The article (on my reading anyway) doesn't mention if it was consensual sex, buyers remorse, or if the guy forced himself onto her. Nor does it mention what age each of the participants thought the other was, represented themselves as, or what their intentions were. Please correct me if I am wrong.
No doubt there are many cases of "buyers remorse". I've heard of people with only a couple of degrees separation from myself that have done something entirely consensual but incredibly stupid with someone just underage, and have it bite them on the ass when buyers remorse hit. It doesn't make their act any less stupid, excluding the ones who genuinely didn't know.
What is dangerous however is the assumption that this case was buyers remorse. It could have been, but the article doesn't suggest it one way or the other. There is a world of difference between consent then regret and no consent at all.
my question is, what the hell were the girl's parents doing?? They let their minor child be picked up by someone they've never met, taken to dinner and a movie?? Someone needs to slap them upside the head for lousy parenting.
It is quite possible the teen snuck out without her parents knowledge- not hard to do, teens have lied about where they are going since the dawn of time. But even this is an assumption; she may just have terrible parents. And greedy ones too, apparently, given their choice of Myspace as a target.
I think we agree that "expect" is a stronger form of "hope", just that we might not agree precisely on the strength.;)
The phrase I latched onto specifically was "expected of you", rather than just "expected", which (IMHO) has a subtle but very different meaning. The relevant entry in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary is here. Specifically:
to consider bound in duty or obligated
which gives meaning to the original phrase something as: "If a 19 year old takes you to dinner and a movie and you agree to go back to his place certain (sexual) things are expected of you (you are bound in duty to deliver these sexual things or obligated to deliver these sexual things)". Obviously there is big problem with this, hence why I hope the GP really didn't mean it like that.
Of course, if the GP really meant that, I wouldn't be the only one ripping them a new one, they'd be modded to oblivion, so forth. I don't think the GP has bad intent. I just think the choice of words is... unfortunate.
As well he should. The 19-year old invited a 14-year old back to his place with the intent of having sex with her. Is there something else I'm missing in this picture?
Yes, he did something which was wrong by US law. This would've been legal in other countries, like Spain for example.
Then perhaps if he wants to pull this sort of crap he should head off there first. A 14-year old sleeping with a 14-year old is extremely regrettable. A 19-year old should have known better.
If a 19 year old takes you to dinner and a movie and you agree to go back to his place certain things are expected of you
Whooooah there. Wait just one damn minute. You surely can't mean what I think you mean, do you? Please tell me I've misunderstood what you've said.
If you go around to someones place, they may or may not be hoping for something of a sexual nature to happen, but there is never, ever an expectation on someone to "put out" just because you went to visit. Yes, it is a fair assumption that someone who has just wined and dined you is going to try to put the moves on you, but merely visiting isn't consent to take things as far as they want. The visitor can soak up the dinner and movie, drop over, drink their coffee and eat their chips, and at the end of the evening get on up and go, and there's not a damn thing expected of them.
Having said that, I'd question the wisdom of heading back to a 19-year olds place after dinner and a movie because there's a good chance they've got something quite specific in mind. But bear in mind this is a 14-year old, and they don't always have the life experience to avoid making such a poor decision.
My reply to you would be far, far more vicious if I thought you genuinely meant what you've written. It just seems so far out that I'm hoping you chose your words poorly; please tell me that I've misread your actual intent.
if you don't trust their black hats, try it yourself download the beta [microsoft.com] install hack
Well, my hat's off to Microsoft this time on the security of their new operating system. Twenty minutes of clicking links, filling in personal information,adding cookie exceptions across three sites, one user agreement, clearing all cookies out five times to get past site jams, two separate confirmation emails, one passport signup, entering my email address no less than twelve times and I can't even find one download link to this sucker. What is this? Their new plan to make black hats kill themselves with boredom before they can even get the OS?
You can share spreadsheets with other users and can chat while you're editing - multiplayer spreadsheets!
Yeah, sure, it sounds good in theory, but just wait until you're editing a spreadsheet and the person you're editing with uses a border-hack to edit your cell from an adjacent one. Cheater scum.
If Microsoft buys eBay and Paypal, I'm going to cancel my account immediately.
Good luck, it took around two weeks and a few emails on a zero-balance year-long inactive account for me to cancel mine. They wouldn't close it on my request, of course, and copy-pasted a set of instructions (that didn't work) in reply to each email. They wouldn't close it themselves, though. They basically ignored that part of my request each time. Admittedly I had lost the password, so it is partly my fault. Glad I'm out though.
If you proactively find the vulnerability without authorisation, you are probably committing an offence.
Or you stumbled onto it by accident, which does happen.
otherwise everyone could simply claim that and get off.
Hence the mention of "you only performed reasonably minimal actions whilst in the exploited state to confirm that the vulnerability was real" and "the exact steps you took whilst exploiting it". I'm just wondering out loud if there is some way that people who find such vulnerabilities and act responsibly can be protected from the negative consequences of doing the right thing.
Consider this: say you're crossing the street on a green light, and you see out of your peripheral vision a car barreling towards you despite his red light. Do you (a) rely upon the fact that you are "right" or (b) yield to the 1/2 ton of metal and plastic barreling towards you?
(b) obviously, but your example is not analogous.
Many developers and people at organisations at risk are generally thankful to receive information on vulnerabilites so they can actually do something about them. Thus this is something worthwhile to encourage.
However, it only takes one shortsighted fool to kick up a stink to discourage people from doing the right thing. I'm wondering if there is some way to protect the person doing the right thing by removing the sting from the shortsighted.
I can't help but think that with the risk of negative consequences from informing someone incompetent, selfish, or insecure of a vulnerability that there needs to be some sort of safe harbor provision in laws in the case of reporting a vulnerability.
For example: If you stumble upon (or more proactively find) a vulnerability, if you send details of the vulnerability, the actions you took to find it, the exact steps you took whilst exploiting it; and you only performed reasonably minimal actions whilst in the exploited state to confirm that the vulnerability was real, then informing the target of the vulnerability with this information renders you immune from prosecution.
We don't insist that people learn assembly code before they learn C and Java. We don't insist people turn assembly instructions into machine code by hand. We don't insist on learning electrical engineering skills before putting machine code into RAM. The way this is taught is to cover the basics first of all, then go into detail about assembly code at a later stage, and if someone goes that far, look at compiler technology and opcode generation.
Starting students should be using nice, friendly GUI IDEs. More advanced, specialised courses should go into the details of how to work without them. Think of it as another layer to dive into later.
Yes, the best developers will know how to work without IDEs. Just like better developers code higher-level languages with an awareness of how the code will be compiled. But there's no need to force that detail onto someone in an introductory course, just because we had to do it.
I'm also a sysadmin, and I have the same issue. However, these laws won't make any difference, as backing up the tracks off a user's fileserver area is an unauthorised copy. You see, the user is the licensee, not the organization.
Can be solved by not backing up certain files or files in certain locations. Of course, this assumes that you're happy to spend the extra time implementing such a system and educating people on how to use it, which also assumes that one actually has the free time and justification to implement such a thing.;)
At one place I work it is a (much hated) policy that certain digital music files are not allowed on the network. This is to protect my place of work from lawsuits. I work in a sysadmin role, and if I find any such files, I'm obligated to delete them. You can imagine how much I love it when someone needs their PC fixed, I run into a set of MP3s, and they seem to be legit (ie. a rip from one CD I've seen in their office). I have to delete them, and explain that they can't have them due to the stupid policy, that I've actually removed them, but if it were up to me I would have left them there. Argh!
When new laws such as these are in place maybe they can ditch that ridiculous policy. It's one part I hate about my job.
How much does it cost to become self-employed? It depends on the industry, of course, but what's a reasonable minimum? $50k? $100k? Do regular people have that kind of money?
No, they don't, but you don't need it. You can take part-time work, in a less-than-ideal field, live right on the edge, and spend the remainder working on your business. Or work full-time, live on half of your wage, and then take time off. I have done both.
Or let's say you wanted to get a loan to start a business instead. Would a bank be willing to provide you with the necessary funds? If so, would you be able to feed yourself while paying back the loan?
I can answer this one pretty quickly. Most banks will practically laugh at you if you don't have income backing you. The first two questions you'll get for any type of business loan are "How much are you currently earning?" and "How long have you been in the (profitable) business?". They won't talk to you if you are below their specified thresholds. They don't care how carefully you've planned things out. Not one has even let me go into details.
Investors are a different beast though.
And what if a larger corporation took notice of what you're doing and decided it didn't want the competition? How long would your company last?
Not long at all. Investors will note this too. If you're going into a field that makes it easy to do this, they won't touch you. They'll leave you to fail on your own. The trick, apparently, is to get into an area where you possess some uniqueness that is too costly to replicate.
The truth is, self-employment is an option for a select few. So in this regard, it's more of an aristocracy than anything else, even if the border between the classes is loosely defined.
You can still make a start in a self-employment field without financial backing, it will be very hard, outright miserable at times, but possible. Some people have made it this way. Most will not. Yes, the people with financial backing have an obscene advantage. It's a horrible state of affairs.
Unfortunately the system logging net usage does not attempt to correlate it to compiler usage, so it doesn't show that you were surfing while waiting for a 15 minute build and link to complete because a header file used by only 21% of the code had to be touched and you need the resulting binary to do testing.
This is precisely why I keep a laptop, pen and paper around, so I can work on some design notes for the next task I plan to tackle during these idle moments. Without these, I'm prone to random web browsing and posting on...
- Technology supports unskippable commercials. - Geek uproar, noone else gives a crap. - People buy DVD players. Becomes ubiquitous. - Unskippable commercials appear.
Now let's look at this tech:
- Technology supports unskippable commercials and channel-change lockout. - Geek uproar, noone else gives a crap. - People buy groovy new TVs as their old ones die. Becomes ubiquitous. - Channel-change lockout appears.
People will eat this one up. Just like DVD. Declining prices on TVs will make this a reality. There will be a brief period of complaint and then people will accept it. Just like DVDs.
Next things to expect (Quick! Off to the patent office!):
- Lockable time slots: Your TV locks into a channel for a half hour block of time. No more channel surfing for you! No pause, no rewind. - Commercial confirmation: How can advertisers be sure you saw the advertisement for their product? Expect a multiple-choice question at the end of the ad to ensure you got the message. Get it right, back to the program. Get it wrong, and the ad plays again, followed by the question again. - TV soft-off disabled. Unless you pull the cable you get to watch the ads, no matter how many times you hit the power button on the remote. Think the soft-off is sacred? Think again. It'll work, because not everyone is going to get out of their chair to turn it off. - Viewing requirements. Want to watch "Artificial Idol"? Well, to access this evenings episode you have to watch this months promo for the show "Everybody loathes Raymond". Couple this with lockable slots and confirmation and you can enforce it. Upstart competitor to "Artificial Idol"? Well, you're going to have to watch an episode of "Everybody loathes Raymond" that just happens to be on at the same time as pilot of the new show. Whoops. And later, and a government announcement from Minitrue or you're locked out entirely. Ouch! Better not miss that one.
Because the courts *always* get it right, as we all know. They are infallible. It's what separates them from the rest of humanity.
I think that unless someone can point to a source of information that suggests a mistrial or other extenuating circumstances then it isn't at all unreasonable to assume that if someone has been convicted of a crime that they may have actually done it.
Star Control 3 made many of us *frumple*. But if Toys for Bob are *jumping in front*, and hope to bring Star Control back into *heavy space*, I would be a very, very *happy camper*. I imagine there will be much *dancing* to make this a reality due to the *silly cows* who hold the license, but if Toys for Bob can get *many fingers* into *slow time*, I'm sure there will be many *parties* *in the middle*. *Spicy games* are always fun.
Well, I'm for anything that will stick it to site-squatting parasites. I had to go with my second choice when naming my game suite because a link-farm scum was sitting on the domain I wanted.
Mind you though, there's a pretty big potential for abuse. What will the protection fees be against ending up on this list?
This mirrors comments from Microsoft, which has long criticised sales of "naked PCs" as helping pirates.
More arrogance from MS, even in the face of there being multiple perfectly good operating systems to choose from. Just because a sold PC doesn't include a purchase of their OS doesn't mean it is guaranteed to have an unlicensed copy of it installed instead.
I had a passing idea to do something like this a bit back, but didn't do anything with it, because I really couldn't see it working.
If they're going ahead with plans to cache certain web content, they had better be lawyered up. Yasee, if you start selling packs of content created by other people for profit, without their permission, those people are going to be mighty pissed when they find out. Sure, this duplication happens every single day through web caches. The difference, though, is that the presence of such caches is well established, and you can always set up your content to not use them (to a a degree). I'm not sure how they plan to get around the whole mass-copyright-infringement angle.
Anyway, I really hope they've thought this thing through...
You could have gotten away with lying about your job, but you got greedy.
Holy crap. Please, anyone with mod points, please send this one into the stratosphere. This one literally knocked me off my chair, no sarcasm, and is one of the funniest Slashdot comments I've seen for some time.
Slashdot Mirror
Buyers remorse Blah Blah Blah.
The article (on my reading anyway) doesn't mention if it was consensual sex, buyers remorse, or if the guy forced himself onto her. Nor does it mention what age each of the participants thought the other was, represented themselves as, or what their intentions were. Please correct me if I am wrong.
No doubt there are many cases of "buyers remorse". I've heard of people with only a couple of degrees separation from myself that have done something entirely consensual but incredibly stupid with someone just underage, and have it bite them on the ass when buyers remorse hit. It doesn't make their act any less stupid, excluding the ones who genuinely didn't know.
What is dangerous however is the assumption that this case was buyers remorse. It could have been, but the article doesn't suggest it one way or the other. There is a world of difference between consent then regret and no consent at all.
my question is, what the hell were the girl's parents doing?? They let their minor child be picked up by someone they've never met, taken to dinner and a movie?? Someone needs to slap them upside the head for lousy parenting.
It is quite possible the teen snuck out without her parents knowledge- not hard to do, teens have lied about where they are going since the dawn of time. But even this is an assumption; she may just have terrible parents. And greedy ones too, apparently, given their choice of Myspace as a target.
I think we agree that "expect" is a stronger form of "hope", just that we might not agree precisely on the strength. ;)
The phrase I latched onto specifically was "expected of you", rather than just "expected", which (IMHO) has a subtle but very different meaning. The relevant entry in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary is here. Specifically:
to consider bound in duty or obligated
which gives meaning to the original phrase something as: "If a 19 year old takes you to dinner and a movie and you agree to go back to his place certain (sexual) things are expected of you (you are bound in duty to deliver these sexual things or obligated to deliver these sexual things)". Obviously there is big problem with this, hence why I hope the GP really didn't mean it like that.
Of course, if the GP really meant that, I wouldn't be the only one ripping them a new one, they'd be modded to oblivion, so forth. I don't think the GP has bad intent. I just think the choice of words is... unfortunate.
Guy gets all the troubles.
As well he should. The 19-year old invited a 14-year old back to his place with the intent of having sex with her. Is there something else I'm missing in this picture?
Yes, he did something which was wrong by US law. This would've been legal in other countries, like Spain for example.
Then perhaps if he wants to pull this sort of crap he should head off there first. A 14-year old sleeping with a 14-year old is extremely regrettable. A 19-year old should have known better.
If a 19 year old takes you to dinner and a movie and you agree to go back to his place certain things are expected of you
Whooooah there. Wait just one damn minute. You surely can't mean what I think you mean, do you? Please tell me I've misunderstood what you've said.
If you go around to someones place, they may or may not be hoping for something of a sexual nature to happen, but there is never, ever an expectation on someone to "put out" just because you went to visit. Yes, it is a fair assumption that someone who has just wined and dined you is going to try to put the moves on you, but merely visiting isn't consent to take things as far as they want. The visitor can soak up the dinner and movie, drop over, drink their coffee and eat their chips, and at the end of the evening get on up and go, and there's not a damn thing expected of them.
Having said that, I'd question the wisdom of heading back to a 19-year olds place after dinner and a movie because there's a good chance they've got something quite specific in mind. But bear in mind this is a 14-year old, and they don't always have the life experience to avoid making such a poor decision.
My reply to you would be far, far more vicious if I thought you genuinely meant what you've written. It just seems so far out that I'm hoping you chose your words poorly; please tell me that I've misread your actual intent.
if you don't trust their black hats, try it yourself
download the beta [microsoft.com]
install
hack
Well, my hat's off to Microsoft this time on the security of their new operating system. Twenty minutes of clicking links, filling in personal information,adding cookie exceptions across three sites, one user agreement, clearing all cookies out five times to get past site jams, two separate confirmation emails, one passport signup, entering my email address no less than twelve times and I can't even find one download link to this sucker. What is this? Their new plan to make black hats kill themselves with boredom before they can even get the OS?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=online+minesw eeper
You can share spreadsheets with other users and can chat while you're editing - multiplayer spreadsheets!
Yeah, sure, it sounds good in theory, but just wait until you're editing a spreadsheet and the person you're editing with uses a border-hack to edit your cell from an adjacent one. Cheater scum.
If Microsoft buys eBay and Paypal, I'm going to cancel my account immediately.
Good luck, it took around two weeks and a few emails on a zero-balance year-long inactive account for me to cancel mine. They wouldn't close it on my request, of course, and copy-pasted a set of instructions (that didn't work) in reply to each email. They wouldn't close it themselves, though. They basically ignored that part of my request each time. Admittedly I had lost the password, so it is partly my fault. Glad I'm out though.
If you proactively find the vulnerability without authorisation, you are probably committing an offence.
Or you stumbled onto it by accident, which does happen.
otherwise everyone could simply claim that and get off.
Hence the mention of "you only performed reasonably minimal actions whilst in the exploited state to confirm that the vulnerability was real" and "the exact steps you took whilst exploiting it". I'm just wondering out loud if there is some way that people who find such vulnerabilities and act responsibly can be protected from the negative consequences of doing the right thing.
Consider this: say you're crossing the street on a green light, and you see out of your peripheral vision a car barreling towards you despite his red light. Do you (a) rely upon the fact that you are "right" or (b) yield to the 1/2 ton of metal and plastic barreling towards you?
(b) obviously, but your example is not analogous.
Many developers and people at organisations at risk are generally thankful to receive information on vulnerabilites so they can actually do something about them. Thus this is something worthwhile to encourage.
However, it only takes one shortsighted fool to kick up a stink to discourage people from doing the right thing. I'm wondering if there is some way to protect the person doing the right thing by removing the sting from the shortsighted.
I can't help but think that with the risk of negative consequences from informing someone incompetent, selfish, or insecure of a vulnerability that there needs to be some sort of safe harbor provision in laws in the case of reporting a vulnerability.
For example: If you stumble upon (or more proactively find) a vulnerability, if you send details of the vulnerability, the actions you took to find it, the exact steps you took whilst exploiting it; and you only performed reasonably minimal actions whilst in the exploited state to confirm that the vulnerability was real, then informing the target of the vulnerability with this information renders you immune from prosecution.
Would this work?
As someone who learnt without pretty IDEs...
We don't insist that people learn assembly code before they learn C and Java. We don't insist people turn assembly instructions into machine code by hand. We don't insist on learning electrical engineering skills before putting machine code into RAM. The way this is taught is to cover the basics first of all, then go into detail about assembly code at a later stage, and if someone goes that far, look at compiler technology and opcode generation.
Starting students should be using nice, friendly GUI IDEs. More advanced, specialised courses should go into the details of how to work without them. Think of it as another layer to dive into later.
Yes, the best developers will know how to work without IDEs. Just like better developers code higher-level languages with an awareness of how the code will be compiled. But there's no need to force that detail onto someone in an introductory course, just because we had to do it.
I'm also a sysadmin, and I have the same issue. However, these laws won't make any difference, as backing up the tracks off a user's fileserver area is an unauthorised copy. You see, the user is the licensee, not the organization.
;)
Can be solved by not backing up certain files or files in certain locations. Of course, this assumes that you're happy to spend the extra time implementing such a system and educating people on how to use it, which also assumes that one actually has the free time and justification to implement such a thing.
Hurry the heck up with these laws already!
At one place I work it is a (much hated) policy that certain digital music files are not allowed on the network. This is to protect my place of work from lawsuits. I work in a sysadmin role, and if I find any such files, I'm obligated to delete them. You can imagine how much I love it when someone needs their PC fixed, I run into a set of MP3s, and they seem to be legit (ie. a rip from one CD I've seen in their office). I have to delete them, and explain that they can't have them due to the stupid policy, that I've actually removed them, but if it were up to me I would have left them there. Argh!
When new laws such as these are in place maybe they can ditch that ridiculous policy. It's one part I hate about my job.
dhasenan
How much does it cost to become self-employed? It depends on the industry, of course, but what's a reasonable minimum? $50k? $100k? Do regular people have that kind of money?
No, they don't, but you don't need it. You can take part-time work, in a less-than-ideal field, live right on the edge, and spend the remainder working on your business. Or work full-time, live on half of your wage, and then take time off. I have done both.
Or let's say you wanted to get a loan to start a business instead. Would a bank be willing to provide you with the necessary funds? If so, would you be able to feed yourself while paying back the loan?
I can answer this one pretty quickly. Most banks will practically laugh at you if you don't have income backing you. The first two questions you'll get for any type of business loan are "How much are you currently earning?" and "How long have you been in the (profitable) business?". They won't talk to you if you are below their specified thresholds. They don't care how carefully you've planned things out. Not one has even let me go into details.
Investors are a different beast though.
And what if a larger corporation took notice of what you're doing and decided it didn't want the competition? How long would your company last?
Not long at all. Investors will note this too. If you're going into a field that makes it easy to do this, they won't touch you. They'll leave you to fail on your own. The trick, apparently, is to get into an area where you possess some uniqueness that is too costly to replicate.
The truth is, self-employment is an option for a select few. So in this regard, it's more of an aristocracy than anything else, even if the border between the classes is loosely defined.
You can still make a start in a self-employment field without financial backing, it will be very hard, outright miserable at times, but possible. Some people have made it this way. Most will not. Yes, the people with financial backing have an obscene advantage. It's a horrible state of affairs.
Unfortunately the system logging net usage does not attempt to correlate it to compiler usage, so it doesn't show that you were surfing while waiting for a 15 minute build and link to complete because a header file used by only 21% of the code had to be touched and you need the resulting binary to do testing.
This is precisely why I keep a laptop, pen and paper around, so I can work on some design notes for the next task I plan to tackle during these idle moments. Without these, I'm prone to random web browsing and posting on...
Oh. It seems I'd better go get my laptop.
This is what happened with DVDs:
- Technology supports unskippable commercials.
- Geek uproar, noone else gives a crap.
- People buy DVD players. Becomes ubiquitous.
- Unskippable commercials appear.
Now let's look at this tech:
- Technology supports unskippable commercials and channel-change lockout.
- Geek uproar, noone else gives a crap.
- People buy groovy new TVs as their old ones die. Becomes ubiquitous.
- Channel-change lockout appears.
People will eat this one up. Just like DVD. Declining prices on TVs will make this a reality. There will be a brief period of complaint and then people will accept it. Just like DVDs.
Next things to expect (Quick! Off to the patent office!):
- Lockable time slots: Your TV locks into a channel for a half hour block of time. No more channel surfing for you! No pause, no rewind.
- Commercial confirmation: How can advertisers be sure you saw the advertisement for their product? Expect a multiple-choice question at the end of the ad to ensure you got the message. Get it right, back to the program. Get it wrong, and the ad plays again, followed by the question again.
- TV soft-off disabled. Unless you pull the cable you get to watch the ads, no matter how many times you hit the power button on the remote. Think the soft-off is sacred? Think again. It'll work, because not everyone is going to get out of their chair to turn it off.
- Viewing requirements. Want to watch "Artificial Idol"? Well, to access this evenings episode you have to watch this months promo for the show "Everybody loathes Raymond". Couple this with lockable slots and confirmation and you can enforce it. Upstart competitor to "Artificial Idol"? Well, you're going to have to watch an episode of "Everybody loathes Raymond" that just happens to be on at the same time as pilot of the new show. Whoops. And later, and a government announcement from Minitrue or you're locked out entirely. Ouch! Better not miss that one.
I could go on but I'm sure you all get the idea.
Of course, for a fee, advertisers can override your preferences and show you the ad anyway.
Please mod parent up. This does seem the natural progression.
Because the courts *always* get it right, as we all know. They are infallible. It's what separates them from the rest of humanity.
I think that unless someone can point to a source of information that suggests a mistrial or other extenuating circumstances then it isn't at all unreasonable to assume that if someone has been convicted of a crime that they may have actually done it.
Star Control 3 made many of us *frumple*. But if Toys for Bob are *jumping in front*, and hope to bring Star Control back into *heavy space*, I would be a very, very *happy camper*. I imagine there will be much *dancing* to make this a reality due to the *silly cows* who hold the license, but if Toys for Bob can get *many fingers* into *slow time*, I'm sure there will be many *parties* *in the middle*. *Spicy games* are always fun.
Well, I'm for anything that will stick it to site-squatting parasites. I had to go with my second choice when naming my game suite because a link-farm scum was sitting on the domain I wanted.
;)
Mind you though, there's a pretty big potential for abuse. What will the protection fees be against ending up on this list?
Seems like win-win from Microsoft's POV though.
From the article:
This mirrors comments from Microsoft, which has long criticised sales of "naked PCs" as helping pirates.
More arrogance from MS, even in the face of there being multiple perfectly good operating systems to choose from. Just because a sold PC doesn't include a purchase of their OS doesn't mean it is guaranteed to have an unlicensed copy of it installed instead.
I had a passing idea to do something like this a bit back, but didn't do anything with it, because I really couldn't see it working.
If they're going ahead with plans to cache certain web content, they had better be lawyered up. Yasee, if you start selling packs of content created by other people for profit, without their permission, those people are going to be mighty pissed when they find out. Sure, this duplication happens every single day through web caches. The difference, though, is that the presence of such caches is well established, and you can always set up your content to not use them (to a a degree). I'm not sure how they plan to get around the whole mass-copyright-infringement angle.
Anyway, I really hope they've thought this thing through...
friendly sysops
You could have gotten away with lying about your job, but you got greedy.
Holy crap. Please, anyone with mod points, please send this one into the stratosphere. This one literally knocked me off my chair, no sarcasm, and is one of the funniest Slashdot comments I've seen for some time.