I don't know anything about this vanfirm, or their history, nor do I care. What is important however are the facts of this case.
Initially, Stella's family only asked McDonald's for her out-of-pocket expenses, about $2,000
A McDonald's Quality Control manager testified that McDonald's knew of the risk of dangerously hot coffee and had no plans to either turn down the heat or warn their customers, even though most customers wouldn't be aware of the scalding danger
He (Stella's Lawyer) asked for $100,000 in compensatory damages including her pain and suffering and triple punitive damages to send a message to McDonald's that their coffee was dangerously hot.
A month later, the judge reduced the jury's punitive award of $2.7 million to only $640,000
This report indicated that McDonald's still keeps its coffee at 180, still 20 hotter than other restaurants.
Third degree burns occur at 185 in just 2 - 5 seconds.
It doesn't take "A lot of old, forgetful, people do a lot of really stupid things." when the product you bought was essentially "dangerous". The judge of the trial even said the case "was not a runaway, I was there," and that it was "appropriate to punish and deter".
I don't see how you can blame stupidity, when it is pretty clear the product was "hotter than other restaurants" and that the risk typically associated with that type of product was greater. Have you never spilled a beverage on yourself? Would you expect to get life treating injuries from that small of an accident? Stella did.
What about a restaurant that serves you? Would you have a case if a waitress spilled the same temperature of coffee on you? With the "more than 700 other people had made claims for scalding coffee burns" McDonalds had already seen, an expectation for people to spill coffee on themselves in their own cars was already established. McDonalds didn't care.
I think it's more than fair to sue a company for knowingly putting customers in unnessiary danger. Just like you would sue a shopping mall for an improperly maintained escalator that ate one of you children.
The point still holds however for the RIAA. They are a US company. It is illegal for them to gather this information from the web without the consent of the parent. Once thier discovery proccess (which had to be done online) picked up that they were tracking a child, they should have by law dropped and erased all this individuals information.
So when did this parent give the P2P people the right to disclose the personal informaion about her child to the RIAA?
Didn't the RIAA break the law by collecting this information? Another link about this law.
So the patent covers "mechanisms for embedding objects within distributed hypermedia documents, where at least some of the object's data is located external to the document, and there is a control path to the object's implementation to support user interaction with the object"
Can the work not be done by the web server instead, and an addition made to the html tag system to allow for binary data to be streamed as "part" of the document? Have the web server grab all the information prior to sending everything, and then stream all the info in one big document to the browser. Sure some things will have to be done differently, but it would also have the added benefit of breaking a number of tracking methods used by advertisers.
If I can come up with this workaround in ten minutes, certainly other people could come up with more complete solutions.
After reading the article, I can't help but wonder if this ruling essentially makes the publication of 2600 Illegal.
The US may have started out founded on freedom, but it appears that is has since turned its back on those principals
The really funny thing is that you can legally use their signal because DirectTV is not a "Lawfull Distributor", they cannot hold you liable for stealing the service. It's like someone stealing stolen property. The "victim" can't really get anywhere with the courts, because he shouldn't have had it in the first place.
It is true about the bandwidth etc, however, once mail servers are all configured to bounce ADV: mails, the bandwidth suck will stop at the headers and subject, and prevent the rest of the volume. You can't possibly beilive that spam with the ADV: on the front of it will continue to be profitable once AOL, HOTMAIL, earthlink and the like all start to BOUNCE ADV: mails that users toggle as don't want spam. Once it ceases to be profitable, it will stop.
Of course that doesn't stop the AOL's MSN's etc from spamming their own customers, but then this will also make it crystal clear who is sending those mails. If I get an ADV: mail even though I said I don't want any, then it must be my provider forcing it on me. Kinda like trying to use the hotmail filter option to filter @hotmail.com doesn't work.
BTW the line Now we can sort out the legitimate Spam from the illegitimate ones.
was my attempt at irony. You are correct, none of them are legitimate.
Now we can sort out the legitimate Spam from the illegitimate ones.
Those trying to claim the high road of "we are just marketers" will have to comply and get filtered, or risk jail. Those that don't are branded as law breakers. This law could put every American based spammer out of buisness eventually.
Great News.
Actually the 911 services do have this type of control. I'm not sure how they do it, but if you hang up without talking to someone after a misdialed 911 the phone rings strait through to your personal extension. That has to be tone control of some sort. So reverse engineer that, and bingo people can't hang up on you.
I know miss dialing 911 sounds stupid, but you try calling the London country code with a 9 to get out of the office sometime.
Just plain wrong. Legal and ethical issues are key to security, both for the client and the company. More key in many cases than keeping hackers out.
Backups, can solve or mitigate data destroyed by hackers, and simple encryption can prevent compromised information, but lost reputation, and lack of consumer confidence will bury a company supposedly based on ethics almost instantly.
Any full scale security audit needs to cover license compliance, in fact, they mentioned their experience with that type of auditing in their letter. They obviously understood the importance of it, even if they didn't apply it correctly.
I've always been a strong believer that protecting my children from harm is retarded. Your typical American family would have their children grow up believing that sharp scissors are safe to play with. Children get protected from handling things like guns, knives, drills, and hedge clippers. They grow up never having experienced the real dangers associated with amputation and only become a bigger part of the world's problems.
Children != Adults, and should be protected from both physical and mental harm. Kids are scared of the monster under the bed for cripes sake, let alone showing them something like the footage of an execution. Those things disturb and cause a certain amount of harm to most sane adults.
So it looks like your bottom line is, damaging children mentally makes them better people. I think most people should have a problem with that view.
Make the law so that it is the receivers right to sue in his own state for damages. This obligates the spammer to defend in Arkansas, or have a judgment passed against him. Eventually the only place these people will be able to do business is in spam friendly states. How many politicians would love to have that moniker associated with their state? "The most spam friendly state in Union".
What I think is truly crazy is the effort to lock these filters down so tight. In my mind, the whole point of filters is to protect from "casual" use of these types of sites, so little Johnny 8 year old can't look at dirty pictures. If someone is determined enough to try IP locating or bablefish, then they know exactly what they want, and most certainly will find a way to bypass any filter. It's a stupid arms race that doesn't accomplish its desired goals at all.
Several years ago I had a 386 with a 10 Meg hard drive. Yup 10 Megs. This was the computers only hard drive, and the problem with it was that the head would always "rest" on the platter. Well when it was "resting", it wouldn't spin. So I ended having to keep the case open, remove the screws holding it in place, and then with my index finger, give the hard drive a 1/2 inch drop at the same time I hit the power. This bounced the head off the platter long enough for the disk to spin and get everything going. I got good enough at this little trick that I very rarely had to try twice. It finally died after about a year and a half of this treatment.
In Canada MYOB software was sold to Intuit. They now no longer support any payroll tax table updates and a bunch of other things that basically make the software useless. However, even with these horrendous omissions, they are as of today, still selling the software at full retail in stores across the country. Lucky customers purchasing this software and want full functionality now have the option of.... well buying different software. This helpful advice came strait from a support call. This is FRUAD and these clowns should be charged criminally. I will never by an Intuit product for as long as I live.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't take "A lot of old, forgetful, people do a lot of really stupid things." when the product you bought was essentially "dangerous". The judge of the trial even said the case "was not a runaway, I was there," and that it was "appropriate to punish and deter".
I don't see how you can blame stupidity, when it is pretty clear the product was "hotter than other restaurants" and that the risk typically associated with that type of product was greater. Have you never spilled a beverage on yourself? Would you expect to get life treating injuries from that small of an accident? Stella did.
What about a restaurant that serves you? Would you have a case if a waitress spilled the same temperature of coffee on you? With the "more than 700 other people had made claims for scalding coffee burns" McDonalds had already seen, an expectation for people to spill coffee on themselves in their own cars was already established. McDonalds didn't care.
I think it's more than fair to sue a company for knowingly putting customers in unnessiary danger. Just like you would sue a shopping mall for an improperly maintained escalator that ate one of you children.
RTFA's
Perhaps some references about the hot coffee case are in order.
The point still holds however for the RIAA. They are a US company. It is illegal for them to gather this information from the web without the consent of the parent. Once thier discovery proccess (which had to be done online) picked up that they were tracking a child, they should have by law dropped and erased all this individuals information.
As of April 21, 2000, some commercial Web sites will be required to obtain parental consent before collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children under the age of 13. The FTC called the rule "a definitive move" that "puts parents in control over the information collected from their children online."
So when did this parent give the P2P people the right to disclose the personal informaion about her child to the RIAA?
Didn't the RIAA break the law by collecting this information?
Another link about this law.
So the patent covers
"mechanisms for embedding objects within distributed hypermedia documents, where at least some of the object's data is located external to the document, and there is a control path to the object's implementation to support user interaction with the object"
Can the work not be done by the web server instead, and an addition made to the html tag system to allow for binary data to be streamed as "part" of the document? Have the web server grab all the information prior to sending everything, and then stream all the info in one big document to the browser. Sure some things will have to be done differently, but it would also have the added benefit of breaking a number of tracking methods used by advertisers.
If I can come up with this workaround in ten minutes, certainly other people could come up with more complete solutions.
After reading the article, I can't help but wonder if this ruling essentially makes the publication of 2600 Illegal.
The US may have started out founded on freedom, but it appears that is has since turned its back on those principals
The really funny thing is that you can legally use their signal because DirectTV is not a "Lawfull Distributor", they cannot hold you liable for stealing the service. It's like someone stealing stolen property. The "victim" can't really get anywhere with the courts, because he shouldn't have had it in the first place.
It is true about the bandwidth etc, however, once mail servers are all configured to bounce ADV: mails, the bandwidth suck will stop at the headers and subject, and prevent the rest of the volume. You can't possibly beilive that spam with the ADV: on the front of it will continue to be profitable once AOL, HOTMAIL, earthlink and the like all start to BOUNCE ADV: mails that users toggle as don't want spam. Once it ceases to be profitable, it will stop.
Of course that doesn't stop the AOL's MSN's etc from spamming their own customers, but then this will also make it crystal clear who is sending those mails. If I get an ADV: mail even though I said I don't want any, then it must be my provider forcing it on me. Kinda like trying to use the hotmail filter option to filter @hotmail.com doesn't work.
BTW the line
Now we can sort out the legitimate Spam from the illegitimate ones.
was my attempt at irony. You are correct, none of them are legitimate.
Now we can sort out the legitimate Spam from the illegitimate ones.
Those trying to claim the high road of "we are just marketers" will have to comply and get filtered, or risk jail. Those that don't are branded as law breakers. This law could put every American based spammer out of buisness eventually.
Great News.
Actually the 911 services do have this type of control. I'm not sure how they do it, but if you hang up without talking to someone after a misdialed 911 the phone rings strait through to your personal extension. That has to be tone control of some sort. So reverse engineer that, and bingo people can't hang up on you.
I know miss dialing 911 sounds stupid, but you try calling the London country code with a 9 to get out of the office sometime.
I really would not be surprised if that wasn't the case.
Well it looks like she either had a change of mind, never wanted to, or doesn't want it publicly known that it could happen.
And how exactly is this nitrogen super cooled to -320? Where does the energy to do this come from?
Just plain wrong. Legal and ethical issues are key to security, both for the client and the company. More key in many cases than keeping hackers out.
Backups, can solve or mitigate data destroyed by hackers, and simple encryption can prevent compromised information, but lost reputation, and lack of consumer confidence will bury a company supposedly based on ethics almost instantly.
Any full scale security audit needs to cover license compliance, in fact, they mentioned their experience with that type of auditing in their letter. They obviously understood the importance of it, even if they didn't apply it correctly.
Didn't this guy just sell 10% of his stock in the company. Bet he knew it was going to break this way weeks ago. Insider trading anyone?
Great, a Wardrive through. What will they think of next?
Children != Adults, and should be protected from both physical and mental harm. Kids are scared of the monster under the bed for cripes sake, let alone showing them something like the footage of an execution. Those things disturb and cause a certain amount of harm to most sane adults.
So it looks like your bottom line is, damaging children mentally makes them better people. I think most people should have a problem with that view.
Part of the problem is that consumers expect this sort of insurance to be included in the cost, much like a credit card.
Make the law so that it is the receivers right to sue in his own state for damages. This obligates the spammer to defend in Arkansas, or have a judgment passed against him. Eventually the only place these people will be able to do business is in spam friendly states.
How many politicians would love to have that moniker associated with their state? "The most spam friendly state in Union".
What I think is truly crazy is the effort to lock these filters down so tight. In my mind, the whole point of filters is to protect from "casual" use of these types of sites, so little Johnny 8 year old can't look at dirty pictures. If someone is determined enough to try IP locating or bablefish, then they know exactly what they want, and most certainly will find a way to bypass any filter.
It's a stupid arms race that doesn't accomplish its desired goals at all.
Several years ago I had a 386 with a 10 Meg hard drive. Yup 10 Megs. This was the computers only hard drive, and the problem with it was that the head would always "rest" on the platter. Well when it was "resting", it wouldn't spin. So I ended having to keep the case open, remove the screws holding it in place, and then with my index finger, give the hard drive a 1/2 inch drop at the same time I hit the power. This bounced the head off the platter long enough for the disk to spin and get everything going. I got good enough at this little trick that I very rarely had to try twice. It finally died after about a year and a half of this treatment.
You may just want to re-think the "convenience to the customer" view.
Thanks for the info. I will have to look into it. Fortunatly for me the tale of woe was not mine, it happened to an associate.
In Canada MYOB software was sold to Intuit. .... well buying different software. This helpful advice came strait from a support call.
They now no longer support any payroll tax table updates and a bunch of other things that basically make the software useless. However, even with these horrendous omissions, they are as of today, still selling the software at full retail in stores across the country.
Lucky customers purchasing this software and want full functionality now have the option of
This is FRUAD and these clowns should be charged criminally. I will never by an Intuit product for as long as I live.