Yes, we in the beautiful, rainy-in-parts Evergreen State have an antispam law on the books. But it's not hardly worth anything, frankly.
Most of the time, you cannot sue out-of-state spammers in small claims court here as the judges will dismiss the cases citing jurisdictional problems. To avoid these problems, you have to file the cases in district or superior court. Because the rules and procedures are so much more formal, most people are not equipped to represent themselves, thus rendering the law effectively impotent.
I'm assuming you're ignorant, a troll, or a knee-jerk America-hater. In any case, let me educate you.
This is not a criminal case, this is a civil case. In a civil case, the government does not have the power to deprive a defendant of his freedom. It can, however, order him to make whole the person(s) he has injured with his conduct. And it is only necessary to prove liability by a preponderance of the evidence (i.e., more likely than not). And in a case where there is no triable issue of fact, the court can grant summary judgment to the side that is so entitled. Every common-law based legal system in the world has it.
For this reason, there is no such thing as being "convicted" of spamming because it's not a crime to spam, it's a civil offense, or tort. May I suggest an "Introduction to Law and the Legal Process" course at your nearest junior college?
And this got a Score: 2! Typical of the bilge you see on/. these days.
Re:Legit companies don't send spam
on
Meet the Spammers
·
· Score: 1
I've never had spam from a legit companny. [sic]
Legit company? I get mortgage spams all the time. I fill them out and am contacted by companies like Aames Home Loan, Washington Mutual, Bank of America, and so on. Likewise for insurance spams - Country Companies, State Farm, Safeco. Legit enough? "Legit" companies may not send spam, but they contract with spamhauses to do it. Spammers say "it's legal!" and "reach gazillions of people!"
The idiocy of PHBs in marketing departments knows no bounds.
A previous poster had talked about the "elite" ex-military guards who "know what they're doing" who will guard this Yucca Mountain repository from terrorists and other assorted vermin. Several posters have also made reference to the National Geographic article on the subject.
The dead tree version of the article carries a picture of one of the "elite" guards. Besides looking like a bit of a dork, the M16 rifle he's carrying has a red tab protruding from the ejection port. Ex-military people will recognize this as a chamber plug. Yes, these "elite" guards, supposedly the best and brightest that our military has to offer, are guarding scads of weapons-grade plutonium with unloaded guns.
4)DOE guards and STAR teams are highly trained, highly motivated, and almost exclusively made up of former 'commando' US soldiers from SEAL, Ranger, Force Recong, Green Berets, and Air Commando/Para Rescue.
Wrong.
Most guards at N-power plants are rent-a-cops.
Be that as it may, I would be very hesitant to put the words "Air Force" and "commando" next to each other. They don't call it the Air Farce for nothing.
-- Some idiot commandeers a chunk of abandoned concrete and rust in the North Sea and proclaims himself head of his own country.
-- This idiot lives there, apart from his ill wife for several years. The latter wisely retired to the mainland where little niceties like "medical care" are available. Idiot begins to think that life in his "country" may not be all it's cracked up to be.
-- Idiot's fuckpuppy, whom we'll call Idiot the Younger, meets some chowderhead last-semester college dropouts. Idiot the Younger, an admitted "computer philistine", gets a wild hair up his ass about making lotsa bucks on "that thar new Internet thang."
-- Idiot the Younger gets the idea that they can host servers in Idiot the Elder's "country" that is a run-down WWII fortress in the middle of the North Sea. These servers are allegedly censor-proof, subpoena-proof, earthquake-proof, act-of-God-proof, yada yada yada. HavenCo is born.
-- These clowns charge you $1,500 a month(yes, a month) plus their grossly-inflated hardware costs for a blazing 256Kbps of bandwidth (yes, ***K***bps)
Folks, this is a scam of the highest order. First off, by their own admission, they won't host anything that jeopardizes their Internet connectivity. In other words, no OpenNap servers, no warez, etc. And what if the choice is their connectivity or your data? Well, by their own admission, they'll tape your drives to a thermite canister, pull the pin, and chuck it over the side. So much for the claim of being able to host "anything."
Even assuming their very shaky national sovereignty claims true, (IANAL) data hosted in Sealand is by no means immune to subpoena as they claim. If I'm a plaintiff's attorney (IANAL) and I want data that's on Sealand, I subpoena it. Sure, the courts don't have jurisdiction over Sealand, but they certainly have jurisdiction over Mr. Defendant (IANAL). And when Mr. Defendant parrots the "it's in Sealand" line, the courts will not hesitate to issue a Writ of Bodily Possession. In other words, until Mr. Defendant decides to cough up his Sealand wares, he sits in the bucket. Getting cornholed by Bubba Noneck on a daily basis has a way of making previously unavailable data appear like magic. Bottom line, this line of argument didn't work for the Catholic Church and their "secret" archives and it won't work for anyone trying to stash stuff on Sealand.
Idiots Sr. and Jr. stand ready to defend Sealand "with rifle and shotgun." That doesn't do you much good when your opposition is armed with nuclear weapons. Make no mistake about it, if China, Iraq, or the RIAA decided they didn't like what was on Sealand, they would have no compunction about hiring some ex-UDTers to sink Roughs Tower in a New York second. Hell, if the US decided they didn't like Sealand, a single Tomahawk missile and it's history. Short of these measures, getting their upstream to firewall them off would be a simple task and have the same effect as a Tomahawk, hence their unwillingness to host anything that would jeopardize their Internet access.
I value privacy and freedom of expression as much as anyone. I just want to point out that paying $1,500 a month to have your website on a slow DSL line in the middle of the North Sea isn't quite the magic bullet that Idiots Sr. or Jr. would like you believe it to be. Of course, IANAL and YMMV.
Let's see here, in the server market, where Linux excels, it has achieved, what, a whole 12% market penetration? Its desktop penetration is negligible. And contrary to what most techies think, PHBs make purchasing decisions, not techies.
If Linux were going great guns as you claim, why is VA Software (no longer VA Linux Systems) teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, its stock at a whopping $0.85 a share?
I'm not a Micro$oftie by any means, but I'm a realist. Much as I'd like to believe to the contrary, M$ isn't going anywhere in the near future. As long as they have the cartooney "point-and-drool" interface that the PHBs love ("it's so EASY to use!"), M$ will be alive and well.
The job market's tight. Those who haven't been fired outright (like 16,000 WorldCommers were today) are looking at being replaced by H1Bs or having their jobs outsourced to India or China or God-only-knows where. So of course the PHBs are going to stick it to the workers.
I know, I know, if only Nader had been elected, this would never have happened. Please, spare me this leftist claptrap.
Seems that ol' Ralphie
got rich on the very corporations he railed against for years. He who introduced us to "Newt Getting-Rich" has himself gotten rich. But since he's a lefty, it's okay.
And in case you haven't noticed, the market, not the government, is doing very well, thank you, at shaking out these losers. As for the people who lost their money, well, when you invest, you take chances. Just as you people don't want to guarantee EvilMegaCorp a certain level of profit, neither should investors in the stock market.
As for the idiot Naderites, it's time for a civics lesson. I know they don't teach this in the schools anymore, but ours is a two-party system. It is set up that way. Don't believe me? Read our Constitution. Read the Federalist Papers. Only thing Nader accomplished in the last election was handing to George W. Bush (who I am not a terribly big fan of, but he's a far better choice than Bore ever would have been).
>we are also a state that has one of the best >anti-spam laws on the books. Read it yourself at
Offtopic, but what the hell . . .
It allows you to recover a measly ten bucks per message or $500. That's gonna shut the spammers down RSN! Lots of attorneys are going to jump on board to sue them spammers to collect their ten bucks. Woohoo!
Washington's law, on the other hand, provides for recovery of $500 PER MESSAGE in addition to providing that a violation of it is a violation of the state Consumer Protection Act. If it's an "interactive computer service" suing under Washington's law, it provides for damages of $1,000.
Now they'll know where their last tuition increase went. Yeah, the one that was "essential to keeping UMD a first-class/world-class/insert-buzzword-du-jour" university. It went to hire a few lawyers (probably close relatives of some high muckymuck educrats) to hire a few more lawyers/educrats who have zero tech knowledge.
But then, what do you expect from a government operation?
Have you read the paper at ALL? EXPERIENCED sysadmins are pounding the pavement. IF they can find work (a VERY big "if"), they're taking pay cuts just to be employed. What chance do illiterate snot-nosed teenagers like yourself have? NONE!
Son, you'd better learn that, regardless of what you "wan't", the world is not your oyster. Be that as it may, I would suggest looking for a new line of work. With all of the H1Bs and outsourcing of IT projects to India, IT just isn't a viable long-term career anymore.
I'm not a Microsoft fan either, but, let's face it, M$ is not going to "loose [sic] all of their software business to open source." And it is not "to [sic] late" either. Even in the server market where Linux excels, they have achieved, what, a whole 15% market penetration? What measly percentage has it achieved in the desktop market? How many tenths of one percent? And what of VA and all of these other Linux companies that were supposed to make money hand over fist? VA? Hah!
Face it, guys, the techies don't make the purchasing decisions, PHBs do. Windoze is marketed to PHBs and that's what's going to get purchased, period. I know it sucks, but open your eyes, guys!
In a 1996-97 survey of 148 undergraduates at three public universities and one private liberal arts college, the researchers found 53 percent of the students admitted to pirating software - meaning the true number likely was considerably higher.
Before I went back to school, I graduated from the police reserve academy. During the academy, I faintly recall a phrase along the lines of "anything you say can and will be used against you . . . " For some reason, if someone called me up asking me if I have committed a federal crime, I don't think most college students would 'fess up. Then again, there are the jocks and the education/sociology/psychology majors, many of whom are still using "that there new Internet thing."
When I took "sadistics" class, I remember something about a "valid" sample. 148 surveyed out of how many millions of undergrad students? Even at that, better than half still admitted to warezing! And he admits that most of the ones who said they didn't probably lied. In sum, you have an invalid sample reaching an admitted unreliable conclusion that, in itself, contradicts the article's "conclusion." Typical of the "news" you see on./
Still a third issue affecting the decline in piracy is price. Software is simply cheaper now than it was in 1996, reducing the incentive to steal, Chiang said.
Not true for the largest company in the industry. Make no mistake about it, prices for M$ products have gone up, not down, especially for their latest monstrosity, XP. When you're a monopoly, you can raise prices, even when the market is in the toilet. But I digress. Anyway, many of those academic licenses provide cheap or free (just got a fully working copy of Win2K) software with the proviso that it is to be deleted upon leaving school. And of course, every single student does so immediately after graduation. Riiiiight. That, to me, comes perilously close to the dictionary definition of "piracy", further invalidating the "conclusion" of the "study."
You are correct, our Army today has been feminized, sissified, dumbed-down, Clintonized to the point where they realized fighting a two-front war is impossible. Rumsfeld said so, they're no longer going to bank on fighting one.
Coo-gars are dense, "WAZZU" sucks festering gonads
on
The Future of MREs
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Offtopic as hell, but here is your much-deserved bitchslap, mister coo-gar. Actually, this should be modded up as a public service for any of the younger/.ers who may be considering WSU.
I know of no reason why attending WSU is a matter of pride. What's there to be proud of? The worst football, if not the worst athletic, program in the Pac-10? Probably one of the worst field coaches in college football in Mikey Price? Oh, I forgot, they went to the Rose Bowl in 1998 for the first time in 50 or so years - and lost, of course. What happens after this? The WSU athletic idiots give him a seven year contract extension after only, what, three winning PAC-10 seasons in the previous ten years? Then there's the Apple Cup "rivalry" between WSU and the University of Washington. Last time I checked, a rivalry is when two teams are somewhat evenly matched. WSU and the UW are not, UW has won three times as many Apple Cup games as WSU. A better football rivalry for WSU is between it and the 1-AA University of Idaho just up the road, to whom they've lost twice in the last three years.
"WAZZU" is run by a spineless, incompetent administration that will spread its legs for the highest alumni donor. Anyone who doubts this needs only to realize that WSU took ZERO action against the fraternities involved in the campus riot four years ago for fear of loss of contributions. That riot did inestimable damage to WSU's already shaky-at-best reputation. What's more, their oh-so-wonderful Edward R. Murrow School of Communications (now THERE'S an employable major!) gave Ted Turner the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Journalism! Now, Ted Turner wouldn't know journalistic excellence if it bit him in the face, but he's got piles and piles of cash.
Typical coo-gar is there to party and not to get an education. Then again, it's quite hard to get one there, especially in a major that is remotely employable or useful. This is a school that announced an E-commerce degree option - in 2001, after the E-commerce bubble had long since burst. You can get an "Information Systems" degree there without taking a SINGLE coding class! Their "computer science" department does not offer a course in C++. Worst of all, anything to do with technology is bought and paid for by His Billness, which of course means no courses in anything not Micro$chlock. WSU was one of the first schools approved to offer M$ certification as an "academic" course, again well after the market for Minesweeper Champion Solitare Experts had dried up. This is a school where one of their sysadmins told me that Win2K has a lower acquisition cost and lower cost of ownership than Linux! And don't even THINK of criticizing M$ there. No, everybody knows that M$ is the only software company in existence.
How bad is WSU's academic reputation? Well, their last two "career" fairs, even when the job market was hot, speak for themselves. Every major retail chain was well-represented. Wal-Mart, Target, Blockbuster, Shucks, JC Penney, K-Mart, you name it, they were there. Of the several dozen companies that showed up, maybe four had ANY kind of high-tech openings and they were all deluged with resumes.
All in all, WSU is like the embarrassing relative that nobody talks about who shows up at the family reunion. It's a fourth rate school with a crappy athletic department in the middle of a wheat field. Small wonder why their enrollment is down and they can't attract decent athletes to their losing teams. Thank God I saw the light and transferred to the UW while I still could.
We actually have a very strong antispam law here. All you have to prove is either the subject line is misleading, another's domain name was used without their permission, or the point of origin/transmission path is forged. Basically, this covers about 99% of spam. Individual consumers can sue the spammers for $500 per message, an "interactive computer service" can sue for $1,000 per message. I have one case pending now and several more in the pipeline.
Check your facts before you run off at the mouth. No, wait, this is/. . . .
The point is, Joe Sixpack with two teeth and an eighth grade education doesn't know anything about USB region encoding. He just knows that he has to buy the "Mahkruhshast ahpruvd kuntruluh."
Now, if enough people do buy this stuff, M$ will come up with a more bulletproof way of locking out the "unapproved" controllers.
In order to recover damages (i.e., money) you have to show that you were, well, damaged. And Be can easily demonstrate now that they've been harmed by Mickey$oft.
Keep in mind that M$ has had to pay dearly for this sort of thing before. They settled with Caldera over DR-DOS early last year IIRC. And M$ noticed it - they admitted having to take a charge against earnings to pay it. It happened close to trial when M$ was getting ready to take a beating.
Make no mistake about it - Be can win and they can win big. After all, the law firms representing them have agreed to take the case on contingency, meaning if they don't win, the lawyers don't get paid. One should wonder what they know that we don't.
1. Not only will Office XP++ not be written for OS X86, but Office XP++ for WinDoze will not open any file written by any previous version of Mac Office ("this file was written with an unauthorized version of Office and may {"contain viruses/have bugs/fsck up your box"}. Also, during the registration process for WinDoze XP++, the registration wizard will scan your HDD for, and spontaneously delete, any such documents. Or the above becomes part of the next "security update" to Office.
2. M$ will design incompatibilities into asp.net, etc., such that any Mac browser is rendered impotent. Also, M$ could bring pressure to bear on other software venders such as Adobe to stop developing for Apple ("you develop for them or us - you pick"). They refuse? See #1. M$ backs down on it? See #1 for any documents written using the third-party software on the Apple platform.
3. See #2 on the CPU side of the house. The Pentium/Athlon du jour suddenly don't run due to an incompat . . . err . . . innovation. But it's just a coincidence, of course. Not a bug, a feature. CPU makers refuse? See #1.
4. Following 1, 2, 3, or 5, Apple, on the verge of bankruptcy, begs M$ to bail them out again. M$ agrees, so as to keep the DOJ and the states off their back, but only on the condition that it discontinues OS X86. (Not developing OS X86 was one of many conditions of the first bailout.)
5. #3 on the networking side that becomes a part of the next mandatory (read: machine won't run until it's installed) "service(d) pack" for Windows XP or part of Windows XP++. All of a sudden, none of the M$ boxes talk to the OS X86 ones.
Think I'm kidding? M$ has done all of this before. Novell? DR-DOS? Netscape?
Apple wouldn't steadily go bankrupt, they'd be nipples north in a New York second. Steve Jobs is a marketing idiot, he couldn't sell ice water to people in Hell, but he won't commit corporate suicide this way.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, we in the beautiful, rainy-in-parts Evergreen State have an antispam law on the books. But it's not hardly worth anything, frankly.
:)
Most of the time, you cannot sue out-of-state spammers in small claims court here as the judges will dismiss the cases citing jurisdictional problems. To avoid these problems, you have to file the cases in district or superior court. Because the rules and procedures are so much more formal, most people are not equipped to represent themselves, thus rendering the law effectively impotent.
Now, for those of us who can . . .
I'm assuming you're ignorant, a troll, or a knee-jerk America-hater. In any case, let me educate you.
/. these days.
This is not a criminal case, this is a civil case. In a civil case, the government does not have the power to deprive a defendant of his freedom. It can, however, order him to make whole the person(s) he has injured with his conduct. And it is only necessary to prove liability by a preponderance of the evidence (i.e., more likely than not). And in a case where there is no triable issue of fact, the court can grant summary judgment to the side that is so entitled. Every common-law based legal system in the world has it.
For this reason, there is no such thing as being "convicted" of spamming because it's not a crime to spam, it's a civil offense, or tort. May I suggest an "Introduction to Law and the Legal Process" course at your nearest junior college?
And this got a Score: 2! Typical of the bilge you see on
I've never had spam from a legit companny. [sic]
Legit company? I get mortgage spams all the time. I fill them out and am contacted by companies like Aames Home Loan, Washington Mutual, Bank of America, and so on. Likewise for insurance spams - Country Companies, State Farm, Safeco. Legit enough? "Legit" companies may not send spam, but they contract with spamhauses to do it. Spammers say "it's legal!" and "reach gazillions of people!"
The idiocy of PHBs in marketing departments knows no bounds.
A previous poster had talked about the "elite" ex-military guards who "know what they're doing" who will guard this Yucca Mountain repository from terrorists and other assorted vermin. Several posters have also made reference to the National Geographic article on the subject.
The dead tree version of the article carries a picture of one of the "elite" guards. Besides looking like a bit of a dork, the M16 rifle he's carrying has a red tab protruding from the ejection port. Ex-military people will recognize this as a chamber plug. Yes, these "elite" guards, supposedly the best and brightest that our military has to offer, are guarding scads of weapons-grade plutonium with unloaded guns.
Sure makes me sleep easier.
Most guards at N-power plants are
rent-a-cops.
Be that as it may, I would be very hesitant to put the words "Air Force" and "commando" next to each other. They don't call it the Air Farce for nothing.
"Sleep tight tonight, your Air Force will."
Mod me offtopic, I don't care.
So let me get this straight:
-- Some idiot commandeers a chunk of abandoned concrete and rust in the North Sea and proclaims himself head of his own country.
-- This idiot lives there, apart from his ill wife for several years. The latter wisely retired to the mainland where little niceties like "medical care" are available. Idiot begins to think that life in his "country" may not be all it's cracked up to be.
-- Idiot's fuckpuppy, whom we'll call Idiot the Younger, meets some chowderhead last-semester college dropouts. Idiot the Younger, an admitted "computer philistine", gets a wild hair up his ass about making lotsa bucks on "that thar new Internet thang."
-- Idiot the Younger gets the idea that they can host servers in Idiot the Elder's "country" that is a run-down WWII fortress in the middle of the North Sea. These servers are allegedly censor-proof, subpoena-proof, earthquake-proof, act-of-God-proof, yada yada yada. HavenCo is born.
-- These clowns charge you $1,500 a month(yes, a month) plus their grossly-inflated hardware costs for a blazing 256Kbps of bandwidth (yes, ***K***bps)
Folks, this is a scam of the highest order. First off, by their own admission, they won't host anything that jeopardizes their Internet connectivity. In other words, no OpenNap servers, no warez, etc. And what if the choice is their connectivity or your data? Well, by their own admission, they'll tape your drives to a thermite canister, pull the pin, and chuck it over the side. So much for the claim of being able to host "anything."
Even assuming their very shaky national sovereignty claims true, (IANAL) data hosted in Sealand is by no means immune to subpoena as they claim. If I'm a plaintiff's attorney (IANAL) and I want data that's on Sealand, I subpoena it. Sure, the courts don't have jurisdiction over Sealand, but they certainly have jurisdiction over Mr. Defendant (IANAL). And when Mr. Defendant parrots the "it's in Sealand" line, the courts will not hesitate to issue a Writ of Bodily Possession. In other words, until Mr. Defendant decides to cough up his Sealand wares, he sits in the bucket. Getting cornholed by Bubba Noneck on a daily basis has a way of making previously unavailable data appear like magic. Bottom line, this line of argument didn't work for the Catholic Church and their "secret" archives and it won't work for anyone trying to stash stuff on Sealand.
Idiots Sr. and Jr. stand ready to defend Sealand "with rifle and shotgun." That doesn't do you much good when your opposition is armed with nuclear weapons. Make no mistake about it, if China, Iraq, or the RIAA decided they didn't like what was on Sealand, they would have no compunction about hiring some ex-UDTers to sink Roughs Tower in a New York second. Hell, if the US decided they didn't like Sealand, a single Tomahawk missile and it's history. Short of these measures, getting their upstream to firewall them off would be a simple task and have the same effect as a Tomahawk, hence their unwillingness to host anything that would jeopardize their Internet access.
I value privacy and freedom of expression as much as anyone. I just want to point out that paying $1,500 a month to have your website on a slow DSL line in the middle of the North Sea isn't quite the magic bullet that Idiots Sr. or Jr. would like you believe it to be. Of course, IANAL and YMMV.
Let's see here, in the server market, where Linux excels, it has achieved, what, a whole 12% market penetration? Its desktop penetration is negligible. And contrary to what most techies think, PHBs make purchasing decisions, not techies.
If Linux were going great guns as you claim, why is VA Software (no longer VA Linux Systems) teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, its stock at a whopping $0.85 a share?
I'm not a Micro$oftie by any means, but I'm a realist. Much as I'd like to believe to the contrary, M$ isn't going anywhere in the near future. As long as they have the cartooney "point-and-drool" interface that the PHBs love ("it's so EASY to use!"), M$ will be alive and well.
The job market's tight. Those who haven't been fired outright (like 16,000 WorldCommers were today) are looking at being replaced by H1Bs or having their jobs outsourced to India or China or God-only-knows where. So of course the PHBs are going to stick it to the workers.
I know, I know, if only Nader had been elected, this would never have happened. Please, spare me this leftist claptrap.
Seems that ol' Ralphie got rich on the very corporations he railed against for years. He who introduced us to "Newt Getting-Rich" has himself gotten rich. But since he's a lefty, it's okay.
And in case you haven't noticed, the market, not the government, is doing very well, thank you, at shaking out these losers. As for the people who lost their money, well, when you invest, you take chances. Just as you people don't want to guarantee EvilMegaCorp a certain level of profit, neither should investors in the stock market.
As for the idiot Naderites, it's time for a civics lesson. I know they don't teach this in the schools anymore, but ours is a two-party system. It is set up that way. Don't believe me? Read our Constitution. Read the Federalist Papers. Only thing Nader accomplished in the last election was handing to George W. Bush (who I am not a terribly big fan of, but he's a far better choice than Bore ever would have been).
You probably will get canned, unless you get replaced by an H1B or your job gets shipped to India.
>we are also a state that has one of the best >anti-spam laws on the books. Read it yourself at
Offtopic, but what the hell . . .
It allows you to recover a measly ten bucks per message or $500. That's gonna shut the spammers down RSN! Lots of attorneys are going to jump on board to sue them spammers to collect their ten bucks. Woohoo!
Washington's law, on the other hand, provides for recovery of $500 PER MESSAGE in addition to providing that a violation of it is a violation of the state Consumer Protection Act. If it's an "interactive computer service" suing under Washington's law, it provides for damages of $1,000.
Now they'll know where their last tuition increase went. Yeah, the one that was "essential to keeping UMD a first-class/world-class/insert-buzzword-du-jour" university. It went to hire a few lawyers (probably close relatives of some high muckymuck educrats) to hire a few more lawyers/educrats who have zero tech knowledge.
But then, what do you expect from a government operation?
Have you read the paper at ALL? EXPERIENCED sysadmins are pounding the pavement. IF they can find work (a VERY big "if"), they're taking pay cuts just to be employed. What chance do illiterate snot-nosed teenagers like yourself have? NONE!
Son, you'd better learn that, regardless of what you "wan't", the world is not your oyster. Be that as it may, I would suggest looking for a new line of work. With all of the H1Bs and outsourcing of IT projects to India, IT just isn't a viable long-term career anymore.
I'm not a Microsoft fan either, but, let's face it, M$ is not going to "loose [sic] all of their software business to open source." And it is not "to [sic] late" either. Even in the server market where Linux excels, they have achieved, what, a whole 15% market penetration? What measly percentage has it achieved in the desktop market? How many tenths of one percent? And what of VA and all of these other Linux companies that were supposed to make money hand over fist? VA? Hah!
Face it, guys, the techies don't make the purchasing decisions, PHBs do. Windoze is marketed to PHBs and that's what's going to get purchased, period. I know it sucks, but open your eyes, guys!
Bending Boeing over? Hah! Boeing pays ZERO property or B&O tax. If that's a "bending over", I'd like to get in on that action.
In a 1996-97 survey of 148 undergraduates at three public universities and one private liberal arts college, the researchers found 53 percent of the students admitted to pirating software - meaning the true number likely was considerably higher.
Before I went back to school, I graduated from the police reserve academy. During the academy, I faintly recall a phrase along the lines of "anything you say can and will be used against you . . . " For some reason, if someone called me up asking me if I have committed a federal crime, I don't think most college students would 'fess up. Then again, there are the jocks and the education/sociology/psychology majors, many of whom are still using "that there new Internet thing."
When I took "sadistics" class, I remember something about a "valid" sample. 148 surveyed out of how many millions of undergrad students? Even at that, better than half still admitted to warezing! And he admits that most of the ones who said they didn't probably lied. In sum, you have an invalid sample reaching an admitted unreliable conclusion that, in itself, contradicts the article's "conclusion." Typical of the "news" you see on ./
Still a third issue affecting the decline in piracy is price. Software is simply cheaper now than it was in 1996, reducing the incentive to steal, Chiang said.
Not true for the largest company in the industry. Make no mistake about it, prices for M$ products have gone up, not down, especially for their latest monstrosity, XP. When you're a monopoly, you can raise prices, even when the market is in the toilet. But I digress. Anyway, many of those academic licenses provide cheap or free (just got a fully working copy of Win2K) software with the proviso that it is to be deleted upon leaving school. And of course, every single student does so immediately after graduation. Riiiiight. That, to me, comes perilously close to the dictionary definition of "piracy", further invalidating the "conclusion" of the "study."
You are correct, our Army today has been feminized, sissified, dumbed-down, Clintonized to the point where they realized fighting a two-front war is impossible. Rumsfeld said so, they're no longer going to bank on fighting one.
Offtopic as hell, but here is your much-deserved bitchslap, mister coo-gar. Actually, this should be modded up as a public service for any of the younger /.ers who may be considering WSU.
I know of no reason why attending WSU is a matter of pride. What's there to be proud of? The worst football, if not the worst athletic, program in the Pac-10? Probably one of the worst field coaches in college football in Mikey Price? Oh, I forgot, they went to the Rose Bowl in 1998 for the first time in 50 or so years - and lost, of course. What happens after this? The WSU athletic idiots give him a seven year contract extension after only, what, three winning PAC-10 seasons in the previous ten years? Then there's the Apple Cup "rivalry" between WSU and the University of Washington. Last time I checked, a rivalry is when two teams are somewhat evenly matched. WSU and the UW are not, UW has won three times as many Apple Cup games as WSU. A better football rivalry for WSU is between it and the 1-AA University of Idaho just up the road, to whom they've lost twice in the last three years.
"WAZZU" is run by a spineless, incompetent administration that will spread its legs for the highest alumni donor. Anyone who doubts this needs only to realize that WSU took ZERO action against the fraternities involved in the campus riot four years ago for fear of loss of contributions. That riot did inestimable damage to WSU's already shaky-at-best reputation. What's more, their oh-so-wonderful Edward R. Murrow School of Communications (now THERE'S an employable major!) gave Ted Turner the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Journalism! Now, Ted Turner wouldn't know journalistic excellence if it bit him in the face, but he's got piles and piles of cash.
Typical coo-gar is there to party and not to get an education. Then again, it's quite hard to get one there, especially in a major that is remotely employable or useful. This is a school that announced an E-commerce degree option - in 2001, after the E-commerce bubble had long since burst. You can get an "Information Systems" degree there without taking a SINGLE coding class! Their "computer science" department does not offer a course in C++. Worst of all, anything to do with technology is bought and paid for by His Billness, which of course means no courses in anything not Micro$chlock. WSU was one of the first schools approved to offer M$ certification as an "academic" course, again well after the market for Minesweeper Champion Solitare Experts had dried up. This is a school where one of their sysadmins told me that Win2K has a lower acquisition cost and lower cost of ownership than Linux! And don't even THINK of criticizing M$ there. No, everybody knows that M$ is the only software company in existence.
How bad is WSU's academic reputation? Well, their last two "career" fairs, even when the job market was hot, speak for themselves. Every major retail chain was well-represented. Wal-Mart, Target, Blockbuster, Shucks, JC Penney, K-Mart, you name it, they were there. Of the several dozen companies that showed up, maybe four had ANY kind of high-tech openings and they were all deluged with resumes.
All in all, WSU is like the embarrassing relative that nobody talks about who shows up at the family reunion. It's a fourth rate school with a crappy athletic department in the middle of a wheat field. Small wonder why their enrollment is down and they can't attract decent athletes to their losing teams. Thank God I saw the light and transferred to the UW while I still could.
HUSKIES RULE! COUGARS DROOL!
We actually have a very strong antispam law here. All you have to prove is either the subject line is misleading, another's domain name was used without their permission, or the point of origin/transmission path is forged. Basically, this covers about 99% of spam. Individual consumers can sue the spammers for $500 per message, an "interactive computer service" can sue for $1,000 per message. I have one case pending now and several more in the pipeline.
/. . . .
Check your facts before you run off at the mouth. No, wait, this is
MOD THIS UP PLEASE! The FTC wants your spam - forward it to uce@ftc.gov. It's in their news release here.
I just found out that my cellular carrier LOGS EACH AND EVERY CALL I HAVE **EVER** MADE and makes it AVAILABLE on something called a BILL!
C'mon guys, even our beloved XMMS does the same thing with its local CDDB database.
Be that as it may, I'm running an OpenBSD firewall, so I can "block out quick" such things.
Just my $0.02 and it's worth what you paid for it.
The point is, Joe Sixpack with two teeth and an eighth grade education doesn't know anything about USB region encoding. He just knows that he has to buy the "Mahkruhshast ahpruvd kuntruluh."
Now, if enough people do buy this stuff, M$ will come up with a more bulletproof way of locking out the "unapproved" controllers.
I'm sure this is redundant, but here goes anyhoo.
In order to recover damages (i.e., money) you have to show that you were, well, damaged. And Be can easily demonstrate now that they've been harmed by Mickey$oft.
Keep in mind that M$ has had to pay dearly for this sort of thing before. They settled with Caldera over DR-DOS early last year IIRC. And M$ noticed it - they admitted having to take a charge against earnings to pay it. It happened close to trial when M$ was getting ready to take a beating.
Make no mistake about it - Be can win and they can win big. After all, the law firms representing them have agreed to take the case on contingency, meaning if they don't win, the lawyers don't get paid. One should wonder what they know that we don't.
OS X86 == suicide and they know it.
1. Not only will Office XP++ not be written for OS X86, but Office XP++ for WinDoze will not open any file written by any previous version of Mac Office ("this file was written with an unauthorized version of Office and may {"contain viruses/have bugs/fsck up your box"}. Also, during the registration process for WinDoze XP++, the registration wizard will scan your HDD for, and spontaneously delete, any such documents. Or the above becomes part of the next "security update" to Office.
2. M$ will design incompatibilities into asp.net, etc., such that any Mac browser is rendered impotent. Also, M$ could bring pressure to bear on other software venders such as Adobe to stop developing for Apple ("you develop for them or us - you pick"). They refuse? See #1. M$ backs down on it? See #1 for any documents written using the third-party software on the Apple platform.
3. See #2 on the CPU side of the house. The Pentium/Athlon du jour suddenly don't run due to an incompat . . . err . . . innovation. But it's just a coincidence, of course. Not a bug, a feature. CPU makers refuse? See #1.
4. Following 1, 2, 3, or 5, Apple, on the verge of bankruptcy, begs M$ to bail them out again. M$ agrees, so as to keep the DOJ and the states off their back, but only on the condition that it discontinues OS X86. (Not developing OS X86 was one of many conditions of the first bailout.)
5. #3 on the networking side that becomes a part of the next mandatory (read: machine won't run until it's installed) "service(d) pack" for Windows XP or part of Windows XP++. All of a sudden, none of the M$ boxes talk to the OS X86 ones.
Think I'm kidding? M$ has done all of this before. Novell? DR-DOS? Netscape?
Apple wouldn't steadily go bankrupt, they'd be nipples north in a New York second. Steve Jobs is a marketing idiot, he couldn't sell ice water to people in Hell, but he won't commit corporate suicide this way.
I dispute your facts.
Be that as it may, you don't dispute my premiss that Apple exists at the pleasure of His Billness developing Office for the platform.