In the United States, we take law and order seriously, and this kid would have been tried as an adult. Seriously, why do some people think someone should be able to do whatever they want without consequences just because they did it a few months before their 18th birthday? Suspended sentence, yea, that'll show him!
I agree, this story is definitely not news, but tech writers must have something to write about, and Slashdot almost went a day without a Linux cheerleading story, so drivel like this makes it on the front page.
I don't doubt they will buy more representatives, but how exactly will they outlaw thoughts? Circumvention is technically illegal already, but that doesn't really change anything.
Are Kaplan's complaints warranted, or is he just taking advantage of some recent Microsoft court losses and trying to get his cut?
Yup. This has been going on for a long time. Once a company becomes successful, kooks start coming out of the woodwork to sue them. It's starting to happen to Google too. Microsoft is an ideal victim for this, with their "unclean" history when it comes to other peoples' intellectual property. Microsoft would be well advised, if they haven't already, to have a strict regimen for ensuring that all code they release is really theirs. This is the only viable defense against these types of suits. This suit certainly won't be the last.
I fully agree that calculators are over-used in most high school math classes, but I think this is going a bit too far. There's nothing wrong with allowing trig students to use basic scientific (non-graphing) calculators. I can't imagine how it would make students more productive or to give them a deeper understanding by making them slog through old log tables. Yes, a student should be able to approximate in fraction form the sin, cos, etc. without a calculator, and by all means should be able to do simple math in their heads, but I think it is counter-productive to make high school seniors do long division or mess with log tables.
many people in the Valley are working for free in the hopes of being hired permanently
Really, do you have an example of this? I haven't heard stories like this since 2002, and if it is really that bad over there, why are these people trying to break into this market? Why not try something a little more profitable, like fast food?
What we are talking about here is not a mandatory thing for the web to work.
Maybe not, but I as a developer would want to know that my page will display correctly in most browsers, and to not have to write different code for each possible browser. This is why VBScript for the web never caught on; most people who know what they're doing don't want an IE-only website.
I think that would cost them the all-important corporate market. Nobody wants their employees being blasted with popups all day while they're trying to work.
The problem with that is spyware changes so frequently. The technology that Microsoft gets when they buy Claria will only help them fight older forms of spyware, not the new and more damaging kind that other people are creating. As for personalization code, they will probably have something to gain there which probably is the main reason they are interested.
Circumventing DRM on your home player, and not distributing it to anyone, is about as risky as cutting off a matress tag. I wouldn't worry too much about getting caught unless I were selling circumvention technology, or stupidly ordering it on the internet with my real name and credit card.
Um, trains are powered by diesel, which is made from oil. Some trains may be electric powered, and chances are the generating stations are burning oil or coal. There's plenty of money to be made burning fossil fuels even without the oil companies supposedly conspiring to prevent mass transit. If an idea is profitable to some company, it will eventually come into use.
This ruling doesn't change anything. It states that cable companies don't have to open their lines to competitors, which is the way things are right now. Service won't get worse because of this ruling, and I really don't think it would get better had they ruled the other way. Look at how well "competitive" DSL worked, or more like didn't work. Hardly anyone can sell DSL other than the local telecom monopoly since they have priced competitors out of the market even if they do allow access to their lines. The only way broadband will be truly competitive is when wireless broadband over a large area is widely available and affordable, and not surprisingly the phone and cable companies are trying very hard to prevent this.
If you have kids some day, do you think your wife will allow you to chuck their baby photos 6 months (or even 6 years) later? If so, you apparently haven't been around too many people with young kids.
So where do you shop? It sounds like you've ruled out almost all large chain stores. Even small stores have been known to engage in shady behavior of some type, making it really hard to patronize only "good" businesses.
In most cases, companies are held responsible for acts by subcontractors. This is why they make sure their subs have insurance, licenses, bonding, etc and are generally reputable. Especially when it comes to toxic waste disposal, the company will thoroughly investigate whoever hauls their waste, since they will be held responsible when it turns up on a beach somewhere. I don't see why illegal advertising would be treated differently by the legal system.
Well said. Ever since my friend's computer was made useless by Norton Internet Security, I knew that Symantec was a dying company. How long will they be successful selling "security" software that simply cannot work well in any situation and causes more harm to a machine than most real viruses?
What will the merger offer.. "virus protected databases" ?
Such a feature can be very helpful for the profitability of a company, since it would be a great way of increasing sales to paranoid PHBs who would believe what their salesman told them.
I would rather buy repairable products that have a longer life, than to pay less for disposable junk.
I agree with you, unfortunately most Americans do not, which is why most stuff now is cheap junk designed to last about 3 years. People buy the cheap WalMart special as opposed to the higher quality product from a small electronics store that costs twice as much.
Profit optimisation does not benefit the consumer, competition does.
Right on, I've been saying this for a long time. If a business suddenly has high profit margins due to cost cutting and high demand (ie. high prices), potential competitors will flock to the market with rival products and services. What better way to enter a new market than to underbid the incumbent companies, so that's what they'll do, starting a price war. The established companies either lower prices or lose business, which is how the consumer benefits.
Really, so half of your friends have no job, half of your neighbors have no job, half of the people you see each day have no job? Unless you live in West Virginia, that sounds a little far-fetched to me. I'm aware that unemployment numbers can be manipulated to sound more favorable, but 50%? Come on, get a grip on reality!
In a civil case, it would make no sense to sue the employee as opposed to spending all efforts going after the company's big bucks. I don't think the individual has much to worry about. Besides, most people don't know exactly how many licenses the company has purchased since it isn't their responsibility to keep track; it's the company's.
It's not that foreign programmers are any less smart or capable, but most outsouring projects, and for that matter many in-house projects, are set up to fail due to lack of planning. When communication is lacking even between workers in the same building, how can the project possibly be a success when people on the other side of the world have no idea what their coworkers are doing with the system that they will eventually need to be able to interface with? It's the processes that cause offshoring to fail, not the people.
The use of the Social Security number as a national ID is the CAUSE of identity theft, not the solution. The only solution is to require creditors to do more to identify a person than to simply use a name and SSN. Anytime there is only one real identifier, whether the current SSN or some other universal number, ID theft will be easy.
If the artists aren't going to get any royalties from this
That wouldn't really be different than the current situation. New artists get screwed out of pretty much all royalties anyway. The only musicians making money on royalties are no longer bound by their first recording contract and have much more favorable terms.
Slashdot Mirror
In the United States, we take law and order seriously, and this kid would have been tried as an adult. Seriously, why do some people think someone should be able to do whatever they want without consequences just because they did it a few months before their 18th birthday? Suspended sentence, yea, that'll show him!
I agree, this story is definitely not news, but tech writers must have something to write about, and Slashdot almost went a day without a Linux cheerleading story, so drivel like this makes it on the front page.
I don't doubt they will buy more representatives, but how exactly will they outlaw thoughts? Circumvention is technically illegal already, but that doesn't really change anything.
Are Kaplan's complaints warranted, or is he just taking advantage of some recent Microsoft court losses and trying to get his cut?
Yup. This has been going on for a long time. Once a company becomes successful, kooks start coming out of the woodwork to sue them. It's starting to happen to Google too. Microsoft is an ideal victim for this, with their "unclean" history when it comes to other peoples' intellectual property. Microsoft would be well advised, if they haven't already, to have a strict regimen for ensuring that all code they release is really theirs. This is the only viable defense against these types of suits. This suit certainly won't be the last.
I fully agree that calculators are over-used in most high school math classes, but I think this is going a bit too far. There's nothing wrong with allowing trig students to use basic scientific (non-graphing) calculators. I can't imagine how it would make students more productive or to give them a deeper understanding by making them slog through old log tables. Yes, a student should be able to approximate in fraction form the sin, cos, etc. without a calculator, and by all means should be able to do simple math in their heads, but I think it is counter-productive to make high school seniors do long division or mess with log tables.
Don't worry bud, I just took care of it in meta-mod.
many people in the Valley are working for free in the hopes of being hired permanently
Really, do you have an example of this? I haven't heard stories like this since 2002, and if it is really that bad over there, why are these people trying to break into this market? Why not try something a little more profitable, like fast food?
What we are talking about here is not a mandatory thing for the web to work.
Maybe not, but I as a developer would want to know that my page will display correctly in most browsers, and to not have to write different code for each possible browser. This is why VBScript for the web never caught on; most people who know what they're doing don't want an IE-only website.
I think that would cost them the all-important corporate market. Nobody wants their employees being blasted with popups all day while they're trying to work.
The problem with that is spyware changes so frequently. The technology that Microsoft gets when they buy Claria will only help them fight older forms of spyware, not the new and more damaging kind that other people are creating. As for personalization code, they will probably have something to gain there which probably is the main reason they are interested.
Circumventing DRM on your home player, and not distributing it to anyone, is about as risky as cutting off a matress tag. I wouldn't worry too much about getting caught unless I were selling circumvention technology, or stupidly ordering it on the internet with my real name and credit card.
Um, trains are powered by diesel, which is made from oil. Some trains may be electric powered, and chances are the generating stations are burning oil or coal. There's plenty of money to be made burning fossil fuels even without the oil companies supposedly conspiring to prevent mass transit. If an idea is profitable to some company, it will eventually come into use.
This ruling doesn't change anything. It states that cable companies don't have to open their lines to competitors, which is the way things are right now. Service won't get worse because of this ruling, and I really don't think it would get better had they ruled the other way. Look at how well "competitive" DSL worked, or more like didn't work. Hardly anyone can sell DSL other than the local telecom monopoly since they have priced competitors out of the market even if they do allow access to their lines. The only way broadband will be truly competitive is when wireless broadband over a large area is widely available and affordable, and not surprisingly the phone and cable companies are trying very hard to prevent this.
If you have kids some day, do you think your wife will allow you to chuck their baby photos 6 months (or even 6 years) later? If so, you apparently haven't been around too many people with young kids.
So where do you shop? It sounds like you've ruled out almost all large chain stores. Even small stores have been known to engage in shady behavior of some type, making it really hard to patronize only "good" businesses.
In most cases, companies are held responsible for acts by subcontractors. This is why they make sure their subs have insurance, licenses, bonding, etc and are generally reputable. Especially when it comes to toxic waste disposal, the company will thoroughly investigate whoever hauls their waste, since they will be held responsible when it turns up on a beach somewhere. I don't see why illegal advertising would be treated differently by the legal system.
Well said. Ever since my friend's computer was made useless by Norton Internet Security, I knew that Symantec was a dying company. How long will they be successful selling "security" software that simply cannot work well in any situation and causes more harm to a machine than most real viruses?
What will the merger offer.. "virus protected databases" ?
Such a feature can be very helpful for the profitability of a company, since it would be a great way of increasing sales to paranoid PHBs who would believe what their salesman told them.
I would rather buy repairable products that have a longer life, than to pay less for disposable junk.
I agree with you, unfortunately most Americans do not, which is why most stuff now is cheap junk designed to last about 3 years. People buy the cheap WalMart special as opposed to the higher quality product from a small electronics store that costs twice as much.
Profit optimisation does not benefit the consumer, competition does.
Right on, I've been saying this for a long time. If a business suddenly has high profit margins due to cost cutting and high demand (ie. high prices), potential competitors will flock to the market with rival products and services. What better way to enter a new market than to underbid the incumbent companies, so that's what they'll do, starting a price war. The established companies either lower prices or lose business, which is how the consumer benefits.
Really, so half of your friends have no job, half of your neighbors have no job, half of the people you see each day have no job? Unless you live in West Virginia, that sounds a little far-fetched to me. I'm aware that unemployment numbers can be manipulated to sound more favorable, but 50%? Come on, get a grip on reality!
In a civil case, it would make no sense to sue the employee as opposed to spending all efforts going after the company's big bucks. I don't think the individual has much to worry about. Besides, most people don't know exactly how many licenses the company has purchased since it isn't their responsibility to keep track; it's the company's.
It's not that foreign programmers are any less smart or capable, but most outsouring projects, and for that matter many in-house projects, are set up to fail due to lack of planning. When communication is lacking even between workers in the same building, how can the project possibly be a success when people on the other side of the world have no idea what their coworkers are doing with the system that they will eventually need to be able to interface with? It's the processes that cause offshoring to fail, not the people.
The use of the Social Security number as a national ID is the CAUSE of identity theft, not the solution. The only solution is to require creditors to do more to identify a person than to simply use a name and SSN. Anytime there is only one real identifier, whether the current SSN or some other universal number, ID theft will be easy.
If the artists aren't going to get any royalties from this
That wouldn't really be different than the current situation. New artists get screwed out of pretty much all royalties anyway. The only musicians making money on royalties are no longer bound by their first recording contract and have much more favorable terms.