well, lets think about that:
"They get big discounts," unneeded with Open source.
"free software," g'uh
" maybe some gifts for the schools". You don't need to give the school software gifts, if the software is free.
You're forgetting the bribes paid to the managers who choose to buy an expensive product. No one pays bribes for them to choose free softare. Or the bribe can be more in the open, MS funds some hardware for schools, an MS certfication program for colleges, etc.
"Interestingly, Microsoft's representative in Brazil decries this as a movement away from freedom and choice..."
I think the word they were searching for was "Ironically".
The author of the article has no clue how MSN search actually works. MSN search returns only sponsored results first. There are 16 sponsored results and then if you go to the next page you see:Results 16-30 of about 8782246 containing "linux windows"
It's not at all obvious that there is a second page at all when the first page says 'Results 1-15 of about 16 containing "linux windows"'. Nowhere (that I can see) does it say or explain that this means "of about 16 sponsored links". That's what Fletcher thought, and until I saw your post I had no inkling either. As you say "It makes their search hard to use, it confuses people, it is dishonest."
MS says, "Fine, we're not doing business in Europe. Sales of all MS products stop on Monday."
Maybe Europe backs down. Then every European government begins a crash program to migrate away from MS, probably to SUSE or some other locally supported OS. Governments, schools, everyone. Businesses follow suit because it's cheaper, patriotic and the govts have worked out smooth migration processes. A year later, MS is fucked in Europe and losing ground in the US and everywhere else.
I never got to see William Hartnell as Dr Who - Jon Pertwee was when I came into the series. I didn't miss much methinks.
Between Hartnell and Pertwee was Patrick Troughton, probably my favourite, though this is from misty 30-year-old memories. I think a lot of episodes from his era were lost, so you won't see many unfortunately. The first two Doctors did a lot of historical stories, where Pertwee spent most of his stint "trapped" by the Timelords in the 1970s, fighting off alien invasions, which coincidentally mostly seemed to land in England.
Rupert Murdoch also owns Star TV in Asia which is happily leftist.
Star TV is leftist? If you mean, "doesn't criticise the Chinse government", maybe. Other than that, look at their schedule. MTV, nature documentaries, sports, movies. All apolitical. The "news" includes Fox News -- leftist?
StarTV is simply entertainment. You don't get permission to broadcast in Asia otherwise. That asshole Murdoch quickly pulled BBC news when China objected to its coverage.
The story says: "NASA told him to 'pound sand'", However, though the quotemearks would imply that this phrase was used in the linked document, I don't see it anywhere. Who decided to dramatise this by inventing colourful language and making it look like a quote?
Also, if you do look at the cited documents on the lunatic's website, they're misaligned scans of court documents. But this isn't simple incompetence, it's encryption! "These document scans are formated to hinder text capture. No portion may be saved or copied for any purpose whatsoever."
Well, us Subscribers tried. Looks like the editor didn't read his/her email.
More precisely, the editor (Cowboy Neal) has an invalid forwarding address:
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:
jdp@mccarthy.vg
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Us right-wing extremists believe, in general, that unless you violate the constitution, you shouldn't go to jail.
I just had a quick look through the US Constitution. Seems to mostly regulate government. Nothing about murder, theft, assault, etc or most other crimes (except treason). So these shouldn't be punished?
Fill the disk only part way, and then label the disk around the outside edge.
Better, write s title or code number in the transparent part in the centre and you don't lose any capacity. Keep the contents list on the cover or a file on your PC.
I doubt the ink will leach much... there's not much of it, and the carrier is pretty volatile and evaporates to the air pretty quickly ( i.e. the ink 'dries' ).
I was given some cheap disks that were labelled with some kind of permanent marker. They worked fine then. A couple of years later I was looking for a file that might have been on them and found them largely unreadable. Looking at the actual disk from the bottom I can see the metal layer is completely gone directly below the ink (which has itself faded, or maybe sunk into the disk.
Here's the post that Belkin have apparently retracted from groups.google:
From: ericd@belkin.com (Eric Deming) Subject: Re: [OT-evil marketing] Belkin does Verislime one better - router spam! Date: 5 Nov 2003 15:25:28 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com
"JerryMouse" wrote in message news:... > Mr. Uh Clem wrote: > > [...] > > What does Belkin say when you complain? > > I'd make their life miserable until they removed the offending software from > my machine. > > You did not conset to this aspect of your machine's modification - this is > nothing less than malicious. > > Raise hell.
I was made aware of this posting by an e-mail that was sent to Belkin's tech support e-mail box. Since I am a product manager for Belkin's LAN products and was very involved with the development of the Parental Control feature, I feel that I can shed some light on this subject. Firstly, without trying to sound too stand-offish, we are not talking about SPAM here. For me to clarify, an understanding of the Parental Control service will really be needed.
Since Parental Control is a subscription service, Belkin wanted to make registering for the service very easy. Since the router actually will work in tandem with an outside server (Cerberian, www.cerberian.com) registration information needs to be collected and sent to Belkin and Cerberian to activate an account. Traditional methods of registration, such as asking the user to go to a website or navigate to the Router's internal Web page to enter information didn't meet the ease-of-use goal. We elected to re-direct one http request to the "Register Now" reminder page. (There is a link in a previous posting if you want to see it) This page asks the user to register for the service for a free 6 month trial. Now, granted this looks like an ad. It should, it is intended to be informative and easy enough to understand. At this point, the user can register or click "No Thanks". Clicking "No Thanks" sets a flag in the Router to stop the Router from re-directing every 8 hours to the reminder page. (Again remember, only one http request every 8 hours). Admittedly, there is no controlling which computer on the LAN this message will pop up on. If the user just closes the window without clicking "No Thanks", then the flag is never set, and the reminders will continue. Now, if you are the type that doesn't want to click the "No Thanks" button, then no problem. Navigate to the Router's internal web interface (default IP = 192.168.2.1), click on the Parental Control menu. In the Menu, select "Don't Remind every 8 hours" (This phrase actually varies a bit, but you get the idea) then click "Apply Changes". DONE. Nothing to it. By the way, this procedure might have to be done if your router is behind a firewall. Reason: filter.belkin.com sends a response to the Router to set the flag. Firewalls will block the response. This might explain the problem in a school for instance.
We did this not to be evil, we did this to make sure that any non-techy person (part of our target audience) would have ample opportunity to opt in or out of the free 6 month trial of the Parental Control feature. The Router doesn't collect information on you and send it to Belkin. We don't have the ability to SPAM you at a later time if you select "No Thanks" or turn off the Reminder manually. I know this feature might be misunderstood and might PO some people. I know the manual could do a better job explaining it. These are all things that we at Belkin are working to remedy.
Oh, one last bit, when upgrading firmware for the Routers that originally shipped without the Parental Control feature, the new firmware has this feature added. This was by popular demand. Our customer install base began to notice the Parental Control feature on new models that we are shipping, and wanted a solution for themselves without having to buy a new product. So, we accommodated them.
I'm happy to answer any questions if you have any. Thanks!
You thought www.altavista.digital.com was a nice thing, or that www.altavista.com was better? I used them over yahoo in the beginning, but it was so hard to spell! I can type www.yahoo.com or www.google.com really easily, there were just to many was to mistype altavista.
Now they have one of the shortest URLs I know: http://av.com.
No they didn't... They only fired him, they didn't prosecute him, which is the extreme action for a breach of an NDA.
Do you in all honesty believe that a court would sustain a prosecution? It's a fucking photp of the inside of a truck. What was disclosed? Judges want some evidence of harm done before imposing a penalty.
They could have made his life hell dealing with it though. So I suppose in America one should tug one's forelock and thank the bossman for not kicking you after he throws you out the door.
It all boils down to: this was an over reaction. The punishment was out of scale. No harm was done to MS, and the offending information could have been removed before it came to anyone's notice if they hadn't been thuggish about it.
>it's not morally justifiable.
Yes you do and yes it is. If an employee shows questionable judgement, you don't keep him/her around until that judgement costs your company big-time.
That's your idea of morality?
>So they fire the guy and create massive publicity for this disclosure. Security was just the pretext.
Then what was the real reason? Why did they want all of this bad publicity? This must be a very complicated evil plan.
I didn't say there was an evil plan. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Why was some guy who works in the print shop hanging around the loading dock taking photos?
RTFA. He is a Mac fanboy. He wanted to share his excitement at seeing a truckload of Macs.
Of course not, you punish all drunk drivers to avoid some of them from doing harm.
The "precrime" aspect of charging drunk drivers who haven't broken any other laws is justifiable because lives are at risk.
just because no harm happened to come from proscribed behaviors doesn't mean that no punishment should come from them.
Well, to go back to your drunk driver analogy, driving drunk can cost you your license and maybe get you in jail. Driving drunk and killing people will get you in jail for a very long time. MS applied the corporate death penalty for a technical breach of rules.
It's not his office building. It's theirs. If they don't want photos of it floating around the net, that's their call.
Sure. But instead of pointing this out and asking him to pull it they fired him. And just again, it WASN'T an office, it was the inside of a delivery truck. No screen captures of killer apps, etc. A truck.
Think about the questions that go through the minds of the security people: Today it was the loading dock but what will it be tomorrow?
You don't fire people because of something that someone else might do tomorrow. (Well, obviously you do, but it's not morally justifiable.)
They might be just Macs to you. Someone else might have other information that they are able to put together with that in order to ascertain something that Microsoft wishes to keep secret.
They ARE "just Macs". Everyone knows that MS uses Macs. They were delivering office equipment. Would he have been fired if it was a dozen photocopiers? (Maybe if it was a dozen shredders...)
So they fire the guy and create massive publicity for this disclosure. Security was just the pretext.
Most engineering firms are very guarded and don't want pictures of their facilities distributed over the Internet.
Facilities? A truck, not a research lab of any description. "If you were 40 years younger and if these nail clippers were a samurai sword you might be a terrorist. So we'll do a cavity search just to cover our asses."
Slashdot Mirror
You think you're joking, but see American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers (ASCAP) has informed [Girl Scout]camps nationwide that they must pay license fees to use any of the 4 million copyrighted songs -- for campfire sing alongs.
"They get big discounts," unneeded with Open source.
"free software," g'uh
" maybe some gifts for the schools". You don't need to give the school software gifts, if the software is free.
You're forgetting the bribes paid to the managers who choose to buy an expensive product. No one pays bribes for them to choose free softare. Or the bribe can be more in the open, MS funds some hardware for schools, an MS certfication program for colleges, etc.
I think the word they were searching for was "Ironically".
I think "predictably".
It's not at all obvious that there is a second page at all when the first page says 'Results 1-15 of about 16 containing "linux windows"'. Nowhere (that I can see) does it say or explain that this means "of about 16 sponsored links". That's what Fletcher thought, and until I saw your post I had no inkling either. As you say "It makes their search hard to use, it confuses people, it is dishonest."
That's why I didn't say you can't trademark a name.
It's impossible to copyright a name. (Notice there are many titles of books, songs, even a few movies, that duplicate others.)
And any text you want to claim copyright on, just publish it (say on a webpage), preferably with the (C) symbol and date, and that's it.
Maybe Europe backs down. Then every European government begins a crash program to migrate away from MS, probably to SUSE or some other locally supported OS. Governments, schools, everyone. Businesses follow suit because it's cheaper, patriotic and the govts have worked out smooth migration processes. A year later, MS is fucked in Europe and losing ground in the US and everywhere else.
Between Hartnell and Pertwee was Patrick Troughton, probably my favourite, though this is from misty 30-year-old memories. I think a lot of episodes from his era were lost, so you won't see many unfortunately. The first two Doctors did a lot of historical stories, where Pertwee spent most of his stint "trapped" by the Timelords in the 1970s, fighting off alien invasions, which coincidentally mostly seemed to land in England.
Star TV is leftist? If you mean, "doesn't criticise the Chinse government", maybe. Other than that, look at their schedule. MTV, nature documentaries, sports, movies. All apolitical. The "news" includes Fox News -- leftist?
StarTV is simply entertainment. You don't get permission to broadcast in Asia otherwise. That asshole Murdoch quickly pulled BBC news when China objected to its coverage.
You mean the red shirts from the USS Enterprise will hunt them down?
Also, if you do look at the cited documents on the lunatic's website, they're misaligned scans of court documents. But this isn't simple incompetence, it's encryption! "These document scans are formated to hinder text capture. No portion may be saved or copied for any purpose whatsoever."
Exactly. Relative to "now". The FA is over a year "old".
To paraphrase NBC, "if you haven't seen it, it's new to you!"
Well, that trumps any definition from a mere dictionary. What do those effete literary types know?
innovation: Something newly introduced.
American Heritage Dictionary
Well, us Subscribers tried. Looks like the editor didn't read his/her email.
........
More precisely, the editor (Cowboy Neal) has an invalid forwarding address:
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:
jdp@mccarthy.vg
(generated from pudge@andover.net)
SMTP error from remote mailer after RCPT TO::
host akane.blockstackers.com [216.144.199.194]:
550 Unknown local part jdp in
I just had a quick look through the US Constitution. Seems to mostly regulate government. Nothing about murder, theft, assault, etc or most other crimes (except treason). So these shouldn't be punished?
Better, write s title or code number in the transparent part in the centre and you don't lose any capacity. Keep the contents list on the cover or a file on your PC.
I was given some cheap disks that were labelled with some kind of permanent marker. They worked fine then. A couple of years later I was looking for a file that might have been on them and found them largely unreadable. Looking at the actual disk from the bottom I can see the metal layer is completely gone directly below the ink (which has itself faded, or maybe sunk into the disk.
Here's the post that Belkin have apparently retracted
from groups.google:
From: ericd@belkin.com (Eric Deming)
Subject: Re: [OT-evil marketing] Belkin does Verislime one better - router spam!
Date: 5 Nov 2003 15:25:28 -0800
Organization: http://groups.google.com
"JerryMouse" wrote in message news:...
> Mr. Uh Clem wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> What does Belkin say when you complain?
>
> I'd make their life miserable until they removed the offending software from
> my machine.
>
> You did not conset to this aspect of your machine's modification - this is
> nothing less than malicious.
>
> Raise hell.
I was made aware of this posting by an e-mail that was sent to
Belkin's tech support e-mail box. Since I am a product manager for
Belkin's LAN products and was very involved with the development of
the Parental Control feature, I feel that I can shed some light on
this subject. Firstly, without trying to sound too stand-offish, we
are not talking about SPAM here. For me to clarify, an understanding
of the Parental Control service will really be needed.
Since Parental Control is a subscription service, Belkin wanted to
make registering for the service very easy. Since the router actually
will work in tandem with an outside server (Cerberian,
www.cerberian.com) registration information needs to be collected and
sent to Belkin and Cerberian to activate an account. Traditional
methods of registration, such as asking the user to go to a website or
navigate to the Router's internal Web page to enter information didn't
meet the ease-of-use goal. We elected to re-direct one http request to
the "Register Now" reminder page. (There is a link in a previous
posting if you want to see it) This page asks the user to register for
the service for a free 6 month trial. Now, granted this looks like an
ad. It should, it is intended to be informative and easy enough to
understand. At this point, the user can register or click "No Thanks".
Clicking "No Thanks" sets a flag in the Router to stop the Router from
re-directing every 8 hours to the reminder page. (Again remember, only
one http request every 8 hours). Admittedly, there is no controlling
which computer on the LAN this message will pop up on. If the user
just closes the window without clicking "No Thanks", then the flag is
never set, and the reminders will continue. Now, if you are the type
that doesn't want to click the "No Thanks" button, then no problem.
Navigate to the Router's internal web interface (default IP =
192.168.2.1), click on the Parental Control menu. In the Menu, select
"Don't Remind every 8 hours" (This phrase actually varies a bit, but
you get the idea) then click "Apply Changes". DONE. Nothing to it. By
the way, this procedure might have to be done if your router is behind
a firewall. Reason: filter.belkin.com sends a response to the Router
to set the flag. Firewalls will block the response. This might explain
the problem in a school for instance.
We did this not to be evil, we did this to make sure that any
non-techy person (part of our target audience) would have ample
opportunity to opt in or out of the free 6 month trial of the Parental
Control feature. The Router doesn't collect information on you and
send it to Belkin. We don't have the ability to SPAM you at a later
time if you select "No Thanks" or turn off the Reminder manually. I
know this feature might be misunderstood and might PO some people. I
know the manual could do a better job explaining it. These are all
things that we at Belkin are working to remedy.
Oh, one last bit, when upgrading firmware for the Routers that
originally shipped without the Parental Control feature, the new
firmware has this feature added. This was by popular demand. Our
customer install base began to notice the Parental Control feature on
new models that we are shipping, and wanted a solution for themselves
without having to buy a new product. So, we accommodated them.
I'm happy to answer any questions if you have any. Thanks!
Isn't it odd that this message isn't (now) available on Google?
Does anyone have a copy from usenet they can post?
Now they have one of the shortest URLs I know: http://av.com.
I see now. Your morality is "Kill them all and let God sort them out".
I read his Blog. Maybe you should. Unlike you, he did not attribute his firing to Mac fanaticism.
Perhaps you can point out where I "attribute his firing to Mac fanaticism". Perhaps not, since that isn't what I said.
Do you in all honesty believe that a court would sustain a prosecution? It's a fucking photp of the inside of a truck. What was disclosed? Judges want some evidence of harm done before imposing a penalty.
They could have made his life hell dealing with it though. So I suppose in America one should tug one's forelock and thank the bossman for not kicking you after he throws you out the door.
It all boils down to: this was an over reaction. The punishment was out of scale. No harm was done to MS, and the offending information could have been removed before it came to anyone's notice if they hadn't been thuggish about it.
Yes you do and yes it is. If an employee shows questionable judgement, you don't keep him/her around until that judgement costs your company big-time.
That's your idea of morality?
>So they fire the guy and create massive publicity for this disclosure. Security was just the pretext.
Then what was the real reason? Why did they want all of this bad publicity? This must be a very complicated evil plan.
I didn't say there was an evil plan. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Why was some guy who works in the print shop hanging around the loading dock taking photos?
RTFA. He is a Mac fanboy. He wanted to share his excitement at seeing a truckload of Macs.
Yes it is.
Of course not, you punish all drunk drivers to avoid some of them from doing harm.
The "precrime" aspect of charging drunk drivers who haven't broken any other laws is justifiable because lives are at risk.
just because no harm happened to come from proscribed behaviors doesn't mean that no punishment should come from them.
Well, to go back to your drunk driver analogy, driving drunk can cost you your license and maybe get you in jail. Driving drunk and killing people will get you in jail for a very long time. MS applied the corporate death penalty for a technical breach of rules.
Sure. But instead of pointing this out and asking him to pull it they fired him. And just again, it WASN'T an office, it was the inside of a delivery truck. No screen captures of killer apps, etc. A truck.
Think about the questions that go through the minds of the security people: Today it was the loading dock but what will it be tomorrow?
You don't fire people because of something that someone else might do tomorrow. (Well, obviously you do, but it's not morally justifiable.)
They might be just Macs to you. Someone else might have other information that they are able to put together with that in order to ascertain something that Microsoft wishes to keep secret.
They ARE "just Macs". Everyone knows that MS uses Macs. They were delivering office equipment. Would he have been fired if it was a dozen photocopiers? (Maybe if it was a dozen shredders...)
So they fire the guy and create massive publicity for this disclosure. Security was just the pretext.
Most engineering firms are very guarded and don't want pictures of their facilities distributed over the Internet.
Facilities? A truck, not a research lab of any description. "If you were 40 years younger and if these nail clippers were a samurai sword you might be a terrorist. So we'll do a cavity search just to cover our asses."