What part of "triple the fatality rate for rollovers", "poorer handling", and "longer stopping distance" did you not understand? SUVs are not safer than most vehicles, that's the whole point of all this madness.
Equal value is usualy worded to mean "how much a new one costs" in the agreements. So if they simply sent you a new box that had the latest firmware (but missing whatever "foo" feature), and had the same MSRP as the one that you bought then it would satisfy the terms of the warranty. In fact they could send you a new model that had far fewer or different features, as long as it has an equal or greater retail price. It's all spelled out as such in the agreement.
I'm not trying to say any of this doesn't suck from the end user standpoint, just that there's nothing illegal or underhanded about it, that's how warranties work.
I don't feel like repeating myself. Please read my response here.
The original poster was exercising a warranty claim when he submitted his DVD player to the manufacturer for repair. Most warranty terms stipulate that it's at the manufacturer's sole discretion as to how to handle such claims. No one forced anything on anyone. The owner chose to exercise the terms of his warranty, and apparently was unware of these terms.
Sorry, no. You're wrong. If you bring in your car with a flat tire, and while it's in, they change the firmware in the engine without telling you, they're acting illegally, making modifications to your property without your permission. If that firmware "upgrade" has a speed-limiter that prevents your car from going over 85 mph, you'd be raising hell, too.
Spoken like someone who has never actually read the terms of the warranty that comes with consumer electronics. If you had read those terms, you would know that the manufacturer explicitly states that when a machine is returned for warranty service that they have the exclusive right to decide how and to what extent repairs are to be made -- this includes whether to fix the unit or just give you a new one of "equal or greater value", among other options. If you think I'm joking, go read that warranty card. You have no obligation to specify "Please fix this part but don't touch this part." If you return something for warranty service you get the fixes that the manufacturer decides that you get. This is how a warranty works.
You bought and own the hardare, yes. You are free to do whatever you want with it. But if you want to exercise your warranty, you're bound to its terms, one of which is that the manufactuer alone gets to decide how to satisfy your warranty claim. A lot of times this means them sending you a brand new model, sometimes it means fixing the old one. If upgrading the firmware and removing an unsupported feature is what they choose, then so be it. You have the right not to exercise your warranty contract, and do whatever you want with your precious hardware that you now own.
Again, if you think I'm making this up, go read the fine print.
When are you people going to realize the difference between hardware and software? You bought the DVD player, you own the hardware. You don't own the software, and the APEX people are free to support or NOT support any feature they want, it's their software. Obviously this "feature" that this DVD player had was an unsupported thing that they decided to remove in later versions. That's their right as authors of the software.
Your analogy to a car coming back without the radio is ridiculous. They did not remove any hardware. A better analogy would be the case where you brought your car in to Ford and when you got it back the ECU (engine control unit) had been reflashed with a new firmware calibration which improved mileage or removed some cold-start quirk. And guess what, this kind of thing happens all the time with modern cars. If that update removed some undocumented, unsupported feature then boo-hoo, that's unfortunate. But it's hardly illegal, and if you told your bank that you didn't feel like making your lease payment because the dealer did something that was within their rights but unfortunate, you would be laughed at by your loan officer.
That you somehow managed to get your credit card company to agree with you just speaks to the volume of customer service and complaint resolution that they must have to deal with, such that it's easier for them to just nod and put up with people like you than it is to try to convince you otherwise.
Well, I don't think anyone here is going to be able to help you much with this, since it really depends on the details. There's certainly nothing illegal about making a website for alums to coordinate. If they object based upon such a general reason, tell them to piss off as they're clearly just trying to get you to cave in.
However, if you used any copyrighted logos or artwork swiped directly from their site or any of their literature, they could probably get an injunction based on that. So, make sure the site is either text-only, or that any logos that you do use are original works that you create. Since it sounds like this is a non-commercial endeavor I don't know exactly how trademark laws work but so long as you acknowledge all marks as being property of their owners and you're not selling something that's related in any way, then there's no reason that you can't use a logo of a product or institution.
In other words, I don't think it's illegal for me to put a picture of a box of "Kellogs Corn Flakes" on a web site, so long as I took the picture (i.e. I own the copyright), and I'm not trying to sell cereal.
I know that colleges are often very protective of their Mascots and logos since they want a piece of the pie in terms of merchandising and they don't want thier image tarnished. If they continue to object to your site (moreso than a "please stop") then it will probably be on these grounds.
So what you're basically saying is "I don't want to receive spam, but if one of our customers spams it's okay if we take a couple of days (!!!) to fix it... That's not our fault, it was just a little spam, we coulnd't possibly prevent that." Well, I'm sorry to say, it IS possible to prevent that, and those of us that receive that spam couldn't care less whether or not you had good intentions. The only thing we care about is NOT receiving spam, and in that sense the blocklists are wickedly effective. It's a classic case of "benefit to the group as a whole vs. pain in the ass for a few." I suggest that you install an automated means of detecting spam being sent from your network, and add a "cleanup fees" clause to your contract so that any loser that spams subsidizes your spam monitoring setup.
Bouncing is fine and good, but we have to be careful to define what "bouncing" means, exactly. A proper bounce occurs with a delivery error message (i.e. "550 I don't want this") during the delivery phase. It must occur while the connection is still open. Sadly, if you are relaying mail (as opposed to sending it directly from the source to the final MX) there is no way to do a proper bounce. Ther reason for this is that you absolutely cannot trust the From line or the envelope-sender, because in the case of viruses and spam they are ALWAYS fake.
So, if you are actually bouncing mail, then good. However, if your definition of "bouncing" involves looking at any of the addresses in the mail, you're just part of the problem by adding junk someone's inbox.
That's a pretty tenuous theory. Most Bayesian filters operate on the complete body of the message... Any spam-filter that gives ANY significant weight to the contents of the From: line is broken. Anything can be placed there by the spammer, it's useless and naive to use it for filtering.
In the case of the RBL (realtime block-lists), they use the existing infrastructure of DNS and so the load is fully distributed and cached. The first time you make a query for the status of a given IP address, you'll probably end up getting a response from one of the authoritative nameservers, but all subsequent queries for the same name will be cached without any extra burden on the nameserver. Additionally, there are usually many slave/secondary nameservers for the main RBLs, so load is not too much of an issue.
I'm not sure how DCC or Razor handles this, but remember that these services are used by high-volume mailservers all over the globe, so there's bound to be enough redundancy that a mere batch of 1000 messages would be pretty insignificant.
I think the author did it to be "fair", in that he wanted to test the innate ability of each software piece without falling back on any sort of "ask someone else" functionality. That sentiment makes a certain amount of sense (and it's a good idea to try to keep all your variables under control) but in this setting it makes no sense. If querying DNS blocklists and checksum clearinghouses significantly improves SpamAssassin's scores, and most people would be using it with this enabled, then it really seems unfair to test it with this disabled.
Maybe we need an exit poll for people buying SCO shares.
"Excuse me, Mr. Ameritrade customer, we'd like to ask you a few questions, if you don't mind... What in the bloody piss were you thinking buying SCO shares?"
Agreed. The author made up the artificial constraint that "no program is allowed to contact the network" which means that SpamAssassin wasn't able to check the DNS blacklists for things like exploited open proxies/relays in the Received chain, or to check with distributed signiture services like RAZOR/DCC, etc.
If you're not going to let the program use its full capabilities, why test it?
Analogously, what kind of hardware review site would do a review along the lines of "This motherboard supports this extra feature that will improve CPU speed noticeably, but we're going to disable it for our tests (even though most of you would want to use it.)"
It's called substance abuse and it's a medical condition that can be treated. It's exactly analogous to the situation of someone that has a large infected wound on his foot but refuses to see a doctor because he "doesn't like doctors" even though it prevents him from walking very far, getting a job, etc.
The blurb from "fygment" must have been written by a mouse, as there's hardly a complete sentence in that jumble of incoherent fragments. I find this situation has become all too common on slashdot recently. If you can't be bothered to write a cohesive paragraph with complete sentences, then stop submitting to slashdot. You may not think it's important, but when you write things that will be read by a number of people it is essential. Use whatever style you want in email or IM but if you're going to submit something for public consumption you should take the time to learn how to use English, otherwise you just come off looking like a rambling idiot.
This is just a variation on a theme... There are a number of business practices out there that capitalize on the lazyness (or in your case, shyness) of the consumer. For example, mail-in rebates: you get to advertise a low price to make the deal, and in the majority of cases the buyer is too lazy to jump through the hoops properly to get the refund (lost the reciept, forgot to save the reciept, didn't remember to take the proper form from the store, doesn't have any stamps on hand, etc.) In the worst case when you do honor the refund you get an interest-free loan from the consumer for a good 6 months or so, which I'm sure is good for the bottom-line.
Another popular one is the "sign up for this FREE thing! No risk!" with the added bonus of "if you don't cancel you're automatically enrolled in our nonfree program." This works especially well if you can weasel out the CC number, or ever better: if you ARE the CC merchant. Those little automatic charges go completely unnoticed on people's statements a lot of times. You get bonus points for cooking up a "yearly dues" situation where you can charge one large lump fee and further hide yourself. Of course the poor schmuck can cancel (and usually get back all their money if they were tricked) but it takes work to call up and wait on hold, etc.
And yes, I'm perfectly aware of BSD-style licenses. Obviously those would be more or less unaffected in this discussion. However it seems to me like the majority of OS software is released under the GPL or a similar license, with BSD being the minority.
While the free software community would probably disapprove, it doesn't seem as though it would be particularly damaging.
One of the main reasons that OSS works as it does is that developers know that by releasing their software under the GPL, that it will remain free and that any changes that some third party makes (assuming they publicise) will be incorporated. My point is that without these protections that copyright afford, many people would not release their code publicly. As it is now, you can release your GPL code and know fairly confidently that someone can't just take it and sell it as their own, and start raking in the profits from your work. But without copyright law, there is no such protection and it's a free-for-all. My point is that many developers would not release their code in such a circumstance, as they don't want someone profiting from it or whatever. Without copyright, open source would take a hit, and thus OS relies on copyright for protection of its authors' works.
Oh really? "Microsoft relies on the government-granted monopoly of copyright." And Open Source DOESN'T rely on copyright, how exactly? If you throw out copyright law then anyone is free to do anything, including taking your GPL source code, making a few changes, and selling that as a commerical closed source project. I don't think many OSS advocates would stand for that for very long, and you can damn well bet it would cause a lot of people to stop developing free software.
You can't have it both ways. If "relying on copyright" is a bad thing, then both MS and open source projects are equally guilty. Just because MS uses it in a very different way doesn't mean both philosophies don't require it as the central component.
No, his post was false because it implied that there was some magical license that gives you special rights to a single physical copy of the work. This is wrong on two points: there is no license, and free use (being an integral component of copyright law) specifies that you always have the right to make non-commercial, personal archival copies. There cannot exist[*] a situation where you have the right to a CD but not the right to make such a backup. This is what the original poster was trying to say.
[*] It could exist if labels were to introduce licensing (in which they could give or revoke additional rights, the agreement being a contract) as in the case of software. However, as of right now, no one is doing that for music, so everything stems from copyright law. However, they would have to tread very carefully here, since if they start to claim that music recordings are software, then section 117 comes into play, which gives you the explicit right ot back up software for archival purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
SUVs are already safer than most vehicles
What part of "triple the fatality rate for rollovers", "poorer handling", and "longer stopping distance" did you not understand? SUVs are not safer than most vehicles, that's the whole point of all this madness.
Equal value is usualy worded to mean "how much a new one costs" in the agreements. So if they simply sent you a new box that had the latest firmware (but missing whatever "foo" feature), and had the same MSRP as the one that you bought then it would satisfy the terms of the warranty. In fact they could send you a new model that had far fewer or different features, as long as it has an equal or greater retail price. It's all spelled out as such in the agreement.
I'm not trying to say any of this doesn't suck from the end user standpoint, just that there's nothing illegal or underhanded about it, that's how warranties work.
I don't feel like repeating myself. Please read my response here.
The original poster was exercising a warranty claim when he submitted his DVD player to the manufacturer for repair. Most warranty terms stipulate that it's at the manufacturer's sole discretion as to how to handle such claims. No one forced anything on anyone. The owner chose to exercise the terms of his warranty, and apparently was unware of these terms.
Sorry, no. You're wrong. If you bring in your car with a flat tire, and while it's in, they change the firmware in the engine without telling you, they're acting illegally, making modifications to your property without your permission. If that firmware "upgrade" has a speed-limiter that prevents your car from going over 85 mph, you'd be raising hell, too.
Spoken like someone who has never actually read the terms of the warranty that comes with consumer electronics. If you had read those terms, you would know that the manufacturer explicitly states that when a machine is returned for warranty service that they have the exclusive right to decide how and to what extent repairs are to be made -- this includes whether to fix the unit or just give you a new one of "equal or greater value", among other options. If you think I'm joking, go read that warranty card. You have no obligation to specify "Please fix this part but don't touch this part." If you return something for warranty service you get the fixes that the manufacturer decides that you get. This is how a warranty works.
You bought and own the hardare, yes. You are free to do whatever you want with it. But if you want to exercise your warranty, you're bound to its terms, one of which is that the manufactuer alone gets to decide how to satisfy your warranty claim. A lot of times this means them sending you a brand new model, sometimes it means fixing the old one. If upgrading the firmware and removing an unsupported feature is what they choose, then so be it. You have the right not to exercise your warranty contract, and do whatever you want with your precious hardware that you now own.
Again, if you think I'm making this up, go read the fine print.
When are you people going to realize the difference between hardware and software? You bought the DVD player, you own the hardware. You don't own the software, and the APEX people are free to support or NOT support any feature they want, it's their software. Obviously this "feature" that this DVD player had was an unsupported thing that they decided to remove in later versions. That's their right as authors of the software.
Your analogy to a car coming back without the radio is ridiculous. They did not remove any hardware. A better analogy would be the case where you brought your car in to Ford and when you got it back the ECU (engine control unit) had been reflashed with a new firmware calibration which improved mileage or removed some cold-start quirk. And guess what, this kind of thing happens all the time with modern cars. If that update removed some undocumented, unsupported feature then boo-hoo, that's unfortunate. But it's hardly illegal, and if you told your bank that you didn't feel like making your lease payment because the dealer did something that was within their rights but unfortunate, you would be laughed at by your loan officer.
That you somehow managed to get your credit card company to agree with you just speaks to the volume of customer service and complaint resolution that they must have to deal with, such that it's easier for them to just nod and put up with people like you than it is to try to convince you otherwise.
Well, I don't think anyone here is going to be able to help you much with this, since it really depends on the details. There's certainly nothing illegal about making a website for alums to coordinate. If they object based upon such a general reason, tell them to piss off as they're clearly just trying to get you to cave in.
However, if you used any copyrighted logos or artwork swiped directly from their site or any of their literature, they could probably get an injunction based on that. So, make sure the site is either text-only, or that any logos that you do use are original works that you create. Since it sounds like this is a non-commercial endeavor I don't know exactly how trademark laws work but so long as you acknowledge all marks as being property of their owners and you're not selling something that's related in any way, then there's no reason that you can't use a logo of a product or institution.
In other words, I don't think it's illegal for me to put a picture of a box of "Kellogs Corn Flakes" on a web site, so long as I took the picture (i.e. I own the copyright), and I'm not trying to sell cereal.
I know that colleges are often very protective of their Mascots and logos since they want a piece of the pie in terms of merchandising and they don't want thier image tarnished. If they continue to object to your site (moreso than a "please stop") then it will probably be on these grounds.
GameSpy's ad department must just looooove slashdot. Hmmm. Funny, that.
And people live there voluntarily, WHY?!?!?
So what you're basically saying is "I don't want to receive spam, but if one of our customers spams it's okay if we take a couple of days (!!!) to fix it... That's not our fault, it was just a little spam, we coulnd't possibly prevent that." Well, I'm sorry to say, it IS possible to prevent that, and those of us that receive that spam couldn't care less whether or not you had good intentions. The only thing we care about is NOT receiving spam, and in that sense the blocklists are wickedly effective. It's a classic case of "benefit to the group as a whole vs. pain in the ass for a few." I suggest that you install an automated means of detecting spam being sent from your network, and add a "cleanup fees" clause to your contract so that any loser that spams subsidizes your spam monitoring setup.
Bouncing is fine and good, but we have to be careful to define what "bouncing" means, exactly. A proper bounce occurs with a delivery error message (i.e. "550 I don't want this") during the delivery phase. It must occur while the connection is still open. Sadly, if you are relaying mail (as opposed to sending it directly from the source to the final MX) there is no way to do a proper bounce. Ther reason for this is that you absolutely cannot trust the From line or the envelope-sender, because in the case of viruses and spam they are ALWAYS fake.
So, if you are actually bouncing mail, then good. However, if your definition of "bouncing" involves looking at any of the addresses in the mail, you're just part of the problem by adding junk someone's inbox.
True, there always seem to be things that could have been done better.
But, in the case of SoBig, there were several variants, accounting for more than the original 20 addresses which some people overlooked.
That's a pretty tenuous theory. Most Bayesian filters operate on the complete body of the message... Any spam-filter that gives ANY significant weight to the contents of the From: line is broken. Anything can be placed there by the spammer, it's useless and naive to use it for filtering.
In the case of the RBL (realtime block-lists), they use the existing infrastructure of DNS and so the load is fully distributed and cached. The first time you make a query for the status of a given IP address, you'll probably end up getting a response from one of the authoritative nameservers, but all subsequent queries for the same name will be cached without any extra burden on the nameserver. Additionally, there are usually many slave/secondary nameservers for the main RBLs, so load is not too much of an issue.
I'm not sure how DCC or Razor handles this, but remember that these services are used by high-volume mailservers all over the globe, so there's bound to be enough redundancy that a mere batch of 1000 messages would be pretty insignificant.
I think the author did it to be "fair", in that he wanted to test the innate ability of each software piece without falling back on any sort of "ask someone else" functionality. That sentiment makes a certain amount of sense (and it's a good idea to try to keep all your variables under control) but in this setting it makes no sense. If querying DNS blocklists and checksum clearinghouses significantly improves SpamAssassin's scores, and most people would be using it with this enabled, then it really seems unfair to test it with this disabled.
Maybe we need an exit poll for people buying SCO shares.
"Excuse me, Mr. Ameritrade customer, we'd like to ask you a few questions, if you don't mind... What in the bloody piss were you thinking buying SCO shares?"
Agreed. The author made up the artificial constraint that "no program is allowed to contact the network" which means that SpamAssassin wasn't able to check the DNS blacklists for things like exploited open proxies/relays in the Received chain, or to check with distributed signiture services like RAZOR/DCC, etc.
If you're not going to let the program use its full capabilities, why test it?
Analogously, what kind of hardware review site would do a review along the lines of "This motherboard supports this extra feature that will improve CPU speed noticeably, but we're going to disable it for our tests (even though most of you would want to use it.)"
It's called substance abuse and it's a medical condition that can be treated. It's exactly analogous to the situation of someone that has a large infected wound on his foot but refuses to see a doctor because he "doesn't like doctors" even though it prevents him from walking very far, getting a job, etc.
but when was the last time a nurse jabbed you in the ass
Sounds like the opening scene of a bad porn film to me...
The blurb from "fygment" must have been written by a mouse, as there's hardly a complete sentence in that jumble of incoherent fragments. I find this situation has become all too common on slashdot recently. If you can't be bothered to write a cohesive paragraph with complete sentences, then stop submitting to slashdot. You may not think it's important, but when you write things that will be read by a number of people it is essential. Use whatever style you want in email or IM but if you're going to submit something for public consumption you should take the time to learn how to use English, otherwise you just come off looking like a rambling idiot.
The proper PC term these days is "libido-challenged".
This is just a variation on a theme... There are a number of business practices out there that capitalize on the lazyness (or in your case, shyness) of the consumer. For example, mail-in rebates: you get to advertise a low price to make the deal, and in the majority of cases the buyer is too lazy to jump through the hoops properly to get the refund (lost the reciept, forgot to save the reciept, didn't remember to take the proper form from the store, doesn't have any stamps on hand, etc.) In the worst case when you do honor the refund you get an interest-free loan from the consumer for a good 6 months or so, which I'm sure is good for the bottom-line.
Another popular one is the "sign up for this FREE thing! No risk!" with the added bonus of "if you don't cancel you're automatically enrolled in our nonfree program." This works especially well if you can weasel out the CC number, or ever better: if you ARE the CC merchant. Those little automatic charges go completely unnoticed on people's statements a lot of times. You get bonus points for cooking up a "yearly dues" situation where you can charge one large lump fee and further hide yourself. Of course the poor schmuck can cancel (and usually get back all their money if they were tricked) but it takes work to call up and wait on hold, etc.
And yes, I'm perfectly aware of BSD-style licenses. Obviously those would be more or less unaffected in this discussion. However it seems to me like the majority of OS software is released under the GPL or a similar license, with BSD being the minority.
While the free software community would probably disapprove, it doesn't seem as though it would be particularly damaging.
One of the main reasons that OSS works as it does is that developers know that by releasing their software under the GPL, that it will remain free and that any changes that some third party makes (assuming they publicise) will be incorporated. My point is that without these protections that copyright afford, many people would not release their code publicly. As it is now, you can release your GPL code and know fairly confidently that someone can't just take it and sell it as their own, and start raking in the profits from your work. But without copyright law, there is no such protection and it's a free-for-all. My point is that many developers would not release their code in such a circumstance, as they don't want someone profiting from it or whatever. Without copyright, open source would take a hit, and thus OS relies on copyright for protection of its authors' works.
Oh really? "Microsoft relies on the government-granted monopoly of copyright." And Open Source DOESN'T rely on copyright, how exactly? If you throw out copyright law then anyone is free to do anything, including taking your GPL source code, making a few changes, and selling that as a commerical closed source project. I don't think many OSS advocates would stand for that for very long, and you can damn well bet it would cause a lot of people to stop developing free software.
You can't have it both ways. If "relying on copyright" is a bad thing, then both MS and open source projects are equally guilty. Just because MS uses it in a very different way doesn't mean both philosophies don't require it as the central component.
What? Have you never heard of mod_gzip? Do you have any idea how http works?
No, his post was false because it implied that there was some magical license that gives you special rights to a single physical copy of the work. This is wrong on two points: there is no license, and free use (being an integral component of copyright law) specifies that you always have the right to make non-commercial, personal archival copies. There cannot exist[*] a situation where you have the right to a CD but not the right to make such a backup. This is what the original poster was trying to say.
[*] It could exist if labels were to introduce licensing (in which they could give or revoke additional rights, the agreement being a contract) as in the case of software. However, as of right now, no one is doing that for music, so everything stems from copyright law. However, they would have to tread very carefully here, since if they start to claim that music recordings are software, then section 117 comes into play, which gives you the explicit right ot back up software for archival purposes.