Apparently, rebate fraud is a real problem in the industry. It's not the fact that you did or did not purchase quicken. It's the fact that you may be one of those people who are making a rebate by scamming software companies.
It used to work like this. Buy a piece of hardware which was offering a rebate, cut out the UPC code, and send the rebate in with upc code from box. Return product to store, complaining that it doesn't work. Get refund, and wait for rebate check. That was until Best Buy and others refused to take back returns if the UPC was not attached.
Basically people started to figure out how to make a few hundred bucks by just cutting and sending UPC symbols. And that's why you have to go through the rebate center who's job is to make sure every rebate request follows the explicit rules of that particular rebate. And yes, they will just reject you if you didn't do everything exactly as they ask, like not highlighting the purchase on the receipt.
And that's also why I don't like rebates, and stores that aggressively market rebates (like Best Buy) unless the instant rebates are given to you instantly, and at the register.
I remember back in my college days when the premiere of NYPD blue came on the local ABC affiliate. The local affiliate decided to not air it due to an apparently provocative scene which scared the moral minority, airing in it's place some religious offering from the local churches. I distinctly remember reading a newspaper story telling the reader that the station "censored" the NYPD Blue premiere.
I'll play along for a sec. So I, the paper, and another 20 million americans got our definition wrong. Apparently they merely "filtered" the "content".
Problem is, it's the same evil but with different words. You can call it whatever you want, "removing morally objectionable content", "filtering", "moral processing", whatever the hell you'd like to call it, but the word that best fits it is still "censorship".
Any objection you raise to its proper place in the english language is simply a technicality on proper usage, and not a centerpiece for an argurment.
To be truthful, the watermark is embedded in the digital representation of the analog signal.
Once that digital representation is converted back to analog, all bets are off. Now you get into the so-called Signal to Noise ratio area. Is there enough signal in the Watermark to stick through the noise? I don't know.
You can test this, hook a cable from the line-in to line-out of your sound card, and see if the watermark actually survives the digital-to-analog-back-to-digital process. You didn't mention if you actually did this, but I, and others would be interested in your results, if any.
Well, you're mostly right here, sorta. But as Bruce Schneier pointed out, it still won't survive a brute force attack.
See, you can either make the watermark as an audible signal, which most people won't accept, or you can bury it in the noise.
If it's audible, most people won't even bother.
If it's in the noise, a digital noise filter can potentially remove it. Or just get several differently watermarked files, and use a DSP to smooth over any differences, and then convert it to MP3/Ogg, or any other player that doesn't have a license restriction.
It's not that SDMI will fly, it's that it won't even get off the ground.
No offense or anything, but you're being a tad naive. Look at what Bruce Scheiner said in his latest Cryptogram:
2. Even if the contest was meaningful and the technology survived it, watermarking does not work. It is impossible to design a music watermarking technology that cannot be removed. Here's a brute-force attack: play the music and re-record it. Do it multiple times and use DSP technology to combine the recordings and eliminate noise. Almost always there is a shortcut technique to neutralize the watermark, but the brute-force attack always works.
3. Even if watermarking works, it does not solve the content-protection problem. If a media player only plays watermarked files, then copies of a file will play. If a media player refuses to play watermarked files, then analog-to-digital copies will still work. If a watermark is designed to identify the legitimate owner of the file, it still doesn't prove who copied the file or provide the copyright owner with a party worth suing.
You write "The song file will be viewable if you decode it with your private key." Well, just decode it with your private key and then distribute the decoded song to all your friends around the world, no real magic here.
Actually that is an option, and it was on the table. However, the Gore team couldn't get Bush to go along with it. Bush objected for mostly geographical reasons -- it turns out that most of punch card machines were in heavy democratic areas, where Gore would have gained the most ground anyway in a hand recount. Also, philosophically, Bush argued against hand recounts in federal court, and didn't want to appear to be hypocritical while still fighting the federal court battle.
To my knowledge, After labor day, neither candidate visited Maine, Kansas, Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusets, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska.... all states with a handful of electoral votes each.
I could be wrong on a couple, I guess, but most of 'em no one visited coz Gore wrapped up New England (for the most part) and Bush had most of the west.
The version of the white album that you have on LP is, well, licensed to you. No, you don't own the IP, but then you own the album with the IP on it.
This seems to make sense, until you get to other forms of IP.
To muddy the waters a bit. I own a copy of the song "Smells like teen spirit" by Nirvana. Does that give me the right to own a copy of the cover of that song done by Tori Amos? I mean, afterall your IP is my IP, right? Do I get free access to the sheet music for that song?
So, yes you own the white album LP, so you can listen to all the beatles songs on the LP to your hearts content, and you can do so for as long as you own the album. But if you want to listen to those same songs digitally remastered on CD, then yes, you need to buy them on CD.
I already made the argument about what you now just said 3 posts or so ago. Go back up and look.
If MS the corporate entity paid taxes, MS the group of shareholders would be taxed twice.
You idiot. The law says that corporations can be taxed. I wasn't debating your legal wish list here. I was debating whether or not a loophole should be closed or not.
I just realized you don't know the topic of debate. It's time to stop.
lease correct me if I'm wrong (and I have a sneaking suspicion that I am... I hate to think that the system is even more screwy than I thought), but the company isn't free to just print up as many shares as they wish, they have a limited supply. At some point they run out, and either have to buy back stock or stop paying employees in stock options.
You really should have read the Motley fool article. I had a sneaking suspicion that you indeed did not.
Yes, you can come up with a scheme that does both, prevents employees from cashing in on their options until the stock reaches a certain price, and generates new stock certificates for those that do have options yet to be exercised. In fact I suspect MS does have such a price-control system on their options as a stop gap measure, should the stock never rise again.
Yes, Virginia, profit and loss statements are meaningless on a company balance sheet, at least to an investor. What investors look at is the cash flow, and whether or not it's positive or negative, basically summed up by the "Cash is KING" idea. Corporations will sometimes declare profits before the money has come in, which is reflected in the balance sheet, but meaningless in the bank account. MS has a huge cash flow coming in, which it also considers to be profit, and it is currently untaxed.
At any rate, the point has been well made by others that plenty of taxes are being paid on those profits anyway. How many times do you think a corporation's profit should be taxed, anyway?
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!!! YOU IDIOT! YOU COMPLETELY MISSED THE POINT!!! MS DOESN'T PAY ANY TAXES!!!!
Okay, I'm sorry for calling you an Idiot. But that was the whole point. MS should be taxed only once, which is is once more the value that they are being taxed currently.
MS as a seperate entity from both employees and shareholders? Absurd!
I was actually talking about your analogy not fitting. But since we're on the topic the IRS does distinguish between the three come tax time with three separate sets of rules. Since I didn't incorporate myself and offer stock options, I will have to pay taxes this year.
Of course there's a difference between the majority share holders, the minority share holders, employees with stock options, and the cash in the bank that belongs to MS in the bank that only the majority share owners can control, and all other corporate assets... Your simple analogy simply fails.
And if MS clearly had a loss, it's not reflected on the balance sheets, nor in the cash on hand, nor in the price of the stock. Therefore one can conlude that maybe it's *NOT* a loss. It appears that MS is using this as a genuine source of income, who can then turn it back into other investments.
Now, you and I can go back and forth playing pen and paper games all night long. But at the end of the year, if a company has more cash coming in then going out on the balance sheet, it's making a profit and should be taxed for it, especially when it's using a tax-shelter to generate more income as reported to its shareholders.
What the hell, I did look it in a book called, "Archi med es' Revenge" written by Paul Hoffman in 1988
In that book he devotes a chapter to the mathematics of voting. He constructed an example to show that if one candidate actually increases his popularity in the polls, it would cause him to lose an election using the "Plurality with Elimination" scheme.
The real issue was that Microsoft was making money off of employees exercising their options. One of the arguments for the stock-option deduction was that Microsoft was actually losing money and therefore should get a tax write-off. As the Fool article shows this simply wasn't true.
So not only did MS gain money off the tax loophole, they didn't pay taxes on it either.
Of course, analogies are imperfect, and yours is too. While the basic mechanics are right, Microsoft acts more as a middle man, keeping the cash it has acquired. When the Microsoft stock bubble bursts, MS loses money only on the value of the market value of the stock it owns, not on the cash it has acquired from the employees. The 5 billion remains in the bank untouched and untaxed.
So the only real question is, if the government closed the tax loophole, would MS stop giving stock options? Of course they wouldn't. They are relying on it as a major revenue stream.
To recap, Microsoft plays the shareholders amongst themselves. A price of a stock certificate is just merely the price determined by market forces, which may or may not actually represent the value of the company. And third, Microsoft has figured out a way to create a self-sustaining market bubble as a major revenue stream and tax shelter, as long as investors are willing to invest in them.
I usually use sprint as my LD provider. They've treated me pretty good in the past.
I was home one afternoon, and was called by a sprint customer service rep, saying I had been slammed. Apparently, the practice had been growing, and there were a number of different ways that one could actually be slammed.
All it really takes is your address and telephone number. For instance, have you ever participated in a raffle? By signing your name to a sheet of paper, and not flipping the paper over to read the fine print in light yellow ink, you may have just agreed to be switched to another company.
It turns out that a lot of companies that offer raffles, are really doing it so sign up new long distance customers hoping people won't notice or don't care or both.
The second time it happened, AT&T did it. I was a sprint customer, and one month I got a bill in the mail from the local exchange, and there were all these charges from AT&T. AT&T had casually $2.59 for a several one minute phone calls. This was usually because I was leaving messages on an answering machine. But the two 40 minute calls were $25 apiece. And after going back between AT&T and the local exchange 3 times, they finally figured it out, and I was given a refund.
There was a Long Distance company called "I don't care, Inc." The trick was when people would order new telephone service, the operator would ask the new customer, "Which company would you like for your long distance provider?" Of course, the unknowing customer would say, "I don't care." And that's exactly what they got, a company that jacked their long distance rates as high as 60% over regular AT&T long distance rates.
I went over to Michael Rothwell's page about it, and well, was completely underwhelmed by his initial response. Besides, lawyers will never take anything seriously unless mail addressed to them are from another lawyer.
So, perhaps a better response would have been something more like this:
Dear Sirs,
Thank you for your letter dated August 30, 2000 regarding my website flyingbuttmonkeys.com. After consulting my lawyers, a few questions remain. I have summarized these questions for you here.
1. What Intellectual Property owned by Digital convergence was revealed on flyingbuttmonkeys.com?
2. Would you please cite the exact law I am accused of violating?
3. Would you please describe how one would consent to the End User License Agreement covered by the Cuecat and Digital Convergence Intellectual Property?
4. Would it be possible for the user to use the cuecat hardware without agreeing to the End User License Agreement?
5. If a user expressed consent to the End User License Agreement described above, please explain how the user would express consent to any changes made to the End User License Agreement by Digital Convergence or any other third party?
Look at the commas.;^) The OR's in the second statement still belong with the clause that says, "customer agrees not to use the service for operation... "
resell the service or otherwise charge others to use the service, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, or on a bundled or ununbundled basis. the service is to be used solely in a private residence; living quarters in a hotel, hospital, dorm, sorority or fraternity house, or boarding house; or the residential portion of a premises which is used for both business and residential purposes. without limiting the generality of the foregoing, the service is for personal and non-commercial use only and customer agrees not to use the service for operation as an internet service provider, a server site for ftp, telnet, rlogin, e-mail hosting, "web hosting" or other similar applications, for any business enterprise including, but not limited to, those in competition with the service , OR as an end-point on a non-comcast local area network or wide area network , OR in conjunction with a vpn (virtual private network) or a vpn tunneling protocol; or
So basically you can't use the service for operation as an ISP, FTP Server etc.... and you can't use it for a business enterprise. And you can't use it for a end-point for a WAN. AND you can't use it in conjunction with a VPN.
Must have been a real slimy lawyer who wrote this one up! LOL!
Well... I'd still rather get my legal advice from a real slimy lawyer then from a slashdot poster.
resell the service or otherwise charge others to use the service, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, or on a bundled or ununbundled basis. the service is to be used solely in a private residence; living quarters in a hotel, hospital, dorm, sorority or fraternity house, or boarding house; or the residential portion of a premises which is used for both business and residential purposes. without limiting the generality of the foregoing, the service is for personal and non-commercial use only and customer agrees not to use the service for operation as an internet service provider, a server site for ftp, telnet, rlogin, e-mail hosting, "web hosting" or other similar applications, for any business enterprise including, but not limited to, those in competition with the service, or as an end-point on a non-comcast local area network or wide area network, or in conjunction with a vpn (virtual private network) or a vpn tunneling protocol; or
Aren't you glad they made a change to the customer agreement without asking for your approval first?
Technically, I think they're trying to cash in on the companies and people who are working at home and use a VPN into their corporate office. If you want to use a VPN then you need to go with their corporate broadband services. No one needs to *USE* a vpn unless they were working for a corporation anyway, right?
They had at one point suggested a whole new slew of TLD's at one point. So if you wanted cars... go to ford.cars. For music, ford.music. Beer, ford.beer. etc...
That makes better sense, because then everyone gets their own domain name, and no cooperation is necessary.
YYANALAIS. (Yes, you are not a lawyer, and it shows;^)
The courts have ruled that it's not the one with the most money that get the domain name. It's the one whose brand would occur the most damage if brand "dilution" were allowed to occur.
The courts see it like this. If you go up to most people on the street and ask them what "Ford" makes, most of the people are going to say cars.
The fact is "Ford" is a nationally recognized brand name. And it is certainly more nationally recognized than say, "Ford Musical Instruments". So of course Ford Motor Company deserves the domain ford.com.
The freenet developers just can't decide what they want this tool to be. Is this a tool for violating copyright, or is it a tool for the real propagation of free speech?
People have said many unpopular ideas, and written unpopular essays, that over time American citizens grew to accept. No, it didn't happen overnight, and it may have taken several decades for us to accept something as true. "Citizen Kane" was plagued with bad reviews when it first came out, and is now considered one of the best films of last century.
I also find it interesting, that the developers believe in deleting documents that are unpopular, but won't let people who enter keys delete their own documents.
The "RFC" which appeared in the Federal Register did a good job with explaining many issues in context in current law.
For instance, it is illegal to not allow the consumer to see the warranty, before the consumer buys it. In many cases, you can only see the warranty after you purchase the software and click the license agreement.
Maybe thee ftc will actually do something more than giving a waranty on the media only.
THAT is probably one of the most hypocritical aspects of this story.
*cough* Stop playing fast and loose with the english language. Slashdot never claimed to be an environmental or green website, so it can't be hypocritical. *duh*
slashdot is a geek web-site. It's for geeks, it's by geeks.
So... can you not be a geek and use microsoft products? Seems to me you can. Yet, microsoft products hardly get the coverage on slashdot as say the open source products do. And the coverage that MS does get is largely negative. With that in mind read what you just said:
If the oil spill had happened in say, Alaska, and a bunch of seals died, there would be no news of this on slashdot. THAT is probably one of the most hypocritical aspects of this story.
You see, by the definitions you used, slashdot is full of hypocrisy. You only ignore the hypocrisy that you happen to agree with.
We could go on forever about this, but there's no need to. Just think back to when slashdot posted the story about the Kansas State Board of Education removing evolution from the classroom. I'm sure there have been many localities, states, and countries that have attempted to remove evolution from the curriculum. Problem is, stories havn't been posted on slashdot, and that makes it hypocritical. (If you doubt that the Kansas debacle was an appropriate topic on slashdot, maybe you should look at the inordinantly large number of comments submitted in response to the story.)
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently, rebate fraud is a real problem in the industry. It's not the fact that you did or did not purchase quicken. It's the fact that you may be one of those people who are making a rebate by scamming software companies.
It used to work like this. Buy a piece of hardware which was offering a rebate, cut out the UPC code, and send the rebate in with upc code from box. Return product to store, complaining that it doesn't work. Get refund, and wait for rebate check. That was until Best Buy and others refused to take back returns if the UPC was not attached.
Basically people started to figure out how to make a few hundred bucks by just cutting and sending UPC symbols. And that's why you have to go through the rebate center who's job is to make sure every rebate request follows the explicit rules of that particular rebate. And yes, they will just reject you if you didn't do everything exactly as they ask, like not highlighting the purchase on the receipt.
And that's also why I don't like rebates, and stores that aggressively market rebates (like Best Buy) unless the instant rebates are given to you instantly, and at the register.
Bullshit.
I remember back in my college days when the premiere of NYPD blue came on the local ABC affiliate. The local affiliate decided to not air it due to an apparently provocative scene which scared the moral minority, airing in it's place some religious offering from the local churches. I distinctly remember reading a newspaper story telling the reader that the station "censored" the NYPD Blue premiere.
I'll play along for a sec. So I, the paper, and another 20 million americans got our definition wrong. Apparently they merely "filtered" the "content".
Problem is, it's the same evil but with different words. You can call it whatever you want, "removing morally objectionable content", "filtering", "moral processing", whatever the hell you'd like to call it, but the word that best fits it is still "censorship".
Any objection you raise to its proper place in the english language is simply a technicality on proper usage, and not a centerpiece for an argurment.
To be truthful, the watermark is embedded in the digital representation of the analog signal.
Once that digital representation is converted back to analog, all bets are off. Now you get into the so-called Signal to Noise ratio area. Is there enough signal in the Watermark to stick through the noise? I don't know.
You can test this, hook a cable from the line-in to line-out of your sound card, and see if the watermark actually survives the digital-to-analog-back-to-digital process. You didn't mention if you actually did this, but I, and others would be interested in your results, if any.
Well, you're mostly right here, sorta. But as Bruce Schneier pointed out, it still won't survive a brute force attack.
See, you can either make the watermark as an audible signal, which most people won't accept, or you can bury it in the noise.
If it's audible, most people won't even bother.
If it's in the noise, a digital noise filter can potentially remove it. Or just get several differently watermarked files, and use a DSP to smooth over any differences, and then convert it to MP3/Ogg, or any other player that doesn't have a license restriction.
It's not that SDMI will fly, it's that it won't even get off the ground.
2. Even if the contest was meaningful and the technology survived it, watermarking does not work. It is impossible to design a music watermarking technology that cannot be removed. Here's a brute-force attack: play the music and re-record it. Do it multiple times and use DSP technology to combine the recordings and eliminate noise. Almost always there is a shortcut technique to neutralize the watermark, but the brute-force attack always works.
3. Even if watermarking works, it does not solve the content-protection problem. If a media player only plays watermarked files, then copies of a file will play. If a media player refuses to play watermarked files, then analog-to-digital copies will still work. If a watermark is designed to identify the legitimate owner of the file, it still doesn't prove who copied the file or provide the copyright owner with a party worth suing.
You write "The song file will be viewable if you decode it with your private key." Well, just decode it with your private key and then distribute the decoded song to all your friends around the world, no real magic here.
Actually that is an option, and it was on the table. However, the Gore team couldn't get Bush to go along with it. Bush objected for mostly geographical reasons -- it turns out that most of punch card machines were in heavy democratic areas, where Gore would have gained the most ground anyway in a hand recount. Also, philosophically, Bush argued against hand recounts in federal court, and didn't want to appear to be hypocritical while still fighting the federal court battle.
That's kind of a misguided argument.
To my knowledge, After labor day, neither candidate visited Maine, Kansas, Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusets, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska.... all states with a handful of electoral votes each.
I could be wrong on a couple, I guess, but most of 'em no one visited coz Gore wrapped up New England (for the most part) and Bush had most of the west.
The version of the white album that you have on LP is, well, licensed to you. No, you don't own the IP, but then you own the album with the IP on it.
This seems to make sense, until you get to other forms of IP.
To muddy the waters a bit. I own a copy of the song "Smells like teen spirit" by Nirvana. Does that give me the right to own a copy of the cover of that song done by Tori Amos? I mean, afterall your IP is my IP, right? Do I get free access to the sheet music for that song?
So, yes you own the white album LP, so you can listen to all the beatles songs on the LP to your hearts content, and you can do so for as long as you own the album. But if you want to listen to those same songs digitally remastered on CD, then yes, you need to buy them on CD.
There's no real magic here.
I already made the argument about what you now just said 3 posts or so ago. Go back up and look.
If MS the corporate entity paid taxes, MS the group of shareholders would be taxed twice.
You idiot. The law says that corporations can be taxed. I wasn't debating your legal wish list here. I was debating whether or not a loophole should be closed or not.
I just realized you don't know the topic of debate. It's time to stop.
lease correct me if I'm wrong (and I have a sneaking suspicion that I am... I hate to think that the system is even more screwy than I thought), but the company isn't free to just print up as many shares as they wish, they have a limited supply. At some point they run out, and either have to buy back stock or stop paying employees in stock options.
You really should have read the Motley fool article. I had a sneaking suspicion that you indeed did not.
Yes, you can come up with a scheme that does both, prevents employees from cashing in on their options until the stock reaches a certain price, and generates new stock certificates for those that do have options yet to be exercised. In fact I suspect MS does have such a price-control system on their options as a stop gap measure, should the stock never rise again.
Yes, Virginia, profit and loss statements are meaningless on a company balance sheet, at least to an investor. What investors look at is the cash flow, and whether or not it's positive or negative, basically summed up by the "Cash is KING" idea. Corporations will sometimes declare profits before the money has come in, which is reflected in the balance sheet, but meaningless in the bank account. MS has a huge cash flow coming in, which it also considers to be profit, and it is currently untaxed.
At any rate, the point has been well made by others that plenty of taxes are being paid on those profits anyway. How many times do you think a corporation's profit should be taxed, anyway?
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!!! YOU IDIOT! YOU COMPLETELY MISSED THE POINT!!! MS DOESN'T PAY ANY TAXES!!!!
Okay, I'm sorry for calling you an Idiot. But that was the whole point. MS should be taxed only once, which is is once more the value that they are being taxed currently.
MS as a seperate entity from both employees and shareholders? Absurd!
I was actually talking about your analogy not fitting. But since we're on the topic the IRS does distinguish between the three come tax time with three separate sets of rules. Since I didn't incorporate myself and offer stock options, I will have to pay taxes this year.
Of course there's a difference between the majority share holders, the minority share holders, employees with stock options, and the cash in the bank that belongs to MS in the bank that only the majority share owners can control, and all other corporate assets... Your simple analogy simply fails.
And if MS clearly had a loss, it's not reflected on the balance sheets, nor in the cash on hand, nor in the price of the stock. Therefore one can conlude that maybe it's *NOT* a loss. It appears that MS is using this as a genuine source of income, who can then turn it back into other investments.
Now, you and I can go back and forth playing pen and paper games all night long. But at the end of the year, if a company has more cash coming in then going out on the balance sheet, it's making a profit and should be taxed for it, especially when it's using a tax-shelter to generate more income as reported to its shareholders.
--R
What the hell, I did look it in a book called, "Archi med es' Revenge" written by Paul Hoffman in 1988
In that book he devotes a chapter to the mathematics of voting. He constructed an example to show that if one candidate actually increases his popularity in the polls, it would cause him to lose an election using the "Plurality with Elimination" scheme.
This shows an example of the paradox in action.
--R
The real issue was that Microsoft was making money off of employees exercising their options. One of the arguments for the stock-option deduction was that Microsoft was actually losing money and therefore should get a tax write-off. As the Fool article shows this simply wasn't true.
So not only did MS gain money off the tax loophole, they didn't pay taxes on it either.
Of course, analogies are imperfect, and yours is too. While the basic mechanics are right, Microsoft acts more as a middle man, keeping the cash it has acquired. When the Microsoft stock bubble bursts, MS loses money only on the value of the market value of the stock it owns, not on the cash it has acquired from the employees. The 5 billion remains in the bank untouched and untaxed.
So the only real question is, if the government closed the tax loophole, would MS stop giving stock options? Of course they wouldn't. They are relying on it as a major revenue stream.
To recap, Microsoft plays the shareholders amongst themselves. A price of a stock certificate is just merely the price determined by market forces, which may or may not actually represent the value of the company. And third, Microsoft has figured out a way to create a self-sustaining market bubble as a major revenue stream and tax shelter, as long as investors are willing to invest in them.
So I say tax 'em.
I usually use sprint as my LD provider. They've treated me pretty good in the past.
I was home one afternoon, and was called by a sprint customer service rep, saying I had been slammed. Apparently, the practice had been growing, and there were a number of different ways that one could actually be slammed.
All it really takes is your address and telephone number. For instance, have you ever participated in a raffle? By signing your name to a sheet of paper, and not flipping the paper over to read the fine print in light yellow ink, you may have just agreed to be switched to another company.
It turns out that a lot of companies that offer raffles, are really doing it so sign up new long distance customers hoping people won't notice or don't care or both.
The second time it happened, AT&T did it. I was a sprint customer, and one month I got a bill in the mail from the local exchange, and there were all these charges from AT&T. AT&T had casually $2.59 for a several one minute phone calls. This was usually because I was leaving messages on an answering machine. But the two 40 minute calls were $25 apiece. And after going back between AT&T and the local exchange 3 times, they finally figured it out, and I was given a refund.
There was a Long Distance company called "I don't care, Inc." The trick was when people would order new telephone service, the operator would ask the new customer, "Which company would you like for your long distance provider?" Of course, the unknowing customer would say, "I don't care." And that's exactly what they got, a company that jacked their long distance rates as high as 60% over regular AT&T long distance rates.
I went over to Michael Rothwell's page about it, and well, was completely underwhelmed by his initial response. Besides, lawyers will never take anything seriously unless mail addressed to them are from another lawyer.
So, perhaps a better response would have been something more like this:
Dear Sirs,
Thank you for your letter dated August 30, 2000 regarding my website flyingbuttmonkeys.com. After consulting my lawyers, a few questions remain. I have summarized these questions for you here.
1. What Intellectual Property owned by Digital convergence was revealed on flyingbuttmonkeys.com?
2. Would you please cite the exact law I am accused of violating?
3. Would you please describe how one would consent to the End User License Agreement covered by the Cuecat and Digital Convergence Intellectual Property?
4. Would it be possible for the user to use the cuecat hardware without agreeing to the End User License Agreement?
5. If a user expressed consent to the End User License Agreement described above, please explain how the user would express consent to any changes made to the End User License Agreement by Digital Convergence or any other third party?
Thank you. I appreciate your response.
Sincerely...
Look at the commas. ;^) The OR's in the second statement still belong with the clause that says, "customer agrees not to use the service for operation ... "
resell the service or otherwise charge others to use the service, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, or on a bundled or ununbundled basis. the service is to be used solely in a private residence; living quarters in a hotel, hospital, dorm, sorority or fraternity house, or boarding house; or the residential portion of a premises which is used for both business and residential purposes. without limiting the generality of the foregoing, the service is for personal and non-commercial use only and customer agrees not to use the service for operation as an internet service provider, a server site for ftp, telnet, rlogin, e-mail hosting, "web hosting" or other similar applications, for any business enterprise including, but not limited to, those in competition with the service , OR as an end-point on a non-comcast local area network or wide area network , OR in conjunction with a vpn (virtual private network) or a vpn tunneling protocol; or
So basically you can't use the service for operation as an ISP, FTP Server etc.... and you can't use it for a business enterprise. And you can't use it for a end-point for a WAN. AND you can't use it in conjunction with a VPN.
Must have been a real slimy lawyer who wrote this one up! LOL!
Well... I'd still rather get my legal advice from a real slimy lawyer then from a slashdot poster.
resell the service or otherwise charge others to use the service, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, or on a bundled or ununbundled basis. the service is to be used solely in a private residence; living quarters in a hotel, hospital, dorm, sorority or fraternity house, or boarding house; or the residential portion of a premises which is used for both business and residential purposes. without limiting the generality of the foregoing, the service is for personal and non-commercial use only and customer agrees not to use the service for operation as an internet service provider, a server site for ftp, telnet, rlogin, e-mail hosting, "web hosting" or other similar applications, for any business enterprise including, but not limited to, those in competition with the service, or as an end-point on a non-comcast local area network or wide area network, or in conjunction with a vpn (virtual private network) or a vpn tunneling protocol; or
See, you *ARE* prohibited from using a vpn.
Aren't you glad they made a change to the customer agreement without asking for your approval first?
Technically, I think they're trying to cash in on the companies and people who are working at home and use a VPN into their corporate office. If you want to use a VPN then you need to go with their corporate broadband services. No one needs to *USE* a vpn unless they were working for a corporation anyway, right?
They had at one point suggested a whole new slew of TLD's at one point. So if you wanted cars... go to ford.cars. For music, ford.music. Beer, ford.beer. etc...
That makes better sense, because then everyone gets their own domain name, and no cooperation is necessary.
YYANALAIS. (Yes, you are not a lawyer, and it shows ;^)
The courts have ruled that it's not the one with the most money that get the domain name. It's the one whose brand would occur the most damage if brand "dilution" were allowed to occur.
The courts see it like this. If you go up to most people on the street and ask them what "Ford" makes, most of the people are going to say cars.
The fact is "Ford" is a nationally recognized brand name. And it is certainly more nationally recognized than say, "Ford Musical Instruments". So of course Ford Motor Company deserves the domain ford.com.
The freenet developers just can't decide what they want this tool to be. Is this a tool for violating copyright, or is it a tool for the real propagation of free speech?
People have said many unpopular ideas, and written unpopular essays, that over time American citizens grew to accept. No, it didn't happen overnight, and it may have taken several decades for us to accept something as true. "Citizen Kane" was plagued with bad reviews when it first came out, and is now considered one of the best films of last century.
I also find it interesting, that the developers believe in deleting documents that are unpopular, but won't let people who enter keys delete their own documents.
Apparently, the mambo-X is shipping and will release an in-dash player soon.
http://www.mambox.com/news.htm, 5th paragraph down:
"Mambo-X does not stop at P300. The in-dash version of Mambo-X (C300) will be in production soon."
BTW, does anybody have a mambo-X and want to post a review of it?
The "RFC" which appeared in the Federal Register did a good job with explaining many issues in context in current law.
For instance, it is illegal to not allow the consumer to see the warranty, before the consumer buys it. In many cases, you can only see the warranty after you purchase the software and click the license agreement.
Maybe thee ftc will actually do something more than giving a waranty on the media only.
THAT is probably one of the most hypocritical aspects of this story.
*cough* Stop playing fast and loose with the english language. Slashdot never claimed to be an environmental or green website, so it can't be hypocritical. *duh*
Bias, yes. Hypocrisy, no.
slashdot is a geek web-site. It's for geeks, it's by geeks.
So... can you not be a geek and use microsoft products? Seems to me you can. Yet, microsoft products hardly get the coverage on slashdot as say the open source products do. And the coverage that MS does get is largely negative. With that in mind read what you just said:
If the oil spill had happened in say, Alaska, and a bunch of seals died, there would be no news of this on slashdot. THAT is probably one of the most hypocritical aspects of this story.
You see, by the definitions you used, slashdot is full of hypocrisy. You only ignore the hypocrisy that you happen to agree with.
We could go on forever about this, but there's no need to. Just think back to when slashdot posted the story about the Kansas State Board of Education removing evolution from the classroom. I'm sure there have been many localities, states, and countries that have attempted to remove evolution from the curriculum. Problem is, stories havn't been posted on slashdot, and that makes it hypocritical. (If you doubt that the Kansas debacle was an appropriate topic on slashdot, maybe you should look at the inordinantly large number of comments submitted in response to the story.)