it won't even provide decent free lunches to poor kids. It's sort of baffling.
I don't understand the source of your confusion. The problem is there are too many children living below the poverty line. If you don't feed them, that number goes down. Seems like the natural solution to me.
But the labor wasn't obtained using the information, the labor was obtained by calling the customer service number. Saying you obtained their labor because you had personal information of a customer is like me calling the phone company's customer service and claiming I obtained their labor because I mentioned that I own a car. Sure, I own a car, but the labor was obtained by dialing.
The customer service rep was going to talk to the caller whether they provided a valid social security number or not.
Since obtaining the labor wasn't enabled by having the personal information, there's no crime here. Now, if I had them install a phone line by impersonating someone else, then you might have something.
There's no law that makes it a crime to get someone to give you information (unless it's banking information). Whether you can get other laws to apply to this situation is up in the air.
*BUT*, it probably *IS* illegal for a company to improperly divulge your social security number to a 3rd party. And one of the pieces of information that the private investigators workingon HP's behalf used to do their pretexting was a social security number. Where do you think they got that?
Login: _______________ Password: ____________ Write a 500 word essay describing the critical political factors that led to the Mexican-American war: ____________
The best part is, we can pay foreigners $0.60 per hour to grade the questions.
Back then companies weren't so blatant as to openly suggest a large # of our 'customers' were liberating the products, but that was precisely what was happening.
The people who pay for the item are the customers. The people who shoplift are criminals.
Security tags weigh less than a paperclip, and can be hidden VERY well. I once bought a wallet at a store where my wife worked, and whenever I would fly after that I would set off the metal detector at the airport. And when they would wand me, the wallet would set off the wand.
Still took SIX trips through airport security before a TSA agent got zealous enough to find the security tag embedded in some recess of the wallet. (The others looked enough to be sure there wasn't something nefarious in there and then just let it go.)
So, no, you're not going to know the tag is there, short of tearing the product apart.
As someone who knows quite a few people who work retail and work retail loss prevention, you could have very simply been at a store where no one is authorized to do anything about shoplifters except specified loss prevention employees.
Or, a store where secrity watches you pretty closely on camera and the employees know that if you set off an alarm, and then get back to the register to have it deactivated, and loss prevention hasn't shown up already, that you're in the clear.
Or, you could live in a state where concealing unpurchased items is enough for a shoplifting conviction, in which case if you go through the securty gates with stuff in a bag, either you've already purchased the items and someone forgot to deactivate the tag, or loss prevention never saw you put something in the bag and there's nothing they can do about it anyway (and most times, if you're in the store with a bag from that store, loss prevention is going to be all over you.)
It may appear unreasonable to you, but you ust don't know how (or why) it works the way it does.
... is that you've just established that the amount of damages you're seeking is based not on actual damage done to you, or severity of the offense, but instead on how much damages you needed to claim in order to get your lawsuit fastracked.
I *USED* to not get USB cables with anything, but now I get them with everything. And I buy a lot of stuff - printers, more printers, USB wireless networking setups, USB cameras, USB barcode scanners, label printers, scales, digital cameras, hell, even my MONITOR came with a USB cable.
I think manufacturers caught o that the customer caught on that they had to include the cost of whateve rextra cables they eneded to buy in the price. By including the cable, they give you $20-$60 of value (depending on the cable and where you're buying your device) for a few bucks. Once one printer comapny starts giving you a pritner and a cable for $100, the other printer companies can't sell you a printer and no cable for $95 to force you to pay Best Buy $30 for the cable. You'll buy the printer with the cable included.
In Vegas, the rule is, 'Don't take other people's chips'.
In EVE Online, the rule is 'If you can convince some idiot to give you their chips if you promise to give them more chips later, we won't do anything if you're lying.' That's the rule.
Here's the other part where the analogy breaks down: The Casino, who owns the chips, is under a legal obligation to give you their cash value if you want to trade them in. Obviously, CCP is under no obligation to give you real money for your in-game currency. Maybe, if CCP promised to give you real cash in exchange for your in-game currency, you MIGHT have a point. But they are not.
Let's put this another way - there is proably hundreds of trillions of ISK in the EVE environment. What if, tomorrow, CCP decided that they didn't want to run EVE anymore, and pulled the plug on the servers and refund any unused subscriptions? Would any rational person think the players could sue CCP for the loss of their in-game assets? Of course not. Why? Because those assets DO NOT BELONG TO THE PLAYERS IN THE FIRST PLACE!
CC will let you, using game mechanics, control certain objects in the game. They expressly will not let you transfer the in-game objects outside of the game mechanics, and expressly specify that they own the objects. Will people pay moey for those objects? Sure. Does that mean you've suffered a monetary loss if control is taken away from you through game mechanics? NO! The only way the in-game objects are worth money to you is if you STEAL THEM FIRST! Trying to portray this as theft would be like saying 'I was going to steal that car, but that other guy stole the car first! He owes me!'
A better question would be, could you be arrested for theft for selling CCP's in-game objects in violation of the uer agreement?
No real money is lost. Only virtual money is lost. If you want to send people to Virtual Prison, I'll back that.
But, the virtual money is not the player's to sell. The only way they can turn the virtual money into real money is by first *STEALING* the virtual money. Because teh virtual money oes not belong to the player, it belongs to the company running the game.
Saying that another player harmed you because they made it harder for you to steal the virtual money from the game company would be like trying to sue someone because they put the cigarettes behind the counter in a locked display. Are the cigarettes worhth money? Yes. Is it arder for you to sell tthose cigaretes for cash? Yes. Were they your cigarettes to sell in the first place? NO!
OK, people are missing some very key pieces of information here.
- No ISK was stolen from anyone. *ALL* of the ISK belongs to CCP, the company that runs the game. It is bits on their servers and part of the user agreement is all of the in-game objects belong to CCP, not the players, and this is something you therefore must agree to when you play.
- When you play the game, everyone agrees to play by the rules. One of the rules is that the vast majority of in-game schemes are LEGAL. Player A took a legal action, and as a result of legal action A, the game master (CCP) reallocated the in-game objects from other players to player A. If you were the other players, tough, you played the game, you 'lost'.
- It is just plain logically silly to accept that players can blow up each other's ships and not accept that players can convince other players to hand over their in-game money. What's the difference? I'm flying around and somebody blows me up, you wouldn't suggest I call up the cops and file a vandalism report would you? So if someone convinces me to give them in-game money, and then doesn't pay me back, that's suddenly a crime?
Honestly, I don't see the advantage here from the band's perspective. Selling a Vanilla mp3 is not hard for even the least qualified web tech using any e-commerce storefront.
This is just the rollout phase. Soon they'll be selling Chocolate mp3s, which is a whole different ballgame. And then what about Strawberry? Your average web tech just isn't waulified to be handling material like that.
I use the information to send you a bill that says you've called a bunch of porn 900 numbers from your cell phone. With my contact number on it. Then I just wait for you to call me and 'verify' your information.
Hey, try reading! I didn't say dismantle R&D. I said don't go mindlessly hiring new employees just you are currently profitable. Employees are an expense, and if you're not hiring people to do something that is going to pay for those employees down the road, you're just throwing your profits away.
Middle-management is essential to getting my job done. I don't want to have to negotiate with the tool vendors on price or licenses. I don't want to have to evaluate how well people are performing. I don't want to have to find, interview, and hire new employees. I don't want to do the department budget, set the schedule, fight to get materials on time from vendors, etc, etc. And, most importantly, I don't want to have to explain what I'm doing to upper management.
Now, some managers are definitely useless, but so are some engineers. That's not a job-level problem, that's a people problem.
Slashdot Mirror
USPPS is a government-owned comanny, whose Board of Directors is either directly or indirectly appointed by the President of hte United States.
it won't even provide decent free lunches to poor kids. It's sort of baffling.
I don't understand the source of your confusion. The problem is there are too many children living below the poverty line. If you don't feed them, that number goes down. Seems like the natural solution to me.
No prohibition on collecting information based on age.
But, you can't distribute or use for marketing purposes any information that appears to be from someone 13 or under.
See, that wasn't that hard, was it?
Why mix the units like that?
Training to be a rocket scientist?
She'll have to change her name to Firefo Xnyder.
Or maybe Thunderbir Dnyder. But that just doesn't have the same ring to it.
But the labor wasn't obtained using the information, the labor was obtained by calling the customer service number. Saying you obtained their labor because you had personal information of a customer is like me calling the phone company's customer service and claiming I obtained their labor because I mentioned that I own a car. Sure, I own a car, but the labor was obtained by dialing.
The customer service rep was going to talk to the caller whether they provided a valid social security number or not.
Since obtaining the labor wasn't enabled by having the personal information, there's no crime here. Now, if I had them install a phone line by impersonating someone else, then you might have something.
There's no law that makes it a crime to get someone to give you information (unless it's banking information). Whether you can get other laws to apply to this situation is up in the air.
*BUT*, it probably *IS* illegal for a company to improperly divulge your social security number to a 3rd party. And one of the pieces of information that the private investigators workingon HP's behalf used to do their pretexting was a social security number. Where do you think they got that?
Login: _______________
Password: ____________
Write a 500 word essay describing the critical political factors that led to the Mexican-American war: ____________
The best part is, we can pay foreigners $0.60 per hour to grade the questions.
No, but you might find yourself pulled over a few blocks down the road, or entertaining some friendly neighborhood officers at your home.
Back then companies weren't so blatant as to openly suggest a large # of our 'customers' were liberating the products, but that was precisely what was happening.
The people who pay for the item are the customers. The people who shoplift are criminals.
Security tags weigh less than a paperclip, and can be hidden VERY well. I once bought a wallet at a store where my wife worked, and whenever I would fly after that I would set off the metal detector at the airport. And when they would wand me, the wallet would set off the wand.
Still took SIX trips through airport security before a TSA agent got zealous enough to find the security tag embedded in some recess of the wallet. (The others looked enough to be sure there wasn't something nefarious in there and then just let it go.)
So, no, you're not going to know the tag is there, short of tearing the product apart.
As someone who knows quite a few people who work retail and work retail loss prevention, you could have very simply been at a store where no one is authorized to do anything about shoplifters except specified loss prevention employees.
Or, a store where secrity watches you pretty closely on camera and the employees know that if you set off an alarm, and then get back to the register to have it deactivated, and loss prevention hasn't shown up already, that you're in the clear.
Or, you could live in a state where concealing unpurchased items is enough for a shoplifting conviction, in which case if you go through the securty gates with stuff in a bag, either you've already purchased the items and someone forgot to deactivate the tag, or loss prevention never saw you put something in the bag and there's nothing they can do about it anyway (and most times, if you're in the store with a bag from that store, loss prevention is going to be all over you.)
It may appear unreasonable to you, but you ust don't know how (or why) it works the way it does.
... is that you've just established that the amount of damages you're seeking is based not on actual damage done to you, or severity of the offense, but instead on how much damages you needed to claim in order to get your lawsuit fastracked.
I *USED* to not get USB cables with anything, but now I get them with everything. And I buy a lot of stuff - printers, more printers, USB wireless networking setups, USB cameras, USB barcode scanners, label printers, scales, digital cameras, hell, even my MONITOR came with a USB cable.
I think manufacturers caught o that the customer caught on that they had to include the cost of whateve rextra cables they eneded to buy in the price. By including the cable, they give you $20-$60 of value (depending on the cable and where you're buying your device) for a few bucks. Once one printer comapny starts giving you a pritner and a cable for $100, the other printer companies can't sell you a printer and no cable for $95 to force you to pay Best Buy $30 for the cable. You'll buy the printer with the cable included.
No. CCP (game company) would ban him if he sold the ISK, and you can be sure they're watching his wallet to make sure he's not selling it on eBay.
In Vegas, the rule is, 'Don't take other people's chips'.
In EVE Online, the rule is 'If you can convince some idiot to give you their chips if you promise to give them more chips later, we won't do anything if you're lying.' That's the rule.
Here's the other part where the analogy breaks down: The Casino, who owns the chips, is under a legal obligation to give you their cash value if you want to trade them in. Obviously, CCP is under no obligation to give you real money for your in-game currency. Maybe, if CCP promised to give you real cash in exchange for your in-game currency, you MIGHT have a point. But they are not.
Let's put this another way - there is proably hundreds of trillions of ISK in the EVE environment. What if, tomorrow, CCP decided that they didn't want to run EVE anymore, and pulled the plug on the servers and refund any unused subscriptions? Would any rational person think the players could sue CCP for the loss of their in-game assets? Of course not. Why? Because those assets DO NOT BELONG TO THE PLAYERS IN THE FIRST PLACE!
CC will let you, using game mechanics, control certain objects in the game. They expressly will not let you transfer the in-game objects outside of the game mechanics, and expressly specify that they own the objects. Will people pay moey for those objects? Sure. Does that mean you've suffered a monetary loss if control is taken away from you through game mechanics? NO! The only way the in-game objects are worth money to you is if you STEAL THEM FIRST! Trying to portray this as theft would be like saying 'I was going to steal that car, but that other guy stole the car first! He owes me!'
A better question would be, could you be arrested for theft for selling CCP's in-game objects in violation of the uer agreement?
No real money is lost. Only virtual money is lost. If you want to send people to Virtual Prison, I'll back that.
But, the virtual money is not the player's to sell. The only way they can turn the virtual money into real money is by first *STEALING* the virtual money. Because teh virtual money oes not belong to the player, it belongs to the company running the game.
Saying that another player harmed you because they made it harder for you to steal the virtual money from the game company would be like trying to sue someone because they put the cigarettes behind the counter in a locked display. Are the cigarettes worhth money? Yes. Is it arder for you to sell tthose cigaretes for cash? Yes. Were they your cigarettes to sell in the first place? NO!
If I dig a hole, and it takes me 2 hours, how much is the hole worth?
If I refill the hole, and dig it again, putting in twice as much labor, is the hole now worth twice as much?
OK, people are missing some very key pieces of information here.
- No ISK was stolen from anyone. *ALL* of the ISK belongs to CCP, the company that runs the game. It is bits on their servers and part of the user agreement is all of the in-game objects belong to CCP, not the players, and this is something you therefore must agree to when you play.
- When you play the game, everyone agrees to play by the rules. One of the rules is that the vast majority of in-game schemes are LEGAL. Player A took a legal action, and as a result of legal action A, the game master (CCP) reallocated the in-game objects from other players to player A. If you were the other players, tough, you played the game, you 'lost'.
- It is just plain logically silly to accept that players can blow up each other's ships and not accept that players can convince other players to hand over their in-game money. What's the difference? I'm flying around and somebody blows me up, you wouldn't suggest I call up the cops and file a vandalism report would you? So if someone convinces me to give them in-game money, and then doesn't pay me back, that's suddenly a crime?
Honestly, I don't see the advantage here from the band's perspective. Selling a Vanilla mp3 is not hard for even the least qualified web tech using any e-commerce storefront.
This is just the rollout phase. Soon they'll be selling Chocolate mp3s, which is a whole different ballgame. And then what about Strawberry? Your average web tech just isn't waulified to be handling material like that.
I use the information to send you a bill that says you've called a bunch of porn 900 numbers from your cell phone. With my contact number on it. Then I just wait for you to call me and 'verify' your information.
with known-good contact info for a business, such as calling a number printed on your phone bill)
Like the phone bill I send you that looks exactly like your normal phone bill, except that it has my number on it?
Hey, try reading! I didn't say dismantle R&D. I said don't go mindlessly hiring new employees just you are currently profitable. Employees are an expense, and if you're not hiring people to do something that is going to pay for those employees down the road, you're just throwing your profits away.
Disclaimer: I am an actual engineer.
Middle-management is essential to getting my job done. I don't want to have to negotiate with the tool vendors on price or licenses. I don't want to have to evaluate how well people are performing. I don't want to have to find, interview, and hire new employees. I don't want to do the department budget, set the schedule, fight to get materials on time from vendors, etc, etc. And, most importantly, I don't want to have to explain what I'm doing to upper management.
Now, some managers are definitely useless, but so are some engineers. That's not a job-level problem, that's a people problem.
You would much rather have the money back than have the company 'invest' it in something that is never going to pay off.
Sometimes companies need to know when they've pulled in more revenue than they can properly reinvest and just give it back to you.