[when I grant permission under the GPL] The permission I grant is limited; I am not giving away all of my exclusive rights regarding my work. But I am granting you something (my permission) and I am not asking anything in return.
I disagree. When I grant you license under the GPL, what I'm asking in return is that that whatever you distribute my code (or it's derivative) with, is also GPLed. This is not necessarily a trivial 'request'.
As was pointed out: If I write a program that takes 1 million lines of code and want to include your 400 line GPL enhancement, I need to GPL my 1million lines of code to do it -- and that's thw whole intent of the GPL.
Now granted -- if I've already written a million lines of code, it should be (relatively) trivial to write my own version of your GPL code -- but the intent of the GPL is to make it be the other way 'round. -- and that's actually closer to what happened in the MySQL/Nusphere case... They took a couple million lines of code, added a few thousand of their own, and tried to sell it as a proprietary product -- then they got snarky when people called them on it.
WHACK!! Slap 'em on the back of the wrist with a sledge-hammer.
It's pretty simple: the object code version of the GPLed code is a derivative of the original source. If you distribute that object code attached to a piece of non-GPLed code, you are violating the GPL.
Note when I distribute my code with a piece of GPLed code, my code (by itself) is not the derivative work. It's the GPL object that's the derivative. I can only distribute the GPLed derivative part of the program if my derivative part of the code is also GPLed.
+--grumble--lameness--filter---+
|..larger object module........|
| +-g.um-ble-+ +-gr--um--ble-+ |
| | GPL CODE | | Non-GPL cod | |
| +-g.um-ble-+ +-gr--um--ble-+ |
+--grumble--lameness--filter---+
If you can distribute the larger object module with out distributing the GPL code, then you don't have to worry about violating the GPL.:-)
Many GPL proponents like the GPL because it severely limits the ways in which GPL code can be coopted to help providers of non-free code, so yes, this is political.
Political or practical? Just like Bill Gates doesn't like people using his code for free, some people like to be able to profit (in an non-financial sense) from their code. By releasing code in a GPL manner, one gets the advantage of both their own code, and of other peoples' code and work.
When someone takes such free code and closes it, the original author now has to pay to use the results of his/her work. Some people just hate the idea of being forced to pay to use their own code.
Given that they seem to be claiming 'significant changes', they really do need to allow another comment period -- if only to see if their changes resolve or exacerbate the issues raised in the original comment period.
In the alternative, it would allow a shell game -- offer an agreement to public comment, let people comment on it and the substitute a different agreement that's far worse than what people commented on.
Now, I realize that they claim that this new version answers many of raised in the almost 30,000 comments against the original, but there's no way for the court to know that if someone other than the two parties who put this agreement together have a chance to comment on it.
Especially given that MS isn't even making full disclosure of their lobbying efforts, there is too much hidden. If (as many people believe) their lobbying efforts were successful, then this agreement is (at least in part) between Microsoft and "friends of Microsoft". It would, therefore, be entirely reckless to pass it without 3rd party comment.
Not to mention notebooks... I've yet to see a Linux distro that can transparently handle being undocked, taken to a conference room, hooked up with a PCMCIA NIC, worked on, then docked again. If I'm wrong here, please correct me and provide links...
Well, as you acknowledged in a later post, Microsoft only managed to get this right in the very recent past. I expect that Linux (if it doesn't have it working now) will have it working in the very near future.
Also: Although this might work with Windows 2000, the difference between an undocked laptop and a docked one might (in some cases) be enough to trigger the XP configuring/licencing 'feature' and force you to go grovelling to Microsoft for permission to undock your laptop (aka 'significantly changing the configuration').
IPX doesn't require configuration because your IPX machine address is your Ethernet MAC address (which is guaranteed to be both unique and available for any machine with an Ethernet card).
Off-topic reminisce:
(this actually reminds me of the time when I ordered an ethernet card for an old Sun-1 (upgraded to a Sun-2). I'm not talking about a sparc-1, either. I mean a 68010 processor with 1/2 megabyte of ram in gold-capped 64Kbit ram chips and a multibus backplane.
In any case, the ethernet card arrived without an ethernet prom. When I complained about this, my sales-droid fired back that this didn't matter because Sun-OS would just use the MAC address of the built-in card.
When I emailed him that my sun didn't have a built in ethernet card, he sent back a rather condescending note about how every sun ever sold had ethernet on it.
After a few such exchanges, I finally got a bit flustered and send back an email telling him that I had a box with serial number 300 etched in the back by hand, a tape of an early release of unix for the Sun that wasn't even written by SUN (Uniplex, I think), and a copy of the glossy PR sheet where sun announced that every box in the future would be sold with ethernet.
I ended by telling him that if he still didn't believe me, "you should talk to someone who was with the company when this computer was shipped -- I suggest Bill Joy".
I never got a direct reply from him, but the eprom did show up shortly after that.
You morons find fault in everything Microsoft does.
When somebody whacks you on the backside of the head with a two by four enough times, you tend to wear helmets around him and get wary of turning your back on that person.
After a couple of years of them not bushwacking people, we might start to trust Microsoft again.
The Microsoft way of doing things is not intuitive. It may be ingrained for people who grew up under Microsoft, but that's not the same as intuitive.
I think that it was pointed out that it's generally possible for people to configure their systems so that it works in the 'Microsoft' way. If the Bundestad was going to order 300,000 copies of Linux, I'm sure that some distro maker would be happy to create a distro version that configured KDE in this manner, out of the box.
Which side of the road you drive on is arbitrary. Countries, however, tend to encourage people within their domain to drive on a specific side of the road while while in that country.
There have been cases where countries have switched between right and left... It requires a lot of PR, and I'd expect that many people just didn't bother to drive on the night of the switchover.
In any case it really is a good idea if the person you meet on the road is driving on the same side of the road (right/left) as opposed to driving on the same side of the road (North/South). It makes for a longer journey (which is a good thing).
Since 90% of clients out there use little endian it would be much more reasonable to have hton and ntoh evaluate to nop , instead of wasting CPU power on this pointless conversion.
If you did that on an Intel box, you'd break everything tha didn't talk to another Microsoft product.
ntoh Network TO Host is designed to convert between Network (big Endian) format and Host (whatever that happens to be) format. That Network format is big-endian is is an accident of history. In some ways it can be considered 'a good thing' that it is different from most computers, because it forced the vast majority of network programmers to write their code in a machine independant manner.
I would actually argue that it was probably designed that way. Vaxen -- which ruled the 'net for much of the '80s were also little-endian. If Network order were chosen to suit 90% of the machines on the net back then, lots and lots of code would break when moved to the (relatively rare) big-endian boxes because (as we all know, being programmers) programmers are lazy.
By putting their kerberos data in Intel format, Microsoft pretty much guarantees non-portability in coding. First of all -- people have to figure out whether they're talking to a Microsoft-braindead application (and treat it specially). And second of all -- if it is an MSBDA, they won't be able to use the (incredibly common) NtoI code... they'll be forced to use routines that may(or may not) be available on all machines. More likely than not, many MS-trained programmers will simply not bother to translate the data (since it's already in native format) which will break all sorts of shit when you either (1) move the code to a Big-endian machine, or (2) move to a 64-bit box.
guh.
If we created a P2P tool that had a real referral system and a way of promoting new music, that would be one thing. Instead, we have a system where you must know what you're looking for before you find it.
Obviously you didn't use napster (or at least you didn't use it the way that I did). I would, quite often, find myself downloading a piece of music 'just for the hell of it' that I would never consider downloading if I were paying for it.
Granted I was looking for something that I (sometimes vaguely) knew, but what I found was sometimes an entirely different matter.
Also: I can tell the difference between an MP3 and a real CD -- even on a (relatively decent) car stereo. If I want the full quality version of a song I like, I'll still go out and buy a CD. (or hunt vinyl).
OK: Hre's a patch that should change sendmail.pid to honeypot.pid.. put the output in a file in your path and make it executable....
# By Stephen Samuel (samuel at bcgreen dot con )
# Reads from standin, writes to standout
# (will need to change permissions on the output)
# changes string $original to $replace
# sendmail.pid -> honeypot.pid
# Note: strings need to be the same length.
# (null padding should work)
The article pointed to forgot to mention that one thing you need to do is make sure to set the Queue Load Average to 0.
# load average at which we just queue messages
O QueueLA=0
on in the.cf file, or '-OQueueLA=0' on the command line. If you don't do this, sendmail will (usually) not queue your email and you WILL be an active open relay.
This can also be set in an mc file as:
define(`confQUEUE_LA', `0')dnl
(For RedHat users -- remember to delete the leading
dnl if you start with the redhat.mc file).
One.mc configuration snipit that might be usefull would be:
This'll mean that you won't be generating (useless) non-delivery messages for email (spam) less than 10 years old, and any attempt to forward queued spam with an ETRN will fail. It also puts this outoging mail in a segregated queue directory.
for the last define line, 'external.interface.ip' should be replaced with the IP address of the interface where you'll be running the honeypot.
If you put this into a new mc file (say honeypot.mc), and use it to build honeypot.cf,
then you can run a spare sendmail that only accepts network connections... (and trashes them)
This does, however, run into one reall nasty bug in the sendmail config... The sendmail.pid filename is hardwired into sendmail...
(that's why I use the path/usr/honeypot/sendmail).
You have to recompile (or patch) the sendmail binary so that it doesn't use/var/run/sendmail.pid).
According to the sendmail book, this is done with
ENVDEF = -D_PATH_SENDMAILPID=\"/var/spool/honeymail.pid\"
in the makefile.
(guh!)
(( You can, of course, always do a hot patch to the binary ))
This isn't their 'spam complaint' line. 1-866-459-7606 is their 'Call here to give us business' line. As such, it is (from their point of view) an "essential service".
Even if it's answered by a single working mom with no technology training, she's being paid by the call, so you're giving her business.
It doesn't guarantee you anything, but it does make the transaction a bit more trackable. The person caching the cheque needs to have an account in that name to deposit the cheque to. This means that (in the case of repeat or massive fraud), the police can go to the bank and get the ID information he gave them to open the account.
If the bank refuses to honor your 'deposit only' request on the back of the cheque, then they are the ones on the hook for any fraud, and a bank will often take extreme steps to recover lost money:-).
We used to tell the students that the machine had caught on fire and had (literally) fallen over.
I gotta hunt down and re-digitize the video that a set of students did back in 1992. At that time the UBC Computer Science GraFic lab had a stack of IBM RS-6000 computers running AIX (which I sometimes pronounced 'aches') which tended to crash far too often.
For their animation lab one group's video was an RS6000 shaking, smoking and melting down into a grave with (computerized) flowers sticking out of it and a gravestone blinking 888 (which the 3-digit LED display would do after a general system panic)
With later versions of AIX and some coddling from your's truely, I was able to make the IBMs a good bit more stable -- but never quite as rock-solid as the SGIs running IRIX -- and they never really outlived their reputation.
Then, of course, there was the obligatory IBM PC... Let's just say it was really good for running Castle Wolfenstein (the original).
It kinda looks to me like he had a real, legitimate business in the running, and some other reason to run and hide.. The Ebay situation was simply a side-effect of his smash-and-grab disappearance.
Think about it this way, though: $250,000 isn't a whole lot to show for a 5 year scam. That comes to about $50K/year.
On the other hand, $250,000 off of less than a month's auctions would point to more than $2Million of business per year. Even a 5% net profit margin would hand him $100K/year.. In other words, staying in business for another 2 years, and then closing the business in a legitimate manner would have probably gotten him far more money than he took in this scam.
I'm pretty sure that when the dust clears on this mess, there will have been some reason behind his leaving like he did than simple scam-greed.
This is not to justify what he did. I'm just saying that there seems to be a salient piece of information missing. Morbid curiosity gets the better of me.
I had written "For Deposit Only" on the back, and that was crossed out by the recipient.
From my understanding of banking rules, the only reason the original poster was able to get the cheque reversed was that the scammer had crossed out 'for deposit only'.
Had he simply deposited it to his bank account, it would have been possible to track the b*st*rd down and harass him like the other victims did, but the bank would have probably been unable/unwilling to reverse the charges.
Consider it a combination of forsight and luck.
I can definitely see the value of putting 'for deposit only' on the back of any cheque going for an ebay purchase. Anybody who refuses that should be immediately considered suspect.
For me, the real issue is the way that the shutdown was ordered... Entire sites get shutdown as a result of vague hand-waving
We want you to shut down the entire site because we think that there are some files somewhere within that may, one day -- when the moon is blue and the sun is red -- be able to be used to violate copyright of something we own
But we're not going to tell you what, where why or how -- so unless you're really good at guessing, you really are going to have to shut down the entire site.
Any law that allows free speech to be infringed on the basis of such vague complaints should, itself, be struck down on the basis of it's vagueness. If an accused can't make a reasonable response to an accusation, it should not be considered a real accusation.
The rights that can be overridden by the notwithstanding clause is really a strange grab bag. Only certain sections are subject to section 33 (the notwithstanding clause) - section 2, and sections 7-15. ....
A lot of other freedoms are not subject to section 33, such as democratic rights, mobility rights, language rights, minority language education rights, and the guaranteed equality of men and women. Legislatures are also not allowed to make laws that interfere with the enforcement of the charter
In other words, they can't stop you from voting, but they can order you to be sumarily shot for talking about it(s2,s7). You can be hunted like a rat for the crime of being English(s15,s12,s7), indefinitely held incommunicado without cause ( s7,s10) (it wasn't for voting, Honest! It's just coincidence that they were all arrested as they were leaving the voting booths!)
You can even be beaten within an inch of your life until you provide a confession(s12,s7), and then executed for 'crimes' that were explicitly legal when you acted (s11) (or even at the time that the confession was beaten out of you). and they can repeatedly try you (in swahili) until they find a jury willing to convict you (s11).. -- and they needn't even stop at one conviction (s11, again)
Hitler's infamous Nurenburg decree could be passed under Canada's constiution -- and much worse. (btw: contrary to popular misconception, the Third Reich started out as a democratically elected, seemingly benign, government).
No. Not all constitutional rights are blunted by the notwithstanding clause, but they migt as well have been. They can't make laws that stop the enforcement of the charter, but you can be arrested 'at random', and sumarily shot shortly after filing a suit asking for protection. -- or for the specific crime of suggesting that others do so.
oh -- and equality rights are section 15 (and thus subject to violation via the notwithstanding clause).
One could say that of my sister's case, but with my girlfriend and her best friend, it was a private conversation on the beach between the two of them. I just happened to be around when the conversation took place.
Slashdot Mirror
As was pointed out: If I write a program that takes 1 million lines of code and want to include your 400 line GPL enhancement, I need to GPL my 1million lines of code to do it -- and that's thw whole intent of the GPL.
Now granted -- if I've already written a million lines of code, it should be (relatively) trivial to write my own version of your GPL code -- but the intent of the GPL is to make it be the other way 'round. -- and that's actually closer to what happened in the MySQL/Nusphere case... They took a couple million lines of code, added a few thousand of their own, and tried to sell it as a proprietary product -- then they got snarky when people called them on it.
WHACK!! Slap 'em on the back of the wrist with a sledge-hammer.
Note when I distribute my code with a piece of GPLed code, my code (by itself) is not the derivative work. It's the GPL object that's the derivative. I can only distribute the GPLed derivative part of the program if my derivative part of the code is also GPLed.
+--grumble--lameness--filter---+ :-)
|..larger object module........|
| +-g.um-ble-+ +-gr--um--ble-+ |
| | GPL CODE | | Non-GPL cod | |
| +-g.um-ble-+ +-gr--um--ble-+ |
+--grumble--lameness--filter---+
If you can distribute the larger object module with out distributing the GPL code, then you don't have to worry about violating the GPL.
Political or practical? Just like Bill Gates doesn't like people using his code for free, some people like to be able to profit (in an non-financial sense) from their code. By releasing code in a GPL manner, one gets the advantage of both their own code, and of other peoples' code and work.
When someone takes such free code and closes it, the original author now has to pay to use the results of his/her work.
Some people just hate the idea of being forced to pay to use their own code.
Given that they seem to be claiming 'significant changes', they really do need to allow another comment period -- if only to see if their changes resolve or exacerbate the issues raised in the original comment period.
In the alternative, it would allow a shell game -- offer an agreement to public comment, let people comment on it and the substitute a different agreement that's far worse than what people commented on.
Now, I realize that they claim that this new version answers many of raised in the almost 30,000 comments against the original, but there's no way for the court to know that if someone other than the two parties who put this agreement together have a chance to comment on it.
Especially given that MS isn't even making full disclosure of their lobbying efforts, there is too much hidden. If (as many people believe) their lobbying efforts were successful, then this agreement is (at least in part) between Microsoft and "friends of Microsoft". It would, therefore, be entirely reckless to pass it without 3rd party comment.
Shouldn't Wintendos be refered to as a NOS (Non Operating System)?
Well, as you acknowledged in a later post, Microsoft only managed to get this right in the very recent past. I expect that Linux (if it doesn't have it working now) will have it working in the very near future.
Also: Although this might work with Windows 2000, the difference between an undocked laptop and a docked one might (in some cases) be enough to trigger the XP configuring/licencing 'feature' and force you to go grovelling to Microsoft for permission to undock your laptop (aka 'significantly changing the configuration').
Off-topic reminisce:
(this actually reminds me of the time when I ordered an ethernet card for an old Sun-1 (upgraded to a Sun-2). I'm not talking about a sparc-1, either. I mean a 68010 processor with 1/2 megabyte of ram in gold-capped 64Kbit ram chips and a multibus backplane.
In any case, the ethernet card arrived without an ethernet prom. When I complained about this, my sales-droid fired back that this didn't matter because Sun-OS would just use the MAC address of the built-in card.
When I emailed him that my sun didn't have a built in ethernet card, he sent back a rather condescending note about how every sun ever sold had ethernet on it.
After a few such exchanges, I finally got a bit flustered and send back an email telling him that I had a box with serial number 300 etched in the back by hand, a tape of an early release of unix for the Sun that wasn't even written by SUN (Uniplex, I think), and a copy of the glossy PR sheet where sun announced that every box in the future would be sold with ethernet.
I ended by telling him that if he still didn't believe me, "you should talk to someone who was with the company when this computer was shipped -- I suggest Bill Joy".
I never got a direct reply from him, but the eprom did show up shortly after that.
When somebody whacks you on the backside of the head with a two by four enough times, you tend to wear helmets around him and get wary of turning your back on that person.
After a couple of years of them not bushwacking people, we might start to trust Microsoft again.
Or, as we used to say as kids:
I think that it was pointed out that it's generally possible for people to configure their systems so that it works in the 'Microsoft' way. If the Bundestad was going to order 300,000 copies of Linux, I'm sure that some distro maker would be happy to create a distro version that configured KDE in this manner, out of the box.
You haven't seen my uncle drive.
Which side of the road you drive on is arbitrary. Countries, however, tend to encourage people within their domain to drive on a specific side of the road while while in that country.
There have been cases where countries have switched between right and left... It requires a lot of PR, and I'd expect that many people just didn't bother to drive on the night of the switchover.
In any case it really is a good idea if the person you meet on the road is driving on the same side of the road (right/left) as opposed to driving on the same side of the road (North/South). It makes for a longer journey (which is a good thing).
Might explain why, when I learned it in school, It was called the "hindu-arabic number system".
If you did that on an Intel box, you'd break everything tha didn't talk to another Microsoft product.
ntoh Network TO Host is designed to convert between Network (big Endian) format and Host (whatever that happens to be) format. That Network format is big-endian is is an accident of history. In some ways it can be considered 'a good thing' that it is different from most computers, because it forced the vast majority of network programmers to write their code in a machine independant manner.
I would actually argue that it was probably designed that way. Vaxen -- which ruled the 'net for much of the '80s were also little-endian. If Network order were chosen to suit 90% of the machines on the net back then, lots and lots of code would break when moved to the (relatively rare) big-endian boxes because (as we all know, being programmers) programmers are lazy.
By putting their kerberos data in Intel format, Microsoft pretty much guarantees non-portability in coding. First of all -- people have to figure out whether they're talking to a Microsoft-braindead application (and treat it specially). And second of all -- if it is an MSBDA, they won't be able to use the (incredibly common) NtoI code... they'll be forced to use routines that may(or may not) be available on all machines. More likely than not, many MS-trained programmers will simply not bother to translate the data (since it's already in native format) which will break all sorts of shit when you either (1) move the code to a Big-endian machine, or (2) move to a 64-bit box.
guh.
Obviously you didn't use napster (or at least you didn't use it the way that I did). I would, quite often, find myself downloading a piece of music 'just for the hell of it' that I would never consider downloading if I were paying for it.
Granted I was looking for something that I (sometimes vaguely) knew, but what I found was sometimes an entirely different matter.
Also: I can tell the difference between an MP3 and a real CD -- even on a (relatively decent) car stereo. If I want the full quality version of a song I like, I'll still go out and buy a CD. (or hunt vinyl).
OK: Hre's a patch that should change sendmail.pid to honeypot.pid.. put the output in a file in your path and make it executable....
.= $segment;
# By Stephen Samuel (samuel at bcgreen dot con )
# Reads from standin, writes to standout
# (will need to change permissions on the output)
# changes string $original to $replace
# sendmail.pid -> honeypot.pid
# Note: strings need to be the same length.
# (null padding should work)
$original="/var/run/sendmail.pid";
$replace ="/var/run/honeypot.pid";
die "strings are not the same length\n" if ( length($original) != ($replen = length ($replace)) );
(binmode STDIN )|| die "binmode ARGV failed";
(binmode STDOUT) || die "binmode STDOUT failed";
while( ( $len=read(STDIN,$segment,1024)) >0) {
$line
$line =~ s/$original/$replace/g;
# keep enough of the line to handle a string broken over input blocks.
$output=substr($line, 0, 1-$replen );
substr($line, 0, 1-$replen ) = '';
print $output;
}
print $line;
# load average at which we just queue messages
O QueueLA=0 on in the
This can also be set in an mc file as:
define(`confQUEUE_LA', `0')dnl
(For RedHat users -- remember to delete the leading dnl if you start with the redhat.mc file).
One .mc configuration snipit that might be usefull would be:
define(`confTO_QUEUEWARN', `4000h')dnl
define(`confTO_QUEUERETURN', `5000d')dnl
define(`confQUEUE_LA', `0')dnl
define(`SMART_HOST', `nohost.nosuch.domain')dnl
define(`QUEUE_DIR',`/var/spool/devnull')dnl
define(`confDAEMON_OPTIONS',`addr=external.inte
This'll mean that you won't be generating (useless) non-delivery messages for email (spam) less than 10 years old, and any attempt to forward queued spam with an ETRN will fail. It also puts this outoging mail in a segregated queue directory.
for the last define line, 'external.interface.ip' should be replaced with the IP address of the interface where you'll be running the honeypot.
If you put this into a new mc file (say honeypot.mc), and use it to build honeypot.cf, then you can run a spare sendmail that only accepts network connections... (and trashes them)
This does, however, run into one reall nasty bug in the sendmail config... The sendmail.pid filename is hardwired into sendmail... (that's why I use the path /usr/honeypot/sendmail).
You have to recompile (or patch) the sendmail binary so that it doesn't use /var/run/sendmail.pid).
According to the sendmail book, this is done with
ENVDEF = -D_PATH_SENDMAILPID=\"/var/spool/honeymail.pid\" in the makefile.
(guh!)
(( You can, of course, always do a hot patch to the binary ))
Even if it's answered by a single working mom with no technology training, she's being paid by the call, so you're giving her business.
If the bank refuses to honor your 'deposit only' request on the back of the cheque, then they are the ones on the hook for any fraud, and a bank will often take extreme steps to recover lost money :-).
I gotta hunt down and re-digitize the video that a set of students did back in 1992. At that time the UBC Computer Science GraFic lab had a stack of IBM RS-6000 computers running AIX (which I sometimes pronounced 'aches') which tended to crash far too often.
For their animation lab one group's video was an RS6000 shaking, smoking and melting down into a grave with (computerized) flowers sticking out of it and a gravestone blinking 888 (which the 3-digit LED display would do after a general system panic)
With later versions of AIX and some coddling from your's truely, I was able to make the IBMs a good bit more stable -- but never quite as rock-solid as the SGIs running IRIX -- and they never really outlived their reputation.
Then, of course, there was the obligatory IBM PC... Let's just say it was really good for running Castle Wolfenstein (the original).
Think about it this way, though: $250,000 isn't a whole lot to show for a 5 year scam. That comes to about $50K/year. .. In other words, staying in business for another 2 years, and then closing the business in a legitimate manner would have probably gotten him far more money than he took in this scam.
On the other hand, $250,000 off of less than a month's auctions would point to more than $2Million of business per year. Even a 5% net profit margin would hand him $100K/year
I'm pretty sure that when the dust clears on this mess, there will have been some reason behind his leaving like he did than simple scam-greed.
This is not to justify what he did. I'm just saying that there seems to be a salient piece of information missing. Morbid curiosity gets the better of me.
From my understanding of banking rules, the only reason the original poster was able to get the cheque reversed was that the scammer had crossed out 'for deposit only'.
Had he simply deposited it to his bank account, it would have been possible to track the b*st*rd down and harass him like the other victims did, but the bank would have probably been unable/unwilling to reverse the charges.
Consider it a combination of forsight and luck.
I can definitely see the value of putting 'for deposit only' on the back of any cheque going for an ebay purchase. Anybody who refuses that should be immediately considered suspect.
The company also said the policy was not a penalty but a deterrent to keep people from driving at unsafe speeds.
This reminds me of the French diplomat who, in response to complaints about France's continued testing of nuclear bombs in the Pacific, said:
We want you to shut down the entire site because we think that there are some files somewhere within that may, one day -- when the moon is blue and the sun is red -- be able to be used to violate copyright of something we own
But we're not going to tell you what, where why or how -- so unless you're really good at guessing, you really are going to have to shut down the entire site.
Any law that allows free speech to be infringed on the basis of such vague complaints should, itself, be struck down on the basis of it's vagueness. If an accused can't make a reasonable response to an accusation, it should not be considered a real accusation.
....
A lot of other freedoms are not subject to section 33, such as democratic rights, mobility rights, language rights, minority language education rights, and the guaranteed equality of men and women. Legislatures are also not allowed to make laws that interfere with the enforcement of the charter
In other words, they can't stop you from voting, but they can order you to be sumarily shot for talking about it(s2,s7). You can be hunted like a rat for the crime of being English(s15,s12,s7), indefinitely held incommunicado without cause ( s7,s10) (it wasn't for voting, Honest! It's just coincidence that they were all arrested as they were leaving the voting booths!)
You can even be beaten within an inch of your life until you provide a confession(s12,s7), and then executed for 'crimes' that were explicitly legal when you acted (s11) (or even at the time that the confession was beaten out of you). and they can repeatedly try you (in swahili) until they find a jury willing to convict you (s11).. -- and they needn't even stop at one conviction (s11, again)
Hitler's infamous Nurenburg decree could be passed under Canada's constiution -- and much worse. (btw: contrary to popular misconception, the Third Reich started out as a democratically elected, seemingly benign, government).
No. Not all constitutional rights are blunted by the notwithstanding clause, but they migt as well have been. They can't make laws that stop the enforcement of the charter, but you can be arrested 'at random', and sumarily shot shortly after filing a suit asking for protection. -- or for the specific crime of suggesting that others do so.
oh -- and equality rights are section 15 (and thus subject to violation via the notwithstanding clause).
One could say that of my sister's case, but with my girlfriend and her best friend, it was a private conversation on the beach between the two of them. I just happened to be around when the conversation took place.