Having actually paid $100 for one on eBay (before they shut that down) I have to say that it remains one of my favorite transactions, in game or out.
I tended to spend my time consulting and spending time with my wife and child and as such couldn't get the really good EQ items (requiring huge time commitments) that make my occasional play more enjoyable.
Items like this allow me to trade an hour of my consulting time to some high school student who waited through 10+ hours of intense play for it drop.
A good trade to both of us and near equivalent in terms of earning power.
I'm pleased that Sony is moving this direction, the risk during this transaction of the party keeping the money and giving me nothing or of Sony canceling my EQ account with hundreds of hours of time invested was a great worry to me.
I would have happily paid a few bucks to an escrow agent to mitigate that risk.
p.s. for non-eq players: The fungi tunic is a high speed regeneration/self-healing shirt that significantly reduces the required waiting time between survivable fights (except at the highest levels).
Re:Other information should be used to prove ident
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In what I was proposing, things like DNA would only be checked in the event needing to absolutely identify somebody, not during financial transactions.
An example is if you are a victim of complete identity theft and are sitting in jail for a crime the identity stealer committed. If the stealer has all your personal data he can create, acquire and produce any identity documents you could.
You want there to be something he can't steal, and the only thing like that is your unique biometrics (DNA, fingerprints, etc). However if that data is not on file somewhere? Even if they arrest him too, as long as he claims to be you and has the documents to back it up, how do you prove yourself?
The current situation allows for this possibility, I mearly propose a fix that gives you a fail-safe proof of identity.
It doesn't even have to be encoded unless it's needed, a blood drop smeared on your original birth certificate would be enough. Most people would never need it, but if you do need it, you REALLY want it to be available.
I was referring only to establishing new lines of credit or security related changes like my billing/notification address.
With such a foundation, credit cards & drivers licences (as they are) or smart-cards with PIN numbers (like AMEX Blue) would be enough for individual purchases.
So it'd be fast and easy except when you want a new credit card or loan. How often do you do that? For me that's at most 2-3 times a year and major loans once a decade maybe.
Don't forget that all prices would be cheaper (perhaps 20-30%), because the costs of identity theft credit cards are not being passed along to you anymore.
Is that enough savings to justify the slight inconvenience when changing your credit profile?
I think it is.
Re:Other information should be used to prove ident
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ID Theft Made Easy
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The problem is that the government, the credit agencies and many businesses already have every piece of data about you necessary to completely impersonate your identity.
The 250 million identities you mention are already in their hands, I just want to make it accurate enough to protect my own interests.
Other than a complete video log of your life (or many many childhood/lifetime photos) and testimony of people who know you your whole life, using DNA or other unique biometrics is the only way to really prove that you are you.
Every other method from current birth certificates to drivers licences (which in CA now require fingerprint data) can be falsified by someone with access to current government/credit agency reports.
The risks we are talking about here also protects against identity thefts where a criminal get a drivers licence in your name, commits a fraud and an then YOU get arrested. if you cannot prove you didn't do it, you are very likely going to jail for the impersonator's crimes.
Data that others could know can never be final proof of identity. Something that can't be stolen is required, unique biometrics (DNA, fingerprints, etc.) are the only thing about you that can't be easily impersonated by somebody reading a computer screen somewhere.
Other information should be used to prove identity
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ID Theft Made Easy
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The way I see it, this is not a sign that people need to be taught not reveal details about their personal life to allow identity theft, but that the standards for allowing new/changed credit and other profitable (including non-monetary) benefits from identity theft should include identifiers that people will not normally give away without realizing it's significance.
Biometrics are a good example, but even that does not go far enough.
How about a video clip where the person says something like "I explicitly authorize the following change to my personal credit/identity profile; Please add a $2453 credit line for ABC appliances to purchase a new washer/drier". This and every other change could be stored with the credit/identity profile. It could be done with a simple mic/webcam and some database extensions.
Birth certificates could include DNA data and/or DNA hashes and new credit/identity profiles could require checking that and recording of a baseline "I Bob Jones authorize the creation of a new credit profile".
New changes to that profile could be checked against past photos / voice prints anytime a change is requested. Impersonators would have to look and sound very much the person being imitated.
This would be A very strong standard to block fraud indeed.
Legislation would be required to prevent the misuse of this kind of DNA data and the accepting of new credit/identity changes without it.
In Summary: Its not the users who are broken, its the system that does not take into account their likely behaviour and provide cost effective technical solutions to the weaknesses of that behaviour.
I read your link and am one of the many "I am a contractor" people who you are referring to.
The IRS form simply asks questions by which an IRS employee can make a determination, not the criteria by which such decisions are made.
In my case, the IRS receives its employment taxes (also corp income taxes) from my consulting corporation so it does not care. In the case of TFA, Adecco pays these taxes so the IRS does not again care.
IMNAL but its my understanding that the laws are structured to make it illegal to make a contracting agreement so that nobody pays the employment taxes. In my corp-to-corp structure my company pays these taxes, so why should HP be liable. In the case of TFA, Adecco pays these taxes so why again should HP be liable.
If the laws structured such that nobody but direct employees could perform certain tasks, then all consulting agreements are garbage. In fact depending on what those activities are, it might be impossible to rely on any service vendors, from power, to garbage collection, to IT consultants, to lawyers, to what-have-you.
I don't believe, that is what the law intended. It was intended to protect unscrupulous employers to dodge paying employment taxes.
As a Adecco contractor, my employment taxes are paid, as a re-ruled HP employee, will the IRS give me the money back if i sue HP for benefits? Will I gave back my premium contracting pay rates? Will the IRS give me back my income taxes I paid on that money? Will my personal expenses be rules subject to different rules of reimbursement? Am I guilty of filing the wrong kind/wrong-info on my personal income taxes for ten years? Is Adecco guilty of filing incorrect income reports for a decade? If I was really an HP employee, have I also been defrauding the IRS for a decade? Should I face penalties for this? Does Adecco have to give it's revenue back to HP? Does it get interest on this money?
Its ridiculous, the clock cannot be be rewound, if nobody but HP is being penalized, how can this be fair? How can the law unwind a set of transactions as complex as a decade of income and employment?
I find it difficult to believe that the law requires this nearly impossible task.
I have to disagree. Several of the "recruiting" companies I mentioned describe themselves as "temporary staffing".
If I were lucky enough to have a gig last 10 years at my contract rates, I wouldn't be suing, I'd be overjoyed, happy as a clam.
As a contractor, I'd be happy to do any task my customer put me at, from supervising teams, to writting code, to technal writting, to pouring coffee or answering phones. Just pay my contract rates and my soul is yours as long as I'm on the clock. I provide any (ethical) service within my skills to help my customer that I can.
Why should I not be able to sign a contract waiving away any rights to customer employee bennifits? I have the option to spend some of my premium pay on my own benifits (and I'd get better ones than HP provides).
I'm sure that the contracts signed by the plaintifs with Adecco stated explicitly that while conversion was possible, it was was never guarenteed. Well HP never chose to, that should be thier right.
Seems to me there is no inequity here and the plaintifs got both a generious payout on layof and 10 years of premium contracting pay in exchange for thier lack of empoyee benifits. Why is this unfair and/or illegal.
Heck, there were even empoyeed by somebody else (Adecco) for that whole 10 years. Surely this is a sign you're not an empoyee of a 3rd party (HP).
As a consultant / contractor of 12 years, lawsuits like this make my life much more difficult.
I can't even begin to describe how many times I have to sign in contracts that I realize I am not an employee of my customer.
I Am being paid a significant premium for the instability of contracting, almost 50%. To think that I could go back over the years and figure out cases where I might have made more money being an in-house employee and then suing just those, is simply ridiculous.
To try to convince my customers I will never EVER have basis to sue them, I do the following:
1) I sign contracts explicitly stating (several times) that I realize I am not and never will become an employee regardless of how long I work there, what I do, for the manner in which I do it.
2) I sign away any right to collect any significant damages if I where to sue anyways.
3) I sub-contract through a recruiting agency, where I sign another set of contracts saying the same thing but to indemnify the recruiting company.
4) I have my Own 1 man C-Corporation who signs the contracting agreement. I myself am not even doing work (technically) for the customer.
5) My Corporation, uses ADP Payroll services to pay it's employees (my) who are all Salaried and their pay not dependant on what company I might do the work for. I myself am a salaried W2 employee of my own C-corp.
Even with all these precautions, I STILL have trouble allaying the fears of potential customers that I can possibly be mistakes to be an employee of my customer.
Lawsuits like this make my life hell and cost me the money of potential customers who are afraid of them.
1) Grant of Copyright License. Licensor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, sublicenseable license to do the following:
to reproduce the Original Work in copies;
to prepare derivative works ("Derivative Works") based upon the Original Work;
to distribute copies of the Original Work and Derivative Works to the public, with the proviso that copies of Original Work or Derivative Works that You distribute shall be licensed under the Open Software License;
to perform the Original Work publicly; and
to display the Original Work publicly.
2) Grant of Patent License. Licensor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, sublicenseable license, under patent claims owned or controlled by the Licensor that are embodied in the Original Work as furnished by the Licensor, to make, use, sell and offer for sale the Original Work and Derivative Works.
IANAL, but it seems pretty clear to me that you can only sign contracts that limit your own rights.
When you wrote derivative works from a GPL source, you did not gain ownership of the original code or even
full patent rights to the code you wrote. The GPL remains in effect. If they argue that your contract gives
them ownership, then that contract is illegal and invalid because the original authors (IBM's Developer Works
& ActiveState and probably many others) were not party to the contract.
I cannot sign a valid contract, assigning ownership of assets I do not own. I mean I can sign one,
but it has no legal standing. The contract and any patents derived from it, would simply be invalidated in the first court to see it.
Am I the only one who gets these annoying "Forbes attache.com audio ads auto-executing when I try to RTFA?
Major websites and businesses should never do these kinds of experiance ruining advertisments. I might have considered using getting some of my business news from forbes.com, but not now that they've gone and annoyed me.
(One of my little dirty secrets is that I tend to browse Slashdot using IE (generally not having spyware problems), if it turns out that these ads don't happen using Firefox, I await my inevitible egging.)
Mr. Borland seems to entirely miss the point that Open-Source software is not free and is not counter to intellectual property rights.
The OSS licence agreement requires intellectual property right laws to be in full effect to work.
Its just the the compensation of OSS licences is not in money to the licence holders, but in restricted behavior in the public interest (freedom to re-distribute, requiring derivative works to be made available to all).
actually those ARE examples of copyright infringement under current law, especially since you are in fact actually representing yourself as a replica of those two very similar characters that are owned by those corporations.
Now if you were doing it as a form of creative parody... that would be a whole different kettle of fish.
Is it just me or does it sound like Microsoft and other litigious American software giants has bought the influence of this European commission? I can only hope that the many countries involved will stand up and fight to at least hold debate on a matter that might ruin most small and mid sized European software companies.
Several Points here, if true, it could be used to devastating effect in licensing / activation programs. Many publishers view download software onto multiple machines proof of violating single machine license agreements, while at the same time allow multiple downloads of that software to ease customer service burden from "It didn't work when I first tried to download it" calls. If a somebody were to buy such a package and then download it to his desktop and then later to his laptop, this kind of fingerprinting would allow the publisher to catch him.
From TFA, it says that:
The technique works by "exploiting small, microscopic deviations in device hardware: clock skews." In practice, Kohno's paper says, his techniques "exploit the fact that most modern TCP stacks implement the TCP timestamps option from RFC 1323 whereby, for performance purposes, each party in a TCP flow includes information about its perception of time in each outgoing packet. A fingerprinter can use the information contained within the TCP headers to estimate a device's clock skew and thereby fingerprint a physical device."
This sounds to me like firewalls would have to be modified to intentionally hide this data and remove this difference in timestamp calculations (the firewall generates both and back translates when doing NAT). So its just a call for yet another firewall patch. Can the firewall vendors patch and globally implement faster than this privacy exploit be exploited? I would hope so at least.
IANAR(researcher), but for journal references how about:
From M.A. Bozarth (1994). Pleasure systems in the brain. In D.M. Warburton (ed.), Pleasure: The politics and the reality (pp. 5-14 + refs). New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Based on research from the origanal study:
Olds, J. and Milner, P.: Positive reinforcement produced by electrical stimulation of septal area and other regions of rat brain. J. Comp. Physiol. Psychol. 47: 419-427, 1954 [Medline pre1966 - no text online availble].
Eight years or so ago, I thought the same thing, and walked past the "check receipt" clerk saying "no thank you I'm in a hurry" (I was).
Well he grabbed my shirt and wrestled with me until I stopped just outside the door. The Manager inside yelled "Call 911!" and 6 clerks surrounded me shoulder-to-shoulder preventing my further departure (in a well rehearsed move).
They demanded to inspect my receipt and to search me. I politely said no and it was clear their intent was to argue with me until the police arrived. I asked if I was under Citizen's arrest and they said "No, but I still cant leave the store". I pointed out that I was 5 feet outside the door and they had no good answer. They said there was an anti-shoplifting law that granted them this right to search me. I knew that pushing them aside would constitute assault on my part.
Not wanting to deal with the police (I don't have the independent wealth or free time necessary to afford a legal defense in this situation) I eventually allowed them to see the receipt and look in my Fry's bag (they had so SURE I was shoplifting). They were incredibly shocked to find out I was not in fact shoplifting, and let me depart.
I checked with the police the next day and they told me that Fry's can and does do this commonly and that its supported by law somehow and if I wanted to know more, I could contact a lawyer.
I was forced to sue or let the matter drop. I wish had the funds/time to sue them, for I think, given my understanding of the law, I would have won on several grounds, including false imprisonment and assault.
Alas with my later day job as a Whitehat security consultant, had I let myself be arrested (even if not charged or later acquitted) I would have not been hired and would have failed several different background checks. So, for me, I guess I made the right choice given the realities of the screwed up world.
To this day, I wish I could have afforded being a privacy rights crusader, but alas twas not to be.
As an aside, at the time I worked as national IT manager of a major Silicon valley based corporation and I justified and pushed through a "No Fry's" policy that cost them probably a couple of hundred thousand in lost sales.
Well what I'm saying is that it's one thing to point out that checking for the registry key for Wine constitutes a security vulnerability and that it needs to fixed/not done and another thing to say that virus authors could / should create the Wine registry keys to block future patches and that this could increase the viability / resistance of a (or any) virus.
One is full disclosure and with the other the virus author has to do his own analysis and think of using the vulnerability in his code.
I know some smart Blackhats that are in the "of course I'd see that, it's in my next rev" camp, but there are beginning Blackhats for whom it would not be so obvious. I want to make it as difficult as I can to come up to speed on doing this, while still fully disclosing.
I suppose it shows a deep conflict in my opinion on full disclosure and this is undoubtedly true. I don't like full disclosure, I just think there isn't anything better out there (maybe responsible delayed full disclosure, but the jury is still out on that one) and we've tried really hiding vulnerabilities and it didn't work.
So now we're stuck with full disclosure's lesser evil. I'd prefer no evil at all, but nobody's come up with a practical way to do that.
Just in case you hadn't thought of it, it's most likely that virus / spyware authors read Slashdot like the rest of us. Therefore you can now expect that feature to be included in the next generation of viruses headed to desktop near you.
While I'm all for full disclosure to encourage vendors to fix bugs faster, lets not try to publicly disclose potentially innovative future virus features based on the results of our insightful analysis.
The world is tough enough without well meaning, skilled and talented technical individuals doing the virus / spyware author's design work for them.
It's probably futile to expect they wouldn't have thought of it themselves, but we could have hoped so. So please just be aware of what you're saying and moral range of your likely audience.
Even in loss, Lexmark has had a great deal of benefit from this lawsuit.
Lexmark has likely made enough money due to the 20-month (2/03 - 10/04) injunction to cover all its legal costs.
Lexmark has probably also gained that same amount of time to build market dominance and condition printer users to buy their overpriced cartridges.
Lexmark has (until now) forestalled additional ink cartridge competitors from entering their market due to the perceived threat of DMCA lawsuits.
Lexmark has a higher market share due to these factors, thus their "economy of scale" is much better and they can more effectively compete against future smaller 3rd party ink cartridge manufacturer, thus discouraging them from entering this market in the lawsuit's loss.
Finally, Lexmark was probably only interesting in payback on the "implied discount" on their printers. Given the 20 months of injunction you can probably mark that payback complete.
Interesting. Well even though you are the first one of my admittedly limited set of viewers who liked the final Prisoner episode, I am now of course intrigued by the debate.
So of course now I have to go and watch the whole series sometime (including the last episode).
Well I did tag the link as a spoiler... Its just that i saw a few episodes of "The Prisioner" many years ago, and kinda liked em, but wasn't willing to go as far as tracking down the whole series on DVD but still wanted to know how it turned out.
I mean why would i want to go to all that trouble just be annoyed that it ended poorly?
Slashdot Mirror
Having actually paid $100 for one on eBay (before they shut that down) I have to say that it remains one of my favorite transactions, in game or out.
I tended to spend my time consulting and spending time with my wife and child and as such couldn't get the really good EQ items (requiring huge time commitments) that make my occasional play more enjoyable.
Items like this allow me to trade an hour of my consulting time to some high school student who waited through 10+ hours of intense play for it drop.
A good trade to both of us and near equivalent in terms of earning power.
I'm pleased that Sony is moving this direction, the risk during this transaction of the party keeping the money and giving me nothing or of Sony canceling my EQ account with hundreds of hours of time invested was a great worry to me.
I would have happily paid a few bucks to an escrow agent to mitigate that risk.
p.s. for non-eq players: The fungi tunic is a high speed regeneration/self-healing shirt that significantly reduces the required waiting time between survivable fights (except at the highest levels).
In what I was proposing, things like DNA would only be checked in the event needing to absolutely identify somebody, not during financial transactions.
An example is if you are a victim of complete identity theft and are sitting in jail for a crime the identity stealer committed. If the stealer has all your personal data he can create, acquire and produce any identity documents you could.
You want there to be something he can't steal, and the only thing like that is your unique biometrics (DNA, fingerprints, etc). However if that data is not on file somewhere? Even if they arrest him too, as long as he claims to be you and has the documents to back it up, how do you prove yourself?
The current situation allows for this possibility, I mearly propose a fix that gives you a fail-safe proof of identity.
It doesn't even have to be encoded unless it's needed, a blood drop smeared on your original birth certificate would be enough. Most people would never need it, but if you do need it, you REALLY want it to be available.
I was referring only to establishing new lines of credit or security related changes like my billing /notification address.
With such a foundation, credit cards & drivers licences (as they are) or smart-cards with PIN numbers (like AMEX Blue) would be enough for individual purchases.
So it'd be fast and easy except when you want a new credit card or loan. How often do you do that? For me that's at most 2-3 times a year and major loans once a decade maybe.
Don't forget that all prices would be cheaper (perhaps 20-30%), because the costs of identity theft credit cards are not being passed along to you anymore.
Is that enough savings to justify the slight inconvenience when changing your credit profile?
I think it is.
The problem is that the government, the credit agencies and many businesses already have every piece of data about you necessary to completely impersonate your identity.
The 250 million identities you mention are already in their hands, I just want to make it accurate enough to protect my own interests.
Other than a complete video log of your life (or many many childhood/lifetime photos) and testimony of people who know you your whole life, using DNA or other unique biometrics is the only way to really prove that you are you.
Every other method from current birth certificates to drivers licences (which in CA now require fingerprint data) can be falsified by someone with access to current government/credit agency reports.
The risks we are talking about here also protects against identity thefts where a criminal get a drivers licence in your name, commits a fraud and an then YOU get arrested. if you cannot prove you didn't do it, you are very likely going to jail for the impersonator's crimes.
Data that others could know can never be final proof of identity. Something that can't be stolen is required, unique biometrics (DNA, fingerprints, etc.) are the only thing about you that can't be easily impersonated by somebody reading a computer screen somewhere.
The way I see it, this is not a sign that people need to be taught not reveal details about their personal life to allow identity theft, but that the standards for allowing new/changed credit and other profitable (including non-monetary) benefits from identity theft should include identifiers that people will not normally give away without realizing it's significance.
Biometrics are a good example, but even that does not go far enough.
How about a video clip where the person says something like "I explicitly authorize the following change to my personal credit/identity profile; Please add a $2453 credit line for ABC appliances to purchase a new washer/drier". This and every other change could be stored with the credit/identity profile. It could be done with a simple mic/webcam and some database extensions.
Birth certificates could include DNA data and/or DNA hashes and new credit/identity profiles could require checking that and recording of a baseline "I Bob Jones authorize the creation of a new credit profile".
New changes to that profile could be checked against past photos / voice prints anytime a change is requested. Impersonators would have to look and sound very much the person being imitated.
This would be A very strong standard to block fraud indeed.
Legislation would be required to prevent the misuse of this kind of DNA data and the accepting of new credit/identity changes without it.
In Summary: Its not the users who are broken, its the system that does not take into account their likely behaviour and provide cost effective technical solutions to the weaknesses of that behaviour.
I read your link and am one of the many "I am a contractor" people who you are referring to.
The IRS form simply asks questions by which an IRS employee can make a determination, not the criteria by which such decisions are made.
In my case, the IRS receives its employment taxes (also corp income taxes) from my consulting corporation so it does not care. In the case of TFA, Adecco pays these taxes so the IRS does not again care.
IMNAL but its my understanding that the laws are structured to make it illegal to make a contracting agreement so that nobody pays the employment taxes. In my corp-to-corp structure my company pays these taxes, so why should HP be liable. In the case of TFA, Adecco pays these taxes so why again should HP be liable.
If the laws structured such that nobody but direct employees could perform certain tasks, then all consulting agreements are garbage. In fact depending on what those activities are, it might be impossible to rely on any service vendors, from power, to garbage collection, to IT consultants, to lawyers, to what-have-you.
I don't believe, that is what the law intended. It was intended to protect unscrupulous employers to dodge paying employment taxes.
As a Adecco contractor, my employment taxes are paid, as a re-ruled HP employee, will the IRS give me the money back if i sue HP for benefits? Will I gave back my premium contracting pay rates? Will the IRS give me back my income taxes I paid on that money? Will my personal expenses be rules subject to different rules of reimbursement? Am I guilty of filing the wrong kind/wrong-info on my personal income taxes for ten years? Is Adecco guilty of filing incorrect income reports for a decade? If I was really an HP employee, have I also been defrauding the IRS for a decade? Should I face penalties for this? Does Adecco have to give it's revenue back to HP? Does it get interest on this money?
Its ridiculous, the clock cannot be be rewound, if nobody but HP is being penalized, how can this be fair? How can the law unwind a set of transactions as complex as a decade of income and employment?
I find it difficult to believe that the law requires this nearly impossible task.
I have to disagree. Several of the "recruiting" companies I mentioned describe themselves as "temporary staffing".
If I were lucky enough to have a gig last 10 years at my contract rates, I wouldn't be suing, I'd be overjoyed, happy as a clam.
As a contractor, I'd be happy to do any task my customer put me at, from supervising teams, to writting code, to technal writting, to pouring coffee or answering phones. Just pay my contract rates and my soul is yours as long as I'm on the clock. I provide any (ethical) service within my skills to help my customer that I can.
Why should I not be able to sign a contract waiving away any rights to customer employee bennifits? I have the option to spend some of my premium pay on my own benifits (and I'd get better ones than HP provides).
I'm sure that the contracts signed by the plaintifs with Adecco stated explicitly that while conversion was possible, it was was never guarenteed. Well HP never chose to, that should be thier right.
Seems to me there is no inequity here and the plaintifs got both a generious payout on layof and 10 years of premium contracting pay in exchange for thier lack of empoyee benifits. Why is this unfair and/or illegal.
Heck, there were even empoyeed by somebody else (Adecco) for that whole 10 years. Surely this is a sign you're not an empoyee of a 3rd party (HP).
As a consultant / contractor of 12 years, lawsuits like this make my life much more difficult.
I can't even begin to describe how many times I have to sign in contracts that I realize I am not an employee of my customer.
I Am being paid a significant premium for the instability of contracting, almost 50%. To think that I could go back over the years and figure out cases where I might have made more money being an in-house employee and then suing just those, is simply ridiculous.
To try to convince my customers I will never EVER have basis to sue them, I do the following:
1) I sign contracts explicitly stating (several times) that I realize I am not and never will become an employee regardless of how long I work there, what I do, for the manner in which I do it.
2) I sign away any right to collect any significant damages if I where to sue anyways.
3) I sub-contract through a recruiting agency, where I sign another set of contracts saying the same thing but to indemnify the recruiting company.
4) I have my Own 1 man C-Corporation who signs the contracting agreement. I myself am not even doing work (technically) for the customer.
5) My Corporation, uses ADP Payroll services to pay it's employees (my) who are all Salaried and their pay not dependant on what company I might do the work for. I myself am a salaried W2 employee of my own C-corp.
Even with all these precautions, I STILL have trouble allaying the fears of potential customers that I can possibly be mistakes to be an employee of my customer.
Lawsuits like this make my life hell and cost me the money of potential customers who are afraid of them.
Thank you, you are correct, Copyright law is probably the more improtant concept here. However Both need to be in full effect.
As described in The Open Software License version 2.1
Shouldn't this be:
In soviet Russia, microscopic black holes eat YOU.
or possibly,
In microscopic black holes, Soviet Russia and YOU both get eaten.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to verify if this is a Buckaroo Banzai quote, it sounds like one to me.
Anybody else know? (Google doesn't have an easy answer).
IANAL, but it seems pretty clear to me that you can only sign contracts that limit your own rights.
When you wrote derivative works from a GPL source, you did not gain ownership of the original code or even full patent rights to the code you wrote. The GPL remains in effect. If they argue that your contract gives them ownership, then that contract is illegal and invalid because the original authors (IBM's Developer Works & ActiveState and probably many others) were not party to the contract.
I cannot sign a valid contract, assigning ownership of assets I do not own. I mean I can sign one, but it has no legal standing. The contract and any patents derived from it, would simply be invalidated in the first court to see it.
Am I the only one who gets these annoying "Forbes attache.com audio ads auto-executing when I try to RTFA?
Major websites and businesses should never do these kinds of experiance ruining advertisments. I might have considered using getting some of my business news from forbes.com, but not now that they've gone and annoyed me.
(One of my little dirty secrets is that I tend to browse Slashdot using IE (generally not having spyware problems), if it turns out that these ads don't happen using Firefox, I await my inevitible egging.)
Mr. Borland seems to entirely miss the point that Open-Source software is not free and is not counter to intellectual property rights.
The OSS licence agreement requires intellectual property right laws to be in full effect to work.
Its just the the compensation of OSS licences is not in money to the licence holders, but in restricted behavior in the public interest (freedom to re-distribute, requiring derivative works to be made available to all).
actually those ARE examples of copyright infringement under current law, especially since you are in fact actually representing yourself as a replica of those two very similar characters that are owned by those corporations.
Now if you were doing it as a form of creative parody... that would be a whole different kettle of fish.
Is it just me or does it sound like Microsoft and other litigious American software giants has bought the influence of this European commission? I can only hope that the many countries involved will stand up and fight to at least hold debate on a matter that might ruin most small and mid sized European software companies.
Several Points here, if true, it could be used to devastating effect in licensing / activation programs. Many publishers view download software onto multiple machines proof of violating single machine license agreements, while at the same time allow multiple downloads of that software to ease customer service burden from "It didn't work when I first tried to download it" calls. If a somebody were to buy such a package and then download it to his desktop and then later to his laptop, this kind of fingerprinting would allow the publisher to catch him.
From TFA, it says that:This sounds to me like firewalls would have to be modified to intentionally hide this data and remove this difference in timestamp calculations (the firewall generates both and back translates when doing NAT). So its just a call for yet another firewall patch. Can the firewall vendors patch and globally implement faster than this privacy exploit be exploited? I would hope so at least.
Dude! What kind of poorly nested pseudo-tags are those?
Didn't you mean:
[troll feeding][spelling nazi]
I deny that he holds a place in anyone's 'anals'!
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IANAR(researcher), but for journal references how about:
From M.A. Bozarth (1994). Pleasure systems in the brain. In D.M. Warburton (ed.), Pleasure: The politics and the reality (pp. 5-14 + refs). New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Based on research from the origanal study:
Olds, J. and Milner, P.: Positive reinforcement produced by electrical stimulation of septal area and other regions of rat brain. J. Comp. Physiol. Psychol. 47: 419-427, 1954 [Medline pre1966 - no text online availble].Eight years or so ago, I thought the same thing, and walked past the "check receipt" clerk saying "no thank you I'm in a hurry" (I was).
Well he grabbed my shirt and wrestled with me until I stopped just outside the door. The Manager inside yelled "Call 911!" and 6 clerks surrounded me shoulder-to-shoulder preventing my further departure (in a well rehearsed move).
They demanded to inspect my receipt and to search me. I politely said no and it was clear their intent was to argue with me until the police arrived. I asked if I was under Citizen's arrest and they said "No, but I still cant leave the store". I pointed out that I was 5 feet outside the door and they had no good answer. They said there was an anti-shoplifting law that granted them this right to search me. I knew that pushing them aside would constitute assault on my part.
Not wanting to deal with the police (I don't have the independent wealth or free time necessary to afford a legal defense in this situation) I eventually allowed them to see the receipt and look in my Fry's bag (they had so SURE I was shoplifting). They were incredibly shocked to find out I was not in fact shoplifting, and let me depart.
I checked with the police the next day and they told me that Fry's can and does do this commonly and that its supported by law somehow and if I wanted to know more, I could contact a lawyer.
I was forced to sue or let the matter drop. I wish had the funds/time to sue them, for I think, given my understanding of the law, I would have won on several grounds, including false imprisonment and assault.
Alas with my later day job as a Whitehat security consultant, had I let myself be arrested (even if not charged or later acquitted) I would have not been hired and would have failed several different background checks. So, for me, I guess I made the right choice given the realities of the screwed up world.
To this day, I wish I could have afforded being a privacy rights crusader, but alas twas not to be.
As an aside, at the time I worked as national IT manager of a major Silicon valley based corporation and I justified and pushed through a "No Fry's" policy that cost them probably a couple of hundred thousand in lost sales.
Well what I'm saying is that it's one thing to point out that checking for the registry key for Wine constitutes a security vulnerability and that it needs to fixed/not done and another thing to say that virus authors could / should create the Wine registry keys to block future patches and that this could increase the viability / resistance of a (or any) virus.
One is full disclosure and with the other the virus author has to do his own analysis and think of using the vulnerability in his code.
I know some smart Blackhats that are in the "of course I'd see that, it's in my next rev" camp, but there are beginning Blackhats for whom it would not be so obvious. I want to make it as difficult as I can to come up to speed on doing this, while still fully disclosing.
I suppose it shows a deep conflict in my opinion on full disclosure and this is undoubtedly true. I don't like full disclosure, I just think there isn't anything better out there (maybe responsible delayed full disclosure, but the jury is still out on that one) and we've tried really hiding vulnerabilities and it didn't work.
So now we're stuck with full disclosure's lesser evil. I'd prefer no evil at all, but nobody's come up with a practical way to do that.
Just in case you hadn't thought of it, it's most likely that virus / spyware authors read Slashdot like the rest of us. Therefore you can now expect that feature to be included in the next generation of viruses headed to desktop near you.
While I'm all for full disclosure to encourage vendors to fix bugs faster, lets not try to publicly disclose potentially innovative future virus features based on the results of our insightful analysis.
The world is tough enough without well meaning, skilled and talented technical individuals doing the virus / spyware author's design work for them.
It's probably futile to expect they wouldn't have thought of it themselves, but we could have hoped so. So please just be aware of what you're saying and moral range of your likely audience.
Even in loss, Lexmark has had a great deal of benefit from this lawsuit.
Lexmark has likely made enough money due to the 20-month (2/03 - 10/04) injunction to cover all its legal costs.
Lexmark has probably also gained that same amount of time to build market dominance and condition printer users to buy their overpriced cartridges.
Lexmark has (until now) forestalled additional ink cartridge competitors from entering their market due to the perceived threat of DMCA lawsuits.
Lexmark has a higher market share due to these factors, thus their "economy of scale" is much better and they can more effectively compete against future smaller 3rd party ink cartridge manufacturer, thus discouraging them from entering this market in the lawsuit's loss.
Finally, Lexmark was probably only interesting in payback on the "implied discount" on their printers. Given the 20 months of injunction you can probably mark that payback complete.
Interesting. Well even though you are the first one of my admittedly limited set of viewers who liked the final Prisoner episode, I am now of course intrigued by the debate.
So of course now I have to go and watch the whole series sometime (including the last episode).
Well I did tag the link as a spoiler... Its just that i saw a few episodes of "The Prisioner" many years ago, and kinda liked em, but wasn't willing to go as far as tracking down the whole series on DVD but still wanted to know how it turned out.
I mean why would i want to go to all that trouble just be annoyed that it ended poorly?