You do realize that a "recent" PC costs all of around $200, that's brand new with a 20 GB hard drive, enough for plenty of music. That is hardly beyond saving for, even below the poverty line, or more likely a gift to the family from a better off relation.
I will concede the gift point - but I'd like to know where you got your $200 figure. Maybe without a monitor and OS, but that's not going to do her much good.
Yes, it is just fine that someone on public housing spends a very small amount to have some entertainment and diversion in their life. If they can spend a less than most people spend on coffee in a couple of weeks to get entertainment whenever they want, great! This shows some good financial sense, instead of buying $20 CD's or going to $10 movies, and it gets their kids a machine to study on, and for their parents to use for very inexpensive vocational education.
I respect your opinion, but do not share it. It is obvious (to me, at least) that she is not furthering her education with this PC, especially if she still thinks they haven't done anything illegal when they're getting sued. I don't think it's fair that someone on public assistance can afford broadband and $30 for Kazaa when I know too many people who bust their butt to pay their own way and can't responsibly spend $200 on a computer, even if a $200 computer existed.
Are "explicit lyrics" OK, depends on the family. Believe it or not, there are a lot of parents that see far more significant threats to their children than harsh language. Why is it that we worry so much about children hearing the "f word", but so little doing anything about the constant verbal and physical abuse at school?
Safe schools are a major concern, but IMO unrelated. My problem with the "f word" is that in our society, it limits your opportunities. That may not be right, and a lot of educated people use the "f word" all the time, but most people do not want someone who constantly uses the "f word" around their customers or children.
If you buy a car at a car lot, then it later turns out to be stolen, you can't be charged for the theft.
Correct, but if you buy a mint 2002 Jaguar with no title at a used car lot for $2,000, there's a pretty good chance you can and will be charged with receipt of stolen property.
If they paid $30 a month to a service that let them download music, like many other web music companies do, it is not unreasonable to think you are doing so legally, and most likely a jury will back that up.
I was unaware that there are any companies that charge a flat monthly fee to purchase as many songs as you want. If there was, and the majority of the time you got incomplete or incorrectly titled tracks, you'd probably want your money back. The problem I have with this defense is that I just don't buy it. If you sign a contract, it means you read and understand it. If you sign it without reading and understanding it, that's your own fault. You can't install Kazaa, or even Kazaa Lite, let alone subscrible to ad-free Kazaa, without acknowledging that downloading copyrighted or illegal material is prohibited. And as much as the media reports that most people don't think downloading unauthorised copyrighted materials is illegal, I don't buy that either. I think most people think it shouldn't be illegal, so they do it anyway.
It is pretty funny that people have a complete meltdown over kids seeing reproduction, but no problem with shows that depict violence as the most frequent and effective way of solving problems, and wholesale slaughter or humiliation (reality shows) as entertainment.
Don't get me started on TV!:-) I have no problem with kids seeing "reproduction" - at an appropriate age, Animal Planet and PBS can be great educational tools in that respect. And if you think it's ok for your (hypothetical) 12 year old daughter to search Kazaa for her favorite Britney Spears tune and see listin
I thought we were talking about the woman who still thinks they've done nothing illegal even after her 12 year old daughter is being sued by the RIAA. I thought we were talking about the woman who thought paying $30 to Kazaa bought her rights to every song ever written, and not just ad-free file trading. I thought we were talking about the people who click "ok" until it works, disregarding all warnings, TOS', EULA's and Opt-In/Out's. I thought we were talking about the woman who somehow missed the last 18 months of neverending stories on the news about how downloading copyrighted material is illegal.
Because that's who I was talking about.
Oh shit, I'm sorry, I forgot to specifically say "regularly displays unsolicited hardcore porn if you don't install blocking software and set your preferences in Kazaa and properly configure SpamAssasin and your mail filters and install Proximotron and make sure your 9 and 12 year olds don't screw with the settings or figure out how to bypass them. How silly of me. Context screws me every time. RTFA
If we made it so that people on welfare, in public housing, etc, weren't allowed to have luxuries and fun, it wouldn't be called 'welfare', it would be called 'prison'.
No, if they had a health club and free college courses it would be called 'prison'.
There are a lot of people, commonly refered to as "the working poor", who stay off public assistance by not considering these luxuries as their God-given rights. These people bust their asses to keep your water-glass full and be self sufficient, while many on public assistance, and yes, even in prison, have far more luxuries and live better than they do. That, my good man, is bullshit (IMHO, of course).
Let me get this straight - explicit lyrics are ok for 12 year olds, people on public assistance can spend money on luxuries (broadband, kazaa, a "recent" pc) as long as is saves them money on other luxuries, you would expect someone in public housing to have a recent PC, and everyone lets their kids roam wild on the Internet, so it's ok?
Would you subscribe to the Playboy Channel and leave it unblocked for your kids to stumble across when they're channel surfing? The stuff on the Playboy channel is a heck of a lot more tame than what you'd likely find in the results of a Kazaa search for Britney Spears.
When did ignorance of the law or ignorance of a device become an acceptable defense?
Ok, I should have said "can afford $30 for music"... the point is maybe the money would have been better spent on some porn filtering software, or I don't know, maybe food? People on public assistance who buy things like CD's, lottery tickets and imported beer piss me off.
Read what you quoted again, "buddy" - I was talking about unsupervised use. And I said investigated for child endangerment, not charged with abuse. Giving a child unsupervised access to a device that regularly displays unsolicited hardcore pornography is easily child endangerment. Do you think a 12 year old girl using Kazaa is not going to search for Britney Spears? Anybody know the average music to porn ratio in the results of a Britney Spears search off the top of their head?
I will give you credit for posting anonymously, jackass.
1. I wonder if this 12 year old got the "What the F*ck do you think you're doing" message from Madonna?
2. How is it that a single mom with 2 kids in city housing can afford $30 just to avoid seeing advertising while stealing music?
3. If the RIAA are in fact only going for the flagrant downloaders - people sharing thousands of songs - then that would mean that A) They must have broadbank and B) They must have a good sized hard drive - See #2 above.
4. Anyone who lets a 12 year old use the Internet, especially Kazaa, unsupervised, should be investigated for child endangerment. And if she was supervising her daughter 100% of the time, then she's the one they should be going after.
I'm sorry, I hate the RIAA as much as the next guy, but this is BS. If anything, this is better than the other 260 lawsuits because maybe it will call attention to the fact that this mother, probably on public assistance, is letting her kids run wild on the Internet and blowing money on broadband and ad-free Kazaa access.
No, actually what I meant by "it couldn't replace ANY other security measure" is that if it could hit on 60% of the 'bad guys' it sees, that's better than 0% of not having it at all.
It's one thing to get searched "unecessarily" once in a while, but like in the case of people who happen to have the same name as someone on a watch list, it's every single time. If the mathematical "score" of your face structure rings a bell, it's going to do it every time. Can you imagine if you had to fly 3 or 4 times a week, and had to endure 2 or 3 hours of questioning to prove you're not that John Doe? And there's nothing you can do about it. There's even one case (sorry for the lack of links - I heard the story weeks or more ago on NPR) where a guy is getting hassled every time he flies, even though the guy with the same name that that's on the list has been in custody at Gitmo for months.
I'm all for a little nusance to save lives, but some of it is way overboard. What would have prevented 9/11 has less to do with airport security, and more to do with better management of info. The info was there - there were reports that they were planning to hijack planes and use them for an attack on US soil before 9/11. Funny you don't hear a lot about that, huh?
Seems like the flase positive rate would be the most important stat, and they don't have it.
Obviously it couldn't replace ANY other security measure, but if it worked 61% of the time with NO false positives, I would call that pretty damn successful, especially in such an early implementation.
They said 10 of the 19 hijackers went through Logan - so this system theorhetically would have caught 6 of them? Better than none. And it seems like the technology would improve with time.
Personally I'd rather have my face scanned then have them strip searching me because my credit sucks and I paid cash for my plane ticket.
smile on your brother... everybody get together, try and use open standards based software right now.
If enough businesses refuse to accept documents in the new format, they'll have a hard time selling it. I think they may have a hard time reaching critical-mass to make it work anyhow - not enough people have it to warrant upgrading, not enough people upgrading to warrant having it.
At least we can hope?
Here's my comments to the publsher via their online form:
The article at http://orlando.bizjournals.com/orlando/stories/200 3/08/25/story1.html?page=1 has got to be about the most useless piece of journalism I have ever had the misfortune of being exposed to. Let's put aside for a moment that this is an online article about technology without a single link to supporting or supplemental information. While I appreciate the need for brievity, the author could have at least pointed to where to find out exactly what the proposed tax is based on. Is it on the LAN hardware? Maintenance? Power consumption? How does the proposed legislation read? It mentions a survey that asks business owners to estimate what the tax will cost them, but doesn't mention where the survey can be obtained or how to participate. I understand everything couldn't be covered, but it would be nice if we were at least pointed in the general direction of some more information. What ever happened to who, what, where, when, why and how?
I remember having a neighborhood kid bring his box over to my place, hooking it up to mine with a laplink cable, and then dialing-up my buddy's PC in the next apartment so we could play 3-player Doom - we thought that was amazing. Internet? Internot.
Now I remember why I added you to my friends list - you so insightful, Joe.:-)
But seriously, as right as you are, I think that's a lot to ask - as is asking them not to click on stuff they should know better than to click on.
But then again, most people I know have learned not to rely on my e-mail - I get so much Spam, I've been known to through out a bit of baby with the bath water.
We occasionally get an important message with an executable attached. We can either let executables through and hope nobody clicks on them, or send a message back to the supposed sender letting them know it didn't go through. Deleting a message without telling anyone is not an option, even though most of those notifications aren't going to valid addresses, whether it's from Spam or Viruses.
Those notifications are just a way for a company to save themselves a lot of work, at the expense of others. So, we take the risk so we don't have to pollute the 'net with (almost always) useless notifications. So I would say the call to admins should be tweak your filters and educate your users, and then turn off the notifications. Becasue you know the first important message to an officer of the corp that gets deleted without any notification is going to get someone fired, and they're not going to take that risk.
I feel your pain - I'm getting swamped myself. But at least I'm getting an idea of how many viruses are going out in my name.
As far as I'm concerned, you can blame all of this on the spammers. Look at the schedule of these SoBig releases and deactivations. I believe this is a response to more and more open relays getting shut down. These viruses are the new open relays, and the only way to stop them is to stop Spam itself - by beating the living crap out of anyone you know who buys anything from a spammer:-)
...maybe they mean lines of code that offends Microsoft - all of them.
Or maybe each line counts as one, but the ones that really tack them off count as 3 or 4 lines.
Or maybe they're running at 640x480 with Word Wrap on...
Ok, I'll stop now.
You're probably right, I was just thinking that it wouldn't be the first time that a (or is it 'an'?:-) LEA went after the easier target instead of the more menacing one.
No good deed goes unpunished. Who's going to give odds that the writer(s) of the 'good' worm will get caught and strung up by the short hairs under the DMCA?
As long as it only affects machines that haven't already been patched- great. But what if it's flawed and actually causes unintentional damage?
And if the original authors of the Blaster worm's intent was to teach people who ignore warnings a lesson, might this not start a virus war, of sorts?
Sounds cool, but I'm not convinced this is an entirely good thing.
Holy crapweezles - I followed the link, and all of the sudden Spybot was flipping out and I was being asked to install not one but two pieces of spyware. WTF? Then there was the offscreen browser window. Nice touch.
Yeah, you're right. The scary part it's the same system that makes treatments more profitable than cures. And those profits buy a lot of really good lobbyists, and really bad politicians.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that a "recent" PC costs all of around $200, that's brand new with a 20 GB hard drive, enough for plenty of music. That is hardly beyond saving for, even below the poverty line, or more likely a gift to the family from a better off relation.
:-) I have no problem with kids seeing "reproduction" - at an appropriate age, Animal Planet and PBS can be great educational tools in that respect. And if you think it's ok for your (hypothetical) 12 year old daughter to search Kazaa for her favorite Britney Spears tune and see listin
I will concede the gift point - but I'd like to know where you got your $200 figure. Maybe without a monitor and OS, but that's not going to do her much good.
Yes, it is just fine that someone on public housing spends a very small amount to have some entertainment and diversion in their life. If they can spend a less than most people spend on coffee in a couple of weeks to get entertainment whenever they want, great! This shows some good financial sense, instead of buying $20 CD's or going to $10 movies, and it gets their kids a machine to study on, and for their parents to use for very inexpensive vocational education.
I respect your opinion, but do not share it. It is obvious (to me, at least) that she is not furthering her education with this PC, especially if she still thinks they haven't done anything illegal when they're getting sued. I don't think it's fair that someone on public assistance can afford broadband and $30 for Kazaa when I know too many people who bust their butt to pay their own way and can't responsibly spend $200 on a computer, even if a $200 computer existed.
Are "explicit lyrics" OK, depends on the family. Believe it or not, there are a lot of parents that see far more significant threats to their children than harsh language. Why is it that we worry so much about children hearing the "f word", but so little doing anything about the constant verbal and physical abuse at school?
Safe schools are a major concern, but IMO unrelated. My problem with the "f word" is that in our society, it limits your opportunities. That may not be right, and a lot of educated people use the "f word" all the time, but most people do not want someone who constantly uses the "f word" around their customers or children.
If you buy a car at a car lot, then it later turns out to be stolen, you can't be charged for the theft.
Correct, but if you buy a mint 2002 Jaguar with no title at a used car lot for $2,000, there's a pretty good chance you can and will be charged with receipt of stolen property.
If they paid $30 a month to a service that let them download music, like many other web music companies do, it is not unreasonable to think you are doing so legally, and most likely a jury will back that up.
I was unaware that there are any companies that charge a flat monthly fee to purchase as many songs as you want. If there was, and the majority of the time you got incomplete or incorrectly titled tracks, you'd probably want your money back. The problem I have with this defense is that I just don't buy it. If you sign a contract, it means you read and understand it. If you sign it without reading and understanding it, that's your own fault. You can't install Kazaa, or even Kazaa Lite, let alone subscrible to ad-free Kazaa, without acknowledging that downloading copyrighted or illegal material is prohibited. And as much as the media reports that most people don't think downloading unauthorised copyrighted materials is illegal, I don't buy that either. I think most people think it shouldn't be illegal, so they do it anyway.
It is pretty funny that people have a complete meltdown over kids seeing reproduction, but no problem with shows that depict violence as the most frequent and effective way of solving problems, and wholesale slaughter or humiliation (reality shows) as entertainment.
Don't get me started on TV!
Oh, we're talking about me now?
I thought we were talking about the woman who still thinks they've done nothing illegal even after her 12 year old daughter is being sued by the RIAA. I thought we were talking about the woman who thought paying $30 to Kazaa bought her rights to every song ever written, and not just ad-free file trading. I thought we were talking about the people who click "ok" until it works, disregarding all warnings, TOS', EULA's and Opt-In/Out's. I thought we were talking about the woman who somehow missed the last 18 months of neverending stories on the news about how downloading copyrighted material is illegal.
Because that's who I was talking about.
Oh shit, I'm sorry, I forgot to specifically say "regularly displays unsolicited hardcore porn if you don't install blocking software and set your preferences in Kazaa and properly configure SpamAssasin and your mail filters and install Proximotron and make sure your 9 and 12 year olds don't screw with the settings or figure out how to bypass them. How silly of me. Context screws me every time. RTFA
If we made it so that people on welfare, in public housing, etc, weren't allowed to have luxuries and fun, it wouldn't be called 'welfare', it would be called 'prison'.
No, if they had a health club and free college courses it would be called 'prison'.
There are a lot of people, commonly refered to as "the working poor", who stay off public assistance by not considering these luxuries as their God-given rights. These people bust their asses to keep your water-glass full and be self sufficient, while many on public assistance, and yes, even in prison, have far more luxuries and live better than they do. That, my good man, is bullshit (IMHO, of course).
Let me get this straight - explicit lyrics are ok for 12 year olds, people on public assistance can spend money on luxuries (broadband, kazaa, a "recent" pc) as long as is saves them money on other luxuries, you would expect someone in public housing to have a recent PC, and everyone lets their kids roam wild on the Internet, so it's ok?
Would you subscribe to the Playboy Channel and leave it unblocked for your kids to stumble across when they're channel surfing? The stuff on the Playboy channel is a heck of a lot more tame than what you'd likely find in the results of a Kazaa search for Britney Spears.
When did ignorance of the law or ignorance of a device become an acceptable defense?
Ok, I should have said "can afford $30 for music"... the point is maybe the money would have been better spent on some porn filtering software, or I don't know, maybe food? People on public assistance who buy things like CD's, lottery tickets and imported beer piss me off.
Read what you quoted again, "buddy" - I was talking about unsupervised use. And I said investigated for child endangerment, not charged with abuse. Giving a child unsupervised access to a device that regularly displays unsolicited hardcore pornography is easily child endangerment. Do you think a 12 year old girl using Kazaa is not going to search for Britney Spears? Anybody know the average music to porn ratio in the results of a Britney Spears search off the top of their head?
I will give you credit for posting anonymously, jackass.
1. I wonder if this 12 year old got the "What the F*ck do you think you're doing" message from Madonna?
2. How is it that a single mom with 2 kids in city housing can afford $30 just to avoid seeing advertising while stealing music?
3. If the RIAA are in fact only going for the flagrant downloaders - people sharing thousands of songs - then that would mean that A) They must have broadbank and B) They must have a good sized hard drive - See #2 above.
4. Anyone who lets a 12 year old use the Internet, especially Kazaa, unsupervised, should be investigated for child endangerment. And if she was supervising her daughter 100% of the time, then she's the one they should be going after.
I'm sorry, I hate the RIAA as much as the next guy, but this is BS. If anything, this is better than the other 260 lawsuits because maybe it will call attention to the fact that this mother, probably on public assistance, is letting her kids run wild on the Internet and blowing money on broadband and ad-free Kazaa access.
Someone said it was up to over $20k - I looked and it was $16k, now it's around $3k. Check out the bid, retraction and cancellation history.
No, actually what I meant by "it couldn't replace ANY other security measure" is that if it could hit on 60% of the 'bad guys' it sees, that's better than 0% of not having it at all.
It's one thing to get searched "unecessarily" once in a while, but like in the case of people who happen to have the same name as someone on a watch list, it's every single time. If the mathematical "score" of your face structure rings a bell, it's going to do it every time. Can you imagine if you had to fly 3 or 4 times a week, and had to endure 2 or 3 hours of questioning to prove you're not that John Doe? And there's nothing you can do about it. There's even one case (sorry for the lack of links - I heard the story weeks or more ago on NPR) where a guy is getting hassled every time he flies, even though the guy with the same name that that's on the list has been in custody at Gitmo for months.
I'm all for a little nusance to save lives, but some of it is way overboard. What would have prevented 9/11 has less to do with airport security, and more to do with better management of info. The info was there - there were reports that they were planning to hijack planes and use them for an attack on US soil before 9/11. Funny you don't hear a lot about that, huh?
Maybe they could come up with some other recognition to use in combination with the strip search? :-)
Seems like the flase positive rate would be the most important stat, and they don't have it.
Obviously it couldn't replace ANY other security measure, but if it worked 61% of the time with NO false positives, I would call that pretty damn successful, especially in such an early implementation.
They said 10 of the 19 hijackers went through Logan - so this system theorhetically would have caught 6 of them? Better than none. And it seems like the technology would improve with time.
Personally I'd rather have my face scanned then have them strip searching me because my credit sucks and I paid cash for my plane ticket.
smile on your brother... everybody get together, try and use open standards based software right now. If enough businesses refuse to accept documents in the new format, they'll have a hard time selling it. I think they may have a hard time reaching critical-mass to make it work anyhow - not enough people have it to warrant upgrading, not enough people upgrading to warrant having it. At least we can hope?
Here's my comments to the publsher via their online form:
0 3/08/25/story1.html?page=1 has got to be about the most useless piece of journalism I have ever had the misfortune of being exposed to. Let's put aside for a moment that this is an online article about technology without a single link to supporting or supplemental information. While I appreciate the need for brievity, the author could have at least pointed to where to find out exactly what the proposed tax is based on. Is it on the LAN hardware? Maintenance? Power consumption? How does the proposed legislation read? It mentions a survey that asks business owners to estimate what the tax will cost them, but doesn't mention where the survey can be obtained or how to participate. I understand everything couldn't be covered, but it would be nice if we were at least pointed in the general direction of some more information. What ever happened to who, what, where, when, why and how?
The article at http://orlando.bizjournals.com/orlando/stories/20
I remember having a neighborhood kid bring his box over to my place, hooking it up to mine with a laplink cable, and then dialing-up my buddy's PC in the next apartment so we could play 3-player Doom - we thought that was amazing. Internet? Internot.
Someone over at 'le Reg' must have read your post... Auto-responders magnify Sobig problem
Now I remember why I added you to my friends list - you so insightful, Joe. :-)
But seriously, as right as you are, I think that's a lot to ask - as is asking them not to click on stuff they should know better than to click on.
But then again, most people I know have learned not to rely on my e-mail - I get so much Spam, I've been known to through out a bit of baby with the bath water.
We occasionally get an important message with an executable attached. We can either let executables through and hope nobody clicks on them, or send a message back to the supposed sender letting them know it didn't go through. Deleting a message without telling anyone is not an option, even though most of those notifications aren't going to valid addresses, whether it's from Spam or Viruses.
:-)
Those notifications are just a way for a company to save themselves a lot of work, at the expense of others. So, we take the risk so we don't have to pollute the 'net with (almost always) useless notifications. So I would say the call to admins should be tweak your filters and educate your users, and then turn off the notifications. Becasue you know the first important message to an officer of the corp that gets deleted without any notification is going to get someone fired, and they're not going to take that risk.
I feel your pain - I'm getting swamped myself. But at least I'm getting an idea of how many viruses are going out in my name.
As far as I'm concerned, you can blame all of this on the spammers. Look at the schedule of these SoBig releases and deactivations. I believe this is a response to more and more open relays getting shut down. These viruses are the new open relays, and the only way to stop them is to stop Spam itself - by beating the living crap out of anyone you know who buys anything from a spammer
...maybe they mean lines of code that offends Microsoft - all of them. Or maybe each line counts as one, but the ones that really tack them off count as 3 or 4 lines. Or maybe they're running at 640x480 with Word Wrap on... Ok, I'll stop now.
Actually I was talking about the reverse engineering and unauthorized access in regard to the DMCA. In case you haven't heard, the US Air Force is already being sued for reverse engineering. But you're right, it's not as appropriate an application of the DMCA as protecting us from recycled toner cartridges is. What was I thinking?
Readers of the supposed Slashdot, why would an 8 foot tall Wookie want to hang out with white-hat virus authors? It does not make sense.
I'll buy that.
You're probably right, I was just thinking that it wouldn't be the first time that a (or is it 'an'? :-) LEA went after the easier target instead of the more menacing one.
No good deed goes unpunished. Who's going to give odds that the writer(s) of the 'good' worm will get caught and strung up by the short hairs under the DMCA? As long as it only affects machines that haven't already been patched- great. But what if it's flawed and actually causes unintentional damage? And if the original authors of the Blaster worm's intent was to teach people who ignore warnings a lesson, might this not start a virus war, of sorts? Sounds cool, but I'm not convinced this is an entirely good thing.
Now every /. page that loads tries to install MediaPlex. That's pretty annoying.
Holy crapweezles - I followed the link, and all of the sudden Spybot was flipping out and I was being asked to install not one but two pieces of spyware. WTF? Then there was the offscreen browser window. Nice touch.
Yeah, you're right. The scary part it's the same system that makes treatments more profitable than cures. And those profits buy a lot of really good lobbyists, and really bad politicians.