The company didn't fire him, and the DA declined to press charges. So yeah, he's really pissed off that all he wanted was proof that the guy claiming to be a phone tech really was a phone tech, and he got punched 3 times in the face, strangled, and chased down the stairs. And Verizon is just like "Well he wasn't convinced, we can't punish him, have a nice day sir." Lolsuit is his only option left.
Right, just like how since you're rewarded with getting to the airport on time when you hire a cabby, you're also jailed for vehicular manslaughter when if they run somebody over.
Yeah, she seems pretty nuts. She's a white supremacist who wants everybody non-white kicked out of the country, or at least the state so the state can secede and form a proper White Nation. Reading earlier posts, it seems to me that her rage stems from the fact that JADE has been increasingly focused on taking down the "mid to upper drug dealers," she regularly flips out at this wording, saying "who decides what's an upper and what's a lower drug dealer? You? Is there a rule? Cite it for me!!!!" and such (paraphrase, not a quote to a specific time). It seems to me she's upset that the upper tier drug dealers are rich white guys, and that JADE is focusing on taking them down, not the small fry downtown drug dealers. She's upset that they're focusing more on cocaine and less on crack and weed, and on taking down ringleaders instead of small scale dealers, and taking down users for possession. She frequently posts their reports, calling them liars, saying that just showing how much cocaine they seized, and that its decreasing, doesn't show they're doing a good job, it shows they're less and less effective. "Where's the numbers on how much is left in the city?" etc. So my interpretation is not that she's a vindictive ex-lover, but that she's a racist, and mad that they seem to be leaving the "black" dealers alone now, and going after the white guys instead!
The whole "lover" and "relationship" business she has going on appears to be because, they eventually contacted her and asked her to stop following them around when they go on raids. She flipped at that, because the letter they sent here was signed with the department name, not by a specific officer. This offended her sensibilities, because it gave her nobody to stalk and harass. She eventually found out who was in charge of the investigation into her blog, and decided that pretending to be an obsessed lover would not only make him uncomfortable, but also (she hoped) make it a conflict of interest, forcing him off the case, so she could repeat it on the new guy until they give up. She explicitly states this as her goal. She would phone his cell, his office, his pager, talk to him as much as she could, that way they have "a relationship" according to a definition from a dictionary, and since you can't investigate somebody you're "in a relationship with", off the case! She fumed about how this didn't work, how the cops don't follow their own laws! When he finally did get put on something more important, she mused at her relief that she didn't have to pretend to be obsessed with him anymore.
In summary, she's nuts. Monitoring the arrests that police are making is a good thing, it keeps them honest. And they didn't arrest her for that. Stalking cops and posting where they go to the gym doesn't keep them honest. All it does is put them in danger. Sure, an angry drug dealer could have done the same thing, if he wanted. And they didn't even arrest her for that, though they yelled at her. And it certainly doesn't keep them honest to stalk them to picnics, and to force events, and inter-force competitions, and talk to their daughters. And then post snarky shit about their daughters, who said "That man is my daddy" "Oh yeah sweetheart, the musclebound big brother thug?" But then for one officer, she posted his name, address, photograph, and a photograph of his home. When she did that, they told her to pull them down, and cited the criminal code she's now been charged with. She said her intent isn't to harass, but to profess her love of the police force, on duty and off! They apparently did not buy it, and when she didn't back down, followed through on their promise to arrest her for the law she clearly violated. I mean really, she calls it "I hearte jade" but only colors in the "HATE" in "hearte", and then says "No it's a fan page, I love the cops, I don't hate them and want them gone, honestly!!!! I LUV U GUYS SO HARD!" Her intent is clear.
Many posters have said your intent doesn't matter, that free speech is immutable.
One mark out of four for having the correct answer to one significant digit. You get no marks for your work and explanation, sadly. Hence the inherent weakness of multiple choice: You get full marks for guesses, or for multiple errors canceling out, or for sheer coincidence.
Water isn't pure H2O, it's 2 H2O in an equilibrium with OH- H3O+. So, don't forget about the H3O+ from the water! Because your numbers are so close, you'll have to redo the equilibrium equation (normally its just lost in the significant digits, so there is no point running the equation, you can just ignore it completely). Your H3O+ from the acid is 1e-8. And so, the total will be 1e-8 + x, where x is the value you'll get from your equilibrium equation. x^2 - 1e-8x -Kw = 0. Kw for water is 1e-14. Plug that into your quadratic equation, and you get x = 0.5e-8 + 1e-7. Go back to your original equation, and you have H3O+ concentration is 1.5e-8 + 1e-7. Take the negative log of that, and you get 6.94. So, as I said, with one significant digit, it's 7. Otherwise, it's not. You need the equilibrium equation to work with weak acids, so there's no excuse for never having heard of it.
"Natural buffering effect of water" indeed...water doesn't have a buffering effect, shit dissolved in water has a buffering effect. If you're assuming pure water, then there is no such effect. If you're assuming non-pure water, did you account for the fact that those alkaline minerals dissolved in the water will make its pH greater than 7? Thought not.
Websense includes a category "anonymizing tools," that will block access to all of the proxies that they know of at the time. Apparently, your office doesn't blacklist that list, but Yemen does.
That, again, is wrong. Scientists are required to have a completely open mind when it comes to everything, even homeopathy. This is precisely why we have useful studies in which scientists tested the claims made by homeopathy and other "alternative" medicine. It's also why we know which of these things work, and which don't.
Well, an open mind within the bounds of reason is the best you can accomplish. This is also not the same thing as a lack of an opinion, which would be all but impossible. So what's outside reason? People who accuse scientists of not having an open mind are actually accusing them of not having blind faith in homeopathic medicine. You see, they posit that scientists, being hateful curmudgeons, despise homeopathic medicine as not made from enough harmful chemicals, and their negative thoughts cancel out the natural psychic abilities that all water has. Thus, tests fail because scientists are too malevolent, and water refuses to work for them. Why don't true believers conduct tests? Testing implies a lack of faith, and as such will still hurt the water's feelings. @discovery.ca did a big test years ago. They had a team of psychic healers who said they can protect tomatoes from tomato blight. After a month or so, they looked at the results. The control group and the psychically healed group were within the margin of error of each other, with the control group faring slightly better than the "healed" group. The psychic's conclusion: The viewers hate psychic healing, and were sending negative thoughts at them. So you see, if you're too "open minded" you can't believe in science anymore;)
Right, no big deal...except that they don't need it to provide the service, (and they're not providing a service to you directly at all!) so they have no right to it whatsoever. You're a member of Slashdot, obviously. You get your news from here, apparently. So then, Slashdot has the right to go after your ISP to get your name, address, and phone number to sell to advertisers? Because if Slashdot was a free newspaper, they'd have that information, so why not now?
They make a little thing that you hold up to your eye. It has a blinking LED. You press a button on the side when the light stops blinking. This tests your reaction time, and in some of the instances, instead of actually going solid, it is just flashing faster, so it also tests your perception. (If you are sleep deprived, drunk, etc, your perceptions slow down, and a blinking light will appear solid). It's smaller than a brethalizer.
Just for the Wii, we have SCUMM VM, OpenTyrian, Super Mario Wars, and countless other small games, GPL or other opensource licenses. Completely illegal to install due to the DMCA, but otherwise legal, using a reverse engineered library to access the 3D hardware and OS calls;) I tried porting StarControl II but the load times were terrible and it had some sort of memory issues or something that made it crash after a few comms interactions, or after about 20 minutes of SuperMelee, so I gave up.
Assassin's Creed got hammered BRUTALLY by Pirates, but not for the reason they think. See, a few days before it hit the streets, a version was leaked to Piratebay. But it was bugged, so at exactly the half way point, it would crash and be unplayable. Either it was an early beta build that leaked, or they leaked a flawed version on purpose to poison the torrents. Either way though, it had the effect of having every single non-corporate review saying "Buggy as hell, don't bother", so nobody bought it. It pirated fine once the pirates got the real version though! And the pirated version was better. The retail version was constantly (every 5 seconds) contacting the Ubisoft servers in Montreal to make sure you had permission to be playing. They choked on the load, so your game would lock up every 5 seconds or so. The pirate version didn't do that. (The retail didn't either if you disabled your network card).
Yes, they've tested it many times. No correlation found. The way they tested it was easy. They wheeled a scary looking device covered in antennas, and the people reacted in pain whenever the green light came on. The only trouble is, it was a big inert piece of metal. The only electronics in it were, well, the LED to show it was "on". Meanwhile, under the dropped ceiling there was an actual massive wifi antenna that would randomly blanket the room in "evil radiation", and they were completely unaware. In other words, they only react to wifi at all if they "know" it's there, even when it isn't.
It doesn't require a 1:1 matchup. You can have two bank accounts, that doesn't mean that since it's a 2:1 matching, that it doesn't identify you anymore! And you can have a joint account, so that's a 1:2 matching, and it still identifies you pretty damn well. Plus, it most certainly does have a 1:1 matchup if the ISP logs DHCP assignments for a reasonable length of time. The ISP knows the account # it was assigned to, and therefore knows the customer it was assigned to. Who cares if they are the one using that computer, it was assigned to one individual. Just like a license plate is assigned to one individual. It doesn't identify who was driving the car, but it identifies SOMEBODY.
but exactly what law did they break? False advertising? I doubt it.
Doubt all you want, but all spokespersons and ad actors are given samples to try before they sign on. The company has a good faith belief that the actor they hired actually did use the product, and agrees with their lines. So, it really is a totally different situation. People are saying that it's because you know the TV actor is a paid actor, but the real reason is, those TV actors are actually made to represent to the company that they've tried the product and like it. They may lie, but the company has covered its ass! Take Commodore 64. They hired William Shatner to hawk their PCs. They sent him one, and told him to try it out before agreeing to anything. He didn't. They pestered him so he took it out of the box, and couldn't figure out how to turn it on, so he just said he'd tried it out and it's fine. That's totally different than if they'd just run ads with fake names and fake testimonials. You could try to argue that they should have known he'd just pretend to have used it, and just lie about how much he likes it, so therefore they were lying to the public...but that's a stretch. I'm sure lots of spokespersons actually use and like the product, even if few of them actively sought out the company to be a spokesperson.
Certainly no more false than Wilford Brimley talking about Liberty Medical products as if he was at all familiar with the company before they started paying him.
Bad choice, because he almost definitely was. He's been speaking on behalf of the American Diabetes Association, visiting VA hospitals, spreading awareness of diabetes, for longer than he's been a spokesperson for Liberty Medical. And Liberty Medical is a key member of the ADA, so he was almost certainly aware of their existence well before they paid him a cent, and he probably used their products too, since they're one of the few companies who makes them at all. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he asked THEM, so he could have funding to do radio and TV PSAs, rather than being limited to speaking at VA hospitals and the like. He's quite the activist, even if most of his causes (gambling and cock fighting) aren't nearly so PC as diabetes awareness.
A better comparison for astroturfing would be a medical journal that's owned and published by a drug company, and full of fake articles about the effectiveness of said drug company's products. That's disappointingly come up a few times recently, though I have no idea if anything really came of it (other than moral outrage on Slashdot). But I'd at least hope they'd get a massive fine.
That's not quite how it works. Sharing music is only legal because downloading it is illegal, and a judge said that both parties can't have made the copy, especially since one party was automated. His non-car analogy was that a library "makes available" books and a photocopier. But if you decide to go beyond fair use and photocopy dozens of books in full, it's your fault, not that of the library who made it possible. You don't get sued because how can the RIAA gather enough evidence for a subpoena, if sharing the files isn't actionable, only downloading them, but downloading them from an authorized distributor would NOT be actionable? They can't, so when the judge told them that they have to sue for downloading, not uploading, they gave up and ran back to their American masters to get Canada put on the terrorist list even though our piracy rate is 1/2 of any other country on the list, and probably lower than the USAs! Also, ISPs send you a letter instead of suing because they want you to not use bandwidth. They can't sue you anyways because it's not actionable for THEM, it's not THEIR music. While they COULD report you to the CRIA with their evidence, I cannot imagine the enormity of the backlash if CBC/A-Channel/etc ran a bit about how Bell was illegally spying on customers and giving their data to the CRIA so they could sue the customer and make them stop using up the bandwidth they bought.
It should work just fine on "Full Cone" NAT. I have no idea what proportion of consumer routers work this way, but it uses less memory and effort, so probably most! With any sort of NAT, PC1 (192.168.0.100) connects to blizzards server from port 1234 or what-have-you. Your NAT router says "Sure, why not" and forwards that as coming from your.ip:1234. Now PC2 (192.168.0.100) does the same, but the router says "That's in use, you can be port 4321!" and forwards it as you.ip:4321. Blizzard responds to your.ip, and if the packet is to 1234, it goes to PC1, and if its port 4321, it goes to PC2. When the game starts, the PCs talk to each other, not the server. So 192.168.0.100:1234 will send a packet to your.ip:4321. Your router gets it, and will translate it as originating from "your.ip:1234". It will then look at it and say "a packet addressed to your.ip:4321? OK" and forward that to 192.168.0.101:1234. That is, if it allows that sort of thing. Some routers only allow incoming connections from servers that have already been talked to. This takes more memory, but some will do it for more security. If that's the case, PC1 and PC2 can't talk to each other! But still, it may make exceptions for local connections. It may also allow failed packets to count, so when PC1 and PC2 both get blocked since they haven't talked to each other before, their retry packets may get through, since now they HAVE sent to each other before! It all depends on the nitty-gritties of your router. (My old router wouldn't even work for a local packet addressed to your.ip:anything, even with port forwarding, it would just discard the packet!)
The article doesn't give any examples, and when I Google Rosetta Stone, I see no fraudulent ads. I see things like "Foundation Stone Learn Turkish software: Way cheaper than Rosetta Stone". and "$550? Beware the Stone! Spanish Language DVDs at affordable prices!!!" That's if you find the competitors under the sea of cnet amazon ebay and other affiliates trying to earn some comission from linking to the genuine real software.
What Google are you using? Must not be my google.
Result 1: Wikipedia Article on the real Rosetta Stone
Result 2: Wikipedia Article on Rosetta Stone Ltd.
Result 3: Rosetta Stone Ltd's website
Result 4: Google Books hit for a book on the real Rosetta Stone
Result 5: Slashdot result for this very article.
No ad hits at all, so I guess pending the lawsuit they pulled all the Rosetta Stone ads?
I see, selective breeding based on phenotype is perfectly acceptable. As soon as you base it on genotype, suddenly you've destroyed the world utterly. Fascinating. Turkeys were bred into existence based on phenotype, and are a pretty horrifying tumorous monstrosity. They're so obese they can barely even move, and are totally unable to have sex due to their disgusting size. That's fine I guess, but as soon as you start selective breeding based on genotype, it's a billion times worse!
If you link straight to the article, they lose the ad revenue from the 180,000 pages you have to click through from their front page to any actual news!;)
Some enviro whack jobs say the methane is a 'greenhouse gas' but that is hard to buy since it is less than two parts per million currently. Even if we take the "twenty times the greenhouse effect as CO2" at face value that works out to rounding error compared to all of the other factors that influence the global environment.
The greenhouse effect is not made up, it actually happens. What's being debated is if its enough to cause global warming, or if other systems will balance it, not whether certain gases can absorb and reflect infrared radiation. Scientists can point lasers at methane and observe its infrared absorption and reflection levels. And it's contribution as a greenhouse gas is, in fact, 20 times that of CO2 for a given amount. They can even do it for gases that aren't even in the atmosphere beyond parts per quadrillion, too. It certainly contributes a lot less than CO2 does, but it's not negligible, either. There's also no harm in feeding cows healthier diets, and breeding them to digest more completely so they produce less methane. If they reduced it by 10%, like TFA is suggesting, that would be enough to balance methane emissions with the natural methane sinks, then everybody will shut up about it and you and I can both enjoy our steaks. And if they're feeding them more flax, maybe we'll be healthier for it. You can get the same effect by paving over landfills and building methane turbines to burn all that garbage gas and turn it into electricity, though you'd have to get at least 50% of all landfills to balance things out. And, why not do both? The imbalance between methane production and sequestration/destruction is certainly not the most pressing issue with regards to gas emissions, but it's not like these farmers would otherwise be making more efficient car engines, but can't because they've got to worry about feeding more flax to their cows...
Slashdot Mirror
The company didn't fire him, and the DA declined to press charges. So yeah, he's really pissed off that all he wanted was proof that the guy claiming to be a phone tech really was a phone tech, and he got punched 3 times in the face, strangled, and chased down the stairs. And Verizon is just like "Well he wasn't convinced, we can't punish him, have a nice day sir." Lolsuit is his only option left.
Right, just like how since you're rewarded with getting to the airport on time when you hire a cabby, you're also jailed for vehicular manslaughter when if they run somebody over.
Yeah, she seems pretty nuts. She's a white supremacist who wants everybody non-white kicked out of the country, or at least the state so the state can secede and form a proper White Nation. Reading earlier posts, it seems to me that her rage stems from the fact that JADE has been increasingly focused on taking down the "mid to upper drug dealers," she regularly flips out at this wording, saying "who decides what's an upper and what's a lower drug dealer? You? Is there a rule? Cite it for me!!!!" and such (paraphrase, not a quote to a specific time). It seems to me she's upset that the upper tier drug dealers are rich white guys, and that JADE is focusing on taking them down, not the small fry downtown drug dealers. She's upset that they're focusing more on cocaine and less on crack and weed, and on taking down ringleaders instead of small scale dealers, and taking down users for possession. She frequently posts their reports, calling them liars, saying that just showing how much cocaine they seized, and that its decreasing, doesn't show they're doing a good job, it shows they're less and less effective. "Where's the numbers on how much is left in the city?" etc. So my interpretation is not that she's a vindictive ex-lover, but that she's a racist, and mad that they seem to be leaving the "black" dealers alone now, and going after the white guys instead!
The whole "lover" and "relationship" business she has going on appears to be because, they eventually contacted her and asked her to stop following them around when they go on raids. She flipped at that, because the letter they sent here was signed with the department name, not by a specific officer. This offended her sensibilities, because it gave her nobody to stalk and harass. She eventually found out who was in charge of the investigation into her blog, and decided that pretending to be an obsessed lover would not only make him uncomfortable, but also (she hoped) make it a conflict of interest, forcing him off the case, so she could repeat it on the new guy until they give up. She explicitly states this as her goal. She would phone his cell, his office, his pager, talk to him as much as she could, that way they have "a relationship" according to a definition from a dictionary, and since you can't investigate somebody you're "in a relationship with", off the case! She fumed about how this didn't work, how the cops don't follow their own laws! When he finally did get put on something more important, she mused at her relief that she didn't have to pretend to be obsessed with him anymore.
In summary, she's nuts. Monitoring the arrests that police are making is a good thing, it keeps them honest. And they didn't arrest her for that. Stalking cops and posting where they go to the gym doesn't keep them honest. All it does is put them in danger. Sure, an angry drug dealer could have done the same thing, if he wanted. And they didn't even arrest her for that, though they yelled at her. And it certainly doesn't keep them honest to stalk them to picnics, and to force events, and inter-force competitions, and talk to their daughters. And then post snarky shit about their daughters, who said "That man is my daddy" "Oh yeah sweetheart, the musclebound big brother thug?" But then for one officer, she posted his name, address, photograph, and a photograph of his home. When she did that, they told her to pull them down, and cited the criminal code she's now been charged with. She said her intent isn't to harass, but to profess her love of the police force, on duty and off! They apparently did not buy it, and when she didn't back down, followed through on their promise to arrest her for the law she clearly violated. I mean really, she calls it "I hearte jade" but only colors in the "HATE" in "hearte", and then says "No it's a fan page, I love the cops, I don't hate them and want them gone, honestly!!!! I LUV U GUYS SO HARD!" Her intent is clear.
Many posters have said your intent doesn't matter, that free speech is immutable.
She follows them home and to the gym, not just while on duty.
One mark out of four for having the correct answer to one significant digit. You get no marks for your work and explanation, sadly. Hence the inherent weakness of multiple choice: You get full marks for guesses, or for multiple errors canceling out, or for sheer coincidence.
Water isn't pure H2O, it's 2 H2O in an equilibrium with OH- H3O+. So, don't forget about the H3O+ from the water! Because your numbers are so close, you'll have to redo the equilibrium equation (normally its just lost in the significant digits, so there is no point running the equation, you can just ignore it completely). Your H3O+ from the acid is 1e-8. And so, the total will be 1e-8 + x, where x is the value you'll get from your equilibrium equation. x^2 - 1e-8x -Kw = 0. Kw for water is 1e-14. Plug that into your quadratic equation, and you get x = 0.5e-8 + 1e-7. Go back to your original equation, and you have H3O+ concentration is 1.5e-8 + 1e-7. Take the negative log of that, and you get 6.94. So, as I said, with one significant digit, it's 7. Otherwise, it's not. You need the equilibrium equation to work with weak acids, so there's no excuse for never having heard of it.
"Natural buffering effect of water" indeed...water doesn't have a buffering effect, shit dissolved in water has a buffering effect. If you're assuming pure water, then there is no such effect. If you're assuming non-pure water, did you account for the fact that those alkaline minerals dissolved in the water will make its pH greater than 7? Thought not.
On top of that, it's always done this. If they'd run this article 5 years ago it would have been "Snooze, ye olde news is olde."
Websense includes a category "anonymizing tools," that will block access to all of the proxies that they know of at the time. Apparently, your office doesn't blacklist that list, but Yemen does.
Well, an open mind within the bounds of reason is the best you can accomplish. This is also not the same thing as a lack of an opinion, which would be all but impossible. So what's outside reason? People who accuse scientists of not having an open mind are actually accusing them of not having blind faith in homeopathic medicine. You see, they posit that scientists, being hateful curmudgeons, despise homeopathic medicine as not made from enough harmful chemicals, and their negative thoughts cancel out the natural psychic abilities that all water has. Thus, tests fail because scientists are too malevolent, and water refuses to work for them. Why don't true believers conduct tests? Testing implies a lack of faith, and as such will still hurt the water's feelings. @discovery.ca did a big test years ago. They had a team of psychic healers who said they can protect tomatoes from tomato blight. After a month or so, they looked at the results. The control group and the psychically healed group were within the margin of error of each other, with the control group faring slightly better than the "healed" group. The psychic's conclusion: The viewers hate psychic healing, and were sending negative thoughts at them. So you see, if you're too "open minded" you can't believe in science anymore ;)
Right, no big deal...except that they don't need it to provide the service, (and they're not providing a service to you directly at all!) so they have no right to it whatsoever. You're a member of Slashdot, obviously. You get your news from here, apparently. So then, Slashdot has the right to go after your ISP to get your name, address, and phone number to sell to advertisers? Because if Slashdot was a free newspaper, they'd have that information, so why not now?
Key word is "if"
They make a little thing that you hold up to your eye. It has a blinking LED. You press a button on the side when the light stops blinking. This tests your reaction time, and in some of the instances, instead of actually going solid, it is just flashing faster, so it also tests your perception. (If you are sleep deprived, drunk, etc, your perceptions slow down, and a blinking light will appear solid). It's smaller than a brethalizer.
Just for the Wii, we have SCUMM VM, OpenTyrian, Super Mario Wars, and countless other small games, GPL or other opensource licenses. Completely illegal to install due to the DMCA, but otherwise legal, using a reverse engineered library to access the 3D hardware and OS calls ;) I tried porting StarControl II but the load times were terrible and it had some sort of memory issues or something that made it crash after a few comms interactions, or after about 20 minutes of SuperMelee, so I gave up.
Well, yeah, $41 million in a quarter seems like a lot of net income, but remember, that's only like 4 of their god damned monster cables.
Assassin's Creed got hammered BRUTALLY by Pirates, but not for the reason they think. See, a few days before it hit the streets, a version was leaked to Piratebay. But it was bugged, so at exactly the half way point, it would crash and be unplayable. Either it was an early beta build that leaked, or they leaked a flawed version on purpose to poison the torrents. Either way though, it had the effect of having every single non-corporate review saying "Buggy as hell, don't bother", so nobody bought it. It pirated fine once the pirates got the real version though! And the pirated version was better. The retail version was constantly (every 5 seconds) contacting the Ubisoft servers in Montreal to make sure you had permission to be playing. They choked on the load, so your game would lock up every 5 seconds or so. The pirate version didn't do that. (The retail didn't either if you disabled your network card).
Yes, they've tested it many times. No correlation found. The way they tested it was easy. They wheeled a scary looking device covered in antennas, and the people reacted in pain whenever the green light came on. The only trouble is, it was a big inert piece of metal. The only electronics in it were, well, the LED to show it was "on". Meanwhile, under the dropped ceiling there was an actual massive wifi antenna that would randomly blanket the room in "evil radiation", and they were completely unaware. In other words, they only react to wifi at all if they "know" it's there, even when it isn't.
It doesn't require a 1:1 matchup. You can have two bank accounts, that doesn't mean that since it's a 2:1 matching, that it doesn't identify you anymore! And you can have a joint account, so that's a 1:2 matching, and it still identifies you pretty damn well. Plus, it most certainly does have a 1:1 matchup if the ISP logs DHCP assignments for a reasonable length of time. The ISP knows the account # it was assigned to, and therefore knows the customer it was assigned to. Who cares if they are the one using that computer, it was assigned to one individual. Just like a license plate is assigned to one individual. It doesn't identify who was driving the car, but it identifies SOMEBODY.
Doubt all you want, but all spokespersons and ad actors are given samples to try before they sign on. The company has a good faith belief that the actor they hired actually did use the product, and agrees with their lines. So, it really is a totally different situation. People are saying that it's because you know the TV actor is a paid actor, but the real reason is, those TV actors are actually made to represent to the company that they've tried the product and like it. They may lie, but the company has covered its ass! Take Commodore 64. They hired William Shatner to hawk their PCs. They sent him one, and told him to try it out before agreeing to anything. He didn't. They pestered him so he took it out of the box, and couldn't figure out how to turn it on, so he just said he'd tried it out and it's fine. That's totally different than if they'd just run ads with fake names and fake testimonials. You could try to argue that they should have known he'd just pretend to have used it, and just lie about how much he likes it, so therefore they were lying to the public...but that's a stretch. I'm sure lots of spokespersons actually use and like the product, even if few of them actively sought out the company to be a spokesperson.
Bad choice, because he almost definitely was. He's been speaking on behalf of the American Diabetes Association, visiting VA hospitals, spreading awareness of diabetes, for longer than he's been a spokesperson for Liberty Medical. And Liberty Medical is a key member of the ADA, so he was almost certainly aware of their existence well before they paid him a cent, and he probably used their products too, since they're one of the few companies who makes them at all. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he asked THEM, so he could have funding to do radio and TV PSAs, rather than being limited to speaking at VA hospitals and the like. He's quite the activist, even if most of his causes (gambling and cock fighting) aren't nearly so PC as diabetes awareness.
A better comparison for astroturfing would be a medical journal that's owned and published by a drug company, and full of fake articles about the effectiveness of said drug company's products. That's disappointingly come up a few times recently, though I have no idea if anything really came of it (other than moral outrage on Slashdot). But I'd at least hope they'd get a massive fine.
That's not quite how it works. Sharing music is only legal because downloading it is illegal, and a judge said that both parties can't have made the copy, especially since one party was automated. His non-car analogy was that a library "makes available" books and a photocopier. But if you decide to go beyond fair use and photocopy dozens of books in full, it's your fault, not that of the library who made it possible. You don't get sued because how can the RIAA gather enough evidence for a subpoena, if sharing the files isn't actionable, only downloading them, but downloading them from an authorized distributor would NOT be actionable? They can't, so when the judge told them that they have to sue for downloading, not uploading, they gave up and ran back to their American masters to get Canada put on the terrorist list even though our piracy rate is 1/2 of any other country on the list, and probably lower than the USAs! Also, ISPs send you a letter instead of suing because they want you to not use bandwidth. They can't sue you anyways because it's not actionable for THEM, it's not THEIR music. While they COULD report you to the CRIA with their evidence, I cannot imagine the enormity of the backlash if CBC/A-Channel/etc ran a bit about how Bell was illegally spying on customers and giving their data to the CRIA so they could sue the customer and make them stop using up the bandwidth they bought.
It should work just fine on "Full Cone" NAT. I have no idea what proportion of consumer routers work this way, but it uses less memory and effort, so probably most! With any sort of NAT, PC1 (192.168.0.100) connects to blizzards server from port 1234 or what-have-you. Your NAT router says "Sure, why not" and forwards that as coming from your.ip:1234. Now PC2 (192.168.0.100) does the same, but the router says "That's in use, you can be port 4321!" and forwards it as you.ip:4321. Blizzard responds to your.ip, and if the packet is to 1234, it goes to PC1, and if its port 4321, it goes to PC2. When the game starts, the PCs talk to each other, not the server. So 192.168.0.100:1234 will send a packet to your.ip:4321. Your router gets it, and will translate it as originating from "your.ip:1234". It will then look at it and say "a packet addressed to your.ip:4321? OK" and forward that to 192.168.0.101:1234. That is, if it allows that sort of thing. Some routers only allow incoming connections from servers that have already been talked to. This takes more memory, but some will do it for more security. If that's the case, PC1 and PC2 can't talk to each other! But still, it may make exceptions for local connections. It may also allow failed packets to count, so when PC1 and PC2 both get blocked since they haven't talked to each other before, their retry packets may get through, since now they HAVE sent to each other before! It all depends on the nitty-gritties of your router. (My old router wouldn't even work for a local packet addressed to your.ip:anything, even with port forwarding, it would just discard the packet!)
The article doesn't give any examples, and when I Google Rosetta Stone, I see no fraudulent ads. I see things like "Foundation Stone Learn Turkish software: Way cheaper than Rosetta Stone". and "$550? Beware the Stone! Spanish Language DVDs at affordable prices!!!" That's if you find the competitors under the sea of cnet amazon ebay and other affiliates trying to earn some comission from linking to the genuine real software.
What Google are you using? Must not be my google.
Result 1: Wikipedia Article on the real Rosetta Stone
Result 2: Wikipedia Article on Rosetta Stone Ltd.
Result 3: Rosetta Stone Ltd's website
Result 4: Google Books hit for a book on the real Rosetta Stone
Result 5: Slashdot result for this very article.
No ad hits at all, so I guess pending the lawsuit they pulled all the Rosetta Stone ads?
Pornography and sex toys are illegal in the entire USA. Since they
I see, selective breeding based on phenotype is perfectly acceptable. As soon as you base it on genotype, suddenly you've destroyed the world utterly. Fascinating. Turkeys were bred into existence based on phenotype, and are a pretty horrifying tumorous monstrosity. They're so obese they can barely even move, and are totally unable to have sex due to their disgusting size. That's fine I guess, but as soon as you start selective breeding based on genotype, it's a billion times worse!
If you link straight to the article, they lose the ad revenue from the 180,000 pages you have to click through from their front page to any actual news! ;)
The greenhouse effect is not made up, it actually happens. What's being debated is if its enough to cause global warming, or if other systems will balance it, not whether certain gases can absorb and reflect infrared radiation. Scientists can point lasers at methane and observe its infrared absorption and reflection levels. And it's contribution as a greenhouse gas is, in fact, 20 times that of CO2 for a given amount. They can even do it for gases that aren't even in the atmosphere beyond parts per quadrillion, too. It certainly contributes a lot less than CO2 does, but it's not negligible, either. There's also no harm in feeding cows healthier diets, and breeding them to digest more completely so they produce less methane. If they reduced it by 10%, like TFA is suggesting, that would be enough to balance methane emissions with the natural methane sinks, then everybody will shut up about it and you and I can both enjoy our steaks. And if they're feeding them more flax, maybe we'll be healthier for it. You can get the same effect by paving over landfills and building methane turbines to burn all that garbage gas and turn it into electricity, though you'd have to get at least 50% of all landfills to balance things out. And, why not do both? The imbalance between methane production and sequestration/destruction is certainly not the most pressing issue with regards to gas emissions, but it's not like these farmers would otherwise be making more efficient car engines, but can't because they've got to worry about feeding more flax to their cows...