It would be interesting to know how exactly the defendants 'caused spyware to be downloaded'. Looks to me like the plaintiff was visiting sites that had spyware attached to them, he shouldn't have visited these sites if he didn't want spyware installed.
How was the plaintiff to know they were going to download spyware before he went there? It's not like the link says, "Click here to visit a site that installs spyware." I've visited a few, seemingly innocent sites and had them try to download viruses. In all cases, I realized what was happening when the site hung while my AV software went to work. Clicking on Stop did nothing until the AV was done and I'd dealt with the warning. Trying to be helpfull, I've emailed a few webmasters about this, only to have the mail bounce because there's no webmaster address for those sites. There are a few sites blocked in my hosts file, simply because I don't want to deal with the viruses. However, until I went there, I had no way of knowing about them, and neither did the plaintiff.
But their argument that the approach was far more difficult and far less effective than just shooting things with flaming arrows was pretty convincing.
Part of the legend (not myth) is that this was done from more than bowshot, so flaming arrows were right out.
Partly. Even if the universe is bounded, there's no way to tell where the center is, so claiming the Earth is the center is as good as answer as any other.
Thirty years ago I decided that if advertising is intended to influence me and I found it obnoxious, I should allow it to influence me by making me decide not to patronize the establishment. There's a certain fast-food chain I've been ignoring ever since, and haven't missed it.
There are very few countries in this world that could even attempt to do so as it would take a submarine to fire that torpedo.
I take it then, that you know nothing of military history. A large number of warships were sunk in WWII by torpedoes fired from distroyers. When I was in the Navy, my distroyer still carried torpedoes, and I'll bet current ones do as well. BTW, "PT boat" stands for Plywood Torpedo boat.
Up until the early '70s, we had Civil Defense, run locally by volunteers who knew the area. Then, that was dismantled and replaced by FEMA; a centralized bureauocracy headquarted in DC and therefore unable to have any local knowledge. Of course it's slow to respond, and believes in "one size fits all" solutions like forcing people to register on-line with one and only one browser. Thank you, Jimmy Carter for foisting this on us.
Also, can someone who knows tell us if you can have a jury in civil suits?
Of course you can, and when a civil suit goes to trial, it's almost always in front of a jury. I know for sure, because I've served on the jury for a civil suit.
Back when I started for that ISP, Win95 had just come out. Most of our customers were still on 3.1x, and we supported it for many years. Of course, that might have been affected by the fact that the founder's mother still used it.
I'm talking about Win3.1X, 95/98/Me, where IRQs were important. Now, you may not need to know about them, but back when I was talking about, it helped. There were a lot of issues I solved just by knowing what the various settings meant. What made it worse is that some of the cheat sheets had the wrong values, or wrong suggestions. We even had one that told you to correct sync issues by disabling FIFO, and that trick almost never works.
Back when I was doing Tier II support for an ISP, I was almost the only senior there who actually knew what an IRQ was, and what the significance was. I once had another Tier II tech tell me he had no idea what they were, or why they were important. Maybe that's part of the reason he was no good with modem issues and I was the team's resident specialist in them. Today, even people who think they're techs have no understanding of things like IRQs, Base Addresses, FIFOs and so on. If they even know to check them, all they do is set them according to the cheat sheet, and assume the sheet's right. (I almost wrote "hope it's right," then realzied that most of them haven't a clue that the sheet might be wrong.) Not only don't they know anything about the inside workings, they don't want to know either. That's the scary part; they want to be ignorant, but consider themselves techs.
So, what you're saying is that the people at your customer's site would rather work 12-16 hour days for an indefinite length of time than spend 10 minutes getting you the information you need to get the problem solved right away? No wonder they're getting yelled at by their managers.
Over thirty years ago I was working on a missile system that would automatically home on any jammer if it lost its signal. I'm sure our smart bombs today are built to do exactly the same thing, and if they're not, they easily could be. As you say, trying to jam GPS is a good way to get your position bombed.
No, it shows that we geeks know enough about legal stuff to know that it's as much a specialty as system administration, kernel coding or database design. For each of those you get a specialist. In this case, the appropriate specialist is a lawyer.
Re:Burn out at work is not always work related!
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Pay vs. Happiness
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Yeah. We used Vantive. It slowed us down too, but only because the RAID could get bogged down with hundreds of agents accessing a multi-gig database. We also had resolutions, but were allowed to use our own judgement. Good thing too, as I knew better in many cases, and just ignored the "find resolution" feature. Nobody ever complained, though, because I got results, and that's all that counted.
Re:Burn out at work is not always work related!
on
Pay vs. Happiness
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· Score: 1
When I was there, it was 20 calls per day minimum, and less than two minutes "after call" on the average. More idle time between calls was OK if we weren't busy, as long as your phone was in the support queue. Not really that bad, once you knew what you were doing, and even with the occasional hour or more call, I could keep it to that because so many calls were that easy.
Shameless plug time: go to my homepage, and follow the link about the book. It's true stories of tech support, all of which happened to me, personally. If nothing else, it will help you know you're not alone, other people have the same weird experiences you do.
Re:Burn out at work is not always work related!
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Pay vs. Happiness
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Job burnout has more to do with the fact that the employee sacrifices himself for a crappy job...
Not always. I did tech support for an ISP for over seven years. The last two or so I survived largely because of Zoloft. Not because I "sacrificed myself for a crappy job," but because of the incessent rudeness, abuse and refusal to cooperate of the brainless twits I spoke to every day as I did my job. I kept that job because I cared about my work, and I got satisfaction from knowing that there were people who's day was a little better because I had helped them. If I hadn't had that, the Zoloft wouldn't have been enough and the jerks would have driven me away, as they drove a large number of other techs away. You have no idea what burnout is, what causes it or how to prevent it, so stop blathering.
For a while, I was doing tech support at an ISP where the naming convention was countries. As you could see the names of the mail serves in the headers, people started to think that the names meant that the servers were actually in those countries. I can't count how many times I had to explain to lusers that we didn't really have servers in France Spain or Germany.
(Only insanity here is there's a huge overlap between catalogs so one star can have many names)
If you look at a star chart, you'll see that where Andromeda and Pegasus come together, there's a star that can logically be considered as being in either one of them. It has two constellation names, one for each. (It's one of the corners of the Great Quadralateral.
In France, or so I'm told, you can name a child after a saint, a person in The Bible, or a historic personage from over 1,000 years ago. Nothing else. If you try, the name is rejected and you must pick an acceptable name. No exceptions for foreigners. I've heard of clerks simply changing an unacceptable name without telling the proud parents, but I don't know if that's true.
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How was the plaintiff to know they were going to download spyware before he went there? It's not like the link says, "Click here to visit a site that installs spyware." I've visited a few, seemingly innocent sites and had them try to download viruses. In all cases, I realized what was happening when the site hung while my AV software went to work. Clicking on Stop did nothing until the AV was done and I'd dealt with the warning. Trying to be helpfull, I've emailed a few webmasters about this, only to have the mail bounce because there's no webmaster address for those sites. There are a few sites blocked in my hosts file, simply because I don't want to deal with the viruses. However, until I went there, I had no way of knowing about them, and neither did the plaintiff.
Part of the legend (not myth) is that this was done from more than bowshot, so flaming arrows were right out.
Partly. Even if the universe is bounded, there's no way to tell where the center is, so claiming the Earth is the center is as good as answer as any other.
The way I heard it, Lilith was supposed to be Adam's wife, but one of them (I think Adam) rejected the idea. Lilith ended up marrying the Devil.
Prove that it isn't.
Don't be upset; I just metamodded it UNFAIR.
Thirty years ago I decided that if advertising is intended to influence me and I found it obnoxious, I should allow it to influence me by making me decide not to patronize the establishment. There's a certain fast-food chain I've been ignoring ever since, and haven't missed it.
I take it then, that you know nothing of military history. A large number of warships were sunk in WWII by torpedoes fired from distroyers. When I was in the Navy, my distroyer still carried torpedoes, and I'll bet current ones do as well. BTW, "PT boat" stands for Plywood Torpedo boat.
Up until the early '70s, we had Civil Defense, run locally by volunteers who knew the area. Then, that was dismantled and replaced by FEMA; a centralized bureauocracy headquarted in DC and therefore unable to have any local knowledge. Of course it's slow to respond, and believes in "one size fits all" solutions like forcing people to register on-line with one and only one browser. Thank you, Jimmy Carter for foisting this on us.
Of course you can, and when a civil suit goes to trial, it's almost always in front of a jury. I know for sure, because I've served on the jury for a civil suit.
No, bankrupcy can't clear court judgements, so after the bankrupcy, the phisher still owes just as much as before.
Back when I started for that ISP, Win95 had just come out. Most of our customers were still on 3.1x, and we supported it for many years. Of course, that might have been affected by the fact that the founder's mother still used it.
I'm talking about Win3.1X, 95/98/Me, where IRQs were important. Now, you may not need to know about them, but back when I was talking about, it helped. There were a lot of issues I solved just by knowing what the various settings meant. What made it worse is that some of the cheat sheets had the wrong values, or wrong suggestions. We even had one that told you to correct sync issues by disabling FIFO, and that trick almost never works.
Back when I was doing Tier II support for an ISP, I was almost the only senior there who actually knew what an IRQ was, and what the significance was. I once had another Tier II tech tell me he had no idea what they were, or why they were important. Maybe that's part of the reason he was no good with modem issues and I was the team's resident specialist in them. Today, even people who think they're techs have no understanding of things like IRQs, Base Addresses, FIFOs and so on. If they even know to check them, all they do is set them according to the cheat sheet, and assume the sheet's right. (I almost wrote "hope it's right," then realzied that most of them haven't a clue that the sheet might be wrong.) Not only don't they know anything about the inside workings, they don't want to know either. That's the scary part; they want to be ignorant, but consider themselves techs.
So, what you're saying is that the people at your customer's site would rather work 12-16 hour days for an indefinite length of time than spend 10 minutes getting you the information you need to get the problem solved right away? No wonder they're getting yelled at by their managers.
Marketdroids call things "Enterprise class" to appeal to PhB's who grew up with Star Trek.
Over thirty years ago I was working on a missile system that would automatically home on any jammer if it lost its signal. I'm sure our smart bombs today are built to do exactly the same thing, and if they're not, they easily could be. As you say, trying to jam GPS is a good way to get your position bombed.
This reminds me of Neil Armstrong's comment on his moonwalk: "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky."
No, it shows that we geeks know enough about legal stuff to know that it's as much a specialty as system administration, kernel coding or database design. For each of those you get a specialist. In this case, the appropriate specialist is a lawyer.
Yeah. We used Vantive. It slowed us down too, but only because the RAID could get bogged down with hundreds of agents accessing a multi-gig database. We also had resolutions, but were allowed to use our own judgement. Good thing too, as I knew better in many cases, and just ignored the "find resolution" feature. Nobody ever complained, though, because I got results, and that's all that counted.
Shameless plug time: go to my homepage, and follow the link about the book. It's true stories of tech support, all of which happened to me, personally. If nothing else, it will help you know you're not alone, other people have the same weird experiences you do.
Not always. I did tech support for an ISP for over seven years. The last two or so I survived largely because of Zoloft. Not because I "sacrificed myself for a crappy job," but because of the incessent rudeness, abuse and refusal to cooperate of the brainless twits I spoke to every day as I did my job. I kept that job because I cared about my work, and I got satisfaction from knowing that there were people who's day was a little better because I had helped them. If I hadn't had that, the Zoloft wouldn't have been enough and the jerks would have driven me away, as they drove a large number of other techs away. You have no idea what burnout is, what causes it or how to prevent it, so stop blathering.
For a while, I was doing tech support at an ISP where the naming convention was countries. As you could see the names of the mail serves in the headers, people started to think that the names meant that the servers were actually in those countries. I can't count how many times I had to explain to lusers that we didn't really have servers in France Spain or Germany.
If you look at a star chart, you'll see that where Andromeda and Pegasus come together, there's a star that can logically be considered as being in either one of them. It has two constellation names, one for each. (It's one of the corners of the Great Quadralateral.
In France, or so I'm told, you can name a child after a saint, a person in The Bible, or a historic personage from over 1,000 years ago. Nothing else. If you try, the name is rejected and you must pick an acceptable name. No exceptions for foreigners. I've heard of clerks simply changing an unacceptable name without telling the proud parents, but I don't know if that's true.