Scared of what? If you install it and something actually doesn't work then you can simply uninstall it.
Having recently uninstalled XP Service Pack 2 I can say that there is a little more to consider than simply "uninstalling."
Because the VERY first step of the uninstall is a warning that say "If you continue the following applications may not work properly any longer..." and then it lists the vast majority of whatever is installed on the machine. So far, I've done this twice and uninstalling hasn't led to those consequences--yet.
But as any Windows admin knows it is only a matter of time before something that only happens to a minority of Windows installs happens to one of yours.
It's _highly_ probable that Bush will be wearing a wireless earpiece for the debate. Bush will no doubt have some of the best debate people the republican party can buy telling him what to say through such an earpiece. I suppose Kerry could use the same thing, but then again he probably wouldn't need it.
A fun prank might be to use your scanner to find the frequency of Bush's earpiece, then transmit at fairly high power on that frequency for the duration of the debate. Big fun! Especially if you time your jamming so that just as Rove starts to speak, it drops out.
Now THAT is comedy. Fucking performance art, even.
if you look for it you can find a torrent of the "original" trilogy ripped from laserdisc to a DVD format. One DVD per movie. They have menus and everything.
Do you have a link to a Return of the Jedi Torrent where the jackass who ripped the LaserDiscs didn't put his name in the letterbox area right as dramatic moments come to pass?
Fucking Ken Ralston... If I ever find you I promise you an ass-beating.
Every day, 10,000 people die of AIDS, not only in Africa, but also in the U.S. and every country in the world. Many people say AIDS is the worst disaster the world has ever seen because it is killing millions of young people, and robbing the world of its future. While the U.S. is spending more to fight AIDS than ever before, we're still not nearing the minimal goals the UN has set for total global AIDS funding ($12 billion by 2005 and $20 billion for 2007). As President of the richest and most powerful country, what proportion of this $20 billion price tag are you prepared to meet? Also, regarding the $15 billion we've pledged to go toward HIV/AIDS programs in 15 of the world's hardest hit nations over the next 5 years, what will the U.S.'s role be in the other nations that are suffering from the AIDS crisis, and what can Americans do to ensure that the entire $15 billion of support pledged by our government goes towards fighting HIV/AIDS worldwide, regardless of who wins this Election?
A better way to ask the question:
The U.N. has set a goal to fund global AIDS research at $15 billion by 2005 and $20 billion by 2007. Given how distructive AIDS and HIV is to society, what portion of that tab would each of you recommend paying and why?
I really don't know why the federal government is selling the rights that the individual States should be doing. Each state should have the right to lease or sell spectrum. That includes keeping your spectrum off other peoples land (interstates) unless there is an agreement between states. At the local level, I would never outright sell a commodity without some kind of royalties in return - think about land property tax we all pay; so why isn't there a property value assets towards the highly valuable spectrum? This would allow the state to boot venders that violate some quality standard and re-sell it to a better vendor if the state (local population) decides to.
This situation is clearly completely ill-suited to "letting the states decide."
For one thing, the laws of physics preclude radio signals from cooperating with arbitrary lines on a map. Even if you could somehow get every station in America to only broadcast inside one state technically, this still creates the huge problem of broadcast "standards" splintering off into 50 different sets of rules. It is already damn hard to get approval to build a new broadcast tower, or to move a broadcast tower site. Many times, the legal compliance issues for such a move run into the tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars before a dime has been spent on the actual construction of facility and equipment purchase. And this is with only one regulating authority.
Now imagine there are 50 different authorities, each "deciding for themselves" which transmitters, antennae, and other broadcasting equipment they will accept for legal station operation, which ones they won't. Plus, each state will have different standards for acceptable interference. This already complicated process for resolution would only get more complicated.
For instance, stations near state borders face the potential of resolving a cross-border interference dispute by working with their state's broadcast reg. body, the other state's, and the other broadcasters attorneys. In a situation like this involving multiple stations in multiple states, the complexity would go up by an order of magnitude. And, of course, if there was a dispute over which state's laws had precedence, everybody would then sue everybody else, creating a further unneccessary burden on the courts.
Letting the states decide for themselves on some things makes perfect sense. HEre, it does not. Broadcasting is clearly an interstate commerce and is most appropriately regulated by the federal government.
...which sounds great to me. I'm in my 20's and I drive a brand-new Celica, so despite never having gotten a ticket and being a very good (and safe) driver, my insurance costs me $8 a day . This can only be a good thing for me (and my wallet).
Weren't the newer Celicas prized by theives because of their super-high resale value overseas? That might be a contributing factor. You should shop for a better rate. Did you have an accident where somebody else was at fault in the past, or have I drove a Celica when I shopped last year, but found it dogged in all 6 gears. (I won't buy an automatic shift sports car... That is the antithesis of having that sort of auto.) Plus it was sort of a snug fit with my knees under the wheel (I'm 6'4".) Anyway, got a used 2002 maxima instead and think its a great car. And I fit inside, so that is a plus, of course.
I mean, shit, come on. It is just basic to trademark your corporation's name in association with what you do for profits. Not doing so smacks of stupidity! Maybe they should have finished college before starting the company.
And now an interview during their quiet period... well, duh! Like they didn't know there was an IPO in the pipe when they gave the interview. How stupid can you be? If they didn't say "We're doing an IPO next year, and want Playboy to sign something saying they won't publish it during the legal quiet period" they deserve what they get.
In my opinion, Google needs to shape up its business practices if it is going to be subjected to the intense scrutiny that comes with being a publicly traded corporation. They can't pull this half-assed stuff and expect to get away with it, because as we're seeing now, they won't. The eye of the press is un-blinking. Mistakes like this scuttle bright fortunes all the time. It would be a shame if this happened to Google, because I really like them.
I suggest they hire an old guy, (50+) to act as the company's spokesman. Somebody who has been through a million IPOs, who knows the rules and who can make public statements without screwing up the whole company. If I were a google shareholder, I'd expect no less.
Of course, this is a vulnerability. So what if Windows has the same problem? You want me to smile and be happy about open source after sending my money to a thief? Some consolation.
1) Windows and IE do have the same problem, as a couple dozen people have pointed out.
2) "Human-nature" to steal is not the OSS communities fault, (nor MS', really, if we want to be fair. But this is Slashdot, why be fair?)
3) It is true that there are probably a dozen simple ways to fix this, but the problem is that fixing this specific exploit does not solve the problem of a malicious person being able to visually recreate trusted ecommerce vendors' web-sites inside a phony browser window. Dozens of other posters have suggested other implementations of the same idea, so fixing this one doesn't really prevent anything. If you were a volunteer coder, would you invest your free time fixing an exploit that has 1,000 vectors for use?
4) I don't know if I believe that this exploit even really works or not since the "proof-of-concept" code didn't work for me, or a ton of other Firefox users. Maybe because I took the time to configure my browser to my (paranoid) liking.
5) If it pisses you off that much, download the source tree and submit a fix. If you do a good enough job Bill Gates will steal your idea and put it in IE, and that will make everbody more secure, right?
Remind anyone of that scene in the movie 'Wild Wild West' where they extract the last thing the dead guy saw?
You actually saw Wild Wild West and are willing to admit it? We were just ridiculing Will Smith the other day here and decided that WWW might be his worst film ever.
I know your job might be eliminated in the short term, but that doesn't mean you can't get back out there and learn new skills or take on a completely different job. No one ever said that living in America was a free ride. We've all gotta work hard to make our living here. More money being pumped back into our economy due to outsourcing will, IMO, continue to raise stock prices, make the rich richer who will in turn spend their money on more frivolous products, which drives business further ahead. Besides, when the mega-rich have more 'stuff' they need more people to upkeep it, which is a good place for the poor and unemployed to get themselves back on their feet in the short-term so that they aren't wasting their earning potential in the long-term.
In your (and the other outsourcing apologists) view of America, I seem to exist only to service the luxuries of the extremely wealthy. My friend, what you describe is not a free country, it is an oligarchy: A society run by (And geared completely towards the needs of) the vastly wealthy. In an oligarchy, the rest of us are along only to service broken-down Lexuses and Mercedes Benzes and fix hot-tub pumps out at the beach house. Sorry, but that theory of society was (allegedly) flushed down the toilet years ago. I'm not a serf, and my boss isn't a nobleman. I do not exist to serve him. That isn't how our country works. (Or, at least, it wasn't supposed to...)
The fact is that the truly wealthy have what they want, and can afford their whims. They don't need to outsource your job to afford their toys. They don't need to outsource your job at all, but Corporations think they can make a shitload more money if they do it, so they go ahead. In reality, off-shore outsourcing can be summarized in one ugly word: Greed. An example of greed that is so out of control, that the minority in this country would actually sabotage our nation's future to give themselves a few extra bucks now. Off-shore outsourcing is a wealth grab, plain and simple.
A self-serving means to drive down labor costs to permit the extremely wealthy in America to get control of the miniscule bit of wealth that isn't already theirs. It has absolutely nothing to do with making the country, as a whole, stronger because off-shore outsourcing does exactly the opposite.
Ask an economist (a REAL economist, not one who works for King GeorgeW) whether highly-skilled workers "retraining" to flipping burgers helps society. (Althogh, according to King GeorgeW, flipping burgers is "manufacturing", and we all know that "manufacturing" is good for middle-America...)
You're also missing a pretty big chunk of the puzzle here by implying that those who lose jobs can simply be re-trained and get new jobs. This is only partly true, (and it is a very small part.) The part the outsourcing apologists never want to mention is that we are replacing $45-80k per year jobs with $19-30k per year jobs--hardly a 1:1 replacement, like King GeorgeW and friends would have you believe.
In fact, the only people who seem to get any positive benefit out of outsourcing are the majority stock holders (who are already super-rich) and the people in foreign lands now gleefully doing our jobs (for 1/5 the pay.) Show me a benefit to regular Americans, because I don't see it. (And "Cheaper consumer goods" doesn't fly, because unemployed people can't afford to waste their money on that shit. Know any unemployed people with new big-screen HDTVs? Of course not. Unemployed people spend whatever money they have on "survival," not "stuff", no matter how "cheap" that 42inch plasma screen seems.)
Also, before I go, you might want to look into the trend of U.S. companies who not only outsource labor, but also structure the outsourced work as a foreign business to avoid U.S. taxes on profits they make from it. Of course, since the government still costs the same amount to operate whether the robber-barons' corporations pay their share or not, our taxes go up to make up for unpaid portions.
people should not take chess champion statements seriously. It is not just Bobby, there were quite a few other not quite balanced people to hold the crown as well.
Amen. And this applies to any sport or game: Just because you're good at a game or sport (or activity of some kind) doesn't mean that I need to hear your opinion on world politics, economics, etc. Yet for some reason, Americans have this desire to interview celebrities about the issues of the day.
The fact that most celebrities are pretty and not smart is forgotten for the few moments of the interview. And there are smart ones, true. But we often find them to be smart but not articulate. (Or, in this case, particularly sane.)
But I wanted to last night. Got...distracted. Yada yada, here we are. So I guess I didn't win. But I got as close as you can get making only a half-assed effort.
I'm not saying that the job should be "easy" as in they sit around all day, but applying patches shouldn't consume a large chunk of your time nor should it require more IT employees to actually accomplish the repeated patching. I'm not opposed to running a mixed environment (select the proper tool for the job) but MS tends to make a large target that is easy to hit.
Amen brother. And new patches should not re-break old ones. Or change random settings without telling you. (BTW: Last one isn't Microsoft exclusive, but I've had far more personal experience with exploding MS patches than any other OS.)
Traffic is not a competition, it's a team effort. If everyone exercises a little care and common sense, the risk of hitting or getting hit by someone or something are pretty low.
Yeah, common sense is the key term. Take yesterday afternoon. I'm leaving a friend's house. Driving safely through the neighborhood, I pull up to a stop-sign. A child on a bike turns off the sidestreet, onto the one I'm driving on. He proceeds to ride right up the middle of the street. He knew I was there, because he looked me right in the eye before entering the intersection.
I pull away from the stop-sign and he proceeds to continue riding right up the middle of the street. The road widened enough for me to pass, but then the kid meandered towards the "middle" of the new, wider road. After a 1.5 blocks of this, I sound the horn to let him know I'm there, and he scowls at me, like I'm the one disrupting traffic. I roll down the window and ask "Who told you it was safe to ride your bike on the middle of the street like that?" "My mommy." came the reply.
Moral of the story? Common sense breeds more common sense. Parents who are stupid have children who are stupid. In the end, I realized that I should have just run his ass over and saved us all a few welfare dollars later.
No one is forcing you to install WhenU's software.
Maybe this is true, maybe it isn't. We've seen countless examples in our organization of a user getting a pop-up ad for "Free" software that claims to give them some sort of benefit, and watched in horror as clicking "No, thanks" installed the software anyway. Yes, we proactively block access to the servers and IP ranges of known spyware companies at the firewall, but this costs us time (and thus, money) to maintain. But since the scummers (scummer == spammer for the scumware universe) often have multiple hosting providers setup round-robin for load balancing, it is an on-going, ever shifting battle. If we over-react and ban access to a large hosting provider, we risk blocking legitimate traffic that flows through the same outfit.
Perhaps this law should be repealed and re-written in such a way as to target only nefarious software packages (like "CoolSearch", the unremovable beast from Central Asia) while allowing honest vendors to market software based on advertisements. You're right when you say that freedom of speech allows us to speak out about attempts to restrict our other rights, but misguided to think that stopping marketers from essentially stealing people's personal information for their own gain somehow equates to a police state. You're intentionally not adressing the issue that I pay for my connection and PC, and therefore should have control of what is on it. And I shouldn't have to police my "Add/Remove" programs list every day, or run AdAware every time I boot up to guarantee that only the programs I want are on my machine.
And one can imagine customers who might knowingly and willingly install WhenU's software because they perceive a benefit to doing so
Any perceived benefit to these programs is probably the result of deceit and fraud. One can only imagine that people "knowingly and willingly" install it if you ignore every usablity study of the internet over the last few years. They've found that the #1 and #2 complaints of internet users are the number of ads, and the "unclosable-in-your-face" nature of pop-ups. On the side, I help small businesses with their networks and desktop machines. In the last year, the number of companies contacting me about spyware prevention has quintupled. Removing and preventing spyware now represents about 40% of my "on the side" income.
If a user perceives a value to Gator, MyWebSearch, or coolsearch, it is only because they don't understand that these programs are the majority source of their biggest online annoyance. When I ask customers "Why did you install it?" the answer is, nearly every time, "I didn't know it would pop-up 1-million ads/harvest my surfing habits/log all of my keystrokes for the Russian mob."
Perhaps these companies should rethink their business model. If people really "want" WhenU's products (or Gator's, or anybody elses) then they should have no problem with being required to, up-front, tell the user truthfully what the program does. Any complaint about having to disclose this information only proves their sleazy, underhanded intent.
If the software spies or spams you without telling you honestly that it's doing so, you have a remedy in the form of existing laws against fraud or the like -- or possibly new laws that more narrowly target deceptive software.
Despite the fact that spamming using other people's connections counts as fraud, theft, and possibly conversion, we saw exactly ZERO criminal prosecutions until a federal anti-spam law was passed. (That it is mostly ineffective is an argument for another thread.) At that point, law enforcement saw that they could get a prosecution, and started investigating and arresting people.
There are probably a few reasons it took a federal law with criminal penalties to get somebody arrested and under the threat of imprisonment, but mainly its the fact that law enforcement is
Re:Percy Schmeiser in his own words
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Open Source Life?
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Monsanto would certainly bankroll each cop's personal injury lawsuit against you. Then your legal bills would double or triple, because you'd still have the original legal issues with Monsanto.
Uh, dude. If you shoot a trespasser, you always shoot to kill. The dead can't sue (but in some U.S. states, they can vote Republican.)
What seems most interesting is that given the tactics of these "cops", I would think (and IANAL) the detective agency could possibly be brought up on RICO (Racketeering, Influence, and Corrupt Organizations) charges. RICO was designed to prosecute mob extortion and "protection" rackets.
I think that's a pretty logical trail for these people to follow too, in the United States. Because RICO is, of course, a product of our "democracy" here.
Does Canada have a similar "anti-organized crime" law?
There has to be a threat to your life to justify shooting somebody.
So the question, then, is this: If armed men are on my property threatening me, does that constitute a threat to my life that allows me to legally defend myself? It varies from state to state in the U.S.
What about holding them at gun-point until the police arrive to arrest them? Is that permissible?
Re:Percy Schmeiser in his own words
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· Score: 4, Informative
These detectives go into any fields they choose to without permission and steal seeds or plants to check on them. If a farmer catches them trespassing they will laugh at the farmer and make threats.
Are these men armed? I know private citizens are not allowed to have handguns in Canada, but does that apply to ex-cops? Because I'm thinking, if they're armed, on your property illegally and threatening you, presumably you have some right to defend yourself and your land. Perhaps John Q. Farmer should shoot a couple of these "detectives" while they're comitting this burglary. Don't all farmers keep shotguns? I don't know what self-defense laws exist in Canada, but I imagine that a few of these "detectives" turning up in the morgue full of buckshot would create problems for the Monsanto recruiting effort. Not that a few dead bodies ever slowed down a multi-billion dollar behemoth before, but you have to start somewhere.
Or you could call the cops and request that they remove some trespassers, if you're not the violent type. Your call, really.
What I want to see is whatever mods they've created to make managing the enormous uber-cluster(s) that make the place tick. Plus, more than likely, they won't reveal the search code anyway...
But I salivate to review the code to their management tools.
Slashdot Mirror
Embrace the concept of the vernacular... It will set you free.
Quoth the article:
Now, I assume the reason that the feds were involved is that this was for-profit copyright infringement, which is a crime.
Having recently uninstalled XP Service Pack 2 I can say that there is a little more to consider than simply "uninstalling."
Because the VERY first step of the uninstall is a warning that say "If you continue the following applications may not work properly any longer..." and then it lists the vast majority of whatever is installed on the machine. So far, I've done this twice and uninstalling hasn't led to those consequences--yet.
But as any Windows admin knows it is only a matter of time before something that only happens to a minority of Windows installs happens to one of yours.
Only if the sum total of the subtitling is his name, over and over and over again, and only at moments of heightened dramatic tension.
Otherwise, its some guys idea of a joke...
A fun prank might be to use your scanner to find the frequency of Bush's earpiece, then transmit at fairly high power on that frequency for the duration of the debate. Big fun! Especially if you time your jamming so that just as Rove starts to speak, it drops out.
Now THAT is comedy. Fucking performance art, even.
Do you have a link to a Return of the Jedi Torrent where the jackass who ripped the LaserDiscs didn't put his name in the letterbox area right as dramatic moments come to pass?
Fucking Ken Ralston... If I ever find you I promise you an ass-beating.
A better way to ask the question:
The U.N. has set a goal to fund global AIDS research at $15 billion by 2005 and $20 billion by 2007. Given how distructive AIDS and HIV is to society, what portion of that tab would each of you recommend paying and why?
This situation is clearly completely ill-suited to "letting the states decide."
For one thing, the laws of physics preclude radio signals from cooperating with arbitrary lines on a map. Even if you could somehow get every station in America to only broadcast inside one state technically, this still creates the huge problem of broadcast "standards" splintering off into 50 different sets of rules. It is already damn hard to get approval to build a new broadcast tower, or to move a broadcast tower site. Many times, the legal compliance issues for such a move run into the tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars before a dime has been spent on the actual construction of facility and equipment purchase. And this is with only one regulating authority.
Now imagine there are 50 different authorities, each "deciding for themselves" which transmitters, antennae, and other broadcasting equipment they will accept for legal station operation, which ones they won't. Plus, each state will have different standards for acceptable interference. This already complicated process for resolution would only get more complicated.
For instance, stations near state borders face the potential of resolving a cross-border interference dispute by working with their state's broadcast reg. body, the other state's, and the other broadcasters attorneys. In a situation like this involving multiple stations in multiple states, the complexity would go up by an order of magnitude. And, of course, if there was a dispute over which state's laws had precedence, everybody would then sue everybody else, creating a further unneccessary burden on the courts.
Letting the states decide for themselves on some things makes perfect sense. HEre, it does not. Broadcasting is clearly an interstate commerce and is most appropriately regulated by the federal government.
Weren't the newer Celicas prized by theives because of their super-high resale value overseas? That might be a contributing factor. You should shop for a better rate. Did you have an accident where somebody else was at fault in the past, or have I drove a Celica when I shopped last year, but found it dogged in all 6 gears. (I won't buy an automatic shift sports car... That is the antithesis of having that sort of auto.) Plus it was sort of a snug fit with my knees under the wheel (I'm 6'4".) Anyway, got a used 2002 maxima instead and think its a great car. And I fit inside, so that is a plus, of course.
about "Danni's Hard Drive", the porno site where the chick is always on the Howard Stern show?
I had this image of naked Afghanis in veils...
I mean, shit, come on. It is just basic to trademark your corporation's name in association with what you do for profits. Not doing so smacks of stupidity! Maybe they should have finished college before starting the company.
And now an interview during their quiet period... well, duh! Like they didn't know there was an IPO in the pipe when they gave the interview. How stupid can you be? If they didn't say "We're doing an IPO next year, and want Playboy to sign something saying they won't publish it during the legal quiet period" they deserve what they get.
In my opinion, Google needs to shape up its business practices if it is going to be subjected to the intense scrutiny that comes with being a publicly traded corporation. They can't pull this half-assed stuff and expect to get away with it, because as we're seeing now, they won't. The eye of the press is un-blinking. Mistakes like this scuttle bright fortunes all the time. It would be a shame if this happened to Google, because I really like them.
I suggest they hire an old guy, (50+) to act as the company's spokesman. Somebody who has been through a million IPOs, who knows the rules and who can make public statements without screwing up the whole company. If I were a google shareholder, I'd expect no less.
1) Windows and IE do have the same problem, as a couple dozen people have pointed out.
2) "Human-nature" to steal is not the OSS communities fault, (nor MS', really, if we want to be fair. But this is Slashdot, why be fair?)
3) It is true that there are probably a dozen simple ways to fix this, but the problem is that fixing this specific exploit does not solve the problem of a malicious person being able to visually recreate trusted ecommerce vendors' web-sites inside a phony browser window. Dozens of other posters have suggested other implementations of the same idea, so fixing this one doesn't really prevent anything. If you were a volunteer coder, would you invest your free time fixing an exploit that has 1,000 vectors for use?
4) I don't know if I believe that this exploit even really works or not since the "proof-of-concept" code didn't work for me, or a ton of other Firefox users. Maybe because I took the time to configure my browser to my (paranoid) liking.
5) If it pisses you off that much, download the source tree and submit a fix. If you do a good enough job Bill Gates will steal your idea and put it in IE, and that will make everbody more secure, right?
You actually saw Wild Wild West and are willing to admit it? We were just ridiculing Will Smith the other day here and decided that WWW might be his worst film ever.
In your (and the other outsourcing apologists) view of America, I seem to exist only to service the luxuries of the extremely wealthy. My friend, what you describe is not a free country, it is an oligarchy: A society run by (And geared completely towards the needs of) the vastly wealthy. In an oligarchy, the rest of us are along only to service broken-down Lexuses and Mercedes Benzes and fix hot-tub pumps out at the beach house. Sorry, but that theory of society was (allegedly) flushed down the toilet years ago. I'm not a serf, and my boss isn't a nobleman. I do not exist to serve him. That isn't how our country works. (Or, at least, it wasn't supposed to...)
The fact is that the truly wealthy have what they want, and can afford their whims. They don't need to outsource your job to afford their toys. They don't need to outsource your job at all, but Corporations think they can make a shitload more money if they do it, so they go ahead. In reality, off-shore outsourcing can be summarized in one ugly word: Greed. An example of greed that is so out of control, that the minority in this country would actually sabotage our nation's future to give themselves a few extra bucks now. Off-shore outsourcing is a wealth grab, plain and simple.
A self-serving means to drive down labor costs to permit the extremely wealthy in America to get control of the miniscule bit of wealth that isn't already theirs. It has absolutely nothing to do with making the country, as a whole, stronger because off-shore outsourcing does exactly the opposite.
Ask an economist (a REAL economist, not one who works for King GeorgeW) whether highly-skilled workers "retraining" to flipping burgers helps society. (Althogh, according to King GeorgeW, flipping burgers is "manufacturing", and we all know that "manufacturing" is good for middle-America...)
You're also missing a pretty big chunk of the puzzle here by implying that those who lose jobs can simply be re-trained and get new jobs. This is only partly true, (and it is a very small part.) The part the outsourcing apologists never want to mention is that we are replacing $45-80k per year jobs with $19-30k per year jobs--hardly a 1:1 replacement, like King GeorgeW and friends would have you believe.
In fact, the only people who seem to get any positive benefit out of outsourcing are the majority stock holders (who are already super-rich) and the people in foreign lands now gleefully doing our jobs (for 1/5 the pay.) Show me a benefit to regular Americans, because I don't see it. (And "Cheaper consumer goods" doesn't fly, because unemployed people can't afford to waste their money on that shit. Know any unemployed people with new big-screen HDTVs? Of course not. Unemployed people spend whatever money they have on "survival," not "stuff", no matter how "cheap" that 42inch plasma screen seems.)
Also, before I go, you might want to look into the trend of U.S. companies who not only outsource labor, but also structure the outsourced work as a foreign business to avoid U.S. taxes on profits they make from it. Of course, since the government still costs the same amount to operate whether the robber-barons' corporations pay their share or not, our taxes go up to make up for unpaid portions.
Amen. And this applies to any sport or game: Just because you're good at a game or sport (or activity of some kind) doesn't mean that I need to hear your opinion on world politics, economics, etc. Yet for some reason, Americans have this desire to interview celebrities about the issues of the day.
The fact that most celebrities are pretty and not smart is forgotten for the few moments of the interview. And there are smart ones, true. But we often find them to be smart but not articulate. (Or, in this case, particularly sane.)
But I wanted to last night. Got...distracted. Yada yada, here we are. So I guess I didn't win. But I got as close as you can get making only a half-assed effort.
Amen brother. And new patches should not re-break old ones. Or change random settings without telling you. (BTW: Last one isn't Microsoft exclusive, but I've had far more personal experience with exploding MS patches than any other OS.)
Yeah, common sense is the key term. Take yesterday afternoon. I'm leaving a friend's house. Driving safely through the neighborhood, I pull up to a stop-sign. A child on a bike turns off the sidestreet, onto the one I'm driving on. He proceeds to ride right up the middle of the street. He knew I was there, because he looked me right in the eye before entering the intersection.
I pull away from the stop-sign and he proceeds to continue riding right up the middle of the street. The road widened enough for me to pass, but then the kid meandered towards the "middle" of the new, wider road. After a 1.5 blocks of this, I sound the horn to let him know I'm there, and he scowls at me, like I'm the one disrupting traffic. I roll down the window and ask "Who told you it was safe to ride your bike on the middle of the street like that?" "My mommy." came the reply.
Moral of the story? Common sense breeds more common sense. Parents who are stupid have children who are stupid. In the end, I realized that I should have just run his ass over and saved us all a few welfare dollars later.
Maybe this is true, maybe it isn't. We've seen countless examples in our organization of a user getting a pop-up ad for "Free" software that claims to give them some sort of benefit, and watched in horror as clicking "No, thanks" installed the software anyway. Yes, we proactively block access to the servers and IP ranges of known spyware companies at the firewall, but this costs us time (and thus, money) to maintain. But since the scummers (scummer == spammer for the scumware universe) often have multiple hosting providers setup round-robin for load balancing, it is an on-going, ever shifting battle. If we over-react and ban access to a large hosting provider, we risk blocking legitimate traffic that flows through the same outfit.
Perhaps this law should be repealed and re-written in such a way as to target only nefarious software packages (like "CoolSearch", the unremovable beast from Central Asia) while allowing honest vendors to market software based on advertisements. You're right when you say that freedom of speech allows us to speak out about attempts to restrict our other rights, but misguided to think that stopping marketers from essentially stealing people's personal information for their own gain somehow equates to a police state. You're intentionally not adressing the issue that I pay for my connection and PC, and therefore should have control of what is on it. And I shouldn't have to police my "Add/Remove" programs list every day, or run AdAware every time I boot up to guarantee that only the programs I want are on my machine.
Any perceived benefit to these programs is probably the result of deceit and fraud. One can only imagine that people "knowingly and willingly" install it if you ignore every usablity study of the internet over the last few years. They've found that the #1 and #2 complaints of internet users are the number of ads, and the "unclosable-in-your-face" nature of pop-ups. On the side, I help small businesses with their networks and desktop machines. In the last year, the number of companies contacting me about spyware prevention has quintupled. Removing and preventing spyware now represents about 40% of my "on the side" income.
If a user perceives a value to Gator, MyWebSearch, or coolsearch, it is only because they don't understand that these programs are the majority source of their biggest online annoyance. When I ask customers "Why did you install it?" the answer is, nearly every time, "I didn't know it would pop-up 1-million ads/harvest my surfing habits/log all of my keystrokes for the Russian mob."
Perhaps these companies should rethink their business model. If people really "want" WhenU's products (or Gator's, or anybody elses) then they should have no problem with being required to, up-front, tell the user truthfully what the program does. Any complaint about having to disclose this information only proves their sleazy, underhanded intent.
Despite the fact that spamming using other people's connections counts as fraud, theft, and possibly conversion, we saw exactly ZERO criminal prosecutions until a federal anti-spam law was passed. (That it is mostly ineffective is an argument for another thread.) At that point, law enforcement saw that they could get a prosecution, and started investigating and arresting people.
There are probably a few reasons it took a federal law with criminal penalties to get somebody arrested and under the threat of imprisonment, but mainly its the fact that law enforcement is
Uh, dude. If you shoot a trespasser, you always shoot to kill. The dead can't sue (but in some U.S. states, they can vote Republican.)
I think that's a pretty logical trail for these people to follow too, in the United States. Because RICO is, of course, a product of our "democracy" here.
Does Canada have a similar "anti-organized crime" law?
So the question, then, is this: If armed men are on my property threatening me, does that constitute a threat to my life that allows me to legally defend myself? It varies from state to state in the U.S.
What about holding them at gun-point until the police arrive to arrest them? Is that permissible?
Are these men armed? I know private citizens are not allowed to have handguns in Canada, but does that apply to ex-cops? Because I'm thinking, if they're armed, on your property illegally and threatening you, presumably you have some right to defend yourself and your land. Perhaps John Q. Farmer should shoot a couple of these "detectives" while they're comitting this burglary. Don't all farmers keep shotguns? I don't know what self-defense laws exist in Canada, but I imagine that a few of these "detectives" turning up in the morgue full of buckshot would create problems for the Monsanto recruiting effort. Not that a few dead bodies ever slowed down a multi-billion dollar behemoth before, but you have to start somewhere.
Or you could call the cops and request that they remove some trespassers, if you're not the violent type. Your call, really.
What I want to see is whatever mods they've created to make managing the enormous uber-cluster(s) that make the place tick. Plus, more than likely, they won't reveal the search code anyway...
But I salivate to review the code to their management tools.
God, some Star Trek fans are such fucking pussies... Learn to take a joke, people.
...if I get to be the Captain this time. Really, there have been enough Star Trek series that it is definitely My Turn.