Life itself is an imminently slow and painful death and the closer you get to the other end either chronologically or medically, the more foul the risk/reward becomes. Unbearable pain against possible odds with decades ahead of you can easily be worth it while intolerable suffering with little chance of improvement and only a few years ahead as a reward seems like a reasonable point to make such a decision. The fear that death is painful is what clearly keeps a lot of less desperate people from taking their own lives -- but I can quite imagine that there is a threshold where the pain of killing yourself can not possibly be as great as that you grit against every moment of your existence.
It sucks, because it means giving up. Society is afraid of admitting that at times no amount of hope or luck will change things and no matter our human progress and achievements, there are adversaries against we must fold.
Irrational hopelessness leading to suicide is a sickness that should be treated. We shouldn't lump completely rational hopelessness into that same category. It sucks to say "goodbye", but at least it was his choice to make when it was enough. It's only terribly unfortunate that society forced him into doing this painfully and alone, too.
I'll remember your comments next time your house is burglarized or someone holds you up at gunpoint. You don't need any assistance or justice, because you can face life's challenges. Like being a twelve year old child who is the victim of a cruel conspiracy of two adults several times your age and another child over an extending length of time.
I know it probably helps you come to terms with your shitty childhood by responding to other people's problems like a cockface, but at some point you've got to be an adult and realize that just make a twelve year old girl doesn't have the toolkit in life by that time to combat and handle a group of adults conspiring against her and trying to convince her to kill herself.
I mean, maybe that's just me, but I thought childhood was about developing those tools. Not coming out of the womb with them and having to defend yourself against some evil twat and her fucked up brood before you've even stop playing with your My Little Pony toys.
If you tease someone or make a hurtful comment to them and you don't know much about them or they're a stranger, you shouldn't be held accountable to the degree Lori Drew should.
In this case, the criminal KNEW the mental state of the child involved and then conspired with two other people over a long period of time to orchestrate an entire relationship with an underage girl with the sole intention of mentally damaging her and humiliating her and embarrassing her.
Two random people on slashdot telling each other to fuck off and die is one thing. An adult down the street from you who clearly knows your situation and that you probably don't have the strongest support structure around orchestrating your downfall over a long period of time, eventually resulting in the fake child you created to get close to her dumping her and telling her she should go kill herself is inherently more vile, vicious, evil, and criminally responsible for the outcome than two relative strangers spatting at each other here and there.
And don't forget the thing everyone seems to keep glossing over.
This 30/40 year old woman was POSING AS A YOUNG BOY ONLINE TO ENGAGE IN INTIMATE CONVERSATION WITH THE TWELVE YEAR OLD GIRL.
I mean, seriously. When the fuck did THAT become legal?!
I'm pretty sure if your next door neighbor was pretending to be a child so that they could engage in that kind of talk with your underage child, there'd be some ass hauled to jail fucking STAT. Why is that not even a consideration here in this case?!
You've clearly missed the entire point. This case goes far beyond one person saying something mean and the second person's hurt feelings resulting in prosecution.
This case involves a twelve/thirteen year old child.
That the criminal knew was having problems.
That was manipulated by several people much older than her including a 30+ year old woman who conspired against her.
It involves a grown woman posting as a teenage boy to engage in sexual/intimate conversations with a child.
It involves repeated harassment over a period of time.
It involves an attempt to coerce the person into suicide.
Reducing it to "so now you go to jail for hurting someone's feelings" is ridiculous.
What wasn't repeated and intentional about it? Lori Drew posed as a 17 year old boy over a length of time with the intention of eventually dropping the hammer on her by having his fake 17 year old boy "dump" her and tell her she should go kill herself.
That was entirely premeditated, intentional, and repeated. This case is ANYTHING but a case of someone saying "you smell like a poopy head" and then the person killing themselves five minutes later. This was an orchestrated conspiracy among several people to manipulate and harass this little kid.
Negligence is if I forget to set my parking break and my car smashes your fence at the bottom of the incline. Pointing the car toward your house, dropping a brick on the accelerator and then laughing as I watch it smash into your family room is hardly negligence.
People who go around saying that a twelve year old girl should just "toughen up" really piss me off. Even if her attackers and harassers were her own age, it could be brutal and destructive, but in this case the harassers included a group of adults conspiring against her to cause her harm. That has to count for something. It's bullshit to say that a child should just "toughen up" against the orchestrated attacks and manipulations of full grown fucking adults.
If you're a balanced normal adult, you should be able to take a lot of crap and let it roll off your back. But there would certainly be legal consequences if, say, your spouse had serious mental and emotional problems that they were being treat\ed for and you went out of your way to orchestrate their mental torture and abuse and took advantage of their unbalanced state (hell, in many places, you can't take advantage of someone simply in a drunk state and there are protections for consumers who make large purchases and think otherwise within 72 hours!).
And yet... when it comes to a twelve year old girl... she's somehow supposed to be a solid fucking stoic rock. Not only against other children, but fucking adults three or four times her age. Lori Drew reminds me of that movie where the guys pretend to like that girl, but really it's all a game they're playing to make her feel loved and wanted and then they all drop her like a rock on the same day to see if they can collectively drive her to suicide. Except the guy who did that here wasn't a 17 year old boy but a 30-something year old woman and her family.
I'm not saying that we should put in peril every American's rights here just to prosecute this one insignificant twat. I guess considering what the prosecutors were trying her on, the judge did the only right thing that could be done. But that doesn't make the outcome any more pleasant. Justice for all had to trump over justice for one dead kid. And even though it was probably right... it still fucking sucks.
The government chose to use the legal system to make her life a living hell.
The right thing for Drew to do in this case is to sue the government and, specifically, the lead prosecuting attorney. Drew should sue them for mental distress and seek a multi-million dollar award.
Oh, poor, poor lady. Maybe she should hang herself. After all, she's shown *so* much remorse (*eyeroll*) for her actions.
If there was ever a case of harassment that justified some sort of prosecution, it's this one. For fuck's sake, the woman is -- at the very least -- a sexual predator. Posing as an underage boy to have sexual conversations with a twelve year old girl? What the fuck?! Not to mention adding on the intent to cause serious detriment by the machinations of her contrived plot to the girl.
She deserves everything she gets coming to her in a negative fashion. She and her family haven't even shown the slightest bit of remorse over what they did. Fuck them.
The only distressing thing here is that in order for her to get what she deserves, the liberties of everybody in this country have to be put in jeopardy. So to avoid setting such precedents, we have to smile and nod and say "sure, she clearly contributed to this girl killing herself, but she gets to continue being a free useless member of society pursuing her own happiness, because prosecutors couldn't come up with something more applicable than TOS violations.
All outcomes in this are miserable, in some way. Even the right one, which it seems won-out.
So an adult posting as a child having intimate and/or sexual conversations with a child in order to later manipulate and ridicule them is merely "being mean"? If Lori Drew were a man, she'd be thrown away in prison for life for for being a sexual predator engaging in sexual conversations with a twelve year old girl online.
Her actions and intentions (and the results) could reasonably (in spirit, though certainly not law) be seen as manslaughter. Adults have measures they can take, legally, to retaliate against harassment and various forms of emotional and verbal abuse, but if you're a twelve year old little girl you should "just toughen the fuck up"?
The problem here is that this woman is a petty, vile, remorseless cunt (an applicable use of that word in this case which nobody can deny) that did a despicable thing that absolutely contributed significantly to the death of a child. Because the case was so mishandled (there are already laws which should have allowed certain prosecution without the ridiculous liberty-curtailing precedents involved here), the only way to make sure she gets what she deserves is to put the civil liberties of every person in the country in peril.
There is no great outcome either way in this case.
Sort of. You can assign individuals to collective "groups". Like having an address book divided up by Family, Friends, Colleagues, Members of My Website, People I Have No Fucking Clue Who They Are...
But your communications with them are an all or nothing deal. You can't have separate groups where you limit posts/threads/discussions to "Family" and others to "Friends". That would be nifty, though.
I don't follow your comment. What does the application exploiting user data have to do with friend-whores? Your mom is just as likely to use one of those stupid "what does your poop say about you?" quizzes as any random person you might unwisely accept as a "friend".
Also, in a lot of situations, people may have a lot of "friends" on a service like Facebook not because they're attention whores, but because they are in a situation where either by association with certain groups or by nature of their job or otherwise, people tend to want to befriend them on Facebook (or elsewhere). Hell, I have a lot of people I am "friends" with that I don't exactly know. I wish I could keep it to ONLY people I personally know (friends, family, colleagues) but like many people, I am in a situation where denying friend requests would seem rude and arrogant. The only solution would be multiple accounts on such social networking sites, when then defeats the whole purpose.
Of course, I'd prefer we all just stuck with email, but unless you're in the tech industry, it seems like the chances of reaching someone by email is getting slimmer and slimmer.
"Oh, why'd you send it to me by email?! I never check that thing!"
Your apartment isn't a secure and bug-swept panic room, either, but you are right to have some expectation of privacy and security within it. If none of this is an issue, then it should be made clear when people sign up how there information is going to be used rather than "we give you the ability to control your information and privacy" and have options like "private" or "friends only" that aren't really private or friends only.
I understand that some people can only see social networking sites as a means for playing retarded flash games with each other and sniffing each others virtual crotches, but that's not the case for everyone and your opinion of them isn't really relevant to the validity of the complaint over the violation of implied privacy when you sign up.
Think of it this way -- Slashdot has an option for you to post comments as an Anonymous Coward. That implies some degree of anonymity. Does it guarantee it? No. Does it prevent you from being exposed should someone break into the servers and abscond with the database that ties identities to posts? No. But does it imply that you could post a message as an Anonymous account and not have it intentionally exposed by Malda and gang to everyone on earth for exploitation however they see fit? Yes. Should you be pissed off if they did that? Yes.
Look, I understand that everyone is a geek and therefore anything social should be ridiculed. Especially when it's "online" because then not only are social people being social, but they're doing it on "our" turf while we're naked in our basements jerking off to a Chun Li poster -- but how about we step away from that for a bit and focus on the implications of exploiting data that users are told is kept private and protected in the first place? Not exploited by evil crackers looking to trade the information on the black market for a few thousand credit card numbers, but by the organization itself which is implying privacy of your interactions.
And as I've said several times so far -- if it's okay to have their information exposed and exploited on Facebook, then why not on Amazon, Google, your banking service, Paypal, eBay, your doctor's office, your library, your employer, your cable company, power company, telephone company, ISP and anyone else? Each is an entity providing a service and in most cases seeking a profit. So hey, anything goes, right?
People like you really confuse me. I suspect you have very few social interactions in your life, because you fail so readily at comprehending how other people interact. News-flash, people tend to associate with a LOT of people in their life time and many of those people do not live nearby. Colleagues, school chums, friends, relatives, people with shared interests, etc.
Like any social network, there's a lot of attention-whoring. Both of the commercial variety and the "OMG I have 400 friends!" variety. There's also simply a lot of "this is my social circle and rather than emailing everyone individually or chatting on the phone with each of them every day, we can all casually share information and updates and events in a group fashion".
Regardless of people's use of the service, their expectation of privacy is entirely reasonable and reinforced by the assertions made by the site and the nature of the site (not being entirely open, like on Myspace, for example).
The argument from people like you only seems to be applied in these particular cases, because you assume everyone on Facebook is an attention whore and you hate attention whores (well, who doesn't?) and therefore, anything you would otherwise be up in arms about is okay when it's done to people you hate.
After all, if being a corporation driven by cash makes exploitation of your private data acceptable in this way, then you should have no problem with ANY organization you patronize -- doctor to bank to cable company to television repair service --- handing your information out left and right.
Your personal and social issues seem to be the driving motivation behind your conclusions here, because for all intents and purposes, it's "you have no social skills and I hate social networks, so fuck you and your privacy!". Which is just stupid. I value your privacy, because I value my own privacy. Even if you're a fucking idiot.
You miss the point of Facebook, entirely. It's about sharing information with a controlled group of people you have chosen; not every person on the planet who wants it. The problem here is that a site promotes itself as a place you can associate and communicate with a selected community of people that you have individually selected and granted access to and all of its literature promotes the ability for YOU to have CONTROL over your information and interactions (otherwise, they'd just keep using Myspace or something else) while actually violating the implied spirit of everything users sign up for.
Also, I'm glad you feel that violating the entire premise of your service is okay as long as you post it in your Developer API documents that I'm sure everyone's mom and grandparents read before signing up to the service.
Do we have evidence that this is actually adhered to? I have no faith that the settings I have chosen - including "friends only" or the fact that I chose to disable Applications in every way I possibly could from day one will actually be followed.
I think you have missed the entire fucking point of Facebook. Facebook is not about blathering your shit to every fucking moron on earth and acquiring as many "friends" as possible, but about communicating and keeping up with a select group of people that you have chosen to communicate with. For example, colleagues, family, and close friends.
I don't give a fuck about you or what you have to say day in an day out, but your mom might. Or your school chums. Or your best friend at the office. And since Facebook allows you to restrict your interactions to just these chosen people, you have a right to expect your communication to remain between those designated individuals.
You know, sort of the same way the telephone company is a commercial enterprise, but you have a reasonable expectation for your conversations to remain private. Or do you consider talking on the telephone to be blathering to the "whole goddamn universe", too?
Unfortunately, just like your mom probably is more prone to getting a virus on her Windows machine than you are, she's probably more likely to use a "what color are you?" facebook application and thereby put you at risk of exposure.
Again, it is simply disingenuous to trash people as being idiots for using services where security is inherently implied (and options to protect it are right there in the user preferences -- even though they appear not to be adhered to in this demonstration).
That doesn't mean you should share your most private secrets on earth anywhere online that is connected with your real identity. It just means that you shouldn't have to worry that your every piece of information is being sold out from under you when you thought it was just between yourself and the people in your circle. And if you have this attitude that you should *EXPECT* that from Facebook, then you should have that same attitude toward every institution you deal with from the place you bought your car, to your electric, phone, cable companies and medical providers. After all, if your bank's databases are cracked and the data stolen and sold out from under you, it's YOUR fault for being stupid enough to give your financial information to your financial institution, right?
Also, as much as I hate Twitter and Facebook and all these things (though I like LinkedIN), you at the very least are often obligated to sign up so that you can protect your identity from being used by someone *else*. And as much as I hate attention-whores, even they deserve an expectation of a certain degree of privacy in situations where that privacy is implied.
Actually, facebook is very misleading in this way. There ARE options to make each element of your information *ONLY* available to friends. Or even to nobody.
Unfortunately, their Facebook Application API directly violates the spirit of that by making it available to people other than your friends.
The single most awful thing about facebook is the wealth of Applications. They're all crap and at best they're annoying. Every time I see some jack ass wasting my time (because it posts that they are using an app to my information stream) doing another "what kind of dog turd are you?" quiz, it makes me hate humanity just a little bit more.
But you might discuss them with your friends. Until you discover that your friend lets everyone on earth into their house any time they want (ie, run Facebook Applications) and one of those people (applications) has installed a listening device in the lamp and everything you thought you were discussing with your private group of friends is actually being directly pumped to some third party who is not your friend.
People throwing the "imagine that, information on the intarwebs is public!" line are being disingenuous. It's like saying you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your email communication, just because it technically *could* be intercepted. Or that using online banking proves you're an idiot, because your login information *could* be compromised if someone got physical or root access to the bank's database server.
The nature of facebook, like many other things people use, implies a certain degree of privacy and control over your exposure. It's not at all the same as just blathering all your crap on a public forum for all of google to index and serve up somewhere.
Ignorant people are afraid of the technologically savvy the same way they are afraid of science. They don't understand it, so rather than bettering their knowledge and informing themselves, they'd rather fear the worst and attack those who represent a threat (that is, those who know something they don't).
Also, why didn't the guy just say "dude, it was a complex random password and I've completely forgotten it"? They can't force you to give them a password that you've forgotten, surely? Also, is a partial "moral victory" really worth an entire year of your short life span?
Indeed. I had the optical drive problem after about a year (and in that year, the system racked up perhaps no more than 100 hours of use) and Microsoft offered no help in solving the issue. They just told me to do idiotic crap like reformatting the drive. I eventually gave up and dished out another $400 to replace it.
I should note, the optical drive problem I had was not with it scratching the disks. It was with the drive no longer even RECOGNIZING game disks. You put the disk in to play and it would say that you need to insert a DVD or game disk.
Any replacement parts or Xbox Product will be new or refurbished or serviceably used, comparable in function and performance to the original part or Xbox Product and warranted for the remainder of the original Warranty Period or 30 days from the date of shipment of the Xbox Product back to you, whichever is longer.
Three years is ONLY for the Red Ring of Death, which is only one of the many problems your system can experience. Other problems are the GPU overheating and resulting in an E74 error and others are the optical drive just deciding to stop working. I'm sure there are other problems, but those are the two I've been "fortunate" enough to experience, so far.
The minimum expectation for the life of such a product is the life of the hardware cycle. If the cycle of this console is five years (before the next generation comes out), then I should be able to buy it once. I shouldn't have to buy it three or five times due to hardware limitations.
I also wonder how this will impact long term collectors. Think of all the collectors today who still enjoy (or collect and use) older consoles THAT STILL WORK. At this rate, there will be no "retro" XBOX 360 consoles to use in a decade. They'll all be doorstops.
Slashdot Mirror
Life itself is an imminently slow and painful death and the closer you get to the other end either chronologically or medically, the more foul the risk/reward becomes. Unbearable pain against possible odds with decades ahead of you can easily be worth it while intolerable suffering with little chance of improvement and only a few years ahead as a reward seems like a reasonable point to make such a decision. The fear that death is painful is what clearly keeps a lot of less desperate people from taking their own lives -- but I can quite imagine that there is a threshold where the pain of killing yourself can not possibly be as great as that you grit against every moment of your existence.
It sucks, because it means giving up. Society is afraid of admitting that at times no amount of hope or luck will change things and no matter our human progress and achievements, there are adversaries against we must fold.
Irrational hopelessness leading to suicide is a sickness that should be treated. We shouldn't lump completely rational hopelessness into that same category. It sucks to say "goodbye", but at least it was his choice to make when it was enough. It's only terribly unfortunate that society forced him into doing this painfully and alone, too.
I'll remember your comments next time your house is burglarized or someone holds you up at gunpoint. You don't need any assistance or justice, because you can face life's challenges. Like being a twelve year old child who is the victim of a cruel conspiracy of two adults several times your age and another child over an extending length of time.
I know it probably helps you come to terms with your shitty childhood by responding to other people's problems like a cockface, but at some point you've got to be an adult and realize that just make a twelve year old girl doesn't have the toolkit in life by that time to combat and handle a group of adults conspiring against her and trying to convince her to kill herself.
I mean, maybe that's just me, but I thought childhood was about developing those tools. Not coming out of the womb with them and having to defend yourself against some evil twat and her fucked up brood before you've even stop playing with your My Little Pony toys.
If you tease someone or make a hurtful comment to them and you don't know much about them or they're a stranger, you shouldn't be held accountable to the degree Lori Drew should.
In this case, the criminal KNEW the mental state of the child involved and then conspired with two other people over a long period of time to orchestrate an entire relationship with an underage girl with the sole intention of mentally damaging her and humiliating her and embarrassing her.
Two random people on slashdot telling each other to fuck off and die is one thing. An adult down the street from you who clearly knows your situation and that you probably don't have the strongest support structure around orchestrating your downfall over a long period of time, eventually resulting in the fake child you created to get close to her dumping her and telling her she should go kill herself is inherently more vile, vicious, evil, and criminally responsible for the outcome than two relative strangers spatting at each other here and there.
And don't forget the thing everyone seems to keep glossing over.
This 30/40 year old woman was POSING AS A YOUNG BOY ONLINE TO ENGAGE IN INTIMATE CONVERSATION WITH THE TWELVE YEAR OLD GIRL.
I mean, seriously. When the fuck did THAT become legal?!
I'm pretty sure if your next door neighbor was pretending to be a child so that they could engage in that kind of talk with your underage child, there'd be some ass hauled to jail fucking STAT. Why is that not even a consideration here in this case?!
This case has nothing to do with hurt feelings and if that's all you have walked away with, you haven't paid any attention to the facts of the case.
You've clearly missed the entire point. This case goes far beyond one person saying something mean and the second person's hurt feelings resulting in prosecution.
This case involves a twelve/thirteen year old child.
That the criminal knew was having problems.
That was manipulated by several people much older than her including a 30+ year old
woman who conspired against her.
It involves a grown woman posting as a teenage boy to engage in sexual/intimate conversations with a child.
It involves repeated harassment over a period of time.
It involves an attempt to coerce the person into suicide.
Reducing it to "so now you go to jail for hurting someone's feelings" is ridiculous.
What wasn't repeated and intentional about it? Lori Drew posed as a 17 year old boy over a length of time with the intention of eventually dropping the hammer on her by having his fake 17 year old boy "dump" her and tell her she should go kill herself.
That was entirely premeditated, intentional, and repeated. This case is ANYTHING but a case of someone saying "you smell like a poopy head" and then the person killing themselves five minutes later. This was an orchestrated conspiracy among several people to manipulate and harass this little kid.
Negligence is if I forget to set my parking break and my car smashes your fence at the bottom of the incline. Pointing the car toward your house, dropping a brick on the accelerator and then laughing as I watch it smash into your family room is hardly negligence.
People who go around saying that a twelve year old girl should just "toughen up" really piss me off. Even if her attackers and harassers were her own age, it could be brutal and destructive, but in this case the harassers included a group of adults conspiring against her to cause her harm. That has to count for something. It's bullshit to say that a child should just "toughen up" against the orchestrated attacks and manipulations of full grown fucking adults.
If you're a balanced normal adult, you should be able to take a lot of crap and let it roll off your back. But there would certainly be legal consequences if, say, your spouse had serious mental and emotional problems that they were being treat\ed for and you went out of your way to orchestrate their mental torture and abuse and took advantage of their unbalanced state (hell, in many places, you can't take advantage of someone simply in a drunk state and there are protections for consumers who make large purchases and think otherwise within 72 hours!).
And yet... when it comes to a twelve year old girl... she's somehow supposed to be a solid fucking stoic rock. Not only against other children, but fucking adults three or four times her age. Lori Drew reminds me of that movie where the guys pretend to like that girl, but really it's all a game they're playing to make her feel loved and wanted and then they all drop her like a rock on the same day to see if they can collectively drive her to suicide. Except the guy who did that here wasn't a 17 year old boy but a 30-something year old woman and her family.
I'm not saying that we should put in peril every American's rights here just to prosecute this one insignificant twat. I guess considering what the prosecutors were trying her on, the judge did the only right thing that could be done. But that doesn't make the outcome any more pleasant. Justice for all had to trump over justice for one dead kid. And even though it was probably right... it still fucking sucks.
The government chose to use the legal system to make her life a living hell.
The right thing for Drew to do in this case is to sue the government and, specifically, the lead prosecuting attorney. Drew should sue them for mental distress and seek a multi-million dollar award.
Oh, poor, poor lady. Maybe she should hang herself. After all, she's shown *so* much remorse (*eyeroll*) for her actions.
If there was ever a case of harassment that justified some sort of prosecution, it's this one. For fuck's sake, the woman is -- at the very least -- a sexual predator. Posing as an underage boy to have sexual conversations with a twelve year old girl? What the fuck?! Not to mention adding on the intent to cause serious detriment by the machinations of her contrived plot to the girl.
She deserves everything she gets coming to her in a negative fashion. She and her family haven't even shown the slightest bit of remorse over what they did. Fuck them.
The only distressing thing here is that in order for her to get what she deserves, the liberties of everybody in this country have to be put in jeopardy. So to avoid setting such precedents, we have to smile and nod and say "sure, she clearly contributed to this girl killing herself, but she gets to continue being a free useless member of society pursuing her own happiness, because prosecutors couldn't come up with something more applicable than TOS violations.
All outcomes in this are miserable, in some way. Even the right one, which it seems won-out.
So an adult posting as a child having intimate and/or sexual conversations with a child in order to later manipulate and ridicule them is merely "being mean"? If Lori Drew were a man, she'd be thrown away in prison for life for for being a sexual predator engaging in sexual conversations with a twelve year old girl online.
Her actions and intentions (and the results) could reasonably (in spirit, though certainly not law) be seen as manslaughter. Adults have measures they can take, legally, to retaliate against harassment and various forms of emotional and verbal abuse, but if you're a twelve year old little girl you should "just toughen the fuck up"?
The problem here is that this woman is a petty, vile, remorseless cunt (an applicable use of that word in this case which nobody can deny) that did a despicable thing that absolutely contributed significantly to the death of a child. Because the case was so mishandled (there are already laws which should have allowed certain prosecution without the ridiculous liberty-curtailing precedents involved here), the only way to make sure she gets what she deserves is to put the civil liberties of every person in the country in peril.
There is no great outcome either way in this case.
Sort of. You can assign individuals to collective "groups". Like having an address book divided up by Family, Friends, Colleagues, Members of My Website, People I Have No Fucking Clue Who They Are...
But your communications with them are an all or nothing deal. You can't have separate groups where you limit posts/threads/discussions to "Family" and others to "Friends". That would be nifty, though.
I don't follow your comment. What does the application exploiting user data have to do with friend-whores? Your mom is just as likely to use one of those stupid "what does your poop say about you?" quizzes as any random person you might unwisely accept as a "friend".
Also, in a lot of situations, people may have a lot of "friends" on a service like Facebook not because they're attention whores, but because they are in a situation where either by association with certain groups or by nature of their job or otherwise, people tend to want to befriend them on Facebook (or elsewhere). Hell, I have a lot of people I am "friends" with that I don't exactly know. I wish I could keep it to ONLY people I personally know (friends, family, colleagues) but like many people, I am in a situation where denying friend requests would seem rude and arrogant. The only solution would be multiple accounts on such social networking sites, when then defeats the whole purpose.
Of course, I'd prefer we all just stuck with email, but unless you're in the tech industry, it seems like the chances of reaching someone by email is getting slimmer and slimmer.
"Oh, why'd you send it to me by email?! I never check that thing!"
*sigh*
It's like saying you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your email communication, just because it technically *could* be intercepted.
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your email communication.
Please clarify exactly how one has no reasonable expectation of privacy in their email communication?
Your apartment isn't a secure and bug-swept panic room, either, but you are right to have some expectation of privacy and security within it. If none of this is an issue, then it should be made clear when people sign up how there information is going to be used rather than "we give you the ability to control your information and privacy" and have options like "private" or "friends only" that aren't really private or friends only.
I understand that some people can only see social networking sites as a means for playing retarded flash games with each other and sniffing each others virtual crotches, but that's not the case for everyone and your opinion of them isn't really relevant to the validity of the complaint over the violation of implied privacy when you sign up.
Think of it this way -- Slashdot has an option for you to post comments as an Anonymous Coward. That implies some degree of anonymity. Does it guarantee it? No. Does it prevent you from being exposed should someone break into the servers and abscond with the database that ties identities to posts? No. But does it imply that you could post a message as an Anonymous account and not have it intentionally exposed by Malda and gang to everyone on earth for exploitation however they see fit? Yes. Should you be pissed off if they did that? Yes.
Look, I understand that everyone is a geek and therefore anything social should be ridiculed. Especially when it's "online" because then not only are social people being social, but they're doing it on "our" turf while we're naked in our basements jerking off to a Chun Li poster -- but how about we step away from that for a bit and focus on the implications of exploiting data that users are told is kept private and protected in the first place? Not exploited by evil crackers looking to trade the information on the black market for a few thousand credit card numbers, but by the organization itself which is implying privacy of your interactions.
And as I've said several times so far -- if it's okay to have their information exposed and exploited on Facebook, then why not on Amazon, Google, your banking service, Paypal, eBay, your doctor's office, your library, your employer, your cable company, power company, telephone company, ISP and anyone else? Each is an entity providing a service and in most cases seeking a profit. So hey, anything goes, right?
People like you really confuse me. I suspect you have very few social interactions in your life, because you fail so readily at comprehending how other people interact. News-flash, people tend to associate with a LOT of people in their life time and many of those people do not live nearby. Colleagues, school chums, friends, relatives, people with shared interests, etc.
Like any social network, there's a lot of attention-whoring. Both of the commercial variety and the "OMG I have 400 friends!" variety. There's also simply a lot of "this is my social circle and rather than emailing everyone individually or chatting on the phone with each of them every day, we can all casually share information and updates and events in a group fashion".
Regardless of people's use of the service, their expectation of privacy is entirely reasonable and reinforced by the assertions made by the site and the nature of the site (not being entirely open, like on Myspace, for example).
The argument from people like you only seems to be applied in these particular cases, because you assume everyone on Facebook is an attention whore and you hate attention whores (well, who doesn't?) and therefore, anything you would otherwise be up in arms about is okay when it's done to people you hate.
After all, if being a corporation driven by cash makes exploitation of your private data acceptable in this way, then you should have no problem with ANY organization you patronize -- doctor to bank to cable company to television repair service --- handing your information out left and right.
Your personal and social issues seem to be the driving motivation behind your conclusions here, because for all intents and purposes, it's "you have no social skills and I hate social networks, so fuck you and your privacy!". Which is just stupid. I value your privacy, because I value my own privacy. Even if you're a fucking idiot.
You miss the point of Facebook, entirely. It's about sharing information with a controlled group of people you have chosen; not every person on the planet who wants it. The problem here is that a site promotes itself as a place you can associate and communicate with a selected community of people that you have individually selected and granted access to and all of its literature promotes the ability for YOU to have CONTROL over your information and interactions (otherwise, they'd just keep using Myspace or something else) while actually violating the implied spirit of everything users sign up for.
Also, I'm glad you feel that violating the entire premise of your service is okay as long as you post it in your Developer API documents that I'm sure everyone's mom and grandparents read before signing up to the service.
Do we have evidence that this is actually adhered to? I have no faith that the settings I have chosen - including "friends only" or the fact that I chose to disable Applications in every way I possibly could from day one will actually be followed.
I think you have missed the entire fucking point of Facebook. Facebook is not about blathering your shit to every fucking moron on earth and acquiring as many "friends" as possible, but about communicating and keeping up with a select group of people that you have chosen to communicate with. For example, colleagues, family, and close friends.
I don't give a fuck about you or what you have to say day in an day out, but your mom might. Or your school chums. Or your best friend at the office. And since Facebook allows you to restrict your interactions to just these chosen people, you have a right to expect your communication to remain between those designated individuals.
You know, sort of the same way the telephone company is a commercial enterprise, but you have a reasonable expectation for your conversations to remain private. Or do you consider talking on the telephone to be blathering to the "whole goddamn universe", too?
Unfortunately, just like your mom probably is more prone to getting a virus on her Windows machine than you are, she's probably more likely to use a "what color are you?" facebook application and thereby put you at risk of exposure.
Again, it is simply disingenuous to trash people as being idiots for using services where security is inherently implied (and options to protect it are right there in the user preferences -- even though they appear not to be adhered to in this demonstration).
That doesn't mean you should share your most private secrets on earth anywhere online that is connected with your real identity. It just means that you shouldn't have to worry that your every piece of information is being sold out from under you when you thought it was just between yourself and the people in your circle. And if you have this attitude that you should *EXPECT* that from Facebook, then you should have that same attitude toward every institution you deal with from the place you bought your car, to your electric, phone, cable companies and medical providers. After all, if your bank's databases are cracked and the data stolen and sold out from under you, it's YOUR fault for being stupid enough to give your financial information to your financial institution, right?
Also, as much as I hate Twitter and Facebook and all these things (though I like LinkedIN), you at the very least are often obligated to sign up so that you can protect your identity from being used by someone *else*. And as much as I hate attention-whores, even they deserve an expectation of a certain degree of privacy in situations where that privacy is implied.
Actually, facebook is very misleading in this way. There ARE options to make each element of your information *ONLY* available to friends. Or even to nobody.
Unfortunately, their Facebook Application API directly violates the spirit of that by making it available to people other than your friends.
The single most awful thing about facebook is the wealth of Applications. They're all crap and at best they're annoying. Every time I see some jack ass wasting my time (because it posts that they are using an app to my information stream) doing another "what kind of dog turd are you?" quiz, it makes me hate humanity just a little bit more.
But you might discuss them with your friends. Until you discover that your friend lets everyone on earth into their house any time they want (ie, run Facebook Applications) and one of those people (applications) has installed a listening device in the lamp and everything you thought you were discussing with your private group of friends is actually being directly pumped to some third party who is not your friend.
People throwing the "imagine that, information on the intarwebs is public!" line are being disingenuous. It's like saying you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your email communication, just because it technically *could* be intercepted. Or that using online banking proves you're an idiot, because your login information *could* be compromised if someone got physical or root access to the bank's database server.
The nature of facebook, like many other things people use, implies a certain degree of privacy and control over your exposure. It's not at all the same as just blathering all your crap on a public forum for all of google to index and serve up somewhere.
Ignorant people are afraid of the technologically savvy the same way they are afraid of science. They don't understand it, so rather than bettering their knowledge and informing themselves, they'd rather fear the worst and attack those who represent a threat (that is, those who know something they don't).
Also, why didn't the guy just say "dude, it was a complex random password and I've completely forgotten it"? They can't force you to give them a password that you've forgotten, surely? Also, is a partial "moral victory" really worth an entire year of your short life span?
Indeed. I had the optical drive problem after about a year (and in that year, the system racked up perhaps no more than 100 hours of use) and Microsoft offered no help in solving the issue. They just told me to do idiotic crap like reformatting the drive. I eventually gave up and dished out another $400 to replace it.
I should note, the optical drive problem I had was not with it scratching the disks. It was with the drive no longer even RECOGNIZING game disks. You put the disk in to play and it would say that you need to insert a DVD or game disk.
Ah. Makes more sense. :)
Ten years? Where are you getting this from?
Any replacement parts or Xbox Product will be new or refurbished or serviceably used, comparable in function and performance to the original part or Xbox Product and warranted for the remainder of the original Warranty Period or 30 days from the date of shipment of the Xbox Product back to you, whichever is longer.
ONE year.
Three years is ONLY for the Red Ring of Death, which is only one of the many problems your system can experience. Other problems are the GPU overheating and resulting in an E74 error and others are the optical drive just deciding to stop working. I'm sure there are other problems, but those are the two I've been "fortunate" enough to experience, so far.
The minimum expectation for the life of such a product is the life of the hardware cycle. If the cycle of this console is five years (before the next generation comes out), then I should be able to buy it once. I shouldn't have to buy it three or five times due to hardware limitations.
I also wonder how this will impact long term collectors. Think of all the collectors today who still enjoy (or collect and use) older consoles THAT STILL WORK. At this rate, there will be no "retro" XBOX 360 consoles to use in a decade. They'll all be doorstops.