When you're getting sued, the plaintiff's lawyer can send you instructions to preserve all existing and future material with possible evidentiary value in the proceedings. Failure to do so after receiving those instructions is horrendously bad from a legal perspective.
So if a website is purposefully not logging IPs to avoid identifying anonymous posters, and they receive such a notice, does failure to start logging IPs count as failing to preserve material with possible evidentiary value?
"She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, has published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in her field. So when the Yale law student interviewed with 16 firms for a job this summer, she was concerned that she had only four call-backs. She was stunned when she had zero offers."
From reading the linked thread, it seems that putting the summons on the message board serves a legal purpose of establishing minimal effort to serve the individuals in question--the parallel they keep raising is that, if you're unable to serve someone directly for some reason, it's been sufficient in the past to put an ad in a newspaper for a couple weeks. Apparently this was approved by a judge as a starting point.
I don't think this counts as serving them, but it seems to establish some necessary initial step for when they actually do track down the person behind BallsInMyFace42.
The guy in charge of the board, Ciolli, had an offer rescinded because of the scandal caused by these posts (prior to the suit being filed, in response to a WaPo article about them). Law firms are very touchy about "public scandal", and the positions are very competitive, so any negative publicity hurts.
Notice that, in the linked thread, no one is claiming that the posts weren't materially hurtful to the women in question.
I don't think of myself as touchy, hypersensitive, or mentally unstable, and I'd talk to a lawyer if someone was posting my picture on message boards along with accusations about having sex with my dog and my mother.
Law firms are especially sensitive in hiring with respect to 'public scandal'; any negative publicity hurts. A Yale law student in good standing couldn't get a 2L internship? I wonder why.
It sounds stupid from our perspective, but if you read the linked thread, some of them are shitting bricks because 1) a judge signed off on this method, which means it (arguably) satisfies some legal requirement for notification, and 2) it establishes a 'reasonable' attempt to contact them, so should the username be connected to an actual person later on, that person is on the hook.
As evidence that this is a serious legal tactic, the poster PaulieWalnuts who was responsible for most of the really reprehensible stuff has deleted everything he put up there.
Derek Parfit is an interesting philosopher who's done a lot of work on personal identity just by examining various Star Trek transporter scenarios (like what if you're reconstructed at the other end but don't disappear at the start).
This is the dilemma faced by MMORPG devs. If they make the grind more profitable (i.e., shorter), then everyone has tons of gold and epic drops, and the value of those things decrease proportionately. So they add back rarer items that either cost more or drop less frequently, and you're back to the long grind to get the *truly* epic gear.
The only way to let players avoid long, boring grinds is to offer many kinds of grinds so that a player doesn't have to kill 5,000 Xs; instead, they can kill 100 Xs, mine 100 ore, complete 10 quests, and buy 20 herbs. WoW isn't too bad at this; Eve was a bit better than average too, since there were quite a few ways to earn money.
But fundamentally, if you don't want players to get bored because they've got their tier 4 set after only 3 weeks of play, you have to have harder to obtain goals that amount to longer grinds.
pre-emptively changed my Visa card number a couple months before this became public. I found out that I was not affected by this break-in later, so I'm unsure whether or not it was in response to
The question in my mind is, given the basic vulnerability of a long-term CC number, why they don't move to something like SecureId token one-time passwords? If you can have a different six digit number every sixty seconds for five years on one device, surely the same (now public domain) algorithms could be embedded in a credit card. The infrastructure for real-time verification is already in place. With one stroke, the whole CC# theft business could be out of business, and the first mover CC company on this would have a huge marketing advantage: "No one can ever steal your Visa number again".
I put a friend's resume on my boss's desk for an open position, and his job-hopping was the one thing that almost cost him the interview (I had to do some fast talking). We're in our 30s, and by the time you're 35, a resume with too many 1 and 2 year jobs (and no 4 or 5 year jobs) looks like you don't know what you want or what you're doing.
The essential point of the crime is the problem: being arrested for servicing a community of people who don't want to pay in the first place means that when *you* need money, the legal defense fund will be anemic at best.
This sounds like a bullshit complaint that's about a bitter loser denying reality. Remember, anyone can file a complaint; whether it goes anywhere is what matters, and I doubt this one will. Big companies like IBM have checklists for firing people, and if they're saying they warned him months ago, they've almost certainly got it in writing. They've probably also got logs showing his workstation accessing porn. And as for Internet Addiction, even established addictions don't prevent you from getting fired--being addicted to heroin, for example, won't save your job just because you're legitimately, medically addicted to something everyone agrees is uncontrollable.
It's not that he wants a Mac, it's that, if he weren't an interested party in the success of Microsoft (and you can imagine the publicity that would result from a photo of Jim Allchin opening a PowerBook), and he were choosing between Mac and an XP based notebook, he'd take the Mac. It's an evocative way of saying "right now, Mac is better than what we're offering."
Yes, on paper, you can leave or be fired for no reason. But any labor lawyer will tell you that if you're firing someone with any superficial claim to discrimination (e.g., black, female), the fired employee can launch a long, expensive suit starting with an NLRB claim, and to avoid it you should go through the same sort of internal judicial/paperwork process so that you can prove you're not firing them for the wrong reason.
What you're missing is that the basic problem is interoperability. The guy's story is that he's unable after a decade of trying to use a linux desktop in an MS shop. OpenOffice doesn't work well enough with MS Office, Exchange connector doesn't work with advanced Exchange features, etc...
Sure, a clean sheet Linux-based enterprise system can work incredibly well. But most of us aren't in that enviable position.
Medieval 2: Total War leaves bodies on screen, and some impressive images can be achieved. After a hole is knocked in a castle wall, the attacker tries to surge through it, while the defender rushes bodies in to block the gap. After each side has lost 3 or 4 units in the battle, the hole literally looks as plugged up with corpses as it did in the movie Kingdom of Heaven.
They're not directly competitive products, but I think Gates is smart in identifying the Wii as a market-changer. The comparison isn't between cars and sheep, it's between mid and high end cars and a new economy model. When all you can buy is a sedan, the difference between Ford and GM products is relevent. But when all you need is an econo-box, and Hyundai suddenly starts appearing on every street corner, the Toyota dealers start looking around nervously.
One of the best comments ever was in a long thread about the technicalities of RAID hardware. Someone wrote four long paragraphs, and halfway through the second, tacked on to the end of one sentence "and besides, Hermione dies in the last book anyways." *
The outrage was tremendous because, before you even realized you were reading a spoiler, you'd finished and comprehended it. Sweetest troll ever.
* No one knows who dies in the last book, if someone does. At the time, Rowling explicitly said she hadn't decided who. It wasn't a real spoiler, and isn't now. Don't freak out.
Slashdot Mirror
When you're getting sued, the plaintiff's lawyer can send you instructions to preserve all existing and future material with possible evidentiary value in the proceedings. Failure to do so after receiving those instructions is horrendously bad from a legal perspective.
So if a website is purposefully not logging IPs to avoid identifying anonymous posters, and they receive such a notice, does failure to start logging IPs count as failing to preserve material with possible evidentiary value?
A Phi Beta Kappa from Yale failed to get a single job offer on graduation. Yes, they're worried about their jobs.
From here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/03/06/AR2007030602705_pf.html
"She graduated Phi Beta Kappa, has published in top legal journals and completed internships at leading institutions in her field. So when the Yale law student interviewed with 16 firms for a job this summer, she was concerned that she had only four call-backs. She was stunned when she had zero offers."
From reading the linked thread, it seems that putting the summons on the message board serves a legal purpose of establishing minimal effort to serve the individuals in question--the parallel they keep raising is that, if you're unable to serve someone directly for some reason, it's been sufficient in the past to put an ad in a newspaper for a couple weeks. Apparently this was approved by a judge as a starting point.
I don't think this counts as serving them, but it seems to establish some necessary initial step for when they actually do track down the person behind BallsInMyFace42.
The guy in charge of the board, Ciolli, had an offer rescinded because of the scandal caused by these posts (prior to the suit being filed, in response to a WaPo article about them). Law firms are very touchy about "public scandal", and the positions are very competitive, so any negative publicity hurts.
Notice that, in the linked thread, no one is claiming that the posts weren't materially hurtful to the women in question.
I don't think of myself as touchy, hypersensitive, or mentally unstable, and I'd talk to a lawyer if someone was posting my picture on message boards along with accusations about having sex with my dog and my mother.
Law firms are especially sensitive in hiring with respect to 'public scandal'; any negative publicity hurts. A Yale law student in good standing couldn't get a 2L internship? I wonder why.
It sounds stupid from our perspective, but if you read the linked thread, some of them are shitting bricks because 1) a judge signed off on this method, which means it (arguably) satisfies some legal requirement for notification, and 2) it establishes a 'reasonable' attempt to contact them, so should the username be connected to an actual person later on, that person is on the hook.
As evidence that this is a serious legal tactic, the poster PaulieWalnuts who was responsible for most of the really reprehensible stuff has deleted everything he put up there.
Derek Parfit is an interesting philosopher who's done a lot of work on personal identity just by examining various Star Trek transporter scenarios (like what if you're reconstructed at the other end but don't disappear at the start).
This is the dilemma faced by MMORPG devs. If they make the grind more profitable (i.e., shorter), then everyone has tons of gold and epic drops, and the value of those things decrease proportionately. So they add back rarer items that either cost more or drop less frequently, and you're back to the long grind to get the *truly* epic gear.
The only way to let players avoid long, boring grinds is to offer many kinds of grinds so that a player doesn't have to kill 5,000 Xs; instead, they can kill 100 Xs, mine 100 ore, complete 10 quests, and buy 20 herbs. WoW isn't too bad at this; Eve was a bit better than average too, since there were quite a few ways to earn money.
But fundamentally, if you don't want players to get bored because they've got their tier 4 set after only 3 weeks of play, you have to have harder to obtain goals that amount to longer grinds.
Without disagreeing with any of your comments about Java as a language, you're wrong: Java is indeed the replacement for Cobol.
pre-emptively changed my Visa card number a couple months before this became public. I found out that I was not affected by this break-in later, so I'm unsure whether or not it was in response to
The question in my mind is, given the basic vulnerability of a long-term CC number, why they don't move to something like SecureId token one-time passwords? If you can have a different six digit number every sixty seconds for five years on one device, surely the same (now public domain) algorithms could be embedded in a credit card. The infrastructure for real-time verification is already in place. With one stroke, the whole CC# theft business could be out of business, and the first mover CC company on this would have a huge marketing advantage: "No one can ever steal your Visa number again".
Microsoft never manages to get it out the door on time.
I put a friend's resume on my boss's desk for an open position, and his job-hopping was the one thing that almost cost him the interview (I had to do some fast talking). We're in our 30s, and by the time you're 35, a resume with too many 1 and 2 year jobs (and no 4 or 5 year jobs) looks like you don't know what you want or what you're doing.
The essential point of the crime is the problem: being arrested for servicing a community of people who don't want to pay in the first place means that when *you* need money, the legal defense fund will be anemic at best.
This sounds like a bullshit complaint that's about a bitter loser denying reality. Remember, anyone can file a complaint; whether it goes anywhere is what matters, and I doubt this one will. Big companies like IBM have checklists for firing people, and if they're saying they warned him months ago, they've almost certainly got it in writing. They've probably also got logs showing his workstation accessing porn. And as for Internet Addiction, even established addictions don't prevent you from getting fired--being addicted to heroin, for example, won't save your job just because you're legitimately, medically addicted to something everyone agrees is uncontrollable.
It's not that he wants a Mac, it's that, if he weren't an interested party in the success of Microsoft (and you can imagine the publicity that would result from a photo of Jim Allchin opening a PowerBook), and he were choosing between Mac and an XP based notebook, he'd take the Mac. It's an evocative way of saying "right now, Mac is better than what we're offering."
This is half true.
Yes, on paper, you can leave or be fired for no reason. But any labor lawyer will tell you that if you're firing someone with any superficial claim to discrimination (e.g., black, female), the fired employee can launch a long, expensive suit starting with an NLRB claim, and to avoid it you should go through the same sort of internal judicial/paperwork process so that you can prove you're not firing them for the wrong reason.
Daniel Radcliffe acting in Equus. Saucy photo included.
Who'da thunk it? Harry Potter has a treasure trail.
What you're missing is that the basic problem is interoperability. The guy's story is that he's unable after a decade of trying to use a linux desktop in an MS shop. OpenOffice doesn't work well enough with MS Office, Exchange connector doesn't work with advanced Exchange features, etc...
Sure, a clean sheet Linux-based enterprise system can work incredibly well. But most of us aren't in that enviable position.
Medieval 2: Total War leaves bodies on screen, and some impressive images can be achieved. After a hole is knocked in a castle wall, the attacker tries to surge through it, while the defender rushes bodies in to block the gap. After each side has lost 3 or 4 units in the battle, the hole literally looks as plugged up with corpses as it did in the movie Kingdom of Heaven.
He's really not an in-your-face kind of guy.
No? Not when he's screaming across the restaurant "this bacon is too greasy!" or yelling at you for smoking within 100 yards of him?
They're not directly competitive products, but I think Gates is smart in identifying the Wii as a market-changer. The comparison isn't between cars and sheep, it's between mid and high end cars and a new economy model. When all you can buy is a sedan, the difference between Ford and GM products is relevent. But when all you need is an econo-box, and Hyundai suddenly starts appearing on every street corner, the Toyota dealers start looking around nervously.
HaHAAAAAAAAAA!
/. thread about KDE where someone made a joke about everything starting with a K!
That's friggin' hilarious! I love it! Until now, I'd never seen a
MOD PARENT UP!
I admire elegance, even in trolling. The troll I mentioned was better than an AST, the original high water mark for trolling.
One of the best comments ever was in a long thread about the technicalities of RAID hardware. Someone wrote four long paragraphs, and halfway through the second, tacked on to the end of one sentence "and besides, Hermione dies in the last book anyways." *
The outrage was tremendous because, before you even realized you were reading a spoiler, you'd finished and comprehended it. Sweetest troll ever.
* No one knows who dies in the last book, if someone does. At the time, Rowling explicitly said she hadn't decided who. It wasn't a real spoiler, and isn't now. Don't freak out.