every abusing that internet provider again. I fail to see the problem here. The REASON these modems are capped in the first place are because of these very abusers. Granted, AT&T as well as other cable providers probably don't want to lose a bunch of customers, but the heavy warez/movie trading crowd they would happily do without as they tend to overuse their bandwidth allocation regardless, as well as creating potential legal liabilities.
This gives them an easy out. If they're able to detect an uncapped cable modem in a matter of hours after its been uncapped, then this is a great way to relieve yourself of a bunch of unwanted customers. And they don't even have to monitor bandwidth content. Just have to check the speed going over the physical maximum.
This should also be a wakeup call for parents who "share" their internet connection with their kids. Better let your children be aware that if ever they do something this foolish there will be serious hell to pay. PAY ATTENTION to what your children are doing. You don't know?? Then don't let them have internet access. When they turn 18, let them get their own account, and they can use or abuse it as they see fit.
Or if you REALLY need that extra bandwidth, pay for an account that provides for it. MOST companies, even cable providers have accounts that provide greater upstream bandwidth, but they don't cost $49, and they're rarely parts of a promotional deal.
-Restil
So that the more relaxed you are, the stronger your armor and weapons are. So to become a more efficient killer, you need to be extremely calm while doing so. Imagine the fallout from this.
Instead of having kids walk into a school armed with guns and shooting the whole place up in a violent rage, they'll walk in calmly, casually without any rasied emotion whatsoever, and silently stab someone in the back, and keep going as if nothing happened.
Another fun possibility is a game called "Lie detector trainer" where you can "practice" lying to the computer without generating the appropriate emotional response. And how you proceed in the game is dependant on how well you can lie. Of course, people might cheat and tell the truth. There's always an exploit.
-Restil
I liked the suggestion of throttling the bandwidth on the ports in use. But make it more gradual. When you start, throttle it to about 1/4 of the total bandwidth, then decrease it by a rather sizeable percentage every few days until you're at the bandwidth that ping uses.
The network is already running slowly as it is, so the teachers and other abusers already are expecting it to run somewhat slowly. If someone DOES complain about it, draft a well written proposal to your supervisors or the school board or both, claiming that more money is needed for additional bandwidth because the teachers (and include the names of those who complain) NEED these programs so they can trade music, illegally copied programs, and porn while at work. Specify that you don't see any legitimate use for these programs at school, but since their policy doesn't forbid them, you need the bandwidth increase so the teachers can continue to use them.
I'm guessing that anyone with half a brain will take a look at that and you will have your broad policy change that's needed.
-Restil
"The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves"
Yes, the whole cause and effect problem aside, there was a REASON Arnie had to lower himself into the steel. He ALSO had a chip, and there is a fairly reasonable chance that at some point in the future THAT chip could be captured and analyzed, and since its in perfectly working order, it would take a lot less time for some other Cyberdyne systems to pick up where the original left off, or even start from scratch, in order to hit the 1997 deadline for nuclear war.
And since it was the original Terminator that created the future in the first place, that in and of itself creates an interesting paradox, since without the future already in place, there was no possibility of sending a Terminator back in time. UNLESS of course, the pattern started in the future not ravaged by war, but instead by someone else with other motives, who sent back both the first Terminator and Reese to cause the change in history. What that motive might have been, is difficult to say.
-Restil
The simple fact that they've always refered to it as "warp" speed and not "light" speed is testamount to a potential loophole in general relativity, that a bubble of space could potentially move faster than light, even though no object in that space can, relative to the bubble itself.
The only problem with this is, assuming that its possible, and it might be, the numerous plot elements involved that allow weapons fire, transporting, and other fun activities while in warp.
At least the new Enterprise show has a possibility of correcting some bad errors since most of these magical technologies either don't exist yet, or are in their infant stages. They don't yet have shields, force fields were just introduced last episode and are a buggy contraption at this point. Everyone except Malcolm is too scared to use the transporter, so we don't have any transporter based plot elements to screw up yet. They seem to be spending a lot less time on the technical aspects of interstellar space travel and more on the social and politcal aspects of it. Which really isn't a bad thing. Its a lot harder to screw that up.
Of course, in the pilot they go the Klingon homeworld's location all wrong. But they gotta screw up SOMETHING... hehe
-Restil
For pure speculation purposes....
All four travellers using the time machine in the terminator movies were naked. Kyle gave the reasoning that nothing non-living can get through, although anything non-living encased in living tissue can.
Although, if this was true, then they should have all come through hairless and without fingernails, since mostly these parts of the human body are dead.
I think the time machine only works with something thats exterior is composed of a cellular structure. Say the time displacement fields cause some degree of matter displacement to the outer centemeter or so of anything passing through it. If it's composed of a cellular structure, which humans and the T1000 are, then it can pass through since while the exterior might be disrupted, it would also be reorganized. A mechanical device however, composed of parts made from solid metal, might be sufficently deformed as to be useless by the time it reaches its destination. It would make it, but would be inoperable. The Arnie Terminator got away with it, since it only affects the outer shell of whatever passes through the machine, and since that part of him IS living tissue, and therefore cellular, he gets away with it.
Ok, there. All explained. Not that it matters.
-Restil
People first discovered the virus when they noticed crashing and instability in their systems. So THAT'S what causes it. And all this time I just thought it was crappy software.
Yes.. I know... this is Microsoft Bashing. Mod me down.
-Restil