"Only the fear that word'll get around that they do this to folks hosting web pages on their servers."
If you are using a decent web hosting company, the other thing that prevents them from claiming your content as their property is having it written in the user agreement that your content is your property. I would never host with a company that says less or doesn't say at all.
As far as this particular university case goes, though, I have absolutely no sympathy. It was their servers. It was their network. Therefore, websitedude was playing by their rules, whether he felt that way or not. "He who has the gold makes the rules"...and it was their gold.
Most, if not all, slashdoters would take great offense at someone coming on to their property telling them how to use a computer system they own. Yet a lot of slashdoters also seem to have no problem telling someone else who owns a computer (in this case, the university) how to run their systems.
If ya don't like the school policies, or don't want the school to try to control things, then buy your own friggin server with your own dimes.
I signed up on Gilat's list several months ago to be a beta tester. I live in the proverbial sticks (to most people around here, "high speed access" means anything faster than 28.8kbps), and cable access or DSL are years away. I would love to have something faster than my current 56kbps.
A couple of weeks or so ago I got the formal invitation in my email to get in to the program early as a beta tester. I turned it down for several reasons.
First, as someone else has already mentioned, just to be a beta tester you had to fork up $499 (plus a hefty installation fee unless installed before Sept 15th). What the previous poster didn't mention was this was because you were buying a whole new friggin computer...you can't use any old machine you got laying around, you MUST by a new one from them, and use their OS (Windows) and hardware. Hence I can't use it with my notebook and I can't use it on my own Linux box without doing a network of my own (see the third point below).
Second, in reading the fine print I discovered that they only guarentee access at 150kbps. After the beta period is over (January 1) I am not willing to pay $69.95 a month to have access that is only going to be 2 - 3 times faster than what I have now for $19.95.
And third, and this was the biggie for me, VPN is forbidden. They consider this a "business" service, and if they make VPN allowable, it will be for "an additional fee". And while they don't explicitly say no networking or internet connection sharing, they don't support it and won't help make it work either.
So my opinion after reading everything was that, at least for me, their service is not offering me anything that would make it worth $69.95 a month plus all the up front cash.
Recently Mr. Katz proclaimed how wonderful it is that people openly steal the intellectual property of others (even though his own books are copyrighted to the hilt, and I'm sure he'd be more than pissed if they were made available for free downloading), and now he wants to raise a petty vandal to the status of the signators of the Declaration of Independance.
Jose is now rotting in a French jail, which is exactly where his worthless vandalizing ass should be. His meals should consist of nothing but Big Macs, and Katz should be restricted to a diet of water and Happy Meals.
Katz's postings prove yet again that old saying...the two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
Re:I wrote that code - I'll tell you what it does
on
Mattel Spyware
·
· Score: 1
There's one other difference...when you buy the newpaper/magazine/cable TV, you KNOW the ads are there before you make the purchase. I wouldn't be nearly as opposed to this sort of crap in applications if the manufacturer(s) would simply disclose, ON THE OUTSIDE OF THE BOX, what their spyware routines do. And some ex-employee singing verses from that popular song "I wrote it three years ago, its harmless" doesn't cut it, and the company deserves all of the bad press they are getting, and they deserve to have even more bad press (and massive loss of sales) heaped upon top of it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Only the fear that word'll get around that they do this to folks hosting web pages on their servers."
If you are using a decent web hosting company, the other thing that prevents them from claiming your content as their property is having it written in the user agreement that your content is your property. I would never host with a company that says less or doesn't say at all.
As far as this particular university case goes, though, I have absolutely no sympathy. It was their servers. It was their network. Therefore, websitedude was playing by their rules, whether he felt that way or not. "He who has the gold makes the rules"...and it was their gold.
Most, if not all, slashdoters would take great offense at someone coming on to their property telling them how to use a computer system they own. Yet a lot of slashdoters also seem to have no problem telling someone else who owns a computer (in this case, the university) how to run their systems.
If ya don't like the school policies, or don't want the school to try to control things, then buy your own friggin server with your own dimes.
I signed up on Gilat's list several months ago to be a beta tester. I live in the proverbial sticks (to most people around here, "high speed access" means anything faster than 28.8kbps), and cable access or DSL are years away. I would love to have something faster than my current 56kbps.
A couple of weeks or so ago I got the formal invitation in my email to get in to the program early as a beta tester. I turned it down for several reasons.
First, as someone else has already mentioned, just to be a beta tester you had to fork up $499 (plus a hefty installation fee unless installed before Sept 15th). What the previous poster didn't mention was this was because you were buying a whole new friggin computer...you can't use any old machine you got laying around, you MUST by a new one from them, and use their OS (Windows) and hardware. Hence I can't use it with my notebook and I can't use it on my own Linux box without doing a network of my own (see the third point below).
Second, in reading the fine print I discovered that they only guarentee access at 150kbps. After the beta period is over (January 1) I am not willing to pay $69.95 a month to have access that is only going to be 2 - 3 times faster than what I have now for $19.95.
And third, and this was the biggie for me, VPN is forbidden. They consider this a "business" service, and if they make VPN allowable, it will be for "an additional fee". And while they don't explicitly say no networking or internet connection sharing, they don't support it and won't help make it work either.
So my opinion after reading everything was that, at least for me, their service is not offering me anything that would make it worth $69.95 a month plus all the up front cash.
Recently Mr. Katz proclaimed how wonderful it is that people openly steal the intellectual property of others (even though his own books are copyrighted to the hilt, and I'm sure he'd be more than pissed if they were made available for free downloading), and now he wants to raise a petty vandal to the status of the signators of the Declaration of Independance.
Jose is now rotting in a French jail, which is exactly where his worthless vandalizing ass should be. His meals should consist of nothing but Big Macs, and Katz should be restricted to a diet of water and Happy Meals.
Katz's postings prove yet again that old saying...the two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
There's one other difference...when you buy the newpaper/magazine/cable TV, you KNOW the ads are there before you make the purchase. I wouldn't be nearly as opposed to this sort of crap in applications if the manufacturer(s) would simply disclose, ON THE OUTSIDE OF THE BOX, what their spyware routines do. And some ex-employee singing verses from that popular song "I wrote it three years ago, its harmless" doesn't cut it, and the company deserves all of the bad press they are getting, and they deserve to have even more bad press (and massive loss of sales) heaped upon top of it.