FCC regulations require that any cell phone, even one without minutes or a plan, must be able to call 911. If it's not 911, it's not an emergency, it's an inconvenience. Therefore, your 70+ year-old parents who are buying minutes every month (because they expire after 30 days, right?) are indeed marketing victims. QED.
The fees that LOOK like government fees are not. They are made-up fees made to look like they come from the government. Unless I am mistaken, the industry that makes you believe in falsehoods is marketing.
I may be a jackass, but I am a correct jackass, unlike you, who, as alexo points out, knows nothing about cell phone bills, being ripped off, or complex sentence structure.
Cell phones aren't convenient. You've been told that they are by marketers. They are expensive, cumbersome, irritating, and unneccessary.
However, I'm sure that your body spray makes you irresistable.
I'm an Electrical Engineer with two kids. I have never owned a cell phone and I have never missed having one. I've been offended by the "go fuck yourself" fees that the carriers put on the bills. 911 / system access / wireless access -- they're all just bullshit fees that only go to the bottom line. So really, anyone with a cell is a victim of marketing. (You might as well be wearing Axe.)
I've been called out on not owning a cell more than once -- "What? your wife could go into labour at any moment and you don't have a cell?"
"She knows where I am and they have a phone here."
"What if there's an emergency?"
"If it's big enough, cells won't work. Just out of curiousity, do you have pre-arranged meeting areas if there IS a big emergency? Do you have 72 hours of food and water at your house?"
If you don't click YES then you cannot use the phone that you paid $300 for. You have a contract that you will have to pay $100 / month for the next 2 years. If you do not click YES then you might as well have taken that money out of the ATM and set it on fire.
YES | NO
Duress, plain and simple, just like every other EULA.
Don't think of taxes as being a fine. Think of them as being insurance against being audited.
For the small amount you're paying, you get: 1. Guarantee of no jail time for not paying taxes. 2. No future fines and interest for tax avoidance. 3. No worries about the above. 4. No guilt about tax evasion.
The world's greatest stockpile of nuclear weapons was guarded for EIGHT YEARS by someone who believed in The Rapture and that God was talking to him directly. A guy who believed in Gog and Nagog and that they were running around in the Middle East starting up the Apocalypse.
No nukes were launched.
Personally, I've always thought of Armageddon, the war to end all wars, as phrased improperly. I interpret it as "war, but with the goal of ending all wars". We don't have an English word for "jihad", meaning "an all-out effort", but that fits the meaning better; a jihad to end all wars.
And yes, the world will end, burnt to a crisp with no life on it, barren and destroyed. The expected timeline for that is billions of years from now, when the sun has exhausted its fuel supply and engulfs us.
No, some people ham-fist addressesd. You'll be tpying laong and hit teh wring button or forget if it was an underscore or a dash. THen where will you go? You don't know, and that's what a lot of scammers have been making money witj for a long tim.
APEGBC (Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia) has a Software Engineer designation, and that's a real one; B.Eng, four+ years of EIT time, and P.Eng registration. One of my friends was one of the first software P.Engs in Canada. (I'm an Electrical EIT working on my P.Eng. My alma mater was one of the first institutions to offer a Software discipline in the Engineering faculty.)
At some point, the law is going to catch up and have similar rules to the building code. Basically, you'll be able to work on your own house or an immediate family member's house without a licence, but to work on other houses you require a contractor's licence and insurance. (This is a gross oversimplification, but good enough for/.)
When they brought in licences for Opticians in BC, some people who'd been working in the field for years failed the test repeatedly. You don't know what you don't know.
I _can_ build boxes that disrupt a lot of stuff. $100 worth of parts and a busy weekend would let me disable all the police radios in town. (Scary thought, isn't it? Worse, this would work in just about any town with a specific type of radio setup.) I can also use my tools to, say, make a diving light or repair just about anything that requires power.
Code writers can do lots of things like that. You can play memory rodeo on your home computer all day and risk nothing but a few bucks if you blow something. You could also write code that creates fraudulent trades. One of these things should put you in jail, and one of those counts should be "writing public software without a licence".
It is way too late in the week to edit this post so it makes sense.
What you have to do to fix these two problems simultaneously is to present a business case. The BSA will fine your company X dollars when you get found out. Find out what X will be. Remind your boss that whomever reports the business to the BSA will get a percentage of X dollars. "I'm perfectly happy here, but do you have anyone in the entire company that's upset? Has anyone been fired? Does anyone hold a grudge against us? Will anyone ever be upset with us?"
Present solutions, such as "implementing 7-Zip instead of WinZIP will cost $0 materially and deploy in one week. This will save us $Y in labour per year, creating a ROI of ($Y / time it will take you * hourly wage) in one year.
You can come up with other solutions for the other products. You might have to licence the software if they will not move on the products. You can usually get site licences for AVG, Office, etc. My company buys the licence by the boatload. (i.e. everything is a site licence) This will fix the problems with overlicencing (the most common form of piracy)
Make graphs. Bosses like graphs that tell them when they start making money off a venture. "Switching to this allows for an increase in productivity, giving us an ROI of Z after 6 months." Use Microsoft's data.
It is simply unacceptable to continue in this manner. You are breaking laws, and doing so commercially. It is one thing to download a cracked version of PhotoShop to participate on Fark / Photoshop Phriday on your home computer or download mp3s for your own amusement. It is a completely different situation to install unlicenced software on a work computer that is being used to make money. The latter is commercial copyright fraud, and it is a Federal Crime in the US. (As far as I know; I'm Canadian and not a lawyer.)
You can fix the problem. That's how to do it.
That's the easy part. The second part is in not getting blamed for the piracy after you leave. If you leave unexpectedly, perhaps 10-15 minutes after presenting your case to the boss, then you will assuredly be pointed at as the cause of the problems. "Oh, I'm not too good with computers. Mr. Smith came in and talked to me about how much we could be saving, something about piracy, and then he was installing this one copy of Office on all the computers."
Now, let's say you go into your boss and he says, "Get... out... you're fired." Tell him, "I am trying to keep you and this company out of jail and bankruptcy. What we are doing is against the law."
Resist the temptation to say, "I have copies of all these emails." That's for later.
So you must: Document, document, document! There's a reason that email programs have BCC on them, and THIS IS THE TIME TO USE IT. BCC your personal email account so you have a record of all these emails. If you get fired, let's say two months later, ostensibly "for no reason, but we're moving in a new direction", you can look at the first severance offer carefully. Then reply, "It looks pretty bad that you are firing me just two months after I told you to stop pirating software. I've got copies of every email I sent you, telling you to stop breaking the law. I've brought this up at company meetings in front of lots of disgruntled former staff that owe you no favours. I would get $X from the BSA if I call them on my cell once I leave the building. What's your _real_ severance package?" (The CEO laughed and said, "fuck, all this time I thought you were just a pushover.")
And that is basically how I lost my first job out of University. They're bankrupt now, but that was due to an unsustainable business model, not anything I did.
Usually they don't have traffic cops investigating homicides. They aren't even enforcing the same code. Motor Vehicle Act vs. Criminal Code. They aren't even in the same BOOK. They don't use the same courts. Even a Dick Wolf law class should teach you *that* much.
Meh, if this gig as an Electrical Engineer doesn't work out, I'll be an Electrician. That's the same thing, right? (Note that I'm not slagging Electricians; there's no way I can do their job in either a legal or competent manner.)
Further, speeders in urban areas, construction zones, school zones, and residential neighbourhoods should lose their licences for life. There are approx 45k traffic fatalities every year in the US alone. People are generally terrible drivers and think they're good because they use their driving skills to evaluate their driving skills. Stopping speeders prevents accidents, saves money, and saves lives. In fact, there were ~17k murders in the US, so you're more than twice as likely to be killed by someone like you in a car compared to a murderer.
On the Interstate, yeah, you can probably speed without much risk to anyone but yourself.
By convention, software is not officially released until it gets to version 1.0. Versions starting with a 0, like 0.5 or 0.8, are considered beta (again, by convention) and do not "count" in terms of release dates for the original package.
Only when you take the big plunge and increment up to version 1.0 do you get release cred.
it's also 20-years for the Berlin Wall, and I want to announce that I danced on it that very night as a Russian linguist in the USAF!)
I salute your contributions but question your priortization. I remember when the wall fell (I was 12) and remember learning about it in Social Studies. The part that I liked best was that you could buy pieces of the wall. (What struck down the wall? Capitalism.)
But yes, you are correct. When IE came out, Netscape was The Big One. MS brought out IE and jokingly said that "it's priced to sell" (free). I don't know if NS was only free to educational, since I was in college at the time.
They then bundled IE as part of Win98's OS. That's what got them in trouble (and still is) with various anti-monopoly lawsuits. Nevertheless, IE quickly dominated the market and has done so ever since.
Slashdot Mirror
FCC regulations require that any cell phone, even one without minutes or a plan, must be able to call 911. If it's not 911, it's not an emergency, it's an inconvenience. Therefore, your 70+ year-old parents who are buying minutes every month (because they expire after 30 days, right?) are indeed marketing victims. QED.
The fees that LOOK like government fees are not. They are made-up fees made to look like they come from the government. Unless I am mistaken, the industry that makes you believe in falsehoods is marketing.
I may be a jackass, but I am a correct jackass, unlike you, who, as alexo points out, knows nothing about cell phone bills, being ripped off, or complex sentence structure.
Cell phones aren't convenient. You've been told that they are by marketers. They are expensive, cumbersome, irritating, and unneccessary.
However, I'm sure that your body spray makes you irresistable.
I'm an Electrical Engineer with two kids. I have never owned a cell phone and I have never missed having one. I've been offended by the "go fuck yourself" fees that the carriers put on the bills. 911 / system access / wireless access -- they're all just bullshit fees that only go to the bottom line. So really, anyone with a cell is a victim of marketing. (You might as well be wearing Axe.)
I've been called out on not owning a cell more than once -- "What? your wife could go into labour at any moment and you don't have a cell?"
"She knows where I am and they have a phone here."
"What if there's an emergency?"
"If it's big enough, cells won't work. Just out of curiousity, do you have pre-arranged meeting areas if there IS a big emergency? Do you have 72 hours of food and water at your house?"
If you don't click YES then you cannot use the phone that you paid $300 for. You have a contract that you will have to pay $100 / month for the next 2 years. If you do not click YES then you might as well have taken that money out of the ATM and set it on fire.
YES | NO
Duress, plain and simple, just like every other EULA.
"Look, we'll give you a PS3 if you tell us your password.
"We'll even throw in the HDMI cable. We'll get it eventually; this way you and I can both go home before lunchtime."
It would just be schematics.
Don't think of taxes as being a fine. Think of them as being insurance against being audited.
For the small amount you're paying, you get:
1. Guarantee of no jail time for not paying taxes.
2. No future fines and interest for tax avoidance.
3. No worries about the above.
4. No guilt about tax evasion.
The world's greatest stockpile of nuclear weapons was guarded for EIGHT YEARS by someone who believed in The Rapture and that God was talking to him directly. A guy who believed in Gog and Nagog and that they were running around in the Middle East starting up the Apocalypse.
No nukes were launched.
Personally, I've always thought of Armageddon, the war to end all wars, as phrased improperly. I interpret it as "war, but with the goal of ending all wars". We don't have an English word for "jihad", meaning "an all-out effort", but that fits the meaning better; a jihad to end all wars.
And yes, the world will end, burnt to a crisp with no life on it, barren and destroyed. The expected timeline for that is billions of years from now, when the sun has exhausted its fuel supply and engulfs us.
Indeed, we're apparently falling down on the game with improbable heros, and problems everyone knows some actual person could not defeat.
True, but for every problem that you cannot defeat, there will be another who will come up with a solution.
'Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.' -G. K. Chesterton
Awesome quote.
...or get nanobots to rebuild him.
Or in Internet English:
OMGWTF!
Just so I'm clear here, does this mean that SSL, (and thus all https traffic) is compromised, or is it just a specific subset?
I mean, are we talking about just twitter and facebook getting fux0r3d or is this everyone from Amazon to banking to webmail?
No, some people ham-fist addressesd. You'll be tpying laong and hit teh wring button or forget if it was an underscore or a dash. THen where will you go? You don't know, and that's what a lot of scammers have been making money witj for a long tim.
Not yet.
APEGBC (Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia) has a Software Engineer designation, and that's a real one; B.Eng, four+ years of EIT time, and P.Eng registration. One of my friends was one of the first software P.Engs in Canada. (I'm an Electrical EIT working on my P.Eng. My alma mater was one of the first institutions to offer a Software discipline in the Engineering faculty.)
At some point, the law is going to catch up and have similar rules to the building code. Basically, you'll be able to work on your own house or an immediate family member's house without a licence, but to work on other houses you require a contractor's licence and insurance. (This is a gross oversimplification, but good enough for /.)
When they brought in licences for Opticians in BC, some people who'd been working in the field for years failed the test repeatedly. You don't know what you don't know.
I _can_ build boxes that disrupt a lot of stuff. $100 worth of parts and a busy weekend would let me disable all the police radios in town. (Scary thought, isn't it? Worse, this would work in just about any town with a specific type of radio setup.) I can also use my tools to, say, make a diving light or repair just about anything that requires power.
Code writers can do lots of things like that. You can play memory rodeo on your home computer all day and risk nothing but a few bucks if you blow something. You could also write code that creates fraudulent trades. One of these things should put you in jail, and one of those counts should be "writing public software without a licence".
It is way too late in the week to edit this post so it makes sense.
Meh, if I had a dollar for every wrong or misinformed thing my profs taught me, it would have paid my tuition in full.
About that last point:
MATLAB has a student licence for $300 that includes every. single. package. They provide it just for the cases like the last guy.
On the other hand, one of my professors bought MATLAB and then used a cracked version because it ran faster without the licencing software.
There are two major components here to consider:
1. You want to stop the piracy.
2. You do not want to be blamed for it.
What you have to do to fix these two problems simultaneously is to present a business case. The BSA will fine your company X dollars when you get found out. Find out what X will be. Remind your boss that whomever reports the business to the BSA will get a percentage of X dollars. "I'm perfectly happy here, but do you have anyone in the entire company that's upset? Has anyone been fired? Does anyone hold a grudge against us? Will anyone ever be upset with us?"
Present solutions, such as "implementing 7-Zip instead of WinZIP will cost $0 materially and deploy in one week. This will save us $Y in labour per year, creating a ROI of ($Y / time it will take you * hourly wage) in one year.
You can come up with other solutions for the other products. You might have to licence the software if they will not move on the products. You can usually get site licences for AVG, Office, etc. My company buys the licence by the boatload. (i.e. everything is a site licence)
This will fix the problems with overlicencing (the most common form of piracy)
Make graphs. Bosses like graphs that tell them when they start making money off a venture. "Switching to this allows for an increase in productivity, giving us an ROI of Z after 6 months." Use Microsoft's data.
It is simply unacceptable to continue in this manner. You are breaking laws, and doing so commercially. It is one thing to download a cracked version of PhotoShop to participate on Fark / Photoshop Phriday on your home computer or download mp3s for your own amusement. It is a completely different situation to install unlicenced software on a work computer that is being used to make money. The latter is commercial copyright fraud, and it is a Federal Crime in the US. (As far as I know; I'm Canadian and not a lawyer.)
You can fix the problem. That's how to do it.
That's the easy part. The second part is in not getting blamed for the piracy after you leave. If you leave unexpectedly, perhaps 10-15 minutes after presenting your case to the boss, then you will assuredly be pointed at as the cause of the problems. "Oh, I'm not too good with computers. Mr. Smith came in and talked to me about how much we could be saving, something about piracy, and then he was installing this one copy of Office on all the computers."
Now, let's say you go into your boss and he says, "Get... out... you're fired." Tell him, "I am trying to keep you and this company out of jail and bankruptcy. What we are doing is against the law."
Resist the temptation to say, "I have copies of all these emails." That's for later.
So you must: Document, document, document! There's a reason that email programs have BCC on them, and THIS IS THE TIME TO USE IT. BCC your personal email account so you have a record of all these emails. If you get fired, let's say two months later, ostensibly "for no reason, but we're moving in a new direction", you can look at the first severance offer carefully. Then reply, "It looks pretty bad that you are firing me just two months after I told you to stop pirating software. I've got copies of every email I sent you, telling you to stop breaking the law. I've brought this up at company meetings in front of lots of disgruntled former staff that owe you no favours. I would get $X from the BSA if I call them on my cell once I leave the building. What's your _real_ severance package?" (The CEO laughed and said, "fuck, all this time I thought you were just a pushover.")
And that is basically how I lost my first job out of University. They're bankrupt now, but that was due to an unsustainable business model, not anything I did.
What if you're not good enough for heaven and not bad enough for hell?
MOD ABUSE -- responding to parent post is not off-topic.
74 kg. Sorry, don't have it in pounds. ;)
Usually they don't have traffic cops investigating homicides. They aren't even enforcing the same code. Motor Vehicle Act vs. Criminal Code. They aren't even in the same BOOK. They don't use the same courts. Even a Dick Wolf law class should teach you *that* much.
Meh, if this gig as an Electrical Engineer doesn't work out, I'll be an Electrician. That's the same thing, right? (Note that I'm not slagging Electricians; there's no way I can do their job in either a legal or competent manner.)
Further, speeders in urban areas, construction zones, school zones, and residential neighbourhoods should lose their licences for life. There are approx 45k traffic fatalities every year in the US alone. People are generally terrible drivers and think they're good because they use their driving skills to evaluate their driving skills. Stopping speeders prevents accidents, saves money, and saves lives. In fact, there were ~17k murders in the US, so you're more than twice as likely to be killed by someone like you in a car compared to a murderer.
On the Interstate, yeah, you can probably speed without much risk to anyone but yourself.
By convention, software is not officially released until it gets to version 1.0. Versions starting with a 0, like 0.5 or 0.8, are considered beta (again, by convention) and do not "count" in terms of release dates for the original package.
Only when you take the big plunge and increment up to version 1.0 do you get release cred.
Well then, let me just stick this bookmark here so I can check those out at home.
Thanks for the heads-up. I'm trying to get a really old laptop running as a netbook, so a really light browser will help immensely.
Many corporate legacy applications use ActiveX and cannot be ported to .NET. Thus, many corporations use IE6 as the only browser.
it's also 20-years for the Berlin Wall, and I want to announce that I danced on it that very night as a Russian linguist in the USAF!)
I salute your contributions but question your priortization. I remember when the wall fell (I was 12) and remember learning about it in Social Studies. The part that I liked best was that you could buy pieces of the wall. (What struck down the wall? Capitalism.)
But yes, you are correct. When IE came out, Netscape was The Big One. MS brought out IE and jokingly said that "it's priced to sell" (free). I don't know if NS was only free to educational, since I was in college at the time.
They then bundled IE as part of Win98's OS. That's what got them in trouble (and still is) with various anti-monopoly lawsuits. Nevertheless, IE quickly dominated the market and has done so ever since.
I use the side buttons to switch tools in microstation. (CAD program)
It's extraordinarily convenient.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster!