So how does a person determine that a check is _actually_ good, so they can avoid these problems?
The only way I know of is to present the check to the issuing bank to cash it and the bank / company have a positive pay agreement; even then I'm not sure if that fully protects you. Probably the best bet is to take the check to a bank manager and get their input on what to do to ensure you don't get stuck; of course too good to be true deals or ones that just don't feel right are a tip off as well. For example, if you get a check for too much offer to return it for correction; a fraudster would come up with reason why not to send it or simply drop you.
Once a bank tells you that a check you deposited is valid, the bank is now liable for that deposit. If the check ends up being fraudulent in this case, the bank is out the $200,000, not the customer who deposited it.
If we change the law so this is the case, banks will be a lot more thorough about checking the validity of deposited checks. Trust me.:)
Except the bank probably only released the funds; they didn't say the check was good. Many US banks will release funds before the check is eventually discovered to be good; people unfortunately think the check is good and that's the root of the scam.
The first time I get payment from a client I always wait to see if it clears before moving forward on a project. It's one of the reasons we require deposits before starting work.
Do you wait for it to actually clear, i.e. be verified as a valid check by the issuing bank, or for the funds to be available? One classic hallmark of these scams is relying on people to think a check is good because the banks release the funds after a few days (as required by law); the scammers then get insistent on getting payment wired or via money transfer so they get their funds before the check actually bounces. Local clients may not be an issue because you can find them, but the scammers are probably untraceable; and even if you could find them the chances of getting money back are pretty slim.
As pointed out above, it's a variant of the old overpayment scam. Lawyers may be a good target because they may be used to helping non-local clients and are smart so they may think the are too smart to be scammed.
Well bands do have the ability to do that - it's just that an unknown band has to decide - do it myself or go with a label that may turn me into a hit? Most decide the later.
I don't think it is just whether the label turns the band into a hit. There is also what I'd call risk equalization.
Snip
Don't get me wrong - the whole industry needs a major overhaul. However, most people critical of the RIAA miss the fact that it does provide one valuable service to the new artist, and that is the key to their success.
I agree - the labels assume all of the risk with new bands so they are going to get almost all of the money; especially since a few hits have to pay for all of the costs of those that don't even become one hit wonders.
If bands had the ability to pit manufacturers against each other in publishing their CDs and albums (and also if the band could decide what percentage they needed from sales) then we would see prices dramatically plummet. Look at CDBaby and think how inexpensive it could get if that kind of market was where we bought all our CDs. And in a capitalistic world, that's how it is supposed to work. But no, acts have contracts and the most popular acts love how the labels shove only those acts down our throats. The music industry is a sorry state right now and rarely do we hear news like this. At least UMG appears to be slowly realizing that it's adapt-or-die time.
We'll bands do have the ability to do that - it's just that an unknown band has to decide - do it myself or go with a label that may turn me into a hit? Most decide the later.
I'm not surprised that they are revising their pricing model - CD sales in the US are still significant (65% of sales) and with WalMart selling the highest share at 20% and driving pricing down to less than $10/Cd anyway all they are doing is giving in to the inevitable.
The evidence for the efficiency and quality of government-run healthcare in other countries is indisputable.
indisputable. While having a safety net is very important, access is still limited- only by availability rather than ability to pay. You can see a doctor but may wait a significant period of time; some countries even allow private practices on a pay for service model that effectively creates a two tier system.
That said, I think we need to reform our system make primary care universally available so the ER stops being the primary care center for the uninsured; that alone will save hospitals a lot of money. ERs bleed money as a result of the current system; to the point hospitals are considering closing their ERs. We also need to get passed the idea we must see a Doctor when a NP or PA could provide equal or better care at a much lower cost.
We also need to attack other costs such as the cost of educating a Doctor, do they really need an undergad degree, a medical degree and a residence or can you provide the same level of basic skill through a streamlined educational process much like some schools have started to do with Pharm Drs; how costs of drug development are borne, i.e. US purchaser of drugs should pay no more than what other nations charge or pay for drugs sold in the US.
It's a complicated structural problem that will take a long time to fix.
I hope it's rushed through, because then it may give ammo for the Supreme Court to rule the action as unconstitutional/illegal... Not to mention that Fed healthcare as it stands is unconstitutional... Amendment 10 of the constitution states:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively,
or to the people
So explain to me how the US government has the power/right to do this?
It's in the Constitution, Article 8:
The Congress shall have power To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
In short, Congress has been granted pretty broad power to govern the US.
Sounds like BS. The idea that you could apply a mathematical formula to something as unpredictable as human behavior, even in group situations, is somewhat absurd if given a properly diverse set of people.
Actually it's not - it looks at human behavior related to decision making as as part of the way to explain economic decisions; and seeks to understand apparent irrationality in the market, for example. As such, it is somewhat at odds with efficient market theory which makes Chicago's mens tennis doubles team of Fama / Thaler an interesting combination.
Not surprisingly, human behavior is often not that unpredictable as people may think, especially in larger groups. There's a large body of research on decision making and economics that is quite fascinating and illuminating.
Re:Oh great, Sony
on
I Want My GTV
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Hulu only blocked PS3 soon after they singed a deal with Microsoft...
I believe that's called Collusion in legal terms, and highly illegal in both the US and Euope. But of course it's Microsoft, so US enforcers turn a blind eye and have some nice donations...
No, it's a called a marketing agreement. Exclusive marketing agreements aren't illegal; collusion is working in concert to exert market power in order to raise prices in concert. Hulu/ MS agreements don't do this; as they aren't able to impact prices given the competition in the mrketplace.
Fair point, if you want to pay private individuals on a regular basis, and don't want to carry cash to do that with. As for businesses, I've got no idea why you think the business needs to be "fixed", there's mobile terminals for doing this, there's no more reason a payterminal needs to be tethered, than say a phone needs to be tethered.
It's true there's costs. Typically not transaction-fees, but you do pay a fee to borrow or permanently have one of the terminal-thingies. It's considered cheaper than dealing with cash though. (dealing with cash takes -time-, and is an inherently high-risk operation, if you have a lot of it lying around, you need precautions against theft etc, which also isn't free) I guess cheques might be better than cash, from the payers perspective. The recipient, though, has an additional worry: he doesn't actually know that there's money to cover the cheque. Want to take a guess at what it costs businesses to deal with bounced cheques ?
I agree that a POS terminal virtually eliminates the bad check problem; and that mobile terminals can handle a lot of business transactions as well. Although, many of the places I used to pay with check, such as pizza delivery, take internet orders so now I just pay via credit card online. Quite a few places also take echecks online as well.
There's the issue of consumer protection to sort out as well. While someone could wash a check, if someone gets your card info they can wipe out your bank account and your stuck waiting to sort it out; that's why i prefer a credit card over both methods - at least I am not out money on a fraudulent charge.
There are pluses and minuses to all methods of payment. I think one reason Europe developed a more advanced payment system was due to all teh currency in use prior to the Euro - they needed a way to make cross-border payment easy and so developed teller machine networks, postal payment schemes, and the old EuroCheck and card system for paying in say, DMs or Escudos when you have a Swiss account; that eventually morphed into an electronic payment system as people became used to electronic transfers.
In the US at least, the push is more from banks to go to such as scheme as it reduces their costs; and it is starting to gain steam but is not yet a normal way to do business. I'd guess more is done via credit card than debit cards; at least from my anecdotal observations.
But that's not what you do for a simple service. You insert your chip-card in the reader, and enter your TAN when asked to confirm the amount. The entire process takes less than 10 seconds, to the point where people who pay -cash- are holding up the line because it takes twice as long as paying by card. And yeah, behind the scenes, when you do that, what happens is that money is transfered from your account to the service-provider. So what ?
You assume everyone has a reader and or checks are only written to established fixed businesses - I write checks to a lot of individuals - to replace checks would require every individual to have a reader and some sort of mobile access - clearly not a practical solution when checks work just fine now. DO I write a lot - no; but when I do it is helpful. In addition, many small business I do regular business prefer checks form their good customers - they pay no processing fee; unlike with other electronic methods. While the cost per transaction is small, it adds up over a number of transactions; and I doubt banks will do this for free, even if it reduces the cost of processing checks.
USA is insane. I mean, the entire cheque-thing ? Hello ? As if it's not ridicolous to begin with, do you send email by handwriting it on paper, then taking a PHOTO of the letter, and sending that to your friend ? No ? Then why is doing the same thing with cheques reasonable ?
Well, checks do have some advantages
I can simply write one for a service instead of having to gain internet access, find the person's account and transfer the balance. Do I really want to do that for every transaction. No; I prefer deciding when to use electronic transfer.
I can avoid giving out my bank account information - I deposit checks simply by scanning them into my account; I don't have to provide everyone that sends me money with my account details; the security of which becomes questionable as more people have access to it.
I have a scanned copy of every check I wrote and was paid; if a question arises about payment I can prove they got paid.
I like being able to chose how I pay; rather than have someone tell me I can only use their desired system.
Contact the owners and ask them if they mind. You might be surprised.
I'd add talking to an IP lawyer as the law can get quite complex. The original owners may not even own the rights anymore; so it's important to figure out who really owns them.
Reminds me of the old (ooooooooooooooooolllllllllllddddddd) textbook my calculus teacher has that managed to sneak through Texas book approval. It had four graphs printed right next to each other, the first of which was a step function, the second a parabola, the third was 2 sqrt functions forming a right-facing parabola, and the last was a right facing absolute function. This was the first time the graphs had been printed in color, too, so the *ahem* naughty word really popped.
While that is funny; the real sad thing is I got the joke. Shades of Big Bang Theory....
Professor Richard Schmidt says user reports are often unreliable: 'When the driver says they have their foot on the brake, they are just plain wrong."
My '08 Prious has had three "surge" events. I was able to stop all three times.
I challenge professor Richard Schmidt: If my foot was on the accelerator, how did I in fact stop?
The Toyota people have told me they'll be reflashing the processors of all the Prius cars in a few months so any brake signal will shut down the engine. Why wasn't that done from the beginning? But anyway, I'm looking forward to the modification. In the meantime, I'm practicing quickly hitting the Neutral gear lever.
He's not saying every human report is wrong, it's just humans often think they saw or did one thing when they didn't. My experience conducting crew assessments in operational and simulator scenarios backs that up - someone will swear they did or say X when multiple observers and the event logger shows they didn't. It's not that they are lying just that we are often unreliable observers.
One of the hardest things in event investigation is sifting through eyewitness statements - which are often misleading or wrong; especially people seem not to be able to say what they saw; but rather interpret it. For example, instead of "I saw smoke" they say "the engine was on fire;" the former is a statement of what they saw, the latter conjecture.
Ads are invasive, intrusive, annoying, and I don't want to see them. ever. There are laws against sending advertisements over the fax and cold-calling cell phones. The logic is that the recipient must pay for the unsolicited advertisement (in fax paper, toner, or cell phone minutes).
Internet ads are no different.
Internet ads are different - the key being unsolicited - you chose to go to a site, unlike fax spam or cold - calls where the sender initiates the communication.
I pay for bandwidth and connection time, so your ad directly costs me money, and it should be illegal for that reason. It costs me time too, making your page slower and more annoying. I don't want to have to hunt for the content among all the cleverly disguised ads. I don't want to have to examine the links to figure out which ones are ads and which ones are legitimate.
You can chose not to visit a site and not expend the bandwidth if you don't like the ads. If you don't like how a site pays for itself, don't visit it. Pretty simple; and if enough people do that the site will go away. Sites have real bills to pay; and unless they do that they will eventually fold. Ads are one way of doing that.
I will continue blocking ads until the end of time. If you can't figure out how to make money without annoying people, that's your problem. Get creative folks, and stop whining about how you wish people would just be more receptive to being annoyed.
They are - one site I frequent ran a public radio style pledge campaign, and vigorously polices its ads to remove annoying ones. Others are moving to paid content. In the end, there is no free lunch; good content costs money and if people insist on blocking ads they will have to find another way to make money or go out of business.
So much for Republican core values of small government, free enterprise, and especially the government getting out of the way of free enterprise to do a job better, cheaper, and without the stifling bureaucracy.
At least that is what Republicans of all stripes say they stand for. In public. Officially.
Pork always wins out, tho.
(Note to Republicans who are incensed by this attack on their imploded view of reality: see the title of this post.)
As you pointed out, Republicans (and many other politicians) are all for cutting government in somebody *else's* district; for free trade until a company in their district loses out to a competitor; while at the same time *creating* jobs in their district (with federal dollars, of course.)
Newsflash - the government does not create jobs - it just picks winners and losers; and will keep doing so as long as bring home federal money means getting re-elected. We vote them in of course, sow we truly have met the enemy, and he is us.
Seriously. Following robots.txt is not law, only convention. I'm sure it doesn't take much to convince themselves to ignore it. Money, "doing the right thing", etc. If you view the copyright infringers as pirates, then why should Attributor follow their wishes?
I'd go even farther to say that sites that use robot.txt to eliminate crawling are probably not major targets - if they don't show up in search engine sthen tehy probably don't generate enough traffic to be worth the effort. Sites that are high traffic are much better targets - their revenue stream form ads is prbabaly significant enough that they don't want to risk losing it. Once enough fall into line they can worry about the ones that are not indexed - in fact they may just want to kill them off to preserve traffic to licensed sites.
Exactly, what *when* they go out of business? Because on the scale of what gets done when a company is bankrupt customers are dead last. There are no more customers: the company is gone. What matters at that point is creditors and the more your owed the higher you are on the list. If there is no non-restricted version held in escrow with a lawyer who has explicit instructions to release when the company goes insolvent then FACT: Your purchase is gone.
More importantly, if such code exists it would have some value - people would be willing to pay to get it so their games still play. As such, in bankruptcy, creditors would take control of those assets, just like any other assets, to help satisfy the debts. It would then be in their best interests to sell the patch to anyone who wants it. Oddly enough, piracy would now work in their favor - more people might actually buy a patch than actually bought the game. Talk about Karma...
Here's a question for a real lawyer - could a company released such a patch right before declaring bankruptcy, knowing they were shutting down and the patch had value for the creditors; but now was worthless?
It seems like it was only yesterday when people were complaining that the black box data was there in the first place. Then came along the complaints on how it was being used against people in courts and in accident investigations. Then the complaint was that only certain people could get the information and you couldn't get it to clear your name or anything- even in one case where I believe the prosecutor got the information and decided it was worthless and tossed it (may be wrong on that).
Now, it seems that everything happening that would have caused a complaint is good and those not allowing it to happen is bad. Go figure.
IANAL, but isn't it the case, in the US at least, that a prosecutor has to provide the defense with all the evidence pertaining to the case in their possession? They then would have to provide any black box data they had; otherwise they'd be withholding evidence.
In a civil case you'd probably be able to get it through discovery.
As a side note; I wonder if Toyota could build a small device to plug in like on OBDC Code Reader,and let it record reams of data, say 3 months worth; that can then be used to troubleshoot the problem? Offer owners a deal - such a s a free oil change every time they bring in the car to get the device swapped? That way, they'd have real world data to analyze.
Have you contacted counterparts at other, similar orgs to see if they use OSS? If they have been successful you might be able to get a management to management dialogue that has a non-tech person say why the solution was great. Hearing that from a peer can be a very effective way to gain support.
Roger that on Sharepoint - MS seems to want to mac it as painful as possible. Great idea, really poor implementation. You'd think they'd a least integrate it with their own products in a seamless manner. Don't even get me started on searching...
Slashdot Mirror
So how does a person determine that a check is _actually_ good, so they can avoid these problems?
The only way I know of is to present the check to the issuing bank to cash it and the bank / company have a positive pay agreement; even then I'm not sure if that fully protects you. Probably the best bet is to take the check to a bank manager and get their input on what to do to ensure you don't get stuck; of course too good to be true deals or ones that just don't feel right are a tip off as well. For example, if you get a check for too much offer to return it for correction; a fraudster would come up with reason why not to send it or simply drop you.
Hmm, the solution to this problems seems obvious.
Once a bank tells you that a check you deposited is valid, the bank is now liable for that deposit. If the check ends up being fraudulent in this case, the bank is out the $200,000, not the customer who deposited it.
If we change the law so this is the case, banks will be a lot more thorough about checking the validity of deposited checks. Trust me. :)
Except the bank probably only released the funds; they didn't say the check was good. Many US banks will release funds before the check is eventually discovered to be good; people unfortunately think the check is good and that's the root of the scam.
Yeah because as everyone knows, Australia is in Europe...
It is. It's a small country whose capital is Vienna.
The first time I get payment from a client I always wait to see if it clears before moving forward on a project. It's one of the reasons we require deposits before starting work.
Do you wait for it to actually clear, i.e. be verified as a valid check by the issuing bank, or for the funds to be available? One classic hallmark of these scams is relying on people to think a check is good because the banks release the funds after a few days (as required by law); the scammers then get insistent on getting payment wired or via money transfer so they get their funds before the check actually bounces. Local clients may not be an issue because you can find them, but the scammers are probably untraceable; and even if you could find them the chances of getting money back are pretty slim.
As pointed out above, it's a variant of the old overpayment scam. Lawyers may be a good target because they may be used to helping non-local clients and are smart so they may think the are too smart to be scammed.
Well bands do have the ability to do that - it's just that an unknown band has to decide - do it myself or go with a label that may turn me into a hit? Most decide the later.
I don't think it is just whether the label turns the band into a hit. There is also what I'd call risk equalization.
Snip
Don't get me wrong - the whole industry needs a major overhaul. However, most people critical of the RIAA miss the fact that it does provide one valuable service to the new artist, and that is the key to their success.
I agree - the labels assume all of the risk with new bands so they are going to get almost all of the money; especially since a few hits have to pay for all of the costs of those that don't even become one hit wonders.
If bands had the ability to pit manufacturers against each other in publishing their CDs and albums (and also if the band could decide what percentage they needed from sales) then we would see prices dramatically plummet. Look at CDBaby and think how inexpensive it could get if that kind of market was where we bought all our CDs. And in a capitalistic world, that's how it is supposed to work. But no, acts have contracts and the most popular acts love how the labels shove only those acts down our throats. The music industry is a sorry state right now and rarely do we hear news like this. At least UMG appears to be slowly realizing that it's adapt-or-die time.
We'll bands do have the ability to do that - it's just that an unknown band has to decide - do it myself or go with a label that may turn me into a hit? Most decide the later.
I'm not surprised that they are revising their pricing model - CD sales in the US are still significant (65% of sales) and with WalMart selling the highest share at 20% and driving pricing down to less than $10/Cd anyway all they are doing is giving in to the inevitable.
The evidence for the efficiency and quality of government-run healthcare in other countries is indisputable.
indisputable. While having a safety net is very important, access is still limited- only by availability rather than ability to pay. You can see a doctor but may wait a significant period of time; some countries even allow private practices on a pay for service model that effectively creates a two tier system.
That said, I think we need to reform our system make primary care universally available so the ER stops being the primary care center for the uninsured; that alone will save hospitals a lot of money. ERs bleed money as a result of the current system; to the point hospitals are considering closing their ERs. We also need to get passed the idea we must see a Doctor when a NP or PA could provide equal or better care at a much lower cost.
We also need to attack other costs such as the cost of educating a Doctor, do they really need an undergad degree, a medical degree and a residence or can you provide the same level of basic skill through a streamlined educational process much like some schools have started to do with Pharm Drs; how costs of drug development are borne, i.e. US purchaser of drugs should pay no more than what other nations charge or pay for drugs sold in the US.
It's a complicated structural problem that will take a long time to fix.
I hope it's rushed through, because then it may give ammo for the Supreme Court to rule the action as unconstitutional/illegal... Not to mention that Fed healthcare as it stands is unconstitutional... Amendment 10 of the constitution states:
So explain to me how the US government has the power/right to do this?
It's in the Constitution, Article 8:
The Congress shall have power To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
In short, Congress has been granted pretty broad power to govern the US.
"behavioral economics. A very interesting field."
Sounds like BS. The idea that you could apply a mathematical formula to something as unpredictable as human behavior, even in group situations, is somewhat absurd if given a properly diverse set of people.
Actually it's not - it looks at human behavior related to decision making as as part of the way to explain economic decisions; and seeks to understand apparent irrationality in the market, for example. As such, it is somewhat at odds with efficient market theory which makes Chicago's mens tennis doubles team of Fama / Thaler an interesting combination.
Not surprisingly, human behavior is often not that unpredictable as people may think, especially in larger groups. There's a large body of research on decision making and economics that is quite fascinating and illuminating.
Hulu only blocked PS3 soon after they singed a deal with Microsoft...
I believe that's called Collusion in legal terms, and highly illegal in both the US and Euope. But of course it's Microsoft, so US enforcers turn a blind eye and have some nice donations...
No, it's a called a marketing agreement. Exclusive marketing agreements aren't illegal; collusion is working in concert to exert market power in order to raise prices in concert. Hulu/ MS agreements don't do this; as they aren't able to impact prices given the competition in the mrketplace.
Fair point, if you want to pay private individuals on a regular basis, and don't want to carry cash to do that with. As for businesses, I've got no idea why you think the business needs to be "fixed", there's mobile terminals for doing this, there's no more reason a payterminal needs to be tethered, than say a phone needs to be tethered.
It's true there's costs. Typically not transaction-fees, but you do pay a fee to borrow or permanently have one of the terminal-thingies. It's considered cheaper than dealing with cash though. (dealing with cash takes -time-, and is an inherently high-risk operation, if you have a lot of it lying around, you need precautions against theft etc, which also isn't free) I guess cheques might be better than cash, from the payers perspective. The recipient, though, has an additional worry: he doesn't actually know that there's money to cover the cheque. Want to take a guess at what it costs businesses to deal with bounced cheques ?
I agree that a POS terminal virtually eliminates the bad check problem; and that mobile terminals can handle a lot of business transactions as well. Although, many of the places I used to pay with check, such as pizza delivery, take internet orders so now I just pay via credit card online. Quite a few places also take echecks online as well.
There's the issue of consumer protection to sort out as well. While someone could wash a check, if someone gets your card info they can wipe out your bank account and your stuck waiting to sort it out; that's why i prefer a credit card over both methods - at least I am not out money on a fraudulent charge.
There are pluses and minuses to all methods of payment. I think one reason Europe developed a more advanced payment system was due to all teh currency in use prior to the Euro - they needed a way to make cross-border payment easy and so developed teller machine networks, postal payment schemes, and the old EuroCheck and card system for paying in say, DMs or Escudos when you have a Swiss account; that eventually morphed into an electronic payment system as people became used to electronic transfers.
In the US at least, the push is more from banks to go to such as scheme as it reduces their costs; and it is starting to gain steam but is not yet a normal way to do business. I'd guess more is done via credit card than debit cards; at least from my anecdotal observations.
But that's not what you do for a simple service. You insert your chip-card in the reader, and enter your TAN when asked to confirm the amount. The entire process takes less than 10 seconds, to the point where people who pay -cash- are holding up the line because it takes twice as long as paying by card. And yeah, behind the scenes, when you do that, what happens is that money is transfered from your account to the service-provider. So what ?
You assume everyone has a reader and or checks are only written to established fixed businesses - I write checks to a lot of individuals - to replace checks would require every individual to have a reader and some sort of mobile access - clearly not a practical solution when checks work just fine now. DO I write a lot - no; but when I do it is helpful. In addition, many small business I do regular business prefer checks form their good customers - they pay no processing fee; unlike with other electronic methods. While the cost per transaction is small, it adds up over a number of transactions; and I doubt banks will do this for free, even if it reduces the cost of processing checks.
USAA does this already. Now, if my bank would let me take a photo of cash and deposit that into my account...
USA is insane. I mean, the entire cheque-thing ? Hello ? As if it's not ridicolous to begin with, do you send email by handwriting it on paper, then taking a PHOTO of the letter, and sending that to your friend ? No ? Then why is doing the same thing with cheques reasonable ?
Well, checks do have some advantages
I can simply write one for a service instead of having to gain internet access, find the person's account and transfer the balance. Do I really want to do that for every transaction. No; I prefer deciding when to use electronic transfer.
I can avoid giving out my bank account information - I deposit checks simply by scanning them into my account; I don't have to provide everyone that sends me money with my account details; the security of which becomes questionable as more people have access to it.
I have a scanned copy of every check I wrote and was paid; if a question arises about payment I can prove they got paid.
I like being able to chose how I pay; rather than have someone tell me I can only use their desired system.
Contact the owners and ask them if they mind. You might be surprised.
I'd add talking to an IP lawyer as the law can get quite complex. The original owners may not even own the rights anymore; so it's important to figure out who really owns them.
Reminds me of the old (ooooooooooooooooolllllllllllddddddd) textbook my calculus teacher has that managed to sneak through Texas book approval. It had four graphs printed right next to each other, the first of which was a step function, the second a parabola, the third was 2 sqrt functions forming a right-facing parabola, and the last was a right facing absolute function. This was the first time the graphs had been printed in color, too, so the *ahem* naughty word really popped.
While that is funny; the real sad thing is I got the joke. Shades of Big Bang Theory....
What if we ran an open data project like an open source project? What would this look like?'"
Every time someone asked about the date, they'd get a reply of RTFM
Whenever someone did like the data they'd fork it with their own approved data
MS would issue a white paper saying why closed source data is better and cheaper
Everytime someone announced some new data, RMS would yell "That's GNU!!!!!>
Professor Richard Schmidt says user reports are often unreliable: 'When the driver says they have their foot on the brake, they are just plain wrong." My '08 Prious has had three "surge" events. I was able to stop all three times. I challenge professor Richard Schmidt: If my foot was on the accelerator, how did I in fact stop? The Toyota people have told me they'll be reflashing the processors of all the Prius cars in a few months so any brake signal will shut down the engine. Why wasn't that done from the beginning? But anyway, I'm looking forward to the modification. In the meantime, I'm practicing quickly hitting the Neutral gear lever.
He's not saying every human report is wrong, it's just humans often think they saw or did one thing when they didn't. My experience conducting crew assessments in operational and simulator scenarios backs that up - someone will swear they did or say X when multiple observers and the event logger shows they didn't. It's not that they are lying just that we are often unreliable observers.
One of the hardest things in event investigation is sifting through eyewitness statements - which are often misleading or wrong; especially people seem not to be able to say what they saw; but rather interpret it. For example, instead of "I saw smoke" they say "the engine was on fire;" the former is a statement of what they saw, the latter conjecture.
Ads are invasive, intrusive, annoying, and I don't want to see them. ever. There are laws against sending advertisements over the fax and cold-calling cell phones. The logic is that the recipient must pay for the unsolicited advertisement (in fax paper, toner, or cell phone minutes).
Internet ads are no different.
Internet ads are different - the key being unsolicited - you chose to go to a site, unlike fax spam or cold - calls where the sender initiates the communication.
I pay for bandwidth and connection time, so your ad directly costs me money, and it should be illegal for that reason. It costs me time too, making your page slower and more annoying. I don't want to have to hunt for the content among all the cleverly disguised ads. I don't want to have to examine the links to figure out which ones are ads and which ones are legitimate.
You can chose not to visit a site and not expend the bandwidth if you don't like the ads. If you don't like how a site pays for itself, don't visit it. Pretty simple; and if enough people do that the site will go away. Sites have real bills to pay; and unless they do that they will eventually fold. Ads are one way of doing that.
I will continue blocking ads until the end of time. If you can't figure out how to make money without annoying people, that's your problem. Get creative folks, and stop whining about how you wish people would just be more receptive to being annoyed.
They are - one site I frequent ran a public radio style pledge campaign, and vigorously polices its ads to remove annoying ones. Others are moving to paid content. In the end, there is no free lunch; good content costs money and if people insist on blocking ads they will have to find another way to make money or go out of business.
But strangely, nobody suffered from headaches as a result of listening to AM radios,
You've obviously not spent nights trying to listen to rock and roll on WOWO after your local station signed off...
So much for Republican core values of small government, free enterprise, and especially the government getting out of the way of free enterprise to do a job better, cheaper, and without the stifling bureaucracy.
At least that is what Republicans of all stripes say they stand for. In public. Officially.
Pork always wins out, tho.
(Note to Republicans who are incensed by this attack on their imploded view of reality: see the title of this post.)
As you pointed out, Republicans (and many other politicians) are all for cutting government in somebody *else's* district; for free trade until a company in their district loses out to a competitor; while at the same time *creating* jobs in their district (with federal dollars, of course.)
Newsflash - the government does not create jobs - it just picks winners and losers; and will keep doing so as long as bring home federal money means getting re-elected. We vote them in of course, sow we truly have met the enemy, and he is us.
Seriously. Following robots.txt is not law, only convention. I'm sure it doesn't take much to convince themselves to ignore it. Money, "doing the right thing", etc. If you view the copyright infringers as pirates, then why should Attributor follow their wishes?
I'd go even farther to say that sites that use robot.txt to eliminate crawling are probably not major targets - if they don't show up in search engine sthen tehy probably don't generate enough traffic to be worth the effort. Sites that are high traffic are much better targets - their revenue stream form ads is prbabaly significant enough that they don't want to risk losing it. Once enough fall into line they can worry about the ones that are not indexed - in fact they may just want to kill them off to preserve traffic to licensed sites.
Exactly, what *when* they go out of business? Because on the scale of what gets done when a company is bankrupt customers are dead last. There are no more customers: the company is gone. What matters at that point is creditors and the more your owed the higher you are on the list. If there is no non-restricted version held in escrow with a lawyer who has explicit instructions to release when the company goes insolvent then FACT: Your purchase is gone.
More importantly, if such code exists it would have some value - people would be willing to pay to get it so their games still play. As such, in bankruptcy, creditors would take control of those assets, just like any other assets, to help satisfy the debts. It would then be in their best interests to sell the patch to anyone who wants it. Oddly enough, piracy would now work in their favor - more people might actually buy a patch than actually bought the game. Talk about Karma...
Here's a question for a real lawyer - could a company released such a patch right before declaring bankruptcy, knowing they were shutting down and the patch had value for the creditors; but now was worthless?
It seems like it was only yesterday when people were complaining that the black box data was there in the first place. Then came along the complaints on how it was being used against people in courts and in accident investigations. Then the complaint was that only certain people could get the information and you couldn't get it to clear your name or anything- even in one case where I believe the prosecutor got the information and decided it was worthless and tossed it (may be wrong on that).
Now, it seems that everything happening that would have caused a complaint is good and those not allowing it to happen is bad. Go figure.
IANAL, but isn't it the case, in the US at least, that a prosecutor has to provide the defense with all the evidence pertaining to the case in their possession? They then would have to provide any black box data they had; otherwise they'd be withholding evidence.
In a civil case you'd probably be able to get it through discovery.
As a side note; I wonder if Toyota could build a small device to plug in like on OBDC Code Reader,and let it record reams of data, say 3 months worth; that can then be used to troubleshoot the problem? Offer owners a deal - such a s a free oil change every time they bring in the car to get the device swapped? That way, they'd have real world data to analyze.
Roger that on Sharepoint - MS seems to want to mac it as painful as possible. Great idea, really poor implementation. You'd think they'd a least integrate it with their own products in a seamless manner. Don't even get me started on searching...