If the game is now ad supported Sony should give it away. That would be only fair.
They can't have it both ways. Charge you for the game and make you watch intrusive ads.
That is all well and good, but, wireless customers have gotten "use" to the cell phones being "free" or 20-60 dollars, because of the contracts. I would prefer to pay a higher rate for a phone, and pick & choose the carrier to use it on.
Heh. You wouldn't have to pay a higher rate for a phone.
The whole problem is caused by this:
There is no competition at all. The cellphone carriers keep a stranglehold on the equipment, with fake subsidies for the equipment which is a piece of subterfuge used to keep customers locked into long contracts. They mark the phones up to $300 or $400, then give you a big discount for signing a 2 year contract.
The carriers should not be allowed to sell phones at all.
If the carriers were just carriers, they would only be concerned with satisfying their customers.
The carriers have very valuable FCC licenses. They have some amount of responsibility that they operate in the public interest, however little anymore.
You would buy your phone from a retailer, and Motorola, Apple, Nokia would be beating down the door at Walmart to sell those phones, which would then work on all networks. They would be sold in a highly competitive market. Prices would decline. There would be no way to mark them up and then discount them since you would be buying from a retailer who has no interest in your service. The kickbacks would stop too.
Then the carriers would be free to compete with each other and there would be no anticompetitive subsidy locking of handsets, no contracts to keep you locked in, and the prices of the service would decline.
This would be pure business. Manufacturing, selling, providing service, all independent of each other.
Before Nextel was bought by Sprint that company (Nextel) was run by some shrewed cookies. They would find a frequency that was not currently being used, and put a beacon on it. Somehow this claimed it for them.
There's *lots* of spectrum that is not being used, like the 2 MHz part of the 220MHz Amateur band that was taken away from ham radio but never actually used by UPS, for whom it was taken.
There are channels of the 2.6 GHz licensed band in LA that have been licensed to the Catholic church for decades and they have continuous analog video on it related to Catholic schools. Like they need that today! I heard about that from the coordination authority for that band. No channels were available, but not for good reason.
If Google's idea is that underutilized spectrum should be opened up to shared usage that might be much better than the way it is now.
For some time I have wanted my bank to just return any documents, checks, credit card charges, *anything* that does not include my original signature personally signed by me in ink.
They don't have the ability to set my account to do that. Walmart, Sears, Kragen, all have signature capture hardware on their cash registers. But why would I want my signature stored in any computer? I wouldn't. I could easily put any signature on any document with a computer. *Lots* of people can today. A printed, pasted, captured signature on a document proves *nothing*.
I just make an "X" on those systems.
If we ever get to court about one of those transactions I will be expecting them to produce an originally signed ink signature, personally signed by me, proving I was here today and signed that document. Without that, well, clearly I wasn't here. Which is the only purpose of signing *anything*. To prove I was there that day and that *is* my signature.
The US government had a standing order to chip brokers for all the 8087 math coprocessors that could be had. They are used in some military radar units and there is no replacement available.
More to the point...is there actually anything ILLEGAL at all about spoofing a caller ID number? I don't know of any laws that require you to give out by any means, the phone number you are calling from.
Since there is no fraud being committed here as far as I can tell, I'm guessing there actually is no crime being committed here...at least in the US?
Which is the whole problem. When caller ID was created it was a way for the telcos to make money, a "service" they could sell, which cost nothing since it was all a part of their switching equipment. They made millions selling those services to us.
But now we find that caller ID is actually insecure, the telcos that created and sold it never took ordinary care to secure it and that anyone can spoof caller ID data, even using a free website caller ID spoofing service.
And now that some people are depending on caller ID being secure, like the AT&T Cellular voicemail as was mentioned earlier in the thread, it's getting to be a problem.
The solution of course is to make the telcos responsible for the security and correctness of the data they are sending their customers who pay for their caller ID service, and to have penalties for allowing the sending of data that is not "true". Like $1000 per falsified caller ID incident.
That's the only solution I can think of. The telcos will either secure the caller ID service lickity split or stop selling it altogether.
Just to illustrate the point:
PirateBay has apparently arranged new connectivity, that new ISP will now be targeted by MPAA and have to get rid of PirateBay to avoid it. The circle continues. You cannot cash copyright pirate's checks and stay in the ISP business. Not anymore. Those days are over. Hooray for MPAA.
Oh, hardly.
Piratebay clearly doesn't host any copyright materials, their role is the same as google's, that of a search engine. They don't cash any checks. Aren't they all essentially volunteers?
They are being wrongly attacked by MPAA. Some day some court will figure that out. But realize that the courts are run by lawyers. Clearly MPAA has much more money to pay lawyers than Piratebay (and Spamhaus) who both give their services away for free. That is likely why there has not been such a court opinion about Piratebay's role. They are outgunned.
Pacific, and now the new host have a high involvement with Intercage, they are cashing checks. They DO get paid.
Spamhaus only provides an opinion of reputability. In Spamhaus' opinion Intercage and their associates are disreputable and should be avoided. That some subscribers to the FREE SBL database want to take Spamhaus' opinion and use it to tag or even filter their mail, well that is those SBL user's right. Nobody has to accept email from anyone.
And sure, SBL is designed to make the upstream providers feel the pain and get some backbone. "Stop helping spammers and crooks destroy the internet and the utility of email or we'll put you in the same category." Spamhaus gets no money for doing so like MPAA does. MPAA has hundreds of millions of dollars to fund their lawyers and legal attacks.
Spamhaus however is influential. They only gain their influence by their user's opinion that their SBL list is useful and not too dangerous to use to filter mail. Apparently they have that reputation and are thus influential. A heavy mallet to be used on spammers and crooks. And Spamhaus is clearly not in it for the money. Pure intentions, not like MPAA at all.
Ok, for the record I am happy they are offline, but the devil's advocate in me does make me wonder about impact of this on net-neutrality.
Consider this, a bandwidth provider cuts off certain traffic because it disproves of this traffic and feels most of it is illegal and it is bad for their business.
Is it Pacific Internet Exchange cutting off access to Intercage because they believe most of the sites (70+ %) involves spam or some other illegal acvitivy?
It's not that at all.
Pacific Internet Exchange cut off Intercage because Spamhaus listed Intercage, Pacific, and all of Pacific's legit customers if any, so none could send or receive email.
Net neutrality? Nope. Nothing to do with that. If Pacific wanted to stay in business they had to avoid being listed by SBL. Once listed they had to resolve that problem or they would have no legit customers left. So it's pure self interest on the part of Pacific. As it should be.
Intercage has apparently arranged new connectivity, that new ISP will now be listed by SBL and have to get rid of Intercage of avoid it. The circle continues. You cannot cash spammers and miscreant's checks and stay in the ISP business. Not anymore. Those days are over. Hooray for Spamhaus.
This article is preposterous. We don't dump e-waste in China, they buy it from us!
They love it, they recycle that stuff and ship it back to us in products they make.
China used to buy computer monitors from us by the millions, they would take them apart, sort the chassis by brand and model, make a special board to run it when they had enough the same and those would be the new TV sets at Walmart. Recycled tubes.
Today they sort the plastic by color, regrind it and mold more plastic items.
They sort the screws by size and reuse them.
They unsolder memory and other chips and resolder them on new boards as needed.
It's all ingenious, really.
The allegation that we are dumping e-waste is absurd.
I have seen all this and talked to the Chinese guys who buy those containers here in the US for their cohorts in China to recycle. This is what I was told. And they are looking for more and more containers to use for raw material.
Without China we'd really have an e-waste problem. Fortunately we don't because of their clever activities.
Reuse-recycle! We're doing it. China is helping us and themselves.
It takes much less energy, effort and causes much less pollution reusing than making new raw materials.
However, the carriers don't own the frequencies they use, they use them in the public interest because we let them.
If they are not serving the public interest their licenses can be revoked.
It couldn't happen to nicer guys!
There's a dark area in the corner of my office this morning. It wasn't there yesterday.
I dropped a pencil and it was sucked into it. How long will this last?
Doesn't Firefox v2 get unsupported after this year ends?
I hope Firefox 3 is fixed before Firefox 2 gets unsupported.
I upgraded 4 or 5 systems to Firefox 3 last week and I am back to Firefox 2 on all of them.
Firefox 3 is faster, a lot faster.
Bit it has too many javascript problems. Too many issues with click on a link and get nothing with Firefox 3.
I filed bug reports about it.
That thing is just not ready for release yet.
You think cops are infallible? Do you think there is something inherent in them to where they don't make mistakes or become mistaken at any point?
If so, is this a trait they are born with, acquire when they get hired as a cop, or only takes effect when they go on duty?
The problem is that cops are human too. Thy jump to conclusions and mistake events around them just like other people do.
That was a little tongue in cheek. I think police can make honest mistakes.
I don't expect them to lie and I expect to be given the benefit of any doubt in my encounters with them.
I read about police and prosecutorial misconduct all the time. If the cop looks up from his newspaper and notices the radar display and isn't absolutely sure which vehicle that is I expect him to sit right there until he gets sure.
I don't expect to have to bring in GPS evidence to refute fake, sloppy, uncertain or contrived evidence brought by the police. It's just not their job to lie, cheat or steal.
If the government has workers whom are found DO lie, cheat and steal I expect action against that by their higher ups.
I have had this very discussion with these very words with members of the county board of supervisors.
The third option might be that the quality of law enforcement officers are down and the particular policeman in question was/is an idiot who forgot to clear his last stop and look up from his newspaper to see the guy going by faster then what he thought the speed limit was and the wrong speed on the radar gun's display.
Well I think that's awfully charitable of you. The police officer was tired or stupid, but was nonetheless able to deliberately stop motorists on false evidence and willing to sign the ticket swearing it was true? He was then willing to show up in court and argue his falsified charges?
That's just ridiculous.
This happened to me when I was pulled over for speeding without my radar detector going off. The cops claimed I was doing 71 Kph in a 50Kph zone. They were wrong on both counts.
1. The speed limit on that road is 80Kph
2. I was actually going just shy of 180Kph.
I pointed out item #1. without mentioning item #2 and avoided a ticket. The real trouble is that even if I had taken the ticket and challenged it in court I would be acquitted of the speeding charge but the cop would still be allowed to keep defrauding motorists in this way.
So the important part of your post and of the story is this:
1.The radar units used by the police are completely defective and unreliable.
or
2.The police who use them are lying.
I'd be really interested in knowing which it is.
If they are unreliable they need to be done away with as a speed measuring method.
If the police are actually lying that is even more disturbing, because no government employee is hired and charged with the responsibility to lie, cheat and steal in their job description, including the police officers. They are only supposed to cite us for things we actually did. They are not supposed to fake crimes, though I suspect some of that does go on, I can't imagine why anyone would lie, cheat or steal for an employer. I sure wouldn't.
Google doesn't want the liability. If anything kills eBay it's going to be getting sued by every luxury good maker on the planet. EBay claims they want to ensure authentic goods but is unwilling to take the steps needed to ensure authenticity
Not really true. Ebay used to be essentially immune to that sort of liability. Remember "eBay is just a venue"?
The way to avoid liability is to avoid sticking your nose into things so that you become liable for "what you know or should have known".
If you have no reasonable way to know you can't be liable for not knowing something.Note this may not apply in French courts run by lunatics.
Now however eBay is knowingly taking on the responsibility for ensuring authenticity. That will be their downfall. Their old lawyers were smart, there was a line eBay didn't cross. With the new and incredibly stupid regime over there they are crossing the line and getting enormous liability, liability they avoided all these years.
Just wait, some of their big sellers who are paying their seller fees based on the anonymous "Detailed Seller Ratings" will sue eBay. In discovery will come out which of their buyers gave them lower DSRs and are costing them money, and then they will add those buyers to the lawsuit in place of the John Does. Ebay will be a defendant along with those eBay members, and they will find out what real liability is. I'd love to be involved. It'd be a hoot. Heh.
Back to Google, they are not responsible for the contents of Google Base, which contains billions of products, some likely completely fake. But Google doesn't know and shouldn't be expected to know. So they are essentially immune to liability. If they started an eBay competitor they would be careful what they pry into. Something eBay used to be careful of, but not anymore.
The complaint is that they are "spamming the internet with deceptive traffic".
No, that is not the complaint, and you are being disingenuous. The complaint is that users of their software are "spamming the internet with deceptive traffic" which is easily correctable with a change in the default install.
Well, it's hardly easily correctable with a change in the default install.
You have to install with this command line:
c:\avg_free_stf_*.exe/REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf/REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch
You couldn't give that command to someone over a beer or even on the phone. It's ridiculously complex, it should be much more simple. It's really really hard.
They stumbled in their architecture decisions on the new release. Made bad choices. Hopefully AVG is fixing all this nonsense right now.
It's more than decent of them to provide a free version.
Do you realize how many people have no ability to order any expensive worthless AV software from Mcafee or Symantec? Like nobody has a credit card?
AVG 7.5 worked great for a free program for lots of these people. They have nowhere else to go.
AVG7 was fairly lightweight and caused me no problems, unlike the PCTOOLS antivirus one guy kept installing at his office. It caused so many problems he had to uninstall it, but when uninstalled took the XP LSP (layered service providers) stack with it. After that he would have to call me.
It took me 4+ hours to find that problem. There was a free thing called LSPFIX that took care of it if anyone has a computer that seems to be perfectly working but won't talk on the network.
As to the new AVG8, I have been re-installing it with those command line switches to get rid of the link scanner. Link scanners are always a bad idea, it makes no sense to preload links from someone's yahoo page with hundreds of links they will never click on, what does anyone care if malware is behind them?
AVG came up with a silly idea with that whole link scanner idea. Hopefully they are fixing the problem by turning that thing off right now.
These type of mid-contract price increases are good for consumers, if they know and take action.
Cellular carriers give out free or subsidized phones as a method of keeping their customers signed up for long contracts. They keep a stranglehold on the equipment to further that.
However, by law when a carrier makes a material change mid-contract their customers, *all* their customers get a get out of contract free 30 day window. It's a great deal and you should exercise your rights when a carrier changes *anything* whether the change affects you or not.
http://wirelesscontractsinfo.blogspot.com/2008/02/cancel-your-wireless-contract-without.html From Sprint Nextel contract:
We will provide you notice of material changes, and may provide you notice of non-material changes, in a manner consistent with this Agreement (see "Providing Notice To Each Other Under The Agreement" section). If a change we make to the Agreement is material and has a material adverse effect on Services under your Term Commitment, you may terminate each line of Service materially affected without incurring an Early Termination Fee only if you: (a) call us within 30 days after the effective date of the change; and (b) specifically advise us that you wish to cancel Services because of a material change to the Agreement that we have made. If you do not cancel Service within 30 days of the change, an Early Termination Fee will apply if you terminate Services before the end of any applicable Term Commitment.
So now that you know you are gaining important new rights that you didn't have before they raised the text message rates you can take advantage of that. You don't have to stop using the service, you can probably just cancel the agreement, though they may deny that. If they do just hang up and call back, it costs cellular carriers over $400 to acquire a customer, they don't want to lose you even month to month though they may deny that. So you're now month to month and can threaten to leave unless they give you another free phone. Heh.
FWIW I have done this. There was much gnashing of teeth at the cell carrier. Uh-oh. A customer who has actually read the contract!
Received from eBay yesterday, revised user agreement and privacy policy terms. What a coincidence!
Received: Jun-30-08
Changes to the eBay User Agreement and Privacy Policy
I'm writing to let you know that the eBay User Agreement and eBay Privacy Policy have been updated, effective immediately for new users and on August 13, 2008, for current users.
The most important thing to keep in mind about this update is that your rights, and our responsibilities, under the User Agreement and Privacy Policy have changed very little. This update was spurred by an international project, rolling out now, that will make the user agreements and privacy policies for eBay platforms around the world much more consistent. This way, when you interact with any eBay platform around the world, you can be sure that very similar policies apply to you no matter where you do your transactions.
There is one substantive change to our User Agreement I'd like to point out. We changed the "Content" and "Liability" sections to accommodate a new program we're rolling out worldwide. That program makes catalogs of content and product descriptions available to sellers, so they can easily include complete and up-to-date product information for the items they list.
Similarly, we've revised the Privacy Policy's "Disclosure" section to make sure that the language we've used there accurately reflects the ways in which we're transferring information between companies in the eBay Inc. corporate family to streamline services, fight fraud and provide you with the best, most relevant experience when you use any of the sites or services of the eBay corporate family.
With these changes, we continue to make sure that our legal documents are consistent with the ways our sites and services are evolving and that we meet the needs of our user community. We hope you'll agree that these changes will make the eBay sites and services work better for you. If you accept the new User Agreement and Privacy Policy, you don't need to take any action. If you do not wish to accept the new User Agreement or Privacy Policy, please refer to our Help pages for instructions on how to close your account.
Thank you for using eBay and we look forward to many more successful transactions!
Sincerely,
Scott Shipman
Senior Counsel -- Global Privacy Practices
eBay Inc.
The important change is in the liability section:
Liability
You will not hold eBay responsible for other users' content, actions or inactions, or items they list. You acknowledge that we are not a traditional auctioneer. Instead, the sites are a venue to allow anyone to offer, sell, and buy just about anything, at anytime, from anywhere, in a variety of pricing formats and venues, such as stores, fixed price formats and auction-style formats. We are not involved in the actual transaction between buyers and sellers. We have no control over and do not guarantee the quality, safety or legality of items advertised, the truth or accuracy of users' content or listings, the ability of sellers to sell items, the ability of buyers to pay for items, or that a buyer or seller will actually complete a transaction.
We do not transfer legal ownership of items from the seller to the buyer, and nothing in this agreement shall modify the governing provisions of California Commercial Code 2401(2) and Uniform Commercial Code 2-401(2), under which legal ownership of an item is transferred upon physical delivery of the item to the buyer by the seller. Unless the buyer and the seller agree otherwise, the buyer will become the item's lawful owner upon physical receipt of the item from the seller, in accordance with California Commercial Code 2401(2) and Uniform Commercial Code 2-401(2). Further, we cannot guarantee continuous or secure access to our services, and operation of the sites may be interfered with by numerous factors outside of our control. According
Elizabeth, that's not really the question.
The fact that this was an insider bidding on auctions is a small part of what's wrong with the domain registrar business. Domain registrars have a clerical position. They have special access to ICANN and the root nameservers and have an inside track on those domains and their ownership.
A registrar can just not release an expired domain and then it's unavailable for registration by others. It seems likely this is how godaddy got the domains that were being auctioned, in essence by misappropriating them.
Given that, registrars should *all* be prohibited from buying, selling, brokering, owning or otherwise trading in those domains. The special access registrars have makes this essential. Expired domains belong to someone, either the expired owner, or the public.
The only entity that clearly doesn't own them is the registrar. The registrar didn't think up the domain name, didn't publicize it, build traffic, link to it, they did nothing. They got paid to make the original registration entry on behalf of their customer, as a contractor. If the customer failed to pay for the renewal and a registrar just kept the property instead of releasing it to be registered by the public they are essentially stealing it.
I point to automobile repossession law of most states for your guidance. If a car is repossessed because the owner didn't pay off his loan of $5000, and the car is subsequently sold for it's true value of $10,000, the owner gets the extra money. The car loan company is not enriched by their grabbing it and successfully selling it. The law is the same for real estate. Why should domain names be different? Many are equally valuable.
As to godaddy, where did godaddy get the domains they were auctioning that day? Did they own them or were they selling them on behalf of another party, and not an alter ego of godaddy. If it's found the domains being auctioned were misappropriated from godaddy's previous customers who had let those domains expire godaddy should be sanctioned.
If godaddy wants to buy and sell domains on it's own account they should give up their registrar business and they would then be free to do so.
ICANN is a weak organization, they are dominated by the registrar industry and are ethically challenged in their job of *regulating* that industry. ICANN can't detect clear conflicts of interest, can't even detect blatant theft on the part of the industry they are supposed to be regulating. That's the problem that needs to be fixed. I'm not holding my breath.
Technical merit? I think not.
They can't block the packets, they sold their users "unlimited" internet. If certain packets are just blocked that's not really unlimited, is it?
They sure didn't tell anyone they were secretly installing Sandvine boxes that nobody had heard of specifically to screw up certain kinds of traffic. They did it in secret. It was subterfuge. A dirty trick. Mischief.
Now that they are found out their story is they are just "managing bandwidth".
But what they are really doing is trying to stop 2% of their customers from using 98% of the bandwidth, bandwidth they have to pay for. Remember, though they are selling "unlimited" internet access at some level *all* bandwidth is measured. Theirs is certainly measured by their upstream provider. There is really no "unlimited" bandwidth.
I notice that now. I read that several times to see if you mentioned the connection type. I missed it.
As I said cable lines are usually a lot faster than ADSL and should be having no problems.
So that leaves fake problems they made for you on purpose.
You might see if there are those Sandvine traffic management boxes I mentioned on your network throttling you.
That may screw up voip. I don't see how it could avoid it since what it does is send you phoney resets all the time.
Bit torrent can take that as can web but voice? Heck no. You will get lots of stuttering, distortion, etc. Pretty much unusable.
Kind of the problem you got. I suspect foul play.
Well, I didn't say it but you would need a codec box to get that. But clearly we weren't discussing FM stereo radio quality voice. I was just throwing that in as what you get on ISDN and how we're being so darned shortchanged by the telcos on our ADSL lines.
And sure you would need two channels for FM stereo. But I've seen that done on remotes with one line, but they only had one mic. It sounded great.
Slashdot Mirror
If the game is now ad supported Sony should give it away. That would be only fair.
They can't have it both ways. Charge you for the game and make you watch intrusive ads.
Heh. You wouldn't have to pay a higher rate for a phone.
The whole problem is caused by this:
There is no competition at all. The cellphone carriers keep a stranglehold on the equipment, with fake subsidies for the equipment which is a piece of subterfuge used to keep customers locked into long contracts. They mark the phones up to $300 or $400, then give you a big discount for signing a 2 year contract.
The carriers should not be allowed to sell phones at all.
If the carriers were just carriers, they would only be concerned with satisfying their customers.
The carriers have very valuable FCC licenses. They have some amount of responsibility that they operate in the public interest, however little anymore.
You would buy your phone from a retailer, and Motorola, Apple, Nokia would be beating down the door at Walmart to sell those phones, which would then work on all networks. They would be sold in a highly competitive market. Prices would decline. There would be no way to mark them up and then discount them since you would be buying from a retailer who has no interest in your service. The kickbacks would stop too.
Then the carriers would be free to compete with each other and there would be no anticompetitive subsidy locking of handsets, no contracts to keep you locked in, and the prices of the service would decline.
This would be pure business. Manufacturing, selling, providing service, all independent of each other.
Before Nextel was bought by Sprint that company (Nextel) was run by some shrewed cookies. They would find a frequency that was not currently being used, and put a beacon on it. Somehow this claimed it for them.
There's *lots* of spectrum that is not being used, like the 2 MHz part of the 220MHz Amateur band that was taken away from ham radio but never actually used by UPS, for whom it was taken.
There are channels of the 2.6 GHz licensed band in LA that have been licensed to the Catholic church for decades and they have continuous analog video on it related to Catholic schools. Like they need that today! I heard about that from the coordination authority for that band. No channels were available, but not for good reason.
If Google's idea is that underutilized spectrum should be opened up to shared usage that might be much better than the way it is now.
For some time I have wanted my bank to just return any documents, checks, credit card charges, *anything* that does not include my original signature personally signed by me in ink.
They don't have the ability to set my account to do that.
Walmart, Sears, Kragen, all have signature capture hardware on their cash registers. But why would I want my signature stored in any computer? I wouldn't. I could easily put any signature on any document with a computer. *Lots* of people can today. A printed, pasted, captured signature on a document proves *nothing*.
I just make an "X" on those systems.
If we ever get to court about one of those transactions I will be expecting them to produce an originally signed ink signature, personally signed by me, proving I was here today and signed that document.
Without that, well, clearly I wasn't here.
Which is the only purpose of signing *anything*. To prove I was there that day and that *is* my signature.
The US government had a standing order to chip brokers for all the 8087 math coprocessors that could be had. They are used in some military radar units and there is no replacement available.
Which is the whole problem. When caller ID was created it was a way for the telcos to make money, a "service" they could sell, which cost nothing since it was all a part of their switching equipment. They made millions selling those services to us.
But now we find that caller ID is actually insecure, the telcos that created and sold it never took ordinary care to secure it and that anyone can spoof caller ID data, even using a free website caller ID spoofing service.
And now that some people are depending on caller ID being secure, like the AT&T Cellular voicemail as was mentioned earlier in the thread, it's getting to be a problem.
The solution of course is to make the telcos responsible for the security and correctness of the data they are sending their customers who pay for their caller ID service, and to have penalties for allowing the sending of data that is not "true". Like $1000 per falsified caller ID incident.
That's the only solution I can think of. The telcos will either secure the caller ID service lickity split or stop selling it altogether.
Oh, hardly.
Piratebay clearly doesn't host any copyright materials, their role is the same as google's, that of a search engine. They don't cash any checks. Aren't they all essentially volunteers?
They are being wrongly attacked by MPAA. Some day some court will figure that out. But realize that the courts are run by lawyers. Clearly MPAA has much more money to pay lawyers than Piratebay (and Spamhaus) who both give their services away for free. That is likely why there has not been such a court opinion about Piratebay's role. They are outgunned.
Pacific, and now the new host have a high involvement with Intercage, they are cashing checks. They DO get paid.
Spamhaus only provides an opinion of reputability. In Spamhaus' opinion Intercage and their associates are disreputable and should be avoided. That some subscribers to the FREE SBL database want to take Spamhaus' opinion and use it to tag or even filter their mail, well that is those SBL user's right. Nobody has to accept email from anyone.
And sure, SBL is designed to make the upstream providers feel the pain and get some backbone. "Stop helping spammers and crooks destroy the internet and the utility of email or we'll put you in the same category." Spamhaus gets no money for doing so like MPAA does. MPAA has hundreds of millions of dollars to fund their lawyers and legal attacks.
Spamhaus however is influential. They only gain their influence by their user's opinion that their SBL list is useful and not too dangerous to use to filter mail. Apparently they have that reputation and are thus influential. A heavy mallet to be used on spammers and crooks. And Spamhaus is clearly not in it for the money. Pure intentions, not like MPAA at all.
It's not that at all.
Pacific Internet Exchange cut off Intercage because Spamhaus listed Intercage, Pacific, and all of Pacific's legit customers if any, so none could send or receive email.
Net neutrality? Nope. Nothing to do with that. If Pacific wanted to stay in business they had to avoid being listed by SBL. Once listed they had to resolve that problem or they would have no legit customers left. So it's pure self interest on the part of Pacific. As it should be.
Intercage has apparently arranged new connectivity, that new ISP will now be listed by SBL and have to get rid of Intercage of avoid it. The circle continues. You cannot cash spammers and miscreant's checks and stay in the ISP business. Not anymore. Those days are over. Hooray for Spamhaus.
This article is preposterous. We don't dump e-waste in China, they buy it from us!
They love it, they recycle that stuff and ship it back to us in products they make.
China used to buy computer monitors from us by the millions, they would take them apart, sort the chassis by brand and model, make a special board to run it when they had enough the same and those would be the new TV sets at Walmart. Recycled tubes.
Today they sort the plastic by color, regrind it and mold more plastic items.
They sort the screws by size and reuse them.
They unsolder memory and other chips and resolder them on new boards as needed.
It's all ingenious, really.
The allegation that we are dumping e-waste is absurd.
I have seen all this and talked to the Chinese guys who buy those containers here in the US for their cohorts in China to recycle.
This is what I was told. And they are looking for more and more containers to use for raw material.
Without China we'd really have an e-waste problem. Fortunately we don't because of their clever activities.
Reuse-recycle! We're doing it. China is helping us and themselves.
It takes much less energy, effort and causes much less pollution reusing than making new raw materials.
However, the carriers don't own the frequencies they use, they use them in the public interest because we let them.
If they are not serving the public interest their licenses can be revoked.
It couldn't happen to nicer guys!
There's a dark area in the corner of my office this morning. It wasn't there yesterday. I dropped a pencil and it was sucked into it. How long will this last?
I hope Firefox 3 is fixed before Firefox 2 gets unsupported.
I upgraded 4 or 5 systems to Firefox 3 last week and I am back to Firefox 2 on all of them.
Firefox 3 is faster, a lot faster.
Bit it has too many javascript problems. Too many issues with click on a link and get nothing with Firefox 3.
I filed bug reports about it.
That thing is just not ready for release yet.
That was a little tongue in cheek. I think police can make honest mistakes.
I don't expect them to lie and I expect to be given the benefit of any doubt in my encounters with them.
I read about police and prosecutorial misconduct all the time. If the cop looks up from his newspaper and notices the radar display and isn't absolutely sure which vehicle that is I expect him to sit right there until he gets sure.
I don't expect to have to bring in GPS evidence to refute fake, sloppy, uncertain or contrived evidence brought by the police. It's just not their job to lie, cheat or steal.
If the government has workers whom are found DO lie, cheat and steal I expect action against that by their higher ups.
I have had this very discussion with these very words with members of the county board of supervisors.
Well I think that's awfully charitable of you. The police officer was tired or stupid, but was nonetheless able to deliberately stop motorists on false evidence and willing to sign the ticket swearing it was true? He was then willing to show up in court and argue his falsified charges?
That's just ridiculous.
So the important part of your post and of the story is this:
1.The radar units used by the police are completely defective and unreliable.
or
2.The police who use them are lying.
I'd be really interested in knowing which it is.
If they are unreliable they need to be done away with as a speed measuring method.
If the police are actually lying that is even more disturbing, because no government employee is hired and charged with the responsibility to lie, cheat and steal in their job description, including the police officers.
They are only supposed to cite us for things we actually did. They are not supposed to fake crimes, though I suspect some of that does go on, I can't imagine why anyone would lie, cheat or steal for an employer. I sure wouldn't.
Not really true. Ebay used to be essentially immune to that sort of liability. Remember "eBay is just a venue"?
The way to avoid liability is to avoid sticking your nose into things so that you become liable for "what you know or should have known".
If you have no reasonable way to know you can't be liable for not knowing something. Note this may not apply in French courts run by lunatics.
Now however eBay is knowingly taking on the responsibility for ensuring authenticity. That will be their downfall. Their old lawyers were smart, there was a line eBay didn't cross. With the new and incredibly stupid regime over there they are crossing the line and getting enormous liability, liability they avoided all these years.
Just wait, some of their big sellers who are paying their seller fees based on the anonymous "Detailed Seller Ratings" will sue eBay. In discovery will come out which of their buyers gave them lower DSRs and are costing them money, and then they will add those buyers to the lawsuit in place of the John Does. Ebay will be a defendant along with those eBay members, and they will find out what real liability is. I'd love to be involved. It'd be a hoot. Heh.
Back to Google, they are not responsible for the contents of Google Base, which contains billions of products, some likely completely fake. But Google doesn't know and shouldn't be expected to know. So they are essentially immune to liability. If they started an eBay competitor they would be careful what they pry into. Something eBay used to be careful of, but not anymore.
Google auctions, more likely. Craigslist's business model is ridiculous.
Well, it's hardly easily correctable with a change in the default install. /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSurf /REMOVE_FEATURE fea_AVG_SafeSearch
You have to install with this command line:
c:\avg_free_stf_*.exe
You couldn't give that command to someone over a beer or even on the phone. It's ridiculously complex, it should be much more simple. It's really really hard.
They stumbled in their architecture decisions on the new release. Made bad choices. Hopefully AVG is fixing all this nonsense right now.
It's more than decent of them to provide a free version.
Do you realize how many people have no ability to order any expensive worthless AV software from Mcafee or Symantec? Like nobody has a credit card?
AVG 7.5 worked great for a free program for lots of these people. They have nowhere else to go.
AVG7 was fairly lightweight and caused me no problems, unlike the PCTOOLS antivirus one guy kept installing at his office. It caused so many problems he had to uninstall it, but when uninstalled took the XP LSP (layered service providers) stack with it. After that he would have to call me.
It took me 4+ hours to find that problem. There was a free thing called LSPFIX that took care of it if anyone has a computer that seems to be perfectly working but won't talk on the network.
As to the new AVG8, I have been re-installing it with those command line switches to get rid of the link scanner. Link scanners are always a bad idea, it makes no sense to preload links from someone's yahoo page with hundreds of links they will never click on, what does anyone care if malware is behind them?
AVG came up with a silly idea with that whole link scanner idea. Hopefully they are fixing the problem by turning that thing off right now.
Cellular carriers give out free or subsidized phones as a method of keeping their customers signed up for long contracts. They keep a stranglehold on the equipment to further that.
However, by law when a carrier makes a material change mid-contract their customers, *all* their customers get a get out of contract free 30 day window. It's a great deal and you should exercise your rights when a carrier changes *anything* whether the change affects you or not.
So now that you know you are gaining important new rights that you didn't have before they raised the text message rates you can take advantage of that. You don't have to stop using the service, you can probably just cancel the agreement, though they may deny that. If they do just hang up and call back, it costs cellular carriers over $400 to acquire a customer, they don't want to lose you even month to month though they may deny that. So you're now month to month and can threaten to leave unless they give you another free phone. Heh.
FWIW I have done this. There was much gnashing of teeth at the cell carrier. Uh-oh. A customer who has actually read the contract!
The important change is in the liability section:
Elizabeth, that's not really the question.
The fact that this was an insider bidding on auctions is a small part of what's wrong with the domain registrar business. Domain registrars have a clerical position. They have special access to ICANN and the root nameservers and have an inside track on those domains and their ownership.
A registrar can just not release an expired domain and then it's unavailable for registration by others. It seems likely this is how godaddy got the domains that were being auctioned, in essence by misappropriating them.
Given that, registrars should *all* be prohibited from buying, selling, brokering, owning or otherwise trading in those domains. The special access registrars have makes this essential. Expired domains belong to someone, either the expired owner, or the public. The only entity that clearly doesn't own them is the registrar. The registrar didn't think up the domain name, didn't publicize it, build traffic, link to it, they did nothing. They got paid to make the original registration entry on behalf of their customer, as a contractor. If the customer failed to pay for the renewal and a registrar just kept the property instead of releasing it to be registered by the public they are essentially stealing it.
I point to automobile repossession law of most states for your guidance. If a car is repossessed because the owner didn't pay off his loan of $5000, and the car is subsequently sold for it's true value of $10,000, the owner gets the extra money. The car loan company is not enriched by their grabbing it and successfully selling it. The law is the same for real estate. Why should domain names be different? Many are equally valuable.
As to godaddy, where did godaddy get the domains they were auctioning that day? Did they own them or were they selling them on behalf of another party, and not an alter ego of godaddy. If it's found the domains being auctioned were misappropriated from godaddy's previous customers who had let those domains expire godaddy should be sanctioned.
If godaddy wants to buy and sell domains on it's own account they should give up their registrar business and they would then be free to do so.
ICANN is a weak organization, they are dominated by the registrar industry and are ethically challenged in their job of *regulating* that industry. ICANN can't detect clear conflicts of interest, can't even detect blatant theft on the part of the industry they are supposed to be regulating. That's the problem that needs to be fixed. I'm not holding my breath.
Technical merit? I think not.
They can't block the packets, they sold their users "unlimited" internet. If certain packets are just blocked that's not really unlimited, is it?
They sure didn't tell anyone they were secretly installing Sandvine boxes that nobody had heard of specifically to screw up certain kinds of traffic. They did it in secret. It was subterfuge. A dirty trick. Mischief.
Now that they are found out their story is they are just "managing bandwidth".
But what they are really doing is trying to stop 2% of their customers from using 98% of the bandwidth, bandwidth they have to pay for. Remember, though they are selling "unlimited" internet access at some level *all* bandwidth is measured. Theirs is certainly measured by their upstream provider. There is really no "unlimited" bandwidth.
I notice that now. I read that several times to see if you mentioned the connection type. I missed it.
As I said cable lines are usually a lot faster than ADSL and should be having no problems.
So that leaves fake problems they made for you on purpose.
You might see if there are those Sandvine traffic management boxes I mentioned on your network throttling you.
That may screw up voip. I don't see how it could avoid it since what it does is send you phoney resets all the time.
Bit torrent can take that as can web but voice? Heck no. You will get lots of stuttering, distortion, etc. Pretty much unusable.
Kind of the problem you got. I suspect foul play.
Well, I didn't say it but you would need a codec box to get that. But clearly we weren't discussing FM stereo radio quality voice. I was just throwing that in as what you get on ISDN and how we're being so darned shortchanged by the telcos on our ADSL lines.
And sure you would need two channels for FM stereo. But I've seen that done on remotes with one line, but they only had one mic. It sounded great.