No apology is needed. As usuall, the submitter and the editor didn't read the letter. The word apology is NOWHERE in the document, and it doesn't "CLEARLY STATE" anything. It's a standard DMCA form letter. You don't have to do anything except remove the file. If you believe you were accused in error, you can file a counter-report, which is probably what the submitter was thinking of.
Yeesh, Slashdot has gone from merely sensationalizing stories to just plain making shit up. I can't wait for the next Linux Kernel release announcement, which I'm sure will end up saying something like "500 University students sued for using Linux; now in Guantanamo Bay"
Not bad. But I think the male geeks out there need something a little more manly. Like, say, ThunderCougarFalconBird.
Car Salesman: Spotted her the moment you came in, didn't you? She's a real beauty.
Fry: Yup, she's beautiful coffee alright.
Salesman: No, the Ford ThunderCougarFalconBird! Nothing makes you feel more like a man than a ThunderCougarFalconBird! So how much were you thinking of spending on this ThunderCougarFalconBird?
Fry: Sorry, I'm not here to buy.
Salesman: I understand, and it's great that you don't care if anyone questions your sexual orientation.
Fry: I care! I care plenty! I just don't know how to make them stop!
Salesman: One word: ThunderCougarFalconBird.
Seriously. This "undue influence" mentioned in the summary is crap. They've done a hell of a lot more than our friends in Redmond.
Now does that mean they get to decide the future of Linux? Of course not. But calling it "undue" is bit harsh. I mean, they embraced an open source OS, and made it palatable to Joe User (I'm not insulting FreeBSD, but really, no one can say that it was something to recommend to newbies) without reducing functionality or adding security holes (c.f. Lindows). They helped push an obscure rendering engine (again, not bashing KDE, but more people had heard of Mozilla/Gecko than Konqueror/KHTML) forward and made a lightning fast world-class browser. I think that entitles them to some input in where things are going. And even then, it's just input - it's free to be ignored.
I keep a few email addresses around on various sites. One of them is literally present on only ONE site in the world, and it's in white text on a white background, with a disclaimer "this email address is a spam honeypot, don't send email to it" in text right next to it.
That address STILL gets Richter's spam-crap. Just like every other spammer out there, he's a liar, a thief (ripping off the people paying him to advertise), and deserves to be gotten rid of.
Good. Then write up an affidavit, and send it to the Spamcop folks to help them in their lawsuit. Seriously. Mentioning it on/. won't do anything.
Because unless SpamCop can prove that people who never opted in actually got mail from this guy, he might just win, thanks to the wonderful CAN-SPAM act and the arguments laid out in the parent post. And then we're all screwed. And don't say it can't happen.
Notice that the DRM scheme has changed. You can now burn 7 playlists to CD when it used to be 10. However, the flip side is that you can now authorize 5 computers as opposed to the old scheme of 3.
No, that's not right. No one seems to be able to grasp this playlist thing. First of all, it ONLY applies to songs you have purchased to iTMS. Second, the way it works is this. You create a playlist with songs purchased from iTMS. You can burn THAT PARTICULAR PLAYLIST to CD 10 times. They have now changed that to 7. You can still burn another playlist containing some of those songs. And really, this is not a big deal. Why would you need 7 copies of the same CD? Two copies - sure, one for your car, one for home. Maybe 3 copies, adding one for work. But 7 copies? If you need that many, you're either giving them to your friends, or you're a total klutz who loses everything they carry, or you have 7 cars with CD changers, and if it's that last one, I have no sympathy for you, and you can suck it up and by the actual CDs instead of using iTMS.
This is being blown so far out of proportion. Seriously. As countless others have said, our email is scanned all the time by third parties for spam and viruses.
If you have concerns about Google scanning your email to place unobstrusive, sometimes-actually-useful text advertisements next to your email, then there is a solution. DON'T FLIPPING USE IT! That's all there is too it!
Seriously. A friend of mine went into a rant about this the other day, and I pointed out that he has a hotmail account. It boggles the mind that people would trust Microsoft, which is KNOWN to have questionable (if any) ethics and morals, and yet be suspicious of Google, which is known to have good ethics and morals (ie: refusing to accept payment for search result ranking, and penalizing folks who purposely try to manipulate the results for personal gain).
When I wrote WebCrawler, one could do a credible job of crawling, indexing, and searching the Web from a single desktop PC. Today, the reality is a little bit different.
No kidding. Back then, one could serve a website from most any machine, and it would be there for all to see. Today only the largest websites can avoid a slashdotting with only 9 posts in the thread.
I wonder what they were recorded on - acetate? There's much better quality recordings done in the 1920's that have been remastered using technology we've had for years.
That's precisely what they were recorded on, according to the article. That, and shellac, and wax. And it's not that we can't remaster them now. In fact, I have a CD of Leadbelly's LOC recordings. It's that this is a non-destructive way of remastering them. Prior to this, remastering them was merely playing them again. Granted it was in a controlled environment, with a near-perfect stylus and the record was painstakingly cleaned, but it was still playing them, and that is by definition destructive. Think of how this will change things. You can remaster something merely by taking a picture of it (yes, i'm oversimplifying). It will make remastering these recordings cheaper and more copies will be available (since the LOC doesn't have to worry about each remastering destroying the original)
It's great that they have come up with a non-destructive way of digitizing these recordings. This will make the recordings easier to distribute, and I hope that many people who could not otherwise hear these recordings will get to do so via their local library or something other method.
On a related note, why does the "after" filename contain the word RIAA? What the hell do they have to do with this? The Library of Congress recordings were made by Alan Lomax (another great american folk singer), somewhere around 1940. If the RIAA gets to make money off this, I think I'm going to be sick. Though actually, now that I think about it, I believe the RIAA has some "standards" for music formats. Hopefully that's all this is.
Here in the USA we produce the Gold American Eagle series (started in 1986) of gold coins, available in four different sizes (1/10 ounce, 1/4 ounce, 1/2 ounce, and One Ounce). While they are technically produced just for investors and collectors
They're designed to be evocative of the original eagle series from the 1800s through ~1930. Quarter Eagles were worth $2.50, half eagles were worth $5, eagles were worth $10, and double eagles (produced for a short time only) were $20.
Re:Possible unlawful use of code
on
VIA Pulls PadLockSL
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· Score: 4, Informative
A lot of people have mentioned in previous WASTE related stories something to the tune of "It was GPLed, I dont care who GPLed it, Im not discontinuing my use or distribution of it" while not actually considering that just because it had the GPL applied to it, the GPL was lawfully applied.
Seriously. This is the kind of attitude that Steve Ballmer and folks can point to and say "See how viral the GPL is? Some guy under contract to AOL simply put the word GPL in the source - they didn't even have to make sure the release complied with the terms of the GPL, and now AOL's valuable IP is gone." And then millions of PHBs will ban the use of the word GPL in their offices, because Ballmer provided 'proof' that it was bad.
The GPL does not let you take any source code anywhere and release it under the GPL. If it did, we'd have seen GPL'd Windows 2000 from the leaked MS source, and a GPL'd version of every piece of source that was ever leaked onto the net. Heck, we could solve Xfree86 problem in a second - someone just grab the latest source with the annoying license, untar it, stick in a GPL LICENSE and COPYING files, tar it back up, and distribute it. Bingo - problem solved. Yet for some strange reason, no one has done that yet. Because it's not allowed. I bet even RMS would agree with that.
The GPL provides an awful lot of protection, but that all goes out the window if the inital release under the GPL was unlawful. And one such case would be if you signed an employment contract stating that any code you wrote was property of the company. If you plan to work on GPL stuff, either get a waiver beforehand, or find another job. But you don't get to decide that part of your contact doesn't apply because you don't like it or feel it's "wrong". If so, I could decide that I don't feel like repaying my car payment, or that I want to knock down a few walls in my apartment, regardless of what my lease says. The courts get to strike down parts of a contract after it's signed - the average person doesn't.
Basically, i can see how this decision was made: "What do you mean they're only buying *some* of the songs? They can't just buy some of the songs, they have to buy all the songs, dammit." What is it about these guys, were they dipped in clue-be-gone when they were young? When somebody goes this far out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot, you just gotta wonder.
Can you blame them? Really, can you? Let me give you an example of how they think:
Picture this. You own a company that manufactures shit. No, literally shit. You have a warehouse full of dogs taking a dump, and you collect it and package it. You have a few specials on MTV where you put some shit on the stage, wearing sparkles and exposing its midriff. And maybe have it endorse a few products. And people are breaking your doors down trying to by more shit. You can't keep up with demand. Then, one day, some enterprising young college student looks in the toilet before he flushes it, and figures out "My god, here's some shit for free." Sure, it's not necessarily the same quality you get when you have a whole warehouse to select from, and sometimes it gets, er, damaged in the processing, but darn it, it's free. Now you're the executive of ShitCo. And suddenly, after nearly half a century, people don't seem to want to buy your shit. They'd rather use their own. You're losing money. What do you do? It can't be that your stuff is too expensive, or not good enough - they couldn't get enough of it in the past. So, you do the only thing that makes sense - you raise prices. That'll increase your revenue. It's the only thing that makes sense.
Can someone please explain to me how the whois database is any different from having your name, address, and phone number in the phone book?
No, seriously. Think about it. If you have phone service, your name, address, and phone number ends up in the phone book. Now, you can customize it a little (omit your first name, omit the street number), but it's there. If you want it not to be there, you pay the phone company for an unlisted number, and they take it out. If you want your whois info not to be there, you pay your registrar a fee (most offer "unlisted" or "proxy" registration in which the domain is registered under their name) and they take it out. This process is perfectly fine as far as ICANN is concerned.
Sure, you could argue you can't reverse-lookup a phone number using the phone book, but there are other directories that provide that service for free (go to any large public library and ask for Cole's City Directory - provides address-to-name/number mapping). So really, if you consider that (domain=address; phonebook=whois; telemarketers=spammers) these two scenarios are really the same. And yet no one goes apeshit when the phone company requires you to provide a valid address.
If you want anonymity online, that's all well and good. But if you want a domain name, you need to pay a little more to remain anonymous. There are tradeoffs in life. There are plenty of ways to hide your whois contact info and still remain in compliance with ICANN rules. Listing your address as "123 Fake St" is not one of them.
Joke's on them if they try that on me. I have some Sony wraparound headphones for my iPod. I mostly use my iPod earbuds on my crappy 10-year-old walkman that only outputs sound on the left channel. The muggers are welcome to it:-)
Well, yes, and it's probably intended to be. Traffic tickets are not intended to end life as you know it, nor would a regulatory fine be intended to put a company out of business.
No, but they are intended to make you realize that what you did was wrong and not do it again. If a traffic ticket is low enough, that doesn't happen. In Boston, for example, the average parking ticket (excluding tow zones) was $10.00. Parking your car in a garage for the day was closer to $15.00. Guess what people did? Parked illegally and paid the fine. Since they paid their tickets promptly, they didn't get their car booted, and parking tickets don't lead to points on your license. The city finally wised up, and now it's something like $50 or $80 minimum for a parking ticket. People suddenly decided that maybe parking in a garage was cheaper.
It's the same thing with MS. Fines should be a percentage, not a flat rate. $500 million would put, say, Redhat out of business in a second. The same amount would hurt Apple, but probably not fatally. For Microsoft, however, it's a pittance. To be paid in 20 equal installments of 1/20th of a pittance each.
I said "parked page". If you're only using the domain for for some other service, why do you need a parked page? You simply don't have anything running on port 80, and then you're all set. I'm talking about one of those "User has not set up this website yet" pages.
That said, some of the cases, especially the Bill Wyman one, are laughable.
Laughable, but in a sad "glad-it-wasn't-me" way. The "other" Bill Wyman in question was a well-respected columnist for a major metropolitan newspaper. (No, not the Daily Planet;-) - the Atlanta Journal-Constitution). He said at the time he had the backing of the newspaper if this went to court. Now imagine he wasn't a columnist. Imagine he was just some guy pulling down $25,000/year who didn't even know a lawyer, much less have one on retainer. He'd probably immediately give in (understandably, since he can't afford to fight it), and someone would have been successfully sued for using their legal name by someone who wasn't even born with the same legal name, but had more money and lawyers. Suddenly it becomes less funny.
It lets the programmer handle system popup message in any way including the one you have described.
There shouldn't be any system popup messages. The program should handle all possible errors for user input. Yes, I said all possible errors. You're dealing with only integers and booleans - it's not hard, but it requires effort (which apparently companies don't want to put into making these). Then, any unexpected behavior is going to come from the OS. And when that happens, the program shouldn't get to try and guess what the problem was. The OS should immediately terminate the program, eject the card, notify the bank and customer, and shut down the ATM until a tech comes along.
My bank still uses older-model Diebold ATMs that don't run windows (i saw one reboot) and don't have a GUI - just a tty interface. And I'm happy about that. Yet another reason to support a local bank.
The last thing we need is more laws. What we need is more common sense. For all cases involving domain name/trademark disputes, the following things need to be taken into account:
original intent
type of product/service being offered
whether the person's legal name is involved
whether consumers will be confused
So, for, example, if my last name was Ford, and I made, say, house paint, and I registered fordhousepaint.com, Ford Motor Company shouldn't get to do jack shit. No consumer in the world, no matter how low their IQ, is going to purchase my house paint and then claim confusion and think they were getting a car. However, if Ford didn't have a website, and I registered Ford.com, and just had a parked page there, it would be pretty clear that I was doing it in the hope of extorting money from Ford.
Now, there are some corner cases, as always. The MikeRoeweSoft thing is very unusual. Mike Roewe was his real name, and he did have a software company. Does it sound the same as another Redmond, WA company? Yes. However, it was pretty clear from the site that he wasn't Bill Gates, and the odds that some consumer would hear about the real microsoft, and want to go to their website, yet not know how to spell their domain name, and came up with MikeRoeweSoft on their own - well that's pretty slim. Personally, I think he should have won that case.
And, using the Ford example from above, if my last name was Ford, and I registered ford.com, and on it I had a huge website, with pages for every member of my family, and a history of the family, and all my relatives had @ford.com e-mail addresses, and then Ford suddenly decides they want to cash in on this e-commerce thing and sues me, well that's a sticky situation. Technically, I was there first, and I'm clearly not pretending to make cars, nor am I interested in selling them my domain name for any price, and technically, they're not Ford either, they're Ford Motor Company. But I guess I don't have a good solution for that situation.
Really, two important things would have prevented this whole problem:
If the damn media hadn't convinced the world that everything ends in.com, then we could have only companies have a.com domain, and we'd create some other TLD for people's personal sites. And Ford Motors could have ford.com, and I could have ford.me or ford.personal or something. The TLDs are now totally and completely useless for determining what kind of site is what now that.com,.net, and.org are used for everything. And it's totally the media's fault. A not insignificant number of people have tried to add.com onto the end of my.edu e-mail address when e-mailing me. It's pretty darn sad.
Domain name disputes should be handled like a small claims court. Plaintiff, defendant, judge, and maybe a few witnesses. And if one party fails to show up 3 times, the case is automatically decided in favor of the defendant. Even someone who is in the right and deserves to win a domain dispute often can't because of high-priced lawyers who file every fucking motion in the book to stall a trial for like 5 years. In fact, I'd watch that on CourtTV. Like the People's Court, but the Domain Court. Heh.
intercepting message boxes that end users should not see.
No, that's the wrong answer. In a well-designed ATM, there should not be any message boxes that users shouldn't see. If any unexpected error happens, the ATM code should immediately say "Sorry, I could not complete your transaction, please try later" and return the card. Having an error orccur and be hidden from the user is very much the wrong answer.
Unfortunately, PayPal is the first resort of the deadbeat buyer.:-/ PayPal only gives seller protection in the US and only if you use something like signature-on-delivery to show the item did arrive safely. Outside the US there is *no* seller protection. In fact, if you sell to a country outside PayPal's authorized list you can get your account cancelled.
Even requiring the buyer to use funds from a bank account won't protect you. The buyer can do a 'charge back' or equivalent at any time and you, the seller, have to prove you sent the item and it was received. When PayPal protects the buyer and the seller equally and fairly I'll start using the service.
See, everyone complains about this. And clearly no one ever reads PayPal's terms of service when they sign up, which says that if you want seller protection, you have to ship via a method that has tracking, and you have to ship to the seller's PayPal address. I always ask for a shipping method involving tracking when I'm the buyer, and most reputable sellers will use one. I mean, with the USPS, it's only 45-55 cents extra. That's nothing. When I've sold on eBay, I refuse to ship any method that does not do tracking.
I recently bid on something that never arrived, and after the seller refused to provide proof that it was mailed, I reported it to PayPal. I got my money back, and the seller sent me a bunch of hate e-mails claiming I was stealing from him. He also reported me as a non-paying bidder to eBay. I got that resolved, and he got a warning for lying to them (he had left feedback indicating payments was received). I pointed out to him the PayPal rules, and suggested that if he didn't want to charge his customers the extra 45 cents (which I would have gladly paid), he shouldn't use PayPal. It all worked out in the end - the item showed up 2 months later, Postage Due (I returned it unopened to the PO - I got my money, and he got his item), but I'm amazed that people don't read up on these things. I can understand not reading 4 pages of agreements when signing up for, say, the NY Times website, but when you're dealing with money, what good reason is there for not reading everything?
Passwords were just a way for the school to exercise control.
Is this "school" you speak of MIT? If so, it's worth pointing out that the root password for any public workstation at MIT is available to any user of the system. However, it's still not a carriage return, because that would be stupid. And users still have their own passwords, because in this day and age, having no password is dumb. Yet if they want root, all they have to is ask. (Well "ask" by means of typing a command - there's no approval process) So it is possible to have passwords and yet still make root available for anyone who asks. Individual passwords make sense because no matter how close knit a "family" you are, some things need to remain private. Would you show your porn collection to your spouse/partner? Would you your mom intimate love letters you wrote to your significant others? Would you show all your cousins the letter from your best friend telling you he's coming out of the closet? No, of course you wouldn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeesh, Slashdot has gone from merely sensationalizing stories to just plain making shit up. I can't wait for the next Linux Kernel release announcement, which I'm sure will end up saying something like "500 University students sued for using Linux; now in Guantanamo Bay"
Not bad. But I think the male geeks out there need something a little more manly. Like, say, ThunderCougarFalconBird.
Now does that mean they get to decide the future of Linux? Of course not. But calling it "undue" is bit harsh. I mean, they embraced an open source OS, and made it palatable to Joe User (I'm not insulting FreeBSD, but really, no one can say that it was something to recommend to newbies) without reducing functionality or adding security holes (c.f. Lindows). They helped push an obscure rendering engine (again, not bashing KDE, but more people had heard of Mozilla/Gecko than Konqueror/KHTML) forward and made a lightning fast world-class browser. I think that entitles them to some input in where things are going. And even then, it's just input - it's free to be ignored.
That address STILL gets Richter's spam-crap. Just like every other spammer out there, he's a liar, a thief (ripping off the people paying him to advertise), and deserves to be gotten rid of.
Good. Then write up an affidavit, and send it to the Spamcop folks to help them in their lawsuit. Seriously. Mentioning it on /. won't do anything.
Because unless SpamCop can prove that people who never opted in actually got mail from this guy, he might just win, thanks to the wonderful CAN-SPAM act and the arguments laid out in the parent post. And then we're all screwed. And don't say it can't happen.
No, that's not right. No one seems to be able to grasp this playlist thing. First of all, it ONLY applies to songs you have purchased to iTMS. Second, the way it works is this. You create a playlist with songs purchased from iTMS. You can burn THAT PARTICULAR PLAYLIST to CD 10 times. They have now changed that to 7. You can still burn another playlist containing some of those songs. And really, this is not a big deal. Why would you need 7 copies of the same CD? Two copies - sure, one for your car, one for home. Maybe 3 copies, adding one for work. But 7 copies? If you need that many, you're either giving them to your friends, or you're a total klutz who loses everything they carry, or you have 7 cars with CD changers, and if it's that last one, I have no sympathy for you, and you can suck it up and by the actual CDs instead of using iTMS.
If you have concerns about Google scanning your email to place unobstrusive, sometimes-actually-useful text advertisements next to your email, then there is a solution. DON'T FLIPPING USE IT! That's all there is too it!
Seriously. A friend of mine went into a rant about this the other day, and I pointed out that he has a hotmail account. It boggles the mind that people would trust Microsoft, which is KNOWN to have questionable (if any) ethics and morals, and yet be suspicious of Google, which is known to have good ethics and morals (ie: refusing to accept payment for search result ranking, and penalizing folks who purposely try to manipulate the results for personal gain).
No kidding. Back then, one could serve a website from most any machine, and it would be there for all to see. Today only the largest websites can avoid a slashdotting with only 9 posts in the thread.
That's precisely what they were recorded on, according to the article. That, and shellac, and wax. And it's not that we can't remaster them now. In fact, I have a CD of Leadbelly's LOC recordings. It's that this is a non-destructive way of remastering them. Prior to this, remastering them was merely playing them again. Granted it was in a controlled environment, with a near-perfect stylus and the record was painstakingly cleaned, but it was still playing them, and that is by definition destructive. Think of how this will change things. You can remaster something merely by taking a picture of it (yes, i'm oversimplifying). It will make remastering these recordings cheaper and more copies will be available (since the LOC doesn't have to worry about each remastering destroying the original)
Huh. I wonder what I was thinking of. Perhaps just the St Gaudens face. Oh well, I didn't have my Red Book with me when I wrote the comment.
On a related note, why does the "after" filename contain the word RIAA? What the hell do they have to do with this? The Library of Congress recordings were made by Alan Lomax (another great american folk singer), somewhere around 1940. If the RIAA gets to make money off this, I think I'm going to be sick. Though actually, now that I think about it, I believe the RIAA has some "standards" for music formats. Hopefully that's all this is.
They're designed to be evocative of the original eagle series from the 1800s through ~1930. Quarter Eagles were worth $2.50, half eagles were worth $5, eagles were worth $10, and double eagles (produced for a short time only) were $20.
Seriously. This is the kind of attitude that Steve Ballmer and folks can point to and say "See how viral the GPL is? Some guy under contract to AOL simply put the word GPL in the source - they didn't even have to make sure the release complied with the terms of the GPL, and now AOL's valuable IP is gone." And then millions of PHBs will ban the use of the word GPL in their offices, because Ballmer provided 'proof' that it was bad.
The GPL does not let you take any source code anywhere and release it under the GPL. If it did, we'd have seen GPL'd Windows 2000 from the leaked MS source, and a GPL'd version of every piece of source that was ever leaked onto the net. Heck, we could solve Xfree86 problem in a second - someone just grab the latest source with the annoying license, untar it, stick in a GPL LICENSE and COPYING files, tar it back up, and distribute it. Bingo - problem solved. Yet for some strange reason, no one has done that yet. Because it's not allowed. I bet even RMS would agree with that.
The GPL provides an awful lot of protection, but that all goes out the window if the inital release under the GPL was unlawful. And one such case would be if you signed an employment contract stating that any code you wrote was property of the company. If you plan to work on GPL stuff, either get a waiver beforehand, or find another job. But you don't get to decide that part of your contact doesn't apply because you don't like it or feel it's "wrong". If so, I could decide that I don't feel like repaying my car payment, or that I want to knock down a few walls in my apartment, regardless of what my lease says. The courts get to strike down parts of a contract after it's signed - the average person doesn't.
Can you blame them? Really, can you? Let me give you an example of how they think:
Picture this. You own a company that manufactures shit. No, literally shit. You have a warehouse full of dogs taking a dump, and you collect it and package it. You have a few specials on MTV where you put some shit on the stage, wearing sparkles and exposing its midriff. And maybe have it endorse a few products. And people are breaking your doors down trying to by more shit. You can't keep up with demand. Then, one day, some enterprising young college student looks in the toilet before he flushes it, and figures out "My god, here's some shit for free." Sure, it's not necessarily the same quality you get when you have a whole warehouse to select from, and sometimes it gets, er, damaged in the processing, but darn it, it's free. Now you're the executive of ShitCo. And suddenly, after nearly half a century, people don't seem to want to buy your shit. They'd rather use their own. You're losing money. What do you do? It can't be that your stuff is too expensive, or not good enough - they couldn't get enough of it in the past. So, you do the only thing that makes sense - you raise prices. That'll increase your revenue. It's the only thing that makes sense.
There, now you know how it works.
No, seriously. Think about it. If you have phone service, your name, address, and phone number ends up in the phone book. Now, you can customize it a little (omit your first name, omit the street number), but it's there. If you want it not to be there, you pay the phone company for an unlisted number, and they take it out. If you want your whois info not to be there, you pay your registrar a fee (most offer "unlisted" or "proxy" registration in which the domain is registered under their name) and they take it out. This process is perfectly fine as far as ICANN is concerned.
Sure, you could argue you can't reverse-lookup a phone number using the phone book, but there are other directories that provide that service for free (go to any large public library and ask for Cole's City Directory - provides address-to-name/number mapping). So really, if you consider that (domain=address; phonebook=whois; telemarketers=spammers) these two scenarios are really the same. And yet no one goes apeshit when the phone company requires you to provide a valid address.
If you want anonymity online, that's all well and good. But if you want a domain name, you need to pay a little more to remain anonymous. There are tradeoffs in life. There are plenty of ways to hide your whois contact info and still remain in compliance with ICANN rules. Listing your address as "123 Fake St" is not one of them.
Joke's on them if they try that on me. I have some Sony wraparound headphones for my iPod. I mostly use my iPod earbuds on my crappy 10-year-old walkman that only outputs sound on the left channel. The muggers are welcome to it :-)
No, but they are intended to make you realize that what you did was wrong and not do it again. If a traffic ticket is low enough, that doesn't happen. In Boston, for example, the average parking ticket (excluding tow zones) was $10.00. Parking your car in a garage for the day was closer to $15.00. Guess what people did? Parked illegally and paid the fine. Since they paid their tickets promptly, they didn't get their car booted, and parking tickets don't lead to points on your license. The city finally wised up, and now it's something like $50 or $80 minimum for a parking ticket. People suddenly decided that maybe parking in a garage was cheaper.
It's the same thing with MS. Fines should be a percentage, not a flat rate. $500 million would put, say, Redhat out of business in a second. The same amount would hurt Apple, but probably not fatally. For Microsoft, however, it's a pittance. To be paid in 20 equal installments of 1/20th of a pittance each.
-AAC sucks, they should have gone with Ogg
-They should have gone with MP3 -WMA isn't so bad, it should have won -Great, more Apple lock-in -Apple's dead anyway-When I was a kid, DVD-ROM tracks where in uLaw raw format and we liked it.
-I don't have a DVD player, you insensitive clod.
I said "parked page". If you're only using the domain for for some other service, why do you need a parked page? You simply don't have anything running on port 80, and then you're all set. I'm talking about one of those "User has not set up this website yet" pages.
http://lists.csail.mit.edu/pipermail/csail-discuss /2004-March/000077.html
Laughable, but in a sad "glad-it-wasn't-me" way. The "other" Bill Wyman in question was a well-respected columnist for a major metropolitan newspaper. (No, not the Daily Planet ;-) - the Atlanta Journal-Constitution). He said at the time he had the backing of the newspaper if this went to court. Now imagine he wasn't a columnist. Imagine he was just some guy pulling down $25,000/year who didn't even know a lawyer, much less have one on retainer. He'd probably immediately give in (understandably, since he can't afford to fight it), and someone would have been successfully sued for using their legal name by someone who wasn't even born with the same legal name, but had more money and lawyers. Suddenly it becomes less funny.
There shouldn't be any system popup messages. The program should handle all possible errors for user input. Yes, I said all possible errors. You're dealing with only integers and booleans - it's not hard, but it requires effort (which apparently companies don't want to put into making these). Then, any unexpected behavior is going to come from the OS. And when that happens, the program shouldn't get to try and guess what the problem was. The OS should immediately terminate the program, eject the card, notify the bank and customer, and shut down the ATM until a tech comes along.
My bank still uses older-model Diebold ATMs that don't run windows (i saw one reboot) and don't have a GUI - just a tty interface. And I'm happy about that. Yet another reason to support a local bank.
So, for, example, if my last name was Ford, and I made, say, house paint, and I registered fordhousepaint.com, Ford Motor Company shouldn't get to do jack shit. No consumer in the world, no matter how low their IQ, is going to purchase my house paint and then claim confusion and think they were getting a car. However, if Ford didn't have a website, and I registered Ford.com, and just had a parked page there, it would be pretty clear that I was doing it in the hope of extorting money from Ford.
Now, there are some corner cases, as always. The MikeRoeweSoft thing is very unusual. Mike Roewe was his real name, and he did have a software company. Does it sound the same as another Redmond, WA company? Yes. However, it was pretty clear from the site that he wasn't Bill Gates, and the odds that some consumer would hear about the real microsoft, and want to go to their website, yet not know how to spell their domain name, and came up with MikeRoeweSoft on their own - well that's pretty slim. Personally, I think he should have won that case.
And, using the Ford example from above, if my last name was Ford, and I registered ford.com, and on it I had a huge website, with pages for every member of my family, and a history of the family, and all my relatives had @ford.com e-mail addresses, and then Ford suddenly decides they want to cash in on this e-commerce thing and sues me, well that's a sticky situation. Technically, I was there first, and I'm clearly not pretending to make cars, nor am I interested in selling them my domain name for any price, and technically, they're not Ford either, they're Ford Motor Company. But I guess I don't have a good solution for that situation.
Really, two important things would have prevented this whole problem:
No, that's the wrong answer. In a well-designed ATM, there should not be any message boxes that users shouldn't see. If any unexpected error happens, the ATM code should immediately say "Sorry, I could not complete your transaction, please try later" and return the card. Having an error orccur and be hidden from the user is very much the wrong answer.
See, everyone complains about this. And clearly no one ever reads PayPal's terms of service when they sign up, which says that if you want seller protection, you have to ship via a method that has tracking, and you have to ship to the seller's PayPal address. I always ask for a shipping method involving tracking when I'm the buyer, and most reputable sellers will use one. I mean, with the USPS, it's only 45-55 cents extra. That's nothing. When I've sold on eBay, I refuse to ship any method that does not do tracking.
I recently bid on something that never arrived, and after the seller refused to provide proof that it was mailed, I reported it to PayPal. I got my money back, and the seller sent me a bunch of hate e-mails claiming I was stealing from him. He also reported me as a non-paying bidder to eBay. I got that resolved, and he got a warning for lying to them (he had left feedback indicating payments was received). I pointed out to him the PayPal rules, and suggested that if he didn't want to charge his customers the extra 45 cents (which I would have gladly paid), he shouldn't use PayPal. It all worked out in the end - the item showed up 2 months later, Postage Due (I returned it unopened to the PO - I got my money, and he got his item), but I'm amazed that people don't read up on these things. I can understand not reading 4 pages of agreements when signing up for, say, the NY Times website, but when you're dealing with money, what good reason is there for not reading everything?
Is this "school" you speak of MIT? If so, it's worth pointing out that the root password for any public workstation at MIT is available to any user of the system. However, it's still not a carriage return, because that would be stupid. And users still have their own passwords, because in this day and age, having no password is dumb. Yet if they want root, all they have to is ask. (Well "ask" by means of typing a command - there's no approval process) So it is possible to have passwords and yet still make root available for anyone who asks. Individual passwords make sense because no matter how close knit a "family" you are, some things need to remain private. Would you show your porn collection to your spouse/partner? Would you your mom intimate love letters you wrote to your significant others? Would you show all your cousins the letter from your best friend telling you he's coming out of the closet? No, of course you wouldn't.