Click fraud is only inflating the number of clicks made by $1B. Roughly 10% according to the article. Sounds suspiciously low to me. Spam certainly comprises greater than 10% of all email sent, why are click fraud rates so low?
I know everyone is bitching about the helmet, but four inches of plastic isn't going to save anyone if they hit a wall at 60+ MPH. He peeled out on a sidewalk! He's lucky there was a minivan there to stop him before he hit a person or a building. That was an extremely stupid move on his part.
It's OK to be importing an unprecedented amount of Chinese goods and exploit the cheap labor for every other aspect of the western economy, but Google is evil because they set up a satellite search service that institutes the required Chinese national policies?
Strawman argument. You brought up cheap Chinese goods and labor, not I. I am in no way defending the exploitation of the chinese worker.
Since the suppression of information is happening regardless of Google's presence, that should clarify that the root of the suppression is not due to U.S. companies agreeing to Chinese government demands, but is the Chinese government itself.
Fact: Google actively filters information on behalf of the Chinese government. The great firewall of China was built with American technology. Google is a part of that.
Frankly, it's also better for U.S. interests to have a "bubble" of Google servers that have a set of blacklisted/censored material for the time being, instead of watching Google lose out entirely in the fastest growing economy to the Chinese domestic engines (e.g. Baidu)
If you'll refer back to the link I posted, you'll see that at least a few members of the US Congress do not believe Google's behavior is in the best interest of the US. Chris Smith went so far as to propose a law to make Google's actions there illegal here. (Of course, his hypocritical solution allows for the filtering of content in the United States to continue, yet would make filtering the exact same material in China illegal.)
In game theory, it seems you would consider the situation a deadlock. I would consider it a prisoner dilemma. I believe human rights are more valuable than money. You must consider money to be more important than human rights. The mods seem to agree with you. Perhaps you and the mods would like to sell your rights... or is it only the rights of other people that you consider to be less important than money?
These politicians who (while it was a popular subject) wanted to crucify Google don't have any qualms about continuing to support China by importing their cheap goods and exploiting the cheap labor costs.
You can thank almighty capitalism for that. Chinese currency manipulation is largely to blame for the "cheap" goods and labor. What follows that is inevitable in a free market. Spineless politicians are more deserving of blame in regards to "one way" free trade with China. In effect, China is exploiting loopholes in a debt based global economy in an attempt to dominate said global economy.
But hey, look at the bright side: For those early adopters who shattered their glass screens, you can actually get a new 4GB phone with your $100 store credit for less than the cost of replacing the glass screen!
Sure - we have the luxury of a service economy because we have a huge amount of oil that permits things like fertiliser and pesticides and trucks to move food and all that crap.
Once we start sliding down the back end of the depletion curve, fertiliser will become increasingly expensive, as will pesticides.
Oh, don't worry. By then, we'll all be using bio-diesel.;-)
I find it hard to believe that there are so many people out there who would willingly bend over and spread their cheeks for anyone in authority who asks for whatever reason. That's such a scary thought, that I'm _hoping_ (and praying, for the future of this country) that it's just a small group of rabble-rousers who are positing those comments.
But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.
Yeah, well, I hope their final production model isn't touchscreen-only. No physical buttons means no tactile interface. I know that doesn't sound like a big deal, but I realized there was a lot I was taking for granted when I actually owned a touchscreen phone. Slick design shouldn't trump usability.
I can't say I could understand why anyone would bother to waste the money on that type of call. 10 years ago was hardly the stone age. Take a look at the screenshot for Network Time for the System 7 Macintosh. It's copyright 1990. You don't need broadband to get your time. Not now or even 10 years ago. You could easily get time with seconds accuracy from CNN, The Weather Channel, and the station programming channel at any time of day. Regardless, I don't see how this is headline news here.... Must be a slow news day:-)
Sad to see it go? I've never even heard of this until today. It sounds like something that's been obsolete for more than a decade, easily. I wonder how much they spent maintaining this service, and how much of my bill reflected that? They should have shut down this service and auctioned the equipment to the nostalgic years ago. People say government is inefficient, but I believe wastefulness is a characteristic of any giant hierarchal entity. This news certainly helps support that belief.
If they try to sue using DMCA, they will almost certainly lose.
Who says they have to sue? They could brick the phone remotely with the IMEI number. Of course, they'd have to figure out which phones were modded, but I'll bet that would be pretty easy to do with a firmware update via iTunes. It wouldn't surprise me a bit. They've already told developers to go to hell, do you think they'll be any less hostile to modders?
So why should they even bother with trying to hault cracking of the iPhone? The product has already been sold. Apple made their official dollar off of it. Their interests should really die there.
Such bullshit as the ISP's demonizing the very customers they oversold to, calling them names, etc, is just unforgivable in my book. It's just bullshit.
So the ISP plans to save money by telling their customers to take a hike? Don't worry about a thing... this will work itself out. If they lop off the top 2% of bandwidth users every month, they'll cut their subscriber base in half in less than 3 years. Any ISP stupid enough to turn away paying customers instead of simply throttling their bandwidth will put itself out of business.
Yes, and as the wiki page on inflationary cosmology points out, the idea that "everything is the center of the universe on the surface of a balloon" is still highly theoretical. Pardon the pun, but there are plenty of holes in the explanation so far. It seems to me that Einstein discovered relativity and it worked really well, but the questions Einstein's work raised and the observational data collected after the fact has puzzled man ever since.
No one has put together a decent explanation. There is no simple "aha!" or equation like E=MC^2 to string theory. All I've ever seen from it are half solved equations and a collection of bad analogies. We're still finding plenty of things, like giant holes in the universe, that were neither predicted nor make any sense at all. That's sorta the whole point of the article, no? Lots of interesting data without any cohesive explanation.
Who's to say AC is wrong about his "center of the big bang" theory? No stars, no gas, not even any "dark matter" which in and of itself is just another "giant hole" in inflationary cosmology. "No one knows where it went, but it must be there! Well... everywhere except that giant gaping hole over there." GP waving off AC's explanation dismissively when GP doesn't have a real explanation himself... that sound's to me like a Christian claiming, "We know God did it, we just don't know how. Since he's God though... that's understandable."
$250 is an expensive repair job. It's half the price of the 4GB phone. Plus another $30 for a loaner. Break it twice and you've bought a new phone. AT&T isn't dumb enough to be offering insurance on the thing either. If it were a rare occurrence, I'm sure AT&T would be happy to take your $5 a month. As it is, you break it, you're f#cked.
Don't fret, I'm sure it suffer the same fate that befell the iPod.
WTF!? The original iPod was cutting edge hardware. The 5GB firefly drive was awarded "Best of Show" at MacWorld Expo in July '01. The original 5GB iPod debuted just months later in October. You could load OS X on it and use it as a pocket sized boot drive. It was jaw dropping awesome in '01.
The iPhone on the other hand... is pretty. Maybe when they open it to developers I'll care. In the meantime, feature phones suck. So do locked phones and glass screens that break. These aren't minor nitpicks to me. They're deal breakers. I've dropped my $800 phone *hard* on average once a month since I received it in May. I can afford a high end phone. I can't afford a new one once a month though.
[Interestingly enough, while searching Google with filtering on, looking for images with iphone broken produces no pictures of iPhones with smashed glass screens, but result #19 (NSFW) is a naked guy spanking his monkey. With image filtering off, an image of an iPhone with a smashed screen is the number one result. I assume the totally unrelated NSFW picture of a guy jacking his cock is moved down the list a bit, because it doesn't make the first page of results. Hmmm.... I though image filtering was to protect children from sexual imagery, not to protect consumers from negative product imagery. It seems I learn something new every day about censorship in Amerika.]
GP is totally wrong. Grokster held nothing of the kind.
Yes, I was wrong. Totally, completely wrong.
But now... since I do value your opinion, I have to ask: Any thoughts on the point I was trying to make? Isn't AOL responsible for knowingly allowing illegal activity to occur on their network?
Could you guys stop nitpicking the Grokster thing for a minute and realize the point I'm trying to make here? AOL is not liable for illegal activity on their network because they hide behind common carrier rules that say they aren't liable as long as they are not monitoring their traffic. Well, in this case, they obviously were monitoring their traffic. They're trying to play both sides of the law by pretending to be two different companies: Elektra Records and AOL Time Warner.
Well, since AOL owns Elektra, it stands to reason that Elektra's monitoring of internet traffic voids AOL's common carrier status. AOL becomes liable for the illegal downloads, therefore, AOL should sue itself. When they became aware of the illegal activity on that IP they became responsible for that illegal activity. They should have blocked access to the files, ports, or simply terminated the account.
This opens up a whole can of whoop ass on AOL. Do you think all the music traded was copyright by Elektra Records alone? Hell no!! Every record company out there should be suing AOL's ass off right now because they voided their common carrier protections.
Looks like entrapment by AOL. Elektra sues AOL for subscriber records... oh wait, Elektra IS AOL, or was at the time. Elektra is owned by Warner music, meaning owned by Time Warner, which as everyone knows, was bought by AOL during the dotcom boom... So, new business model:
Provide internet access. Monitor usage. Allow users to download music freely Profit!!! (Sue users who download AOL music. Put competitors out of business with illegal downloads)
That's just dirty... By the way, before anyone says Kazaa is pure as the driven snow, keep in mind that the Grokster case pretty firmly established that it IS their responsiblilty as far as US law is concerned to police copyright infringement on their network. Also keep in mind that Kazaa is infamous for bundling malware with their product. If Kazaa was installed, who knows what kind of backdoors were left open by their "product."
Personally, I feel sorry for the kid. Too many lawyers and greedy bastards all the way around. If the kid had stolen a physical cd, it would have been a minor issue, not years of misery and thousands of dollars in court. Whatever happened to having the punishment fit the crime?
Slashdot Mirror
Click fraud is only inflating the number of clicks made by $1B. Roughly 10% according to the article. Sounds suspiciously low to me. Spam certainly comprises greater than 10% of all email sent, why are click fraud rates so low?
Larger copy found here.
I know everyone is bitching about the helmet, but four inches of plastic isn't going to save anyone if they hit a wall at 60+ MPH. He peeled out on a sidewalk! He's lucky there was a minivan there to stop him before he hit a person or a building. That was an extremely stupid move on his part.
Making backups of my CDs contributes $4.5 Trillion to the US economy? That greater than one third of the US GDP. Sorry if I'm a skeptic.
at the expense of the rights of people?
Strawman argument. You brought up cheap Chinese goods and labor, not I. I am in no way defending the exploitation of the chinese worker.
Fact: Google actively filters information on behalf of the Chinese government. The great firewall of China was built with American technology. Google is a part of that.
If you'll refer back to the link I posted, you'll see that at least a few members of the US Congress do not believe Google's behavior is in the best interest of the US. Chris Smith went so far as to propose a law to make Google's actions there illegal here. (Of course, his hypocritical solution allows for the filtering of content in the United States to continue, yet would make filtering the exact same material in China illegal.)
In game theory, it seems you would consider the situation a deadlock. I would consider it a prisoner dilemma. I believe human rights are more valuable than money. You must consider money to be more important than human rights. The mods seem to agree with you. Perhaps you and the mods would like to sell your rights... or is it only the rights of other people that you consider to be less important than money?
You can thank almighty capitalism for that. Chinese currency manipulation is largely to blame for the "cheap" goods and labor. What follows that is inevitable in a free market. Spineless politicians are more deserving of blame in regards to "one way" free trade with China. In effect, China is exploiting loopholes in a debt based global economy in an attempt to dominate said global economy.
That's evil. The rest is icing on the cake.
But hey, look at the bright side: For those early adopters who shattered their glass screens, you can actually get a new 4GB phone with your $100 store credit for less than the cost of replacing the glass screen!
Sure - we have the luxury of a service economy because we have a huge amount of oil that permits things like fertiliser and pesticides and trucks to move food and all that crap. Once we start sliding down the back end of the depletion curve, fertiliser will become increasingly expensive, as will pesticides.
Oh, don't worry. By then, we'll all be using bio-diesel. ;-)
I find it hard to believe that there are so many people out there who would willingly bend over and spread their cheeks for anyone in authority who asks for whatever reason. That's such a scary thought, that I'm _hoping_ (and praying, for the future of this country) that it's just a small group of rabble-rousers who are positing those comments.
But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.
Yeah, well, I hope their final production model isn't touchscreen-only. No physical buttons means no tactile interface. I know that doesn't sound like a big deal, but I realized there was a lot I was taking for granted when I actually owned a touchscreen phone. Slick design shouldn't trump usability.
I can't say I could understand why anyone would bother to waste the money on that type of call. 10 years ago was hardly the stone age. Take a look at the screenshot for Network Time for the System 7 Macintosh. It's copyright 1990. You don't need broadband to get your time. Not now or even 10 years ago. You could easily get time with seconds accuracy from CNN, The Weather Channel, and the station programming channel at any time of day. Regardless, I don't see how this is headline news here.... Must be a slow news day :-)
Even if you do run your own server... well, better safe than sorry.
Learn how to secure your emailx
(Mac OS X 10.3+) http://www.joar.com/certificates/
(Windows) http://www.marknoble.com/tutorial/smime/smime.asp
Sad to see it go? I've never even heard of this until today. It sounds like something that's been obsolete for more than a decade, easily. I wonder how much they spent maintaining this service, and how much of my bill reflected that? They should have shut down this service and auctioned the equipment to the nostalgic years ago. People say government is inefficient, but I believe wastefulness is a characteristic of any giant hierarchal entity. This news certainly helps support that belief.
A 13 year old boy recovered without a transplant with the help of one of these things as well.
If they try to sue using DMCA, they will almost certainly lose.
Who says they have to sue? They could brick the phone remotely with the IMEI number. Of course, they'd have to figure out which phones were modded, but I'll bet that would be pretty easy to do with a firmware update via iTunes. It wouldn't surprise me a bit. They've already told developers to go to hell, do you think they'll be any less hostile to modders?
So why should they even bother with trying to hault cracking of the iPhone? The product has already been sold. Apple made their official dollar off of it. Their interests should really die there.
No... It doesn't. Apple gets part of the contract revenue too.
Such bullshit as the ISP's demonizing the very customers they oversold to, calling them names, etc, is just unforgivable in my book. It's just bullshit.
So the ISP plans to save money by telling their customers to take a hike? Don't worry about a thing... this will work itself out. If they lop off the top 2% of bandwidth users every month, they'll cut their subscriber base in half in less than 3 years. Any ISP stupid enough to turn away paying customers instead of simply throttling their bandwidth will put itself out of business.
Yes, and as the wiki page on inflationary cosmology points out, the idea that "everything is the center of the universe on the surface of a balloon" is still highly theoretical. Pardon the pun, but there are plenty of holes in the explanation so far. It seems to me that Einstein discovered relativity and it worked really well, but the questions Einstein's work raised and the observational data collected after the fact has puzzled man ever since.
No one has put together a decent explanation. There is no simple "aha!" or equation like E=MC^2 to string theory. All I've ever seen from it are half solved equations and a collection of bad analogies. We're still finding plenty of things, like giant holes in the universe, that were neither predicted nor make any sense at all. That's sorta the whole point of the article, no? Lots of interesting data without any cohesive explanation.
Who's to say AC is wrong about his "center of the big bang" theory? No stars, no gas, not even any "dark matter" which in and of itself is just another "giant hole" in inflationary cosmology. "No one knows where it went, but it must be there! Well... everywhere except that giant gaping hole over there." GP waving off AC's explanation dismissively when GP doesn't have a real explanation himself... that sound's to me like a Christian claiming, "We know God did it, we just don't know how. Since he's God though... that's understandable."
Magic Apple iPhone glass never breaks.
$250 is an expensive repair job. It's half the price of the 4GB phone. Plus another $30 for a loaner. Break it twice and you've bought a new phone. AT&T isn't dumb enough to be offering insurance on the thing either. If it were a rare occurrence, I'm sure AT&T would be happy to take your $5 a month. As it is, you break it, you're f#cked.
WTF!? The original iPod was cutting edge hardware. The 5GB firefly drive was awarded "Best of Show" at MacWorld Expo in July '01. The original 5GB iPod debuted just months later in October. You could load OS X on it and use it as a pocket sized boot drive. It was jaw dropping awesome in '01.
The iPhone on the other hand ... is pretty. Maybe when they open it to developers I'll care. In the meantime, feature phones suck. So do locked phones and glass screens that break. These aren't minor nitpicks to me. They're deal breakers. I've dropped my $800 phone *hard* on average once a month since I received it in May. I can afford a high end phone. I can't afford a new one once a month though.
[Interestingly enough, while searching Google with filtering on, looking for images with iphone broken produces no pictures of iPhones with smashed glass screens, but result #19 (NSFW) is a naked guy spanking his monkey. With image filtering off, an image of an iPhone with a smashed screen is the number one result. I assume the totally unrelated NSFW picture of a guy jacking his cock is moved down the list a bit, because it doesn't make the first page of results. Hmmm.... I though image filtering was to protect children from sexual imagery, not to protect consumers from negative product imagery. It seems I learn something new every day about censorship in Amerika.]
Oh wow, looky there... crippled phones on networks outside the United States.
GP is totally wrong. Grokster held nothing of the kind.
Yes, I was wrong. Totally, completely wrong.
But now... since I do value your opinion, I have to ask: Any thoughts on the point I was trying to make? Isn't AOL responsible for knowingly allowing illegal activity to occur on their network?
Could you guys stop nitpicking the Grokster thing for a minute and realize the point I'm trying to make here? AOL is not liable for illegal activity on their network because they hide behind common carrier rules that say they aren't liable as long as they are not monitoring their traffic. Well, in this case, they obviously were monitoring their traffic. They're trying to play both sides of the law by pretending to be two different companies: Elektra Records and AOL Time Warner.
Well, since AOL owns Elektra, it stands to reason that Elektra's monitoring of internet traffic voids AOL's common carrier status. AOL becomes liable for the illegal downloads, therefore, AOL should sue itself. When they became aware of the illegal activity on that IP they became responsible for that illegal activity. They should have blocked access to the files, ports, or simply terminated the account.
This opens up a whole can of whoop ass on AOL. Do you think all the music traded was copyright by Elektra Records alone? Hell no!! Every record company out there should be suing AOL's ass off right now because they voided their common carrier protections.
No, AOL should not block files that I am downloading at all.
So you would prefer AOL monitor your usage and then sue you for what someone illegally downloads on your account as they did in this case?
Looks like entrapment by AOL. Elektra sues AOL for subscriber records... oh wait, Elektra IS AOL, or was at the time. Elektra is owned by Warner music, meaning owned by Time Warner, which as everyone knows, was bought by AOL during the dotcom boom... So, new business model:
Provide internet access.
Monitor usage.
Allow users to download music freely
Profit!!! (Sue users who download AOL music. Put competitors out of business with illegal downloads)
That's just dirty... By the way, before anyone says Kazaa is pure as the driven snow, keep in mind that the Grokster case pretty firmly established that it IS their responsiblilty as far as US law is concerned to police copyright infringement on their network. Also keep in mind that Kazaa is infamous for bundling malware with their product. If Kazaa was installed, who knows what kind of backdoors were left open by their "product."
Personally, I feel sorry for the kid. Too many lawyers and greedy bastards all the way around. If the kid had stolen a physical cd, it would have been a minor issue, not years of misery and thousands of dollars in court. Whatever happened to having the punishment fit the crime?