The message that is currently running on their web site was actually what they originally posted on their site on Friday night, when they started to realize the uproar that they had provoked (and posted this message to the usenet).
Then, either Saturday or Sunday, they changed it to the far less likable one, which was much closer to Eric Deming's original reply in the usenet thread (which, oddly enough, was deleted from google groups). The problem is that it seemed more that they were trying to spin than acknowledge the problem. Methinks that they went back to the first version because they realized that they couldn't spin it at all.
...is still available as of 10AM EST! I'm sure some enterprising, hate-filled geek will step up to the plate and fill this void with a much needed "sucks" site.
Just got this from Eric Deming. Funny, he's working late tonight!
From: Eric Deming [mailto:EricD@belkin.com] Sent: Friday, November 07, 2003 10:05 PM Subject: RE: defective router
Please be advised, we are working on this issue. Here is text from our latest posting to NANAE on google. It just went up, so it may not show up for a while.
All,
We at Belkin apologize for the recent trouble our customers have experienced with the wireless router/browser redirect issue. We unintentionally overlooked the effect this feature would have. We never intended to compromise the trust of our customers, and we never intend to do so in the future.
We are taking responsibility for this, and we will be offering firmware fixes early next week. We do not have exact details yet as we are still working on them, and will continue to work on them over the weekend. What we can tell you now is that each Router's firmware that incorporates Parental Control as an option will be changed.
I'll keep posting as things develop. Stay tuned...
I think you people are all crazy. I mean, what's the big deal, It's only a url once in a while and you can turn it off anytim49grjeg;sdf fd s ANNOUNCING A ***FREE*** SIX MONTH TRIAL FOR PARENTAL CONTROLS ON BELKIN WIRELESS ROUTERS! WHAT DANGEROUS SITES ARE YOUR CHILDREN SEEING? (note to user - if you didn't want us to send this message to slashdot in your name, you should have let us know before we silently overwrote your http request with our data)
This is fairly old news. I remember reading about these devices in the Chicago Tribune over a year ago. There is a little more info here. I don't know what the current status of it is in Illinois, though. Hell, Chicago cops will take you out and beat you for a lot less, so use at your own risk.
Who thinks that terrorists and causers of violent chaos use valid credit cards and real ID?
I guess I do
Mohamed Atta
Abdulaziz Alomari
Wail M. al-Shehri
Waleed M. al-Shehri
Satam M. A. Al Suqami
Fayez Rashid Ahmed Hassan Al Qadi Banihammad
Ahmed Alghamdi
Hamza Alghamdi
Marwan Al-Shehhi
Mohald al-Shehri
Khalid Almihdhar
Nawaf Alhazmi
Salem Alhazmi
Hani Hanjour
Majed Moqed
Saeed Alghamdi
Ahmed Ibrahim A. Al Haznawi
Ahmed Alnami
Ziad Samir Jarrah
I believe the Commandant of Rommelwood said it best:
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall
mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you."
It seems to me that the valid reason for making steroid use illegal for competition is that it has dangerous side effects -- i.e., if it was allowed, then everyone would have to use it to stay competitve, and you'd have all these athletes with serious medical problems and roid rages and all that because of it.
If there was a performance-enhancing chemical that was completely safe, I say it is fair, because its use does not involve serious risk. That said, I think the IOC doesn't see it that way.
So my question is, is gene therapy dangerous? If it is, then it probably should be banned. But if not, then why not allow it? At some point, doesn't it seem kind of arbitrary which things are allowed and which are not?
I filled out this application for a credit card one time, but then decided I didn't want it and went to throw it out. Well, I was in the city, and like a cop, a garbage can is never around when you need one. Finally, after some searching, I found one. It was the coolest garbage can! It was this big blue box with a rounded top, and it had this lid that you pull open and slip whatever trash you have in. It just slides down inside and you never have to see it or smell it again. They even had a sticker that said when someone would come around for pick-up. It must have been some kind of European trash system, it was so clean and efficient.
I think there must have been a mix-up at the incinerator, because instead of burning up my application, they sent it in for me! Soon, I got the credit card in the mail. So I put that in the garbage too. And unbelievable! I got it back in the mail. The Europeans sure know how to recycle.
now, if GTA is liable for $100 million for encouraging that behavior...
George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney are in for at least $300 mil for setting a bad example for our youth by starting a violent unprovoked war in the middle east
CNN owes $500 mil for it's gratuitous, jingoistic, spoon-fed-propaganda coverage of the war
...and Fox News owes $750 mil
I figure that the parents of the kids gotta be in for about $2.5 billion apiece
And Joshua and William Buckner, since they are the ones who actually committed the crime, are in for $400 billion each.
But he said the court had expanded privacy rights for criminal suspects.
The prosecutor had to add that in to crank up the fear level. OOO! Those bad criminals now have privacy rights. What would be a more accurate statement is, the court had expanded privacy rights for all citizens. But, of course, that doesn't get the soccer moms worried enough to ask for a repeal of the Bill of Rights.
And the argument that the cops can freely place a GPS on your car and track you because it's just like tailing you, is flawed. A much closer analogy would be to say that they can secretly place a bug on your clothing because that would be the same as following you around listening to your conversation.
And anyone who has ever been burned by a MS patch that caused more problems than it prevented will tell you that you should never be the first guy to install a Windows patch.
The reality that BillG refuses to acknowledge in his public statements is simply that you cannot "just install the patch" in an enterprise environment. It takes time. Time to evaluate the risks of installing vs. not installing, time to test (and resolve any issues that come up), time to develop a deployment plan, time to actually implement the deployment plan, and time to audit and follow up with everyone who 1) has somehow avoided installing it, 2) is a dial-up user and can't download it easily, 3) had their machine utterly crash after the patch was applied.
Don't blame sysadmins. Blame MS for releasing patches which step on the heels of the deployment of the previous critical update. When a new patch comes out every 2 weeks, and a deployment may take 3 weeks, you've got a problem.
So microsoft says that they deleted e-mails because the technology was unimpressive and the e-mails not worth keeping? I think that it would be hard for that to hold water when there probably is thousands of e-mails from the same 35-week time period that are far more mundane and much less worth keeping:
It's Anne Grabowski's birthday! Ice cream cake in Bldg 4-R break room!
Last chance to sign up for this year's Secret Santa/Hidden Hannukah Harry! RSVP with Roger McGillicuddy before December 12th.
Just wanted everyone to know that Bill and Valerie Trammel had a beautiful 8lb, 7oz baby girl at 8:30 last night at Cyprus Creek Memorial Hospital. So let's all welcome little Hortence into the world! Yay!
And so on...
"Yes, your honor, we felt that those e-mails were important enough not to erase from Microsoft's permanent record, but the ones relating to the negotiations for which we were under a legally-binding non-disclosure agreement were just, so, pointless, you know?"
Recent management changes at FWB has led to a major evaluation of the status of development work including Realpc...
"The previous management had made claims in press interviews and on the company website regarding the status and upcoming release of RealPC OSX claiming it was in late beta and about to be released...I am sorry to have to admit that apparently the company has been a party to vaporware when it comes to the claims regarding RealPC."
Reminds me of an old joke...
Stalin is dying, and summons Comrade Khrushchev to his bedside. Wheezing his last few words with difficulty, Stalin tells Khrushchev, "Comrade, the reins of the country are now in your hands. But before I go, I want to give you some advice."
"Yes, yes, Great Leader, what is it?" says Khrushchev.
Reaching under his pillow, Stalin produces two envelopes marked 1 and 2. "Take these letters," he tells Khrushchev. "Keep them safely - don't open them. Only if the country is in turmoil and things start going bad, open the first one. That'll give you some advice on what to do. And, even after that, if things start going REALLY bad, open the second one." And with a gasp Stalin breathed his last.
Well, Khrushchev succeeded him, and sure enough, within a few years things started going bad - unemployment increased, crops failed, people became restless. Nikita decided it was time to open the first letter. All it said was: "Blame everything on me!" So Khrushchev launched a massive deStalinization campaign, and blamed Josef for all the excesses and purges and ills of the present system, and bought himself some time that way.
But things continued on the downside - Kennedy successfully rebuffed Soviet missiles in Cuba, unemployment increased even more, crops failed even more, the Politburo was unhappy with Khrushchev's leadership and upstarts like Brezhnev and Gromyko were threatening his credibility. So finally, after much deliberation, Nikita opened the second letter.
I'm not trying to say that a cost center tax policy is as simple as I have said, but I do believe that it could work. To continue your thought, I do think that trucks should be more heavily "road taxed" than cars. Not 1000 times more, both as a practical matter and your point that trucks are not getting 1000x the benefit of cars by using the roads. And someone who is enjoying goods transported by truck will be paying the tax indirectly -- goods will increase in cost due to shippers including the extra tax in the cost of the item.
This is pretty much like the "window tax" which both France and England instituted in the 17-18th centuries, which hit people pretty hard, and they would do things such as brick up their windows to avoid paying the tax. England also had a "hearth tax" for a while. Why? Because people needed hearths and windows.
Personally, I think taxation should be directly related to the public cost for the item or activity. For instance, having a home means that you make police, fire, schools, prisons, water service, etc. necessary. So tax a home based upon the costs incurred to support these things. Tax a vehicle based on the costs needed to maintain the roads -- i.e., wear and tear on the roads. Tax pollution and garbage.
The things that seem the most unjust are the taxes which are completely disconnected from the use of the tax money. A tax on LANs is ridiculous because there is no reason to think that it costs the state any money for you to have one -- the public incurs no costs to support your LAN. In addition, LANs are things that are needed by people and businesses. So, like windows and hearths, it seems even worse that the state is collecting taxes on them because they know people cannot live without them. It makes you feel very powerless at the hands of the state.
Comic Book Store Guy:
Alec, Alec, regarding that so called "silent" propulsion system in "The Hunt For Red October", I printed out a list of technical errors which I think you'd enjoy discussing.
Slashdot Mirror
quoth Dr. Nick Riviera:
"Inflammable means flammable? What a country!"
Which would make it an anti-anti-anti-spam technique
Then, either Saturday or Sunday, they changed it to the far less likable one, which was much closer to Eric Deming's original reply in the usenet thread (which, oddly enough, was deleted from google groups). The problem is that it seemed more that they were trying to spin than acknowledge the problem. Methinks that they went back to the first version because they realized that they couldn't spin it at all.
...is still available as of 10AM EST! I'm sure some enterprising, hate-filled geek will step up to the plate and fill this void with a much needed "sucks" site.
Just got this from Eric Deming. Funny, he's working late tonight!
From: Eric Deming [mailto:EricD@belkin.com]
Sent: Friday, November 07, 2003 10:05 PM
Subject: RE: defective router
Please be advised, we are working on this issue. Here is text from our latest posting to NANAE on google. It just went up, so it may not show up for a while.
All,
We at Belkin apologize for the recent trouble our customers have experienced with the wireless router/browser redirect issue. We unintentionally overlooked the effect this feature would have. We never intended to compromise the trust of our customers, and we never intend to do so in the future.
We are taking responsibility for this, and we will be offering firmware fixes early next week. We do not have exact details yet as we are still working on them, and will continue to work on them over the weekend. What we can tell you now is that each Router's firmware that incorporates Parental Control as an option will be changed.
I'll keep posting as things develop. Stay tuned...
I think you people are all crazy. I mean, what's the big deal, It's only a url once in a while and you can turn it off anytim49grjeg;sdf
fd
s
ANNOUNCING A ***FREE*** SIX MONTH TRIAL FOR PARENTAL CONTROLS ON BELKIN WIRELESS ROUTERS! WHAT DANGEROUS SITES ARE YOUR CHILDREN SEEING? (note to user - if you didn't want us to send this message to slashdot in your name, you should have let us know before we silently overwrote your http request with our data)
Timmmmmmberrrrrr!
This is fairly old news. I remember reading about these devices in the Chicago Tribune over a year ago. There is a little more info here. I don't know what the current status of it is in Illinois, though. Hell, Chicago cops will take you out and beat you for a lot less, so use at your own risk.
"Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss"
Who thinks that terrorists and causers of violent chaos use valid credit cards and real ID?
I guess I do
Mohamed AttaAbdulaziz Alomari
Wail M. al-Shehri
Waleed M. al-Shehri
Satam M. A. Al Suqami
Fayez Rashid Ahmed Hassan Al Qadi Banihammad
Ahmed Alghamdi
Hamza Alghamdi
Marwan Al-Shehhi
Mohald al-Shehri
Khalid Almihdhar
Nawaf Alhazmi
Salem Alhazmi
Hani Hanjour
Majed Moqed
Saeed Alghamdi
Ahmed Ibrahim A. Al Haznawi
Ahmed Alnami
Ziad Samir Jarrah
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you."
OOO, I agree! You can hear every hi-frequency overtone as the Emperor's clothes come ripping off!
If there was a performance-enhancing chemical that was completely safe, I say it is fair, because its use does not involve serious risk. That said, I think the IOC doesn't see it that way.
So my question is, is gene therapy dangerous? If it is, then it probably should be banned. But if not, then why not allow it? At some point, doesn't it seem kind of arbitrary which things are allowed and which are not?
I think there must have been a mix-up at the incinerator, because instead of burning up my application, they sent it in for me! Soon, I got the credit card in the mail. So I put that in the garbage too. And unbelievable! I got it back in the mail. The Europeans sure know how to recycle.
George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney are in for at least $300 mil for setting a bad example for our youth by starting a violent unprovoked war in the middle east
CNN owes $500 mil for it's gratuitous, jingoistic, spoon-fed-propaganda coverage of the war
I figure that the parents of the kids gotta be in for about $2.5 billion apiece
And Joshua and William Buckner, since they are the ones who actually committed the crime, are in for $400 billion each.
And I'm assuming Saucey is enjoying it, yes?
The prosecutor had to add that in to crank up the fear level. OOO! Those bad criminals now have privacy rights. What would be a more accurate statement is, the court had expanded privacy rights for all citizens. But, of course, that doesn't get the soccer moms worried enough to ask for a repeal of the Bill of Rights.
And the argument that the cops can freely place a GPS on your car and track you because it's just like tailing you, is flawed. A much closer analogy would be to say that they can secretly place a bug on your clothing because that would be the same as following you around listening to your conversation.
The reality that BillG refuses to acknowledge in his public statements is simply that you cannot "just install the patch" in an enterprise environment. It takes time. Time to evaluate the risks of installing vs. not installing, time to test (and resolve any issues that come up), time to develop a deployment plan, time to actually implement the deployment plan, and time to audit and follow up with everyone who 1) has somehow avoided installing it, 2) is a dial-up user and can't download it easily, 3) had their machine utterly crash after the patch was applied.
Don't blame sysadmins. Blame MS for releasing patches which step on the heels of the deployment of the previous critical update. When a new patch comes out every 2 weeks, and a deployment may take 3 weeks, you've got a problem.
ho hum
It's Anne Grabowski's birthday! Ice cream cake in Bldg 4-R break room!
Last chance to sign up for this year's Secret Santa/Hidden Hannukah Harry! RSVP with Roger McGillicuddy before December 12th.
Just wanted everyone to know that Bill and Valerie Trammel had a beautiful 8lb, 7oz baby girl at 8:30 last night at Cyprus Creek Memorial Hospital. So let's all welcome little Hortence into the world! Yay!
And so on...
"Yes, your honor, we felt that those e-mails were important enough not to erase from Microsoft's permanent record, but the ones relating to the negotiations for which we were under a legally-binding non-disclosure agreement were just, so, pointless, you know?"
Michael "slashdot editor" Hutz: Well, your Honor, we've got plenty of hearsay and conjecture, those are _kinds_ of evidence.
"The previous management had made claims in press interviews and on the company website regarding the status and upcoming release of RealPC OSX claiming it was in late beta and about to be released...I am sorry to have to admit that apparently the company has been a party to vaporware when it comes to the claims regarding RealPC."
Reminds me of an old joke...
Stalin is dying, and summons Comrade Khrushchev to his bedside. Wheezing his last few words with difficulty, Stalin tells Khrushchev, "Comrade, the reins of the country are now in your hands. But before I go, I want to give you some advice."
"Yes, yes, Great Leader, what is it?" says Khrushchev. Reaching under his pillow, Stalin produces two envelopes marked 1 and 2. "Take these letters," he tells Khrushchev. "Keep them safely - don't open them. Only if the country is in turmoil and things start going bad, open the first one. That'll give you some advice on what to do. And, even after that, if things start going REALLY bad, open the second one." And with a gasp Stalin breathed his last.
Well, Khrushchev succeeded him, and sure enough, within a few years things started going bad - unemployment increased, crops failed, people became restless. Nikita decided it was time to open the first letter. All it said was: "Blame everything on me!" So Khrushchev launched a massive deStalinization campaign, and blamed Josef for all the excesses and purges and ills of the present system, and bought himself some time that way.
But things continued on the downside - Kennedy successfully rebuffed Soviet missiles in Cuba, unemployment increased even more, crops failed even more, the Politburo was unhappy with Khrushchev's leadership and upstarts like Brezhnev and Gromyko were threatening his credibility. So finally, after much deliberation, Nikita opened the second letter.
All it said was: "Write two letters."
I'm not trying to say that a cost center tax policy is as simple as I have said, but I do believe that it could work. To continue your thought, I do think that trucks should be more heavily "road taxed" than cars. Not 1000 times more, both as a practical matter and your point that trucks are not getting 1000x the benefit of cars by using the roads. And someone who is enjoying goods transported by truck will be paying the tax indirectly -- goods will increase in cost due to shippers including the extra tax in the cost of the item.
Personally, I think taxation should be directly related to the public cost for the item or activity. For instance, having a home means that you make police, fire, schools, prisons, water service, etc. necessary. So tax a home based upon the costs incurred to support these things. Tax a vehicle based on the costs needed to maintain the roads -- i.e., wear and tear on the roads. Tax pollution and garbage.
The things that seem the most unjust are the taxes which are completely disconnected from the use of the tax money. A tax on LANs is ridiculous because there is no reason to think that it costs the state any money for you to have one -- the public incurs no costs to support your LAN. In addition, LANs are things that are needed by people and businesses. So, like windows and hearths, it seems even worse that the state is collecting taxes on them because they know people cannot live without them. It makes you feel very powerless at the hands of the state.
Comic Book Store Guy: Alec, Alec, regarding that so called "silent" propulsion system in "The Hunt For Red October", I printed out a list of technical errors which I think you'd enjoy discussing.