"under a reasonable copyright system would already be public domain"
or under a resonable business model it would have dropped in price and be readily available for purchase. But it's out of print and the few times you find it the seller is asking for a "collector" price of $100+ and you think; "I want it, I'm willing to pay for it but I can't buy it because it doesn't exist anymore other than maybe a low quality 128kbits iTunes download that really isn't owning it, so I'll download it" I wonder how much an on demand CD reprinting service would cost. It would be nice to have some of that "older music" on CD for $5-$10, the kind you can only find on old used cassette.
This may sound bad/conspiracy theory-ish. I'm starting to wonder if the RITA* is using geolocation with the lists of IPs they bought from some possibly questionable collection/data mining agency. I don't remember the last time I heard of a middle or upper class kid getting sued, but they probably have a prepaid no limit iTunes account to go with their 60GB iPod photo. Are they sueing people who in most cases cannot affort their minimum $3500 settlement. They seem to be relying on lists of numners bought from IP harversters and taking what they get as 100% correct and never infallible. My advice to anyone who is unfortunately being sued an as far as they know they have done nothing wrong is how they got their information on you. If someone is using dialup and disconnects data will still be sent to that IP for some time, especially if they were requesting information from P2P apps, maybe kazaa supernodes.
It's possible that the requests were made several minutes before the IP was assigned to them but with the low response time you get with dialup, by the time the RITA snitches' packet sniffers got hold of it the "infringing" IP was assigned to someone else. I used Verizon DSL a few yrs ago before optimumonline was available in the area. The policy was one IP per house but you could connect as many PCs as you want. Without a router to keep a semi-static IP I'd go through lots of IPs a day since I turned my PC off when I left. For at least 20min after connecting ZoneAlarm would record pages of logs from traffic intended for the previous user of the IP, the IPs appeared to be immediately reassigned. I've on seen one takedown notice with logs, the inital detection and followup detection times were 20sec appart. With checking times only 20sec appart it's very possible that the packets they sniffed were going to another person but were time delayed.
Challenge the sources, if they're unwilling to reveal them then they're no more credible than kid A telling the teacher claiming that kid B did something bad or McCarthy's list of Communists that he never let anyone else see.
*I've stopped called the RIAA the RIAA, it's really the RITA Recording Industry Trust of America
It's not a perpetual motion machine, it's adding something to improve the efficency of that very inefficent contraption we call an engine. The internal combustion engine is very inefficent. Only 20% to 30% of the energy produced by the combustion is transfered into mechanical energy making the car move. Yes, some is used by the alternator to recharge the battery and power other devices. Even then over 50% of the energy is wasted heat energy. When you have something that's maybe 50% efficent it's not that difficult to improve on it.
"A current is run from the car battery through the liquid. This process of electrolysis creates hydrogen and oxygen gases which are then fed into the engine's intake manifold where they mix with the gasoline vapours."
It seems his device is using some of the otherwise wasted energy already being produced by the engine to stimulate a chemical reaction producing hydrogen is then added to the fuel-air mixture to improve the use of the gasoline, the combustion chamber only holds so much, so replace some of the fossil fuels with hydrogen and you use less gasoline, improving your miles per gallon of gas. This could be the after market hybrid conversion we've been waiting for.
It's just improving an existing chemical reaction. Want to boil water? add fire, want it to boil faster, add salt. Want your fission nuke to have a greater yield? add some tritium. Want your hydrogen bomb to blow up more stuff, add some naquadria and you'll have yourself a gate-buster.
Building heating systems produce lots of warm dry air creating a static friendly environment. I had a similar experience back in HS, the letter sweaters were made of 100% acrylic, I don't know why they were, but they were. At the end of every day it was go down to the locker room and take the sweater off, the popping sound was very audible, and discharge by grabing the door or hit some random freshman walking by.
I think your're refering to the "deadly" PBC pipe. the myth: someone was sand blasting the paint off a PBC pipe and lots of static built up on the pipe and he was killed by the discharge when he touched the pipe. Myth Busted, while PBC does hold a charge, it's very small and the sand in the air act as discharge points.
The Discovery Channel or TLC had at least a show on this, the most common was the 'wick effect.' It's normal combustion that is limited to the body, usually happens when someone is knocked unconscious or dies while holding a cigarette or candle. I don't think this case would be considered spontaneous combustion since the build up of static electricity is an ignition source, then it's normal combustion once the fuel reaches its flash point.
"Obviously, this guy should have known that it was stolen... And we don't necessarily believe him when he says that the lady told him it was not."
It may not be so obvious, Most of the comments seem to assume that since the thief is female she doesn't know how to operate a computer and that the buyer/reseller being male should have known better. I know a few girls who can find their way around a PC and I know guys who don't, they're called PROFIT. It's obvious he knows how to buy and sell computers, but reformating and reinstalling Windows is mostly automated and doesn't require much skill.
The laptop was stolen from a restricted area so she may be an experienced laptop thief. It doesn't take that much effort to reformat and reinstall windows then install kazaa and click on a bunch of banner adds to get Windows full of spyware to the point of unusability, a perfect checkable cover story in about 2hrs. Someone says she just got a new computer and knowing you buy used computers offers to sell you her old one. You turn it on and have her login and the screen promptly fills with popups. You examine the outside and do not see any markings to even suggest that she is not the legal owner. The posting says sold for $300, but doesn't say who made the offer and called the laptop "expensive" but that's a relative term, I consider a laptop over $1000 to be expensive while someone else may call over $2500 expensive, it only sold for $1159, it couldn't have been that expensive. He could have made the 'generous' offer of $300, thinking she didn't know any better, realizing the chance for a larger profit($800) from the resale. Or he made the low offer of $300 because he wasn't sure how easily he could sell it.
If the sale happened that way I don't see how he could have known he was buying stolen goods. Sales of computer hardware like that happen all the time at colleges and are almost always cash&carry sold as is, no returns, refunds, or exchanges and checking ID doesn't happen. I wouldn't let an individual have/make a copy of my ID. Yes, he was doing something business-like by selling on ebay, but he's not a registered business and I woundn't even let him see an ID card. All he'd be guilty of is poor record keeping and if he doesn't make enough he doesn't have to report it to the IRS so good book keeping probably doesn't matter. The most he probably has is a notebook or office doc with a brief description and the puchase and sale amounts to keep track of PROFIT.
from a co-worker: a guy walks into the bar he and a friend are in asking if anyone wants to buy a new comuter for $400. His friend haggles it down to $250, he goes home opens it and finds a case full of cut up phone books. A few days later he sees the guy walking down the street in the same area and runs after him. A cop drives buy and is told the accusation. The cop makes the seller open his van and they find a couple cases full of phone books and potatoes.
I just finished reading the "Stolen U.C. Berkley Laptop Recovered" posting. I'd agree with the biggest threat to and of laptops for corporate use is loss/theft. If it's lost chances are someone's going to try to access the contents. There needs to be required encryption of the hdd, the data is probably worth far more than the cost of a replacement. Also restriction of what data can be copied to a company laptop. Over the last day there has been postings on the U of Miami at Ohio and U.C. Berkley student information getting where it shouldn't be.
"Every single person I've ever met who look for "great deals" for a living was either a fence or a con artists. Every. Single. One."
Then you have unfortunately met the kind that gives that kind a bad name.
Buy something for free or over 50% off after rebate, cut off barcode without opening the box, send in rebate, resell as new. Even if it only sells for 75% of the market price it's still a 25% profit. Or buy used PC for $200, add more memory and maybe a larger hdd and sell for $500. The price difference depends on the value of your labor. A professional repair or upgrade can be $90 a session plus $75/hr. Or make some connections with a whole saler and buy at wholesale+5% and sell at wholesale+30% or more depending on how the ebay auction goes, it's still less than the at least wholesale+50% retail price. It's win-win, the buyer pays less than rip-off retail and you make at least 25% profit.
Dell frequently has 50% off offers. You can buy a new Dell laptop for $750 and post it on ebay with a 'buy it now' of at least $1250. Anyone who doesn't know about the 50% off offers will be happy to pay less than the $1500 retail list price and you make around $500 each.
Then it depends on you definition of "con artist" Is someone who buys new at $750 and resells new at $1250 a con artist, I'd say no.
"A honest businessman would notify the person who is selling of a potential higher value of the equipment"
It was a person to person sale on ebay, not a full business transaction. A lot of people use it the way they would a garage sale or flea market, they really don't care how much they get for the item as long as they can get it out of their closet and get a few dollars for it. Think of me as you want, but when I'm lucky enough to find something on ebay with with a 'buy it now' of $5 I'm going to buy it for $5 even if I've seen the same item in similar condition selling for $30 or more. I'm not going to tell them they could possibly sell it for 6 times the amount they're asking. A slight variation on that would be asking BestBuy to sell their products for what they're really worth, without the 40% markup or telling people where they can they can get it for less.
Ebay is a mostly open unsensored forum for used goods. By using it your risking buying a stolen or bootleg or broken item. We don't know the story the thief told him when selling it, full of malware and would her cost too much to have it serviced or it was a used ibook she got for $50 and selling at $300 is s 500% profit for her or a friend or roommate got a new PC and was going to throw it out and she offered to take it. If I were to buy a used laptop I wouldn't pay more than $300 either because of the chance I might be the one getting ripped off. For all I know it may have a faulty fan and overheats after 20min of use and she didn't get one of the fancy extended warranty packages and the repair isn't covered.
As far as I'm concerned the ebay buyer and seller are the innocent people who got scammed. For all we know she knew he had a hobby of buying and selling electronics and fast talked him into thinking she was the legal owner of the laptop, after all she was a thief trying to sell off stolen goods.
Where did all the info on the ebay seller come from? The post has a link to CNN which says nothing of the ebay seller and the purchase and sale price.
"A woman shows up with a laptop worth 4 times the price (in used condition, never mind new) and that would not raise a red flag or two?"
1000 12" iBooks for $50 each?
Not everyone knows the resale value of a computer. I've seen plenty of Dell and Gateway commercials advertising laptops for $400-$500 so it's possible she didn't know the real value of it, that is if she wasn't trying to unload stolen merchandise.
"The difference between a fence and a legitimate business is that the fence asks no questions, feigns ignorance and looks the other way when conditions of sale are highly suspicious so that he can make outrageous profit."
"freshman who makes money selling computers and cell-phones online, says he bought the laptop for $300"
He's obviously not a legitimate business, he's a college kid possibly trying to make some spending money. When I make a person to person transaction in cash I don't ask for personal info. If I'm buying I'll listen to their story of why they're selling it and if I believe them I'll agree to the sale, but I don't deal in items over $100.
It's a college, lots od people leave lots of things laying around and I don't think the finder has any legal obligation to try to return it. It may not be considered morally right, but it is legal. A friend found a PC, at most a few months old, in a dumpster when moving into his dorm room, he kept it. I worked for the housing dept for part of a summer until I got more hours with my computer lab/help desk job. The policy is if items are left in the room they're thrown out and the former resident is fined for "failure to leave room in move-in condition" and everything is thrown out. Once it's in the trash it's free game for anyone who wants it. Most of the time it's old clothes and no one wants to touch it with a 10' pole. If it's a nice chair or a fan it's appropriated for the staff rest area. We found an older eMachine and it was taken by one of the full time staff for her son.
I consider it clear that she's guilty, but it is understandable that someone will accept something no questions asked if they're poor and they can make a profit.
Damn RITA*, if they took all the money the spend telling people that there are easy ways to get their content/crap for free they might be able to hire real song writers and real singers, the ones who don't lip-sync. Yes, "piracy" does exist, but they want to use it as the fall guy for their dropping profits, they can't admit their creatiions are so bad they suck and blow at the same time. Maybe they're spending too much sueing people and printing 'anti-piracy' on everything warning the people who went out and bought a CD that "piracy" exists. This last week I purchased the SW-E3 soundtrack, used of course, with the bonus DVD video soundtrack collection and the FBI anti-piracy warning is printed on everything. I can understand having it one the back of the case, but not on the disks, that just makes them look ugly. I wonder when they're going to realize that the paying customers are not going give away what they spend their hard earned money on. They pay less attention to P2P and focus on the leaks within the industry. The tens of thousands of copies downloaded with P2P apps arn't going to be there if they stop the first copy from getting out.
Stop sueing the Internet!!! Since they claim people are sharing and trading thier music with it, it must be possible for them to use this Internet thing to make a profit, and no, legal settlements don't count. iTunes and the like are a start, but the content they sell is of very low quality and DRM-ed. They're not selling a song, they're just letting you rent a low quality demo version, I don't use them for this reason and the limited library. Enough people have a broadband connection and will probably be willing to wait a few more seconds for a version worth listening to, at leats 320+kbpsVBR.
*forget about RIAA, it's really the RITA, Recording Industry Trust on America
They need it for something while your applying(could be for loans), but you can(and should) request a student ID number for use everywhere your SSN would be used, registering for classes, meal plan, some other stuff.
Just because it was on a webserver doesn't mean it was easy to find. Unless your a concerned student who searches for your name and the first group or two of your SSN.
Restrict what's in your webspace! What I'd be concerned about is did the "now retired faculty member" know the directory where they put the file was on a public server or was the file put there and then someone did a chmod 755 on the dir, possibly after they retired by the replacement who didn't know any better. The school I'm at has school.edu/dept/whatevertheywant I know some departments use it for public and private storage, yes bad idea, with password protected files&dirs. If the same happened there it's possible someone made a location public without checking the contents of all the sub dirs. I've heard of this happening too many times, schools need to have clearly labeled dedicated internal network storage and separate webspace. Once they start getting mixed up there's the chance a file will accidentally get copied or moved to the wrong place for all to see. The problem is "public" and "private" are too close when listed alphabetically. If those labels are used it's too easy for someone using a windows interface to accidentally drag&drop something to the wrong location when it looks like: ~admissions_office lunch_menus office_supplies private public schedules warez(maybe not)
"The employee has procrastinated working on it, and goes to print at 4:57. There's something wrong with the printer or their system."
"It's the best lock money can buy, but it has one flaw, the door has to be closed!" -Seinfeld
The problems need to be better compared to things the average person can understand.
"It's the best printer money can buy, it's only flaw is that there needs to be paper in the tray." It's no more the job of IT to keep the printers full than it is to keep the supply closet stocked with pens. The line between something being the responsibility of IT and the office staff needs to be made very very clear. It's the responsibility of the person who finds/causes a problem with the printer or their PC to report it immediately so it can be fixed. It's not IT's problem when Bob can't print because someone accidentally changed the printer's setting earlier in the day and didn't tell someone who can fix it. Even if it takes someone in IT 20sec to reset the printer's settings, someone has to let them know. When you have a leaky sink, the local plumber doesn't use the force to know your sink is leaking, he waits until he gets a call.
yes, that makes PERFECT sense No, it's not ensuring their job security. The interaction with the end users/students is the least important part of their job. I don't know what else high school janitors have to do, maybe disinfect every classroom and fix broken things, there are probably enough routine daily tasks that ensure them keeping their job, no it doesn't include the occasional spilled soda and dropped candy bar. IT staff has to deal with maintaining everything the end users/common office minions doesn't even know exists. I'm sure your IT staff wouldn't like it when the testing of the latest piece of major software or windows patches or new thing that might make the standard drive image crash has to be put off because some fool of an intern in marketing got some virus and/or spyware while goofing off playing some flash game instead of doing whatever marketing does and they loose a day cleaning up after them. Don't confuse network operations(IT) with a HelpDesk or damage control. Even then their main reason for being there is to be experts on and help with the company's mission critical applications, not virus/spyware removal. What happens when someone finds a way to setup a rouge WAP? Depending on the size of the company it might take a while to find and that's possible to happen in companies with and without IT depts.
You could enforce a "the Internet is a privlage" policy. In most cases all your average employee needs is access to the corporate network for internal email and whatever resources they job requires and maybe a select few sites of affiliates/partners/clients which can be allowed by firewall. When a virus is traced back to someone, instead of giving them a slower machine and possibly lowering productivity cut off their Internet access, it will raise their productivity by removing the big distraction that is the Internet.
"I never understood the fascination with her. Not by you, but by the media in general. It seemed like all of a sudden she was famous for being some trust fund baby."
I believe her "fame" started with a video?
So she didn't follow a password rules, using names of people or things close to you. I recall reading that the phone ID number was faked, same as spoofing caller ID info, and the T-Mobie allowed the phone&number to act as username and pword. Could have been another device she had and provider other then T-Mobile. I'm sure enough people have had their phones "hacked" or accidentally given away their account info to some "verify your information" email.
He should be punished harshly for making bomb threats and hacking ISPs and DoS-ing a phone company as a way of crying about his fraudulent being closed.
"but it was some seriously good eating meat."
now I'm getting hungry
"certified angus"
I wonder how long until everyone else realizes that "angus" is only refering to the color of the cow's hide. It has nothing to do with the taste or quality of the meat, only that it's over 50% black, think Gateway boxes only a little more black.
Slashdot Mirror
"under a reasonable copyright system would already be public domain"
or under a resonable business model it would have dropped in price and be readily available for purchase. But it's out of print and the few times you find it the seller is asking for a "collector" price of $100+ and you think; "I want it, I'm willing to pay for it but I can't buy it because it doesn't exist anymore other than maybe a low quality 128kbits iTunes download that really isn't owning it, so I'll download it" I wonder how much an on demand CD reprinting service would cost. It would be nice to have some of that "older music" on CD for $5-$10, the kind you can only find on old used cassette.
This may sound bad/conspiracy theory-ish.
I'm starting to wonder if the RITA* is using geolocation with the lists of IPs they bought from some possibly questionable collection/data mining agency. I don't remember the last time I heard of a middle or upper class kid getting sued, but they probably have a prepaid no limit iTunes account to go with their 60GB iPod photo. Are they sueing people who in most cases cannot affort their minimum $3500 settlement. They seem to be relying on lists of numners bought from IP harversters and taking what they get as 100% correct and never infallible. My advice to anyone who is unfortunately being sued an as far as they know they have done nothing wrong is how they got their information on you. If someone is using dialup and disconnects data will still be sent to that IP for some time, especially if they were requesting information from P2P apps, maybe kazaa supernodes.
It's possible that the requests were made several minutes before the IP was assigned to them but with the low response time you get with dialup, by the time the RITA snitches' packet sniffers got hold of it the "infringing" IP was assigned to someone else. I used Verizon DSL a few yrs ago before optimumonline was available in the area. The policy was one IP per house but you could connect as many PCs as you want. Without a router to keep a semi-static IP I'd go through lots of IPs a day since I turned my PC off when I left. For at least 20min after connecting ZoneAlarm would record pages of logs from traffic intended for the previous user of the IP, the IPs appeared to be immediately reassigned. I've on seen one takedown notice with logs, the inital detection and followup detection times were 20sec appart. With checking times only 20sec appart it's very possible that the packets they sniffed were going to another person but were time delayed.
Challenge the sources, if they're unwilling to reveal them then they're no more credible than kid A telling the teacher claiming that kid B did something bad or McCarthy's list of Communists that he never let anyone else see.
*I've stopped called the RIAA the RIAA, it's really the RITA Recording Industry Trust of America
It's not a perpetual motion machine, it's adding something to improve the efficency of that very inefficent contraption we call an engine.
The internal combustion engine is very inefficent. Only 20% to 30% of the energy produced by the combustion is transfered into mechanical energy making the car move. Yes, some is used by the alternator to recharge the battery and power other devices. Even then over 50% of the energy is wasted heat energy. When you have something that's maybe 50% efficent it's not that difficult to improve on it.
"A current is run from the car battery through the liquid. This process of electrolysis creates hydrogen and oxygen gases which are then fed into the engine's intake manifold where they mix with the gasoline vapours."
It seems his device is using some of the otherwise wasted energy already being produced by the engine to stimulate a chemical reaction producing hydrogen is then added to the fuel-air mixture to improve the use of the gasoline, the combustion chamber only holds so much, so replace some of the fossil fuels with hydrogen and you use less gasoline, improving your miles per gallon of gas. This could be the after market hybrid conversion we've been waiting for.
It's just improving an existing chemical reaction. Want to boil water? add fire, want it to boil faster, add salt. Want your fission nuke to have a greater yield? add some tritium. Want your hydrogen bomb to blow up more stuff, add some naquadria and you'll have yourself a gate-buster.
"Minor nit, but it's PVC - polyvinyl chlorate"
yes, PVC I wonder what was I thinking/typing, probably not much
Building heating systems produce lots of warm dry air creating a static friendly environment.
I had a similar experience back in HS, the letter sweaters were made of 100% acrylic, I don't know why they were, but they were. At the end of every day it was go down to the locker room and take the sweater off, the popping sound was very audible, and discharge by grabing the door or hit some random freshman walking by.
water, water everywhere so let's go have a drink
-Homer Simpson
I think your're refering to the "deadly" PBC pipe.
the myth: someone was sand blasting the paint off a PBC pipe and lots of static built up on the pipe and he was killed by the discharge when he touched the pipe. Myth Busted, while PBC does hold a charge, it's very small and the sand in the air act as discharge points.
"perhaps SHC is therefore no longer a mystery?"
The Discovery Channel or TLC had at least a show on this, the most common was the 'wick effect.' It's normal combustion that is limited to the body, usually happens when someone is knocked unconscious or dies while holding a cigarette or candle. I don't think this case would be considered spontaneous combustion since the build up of static electricity is an ignition source, then it's normal combustion once the fuel reaches its flash point.
"Obviously, this guy should have known that it was stolen... And we don't necessarily believe him when he says that the lady told him it was not."
It may not be so obvious,
Most of the comments seem to assume that since the thief is female she doesn't know how to operate a computer and that the buyer/reseller being male should have known better. I know a few girls who can find their way around a PC and I know guys who don't, they're called PROFIT. It's obvious he knows how to buy and sell computers, but reformating and reinstalling Windows is mostly automated and doesn't require much skill.
The laptop was stolen from a restricted area so she may be an experienced laptop thief. It doesn't take that much effort to reformat and reinstall windows then install kazaa and click on a bunch of banner adds to get Windows full of spyware to the point of unusability, a perfect checkable cover story in about 2hrs. Someone says she just got a new computer and knowing you buy used computers offers to sell you her old one. You turn it on and have her login and the screen promptly fills with popups. You examine the outside and do not see any markings to even suggest that she is not the legal owner. The posting says sold for $300, but doesn't say who made the offer and called the laptop "expensive" but that's a relative term, I consider a laptop over $1000 to be expensive while someone else may call over $2500 expensive, it only sold for $1159, it couldn't have been that expensive. He could have made the 'generous' offer of $300, thinking she didn't know any better, realizing the chance for a larger profit($800) from the resale. Or he made the low offer of $300 because he wasn't sure how easily he could sell it.
If the sale happened that way I don't see how he could have known he was buying stolen goods. Sales of computer hardware like that happen all the time at colleges and are almost always cash&carry sold as is, no returns, refunds, or exchanges and checking ID doesn't happen. I wouldn't let an individual have/make a copy of my ID. Yes, he was doing something business-like by selling on ebay, but he's not a registered business and I woundn't even let him see an ID card. All he'd be guilty of is poor record keeping and if he doesn't make enough he doesn't have to report it to the IRS so good book keeping probably doesn't matter. The most he probably has is a notebook or office doc with a brief description and the puchase and sale amounts to keep track of PROFIT.
sounds familiar
from a co-worker:
a guy walks into the bar he and a friend are in asking if anyone wants to buy a new comuter for $400. His friend haggles it down to $250, he goes home opens it and finds a case full of cut up phone books. A few days later he sees the guy walking down the street in the same area and runs after him. A cop drives buy and is told the accusation. The cop makes the seller open his van and they find a couple cases full of phone books and potatoes.
I just finished reading the "Stolen U.C. Berkley Laptop Recovered" posting. I'd agree with the biggest threat to and of laptops for corporate use is loss/theft. If it's lost chances are someone's going to try to access the contents. There needs to be required encryption of the hdd, the data is probably worth far more than the cost of a replacement. Also restriction of what data can be copied to a company laptop. Over the last day there has been postings on the U of Miami at Ohio and U.C. Berkley student information getting where it shouldn't be.
"Every single person I've ever met who look for "great deals" for a living was either a fence or a con artists. Every. Single. One."
Then you have unfortunately met the kind that gives that kind a bad name.
Buy something for free or over 50% off after rebate, cut off barcode without opening the box, send in rebate, resell as new. Even if it only sells for 75% of the market price it's still a 25% profit. Or buy used PC for $200, add more memory and maybe a larger hdd and sell for $500. The price difference depends on the value of your labor. A professional repair or upgrade can be $90 a session plus $75/hr. Or make some connections with a whole saler and buy at wholesale+5% and sell at wholesale+30% or more depending on how the ebay auction goes, it's still less than the at least wholesale+50% retail price. It's win-win, the buyer pays less than rip-off retail and you make at least 25% profit.
Dell frequently has 50% off offers. You can buy a new Dell laptop for $750 and post it on ebay with a 'buy it now' of at least $1250. Anyone who doesn't know about the 50% off offers will be happy to pay less than the $1500 retail list price and you make around $500 each.
Then it depends on you definition of "con artist" Is someone who buys new at $750 and resells new at $1250 a con artist, I'd say no.
"A honest businessman would notify the person who is selling of a potential higher value of the equipment"
It was a person to person sale on ebay, not a full business transaction. A lot of people use it the way they would a garage sale or flea market, they really don't care how much they get for the item as long as they can get it out of their closet and get a few dollars for it. Think of me as you want, but when I'm lucky enough to find something on ebay with with a 'buy it now' of $5 I'm going to buy it for $5 even if I've seen the same item in similar condition selling for $30 or more. I'm not going to tell them they could possibly sell it for 6 times the amount they're asking.
A slight variation on that would be asking BestBuy to sell their products for what they're really worth, without the 40% markup or telling people where they can they can get it for less.
Ebay is a mostly open unsensored forum for used goods. By using it your risking buying a stolen or bootleg or broken item. We don't know the story the thief told him when selling it, full of malware and would her cost too much to have it serviced or it was a used ibook she got for $50 and selling at $300 is s 500% profit for her or a friend or roommate got a new PC and was going to throw it out and she offered to take it. If I were to buy a used laptop I wouldn't pay more than $300 either because of the chance I might be the one getting ripped off. For all I know it may have a faulty fan and overheats after 20min of use and she didn't get one of the fancy extended warranty packages and the repair isn't covered.
As far as I'm concerned the ebay buyer and seller are the innocent people who got scammed. For all we know she knew he had a hobby of buying and selling electronics and fast talked him into thinking she was the legal owner of the laptop, after all she was a thief trying to sell off stolen goods.
Where did all the info on the ebay seller come from? The post has a link to CNN which says nothing of the ebay seller and the purchase and sale price.
"A woman shows up with a laptop worth 4 times the price (in used condition, never mind new) and that would not raise a red flag or two?"
1000 12" iBooks for $50 each?
Not everyone knows the resale value of a computer. I've seen plenty of Dell and Gateway commercials advertising laptops for $400-$500 so it's possible she didn't know the real value of it, that is if she wasn't trying to unload stolen merchandise.
"The difference between a fence and a legitimate business is that the fence asks no questions, feigns ignorance and looks the other way when conditions of sale are highly suspicious so that he can make outrageous profit."
"freshman who makes money selling computers and cell-phones online, says he bought the laptop for $300"
He's obviously not a legitimate business, he's a college kid possibly trying to make some spending money. When I make a person to person transaction in cash I don't ask for personal info. If I'm buying I'll listen to their story of why they're selling it and if I believe them I'll agree to the sale, but I don't deal in items over $100.
It's a college, lots od people leave lots of things laying around and I don't think the finder has any legal obligation to try to return it. It may not be considered morally right, but it is legal. A friend found a PC, at most a few months old, in a dumpster when moving into his dorm room, he kept it. I worked for the housing dept for part of a summer until I got more hours with my computer lab/help desk job. The policy is if items are left in the room they're thrown out and the former resident is fined for "failure to leave room in move-in condition" and everything is thrown out. Once it's in the trash it's free game for anyone who wants it. Most of the time it's old clothes and no one wants to touch it with a 10' pole. If it's a nice chair or a fan it's appropriated for the staff rest area. We found an older eMachine and it was taken by one of the full time staff for her son.
I consider it clear that she's guilty, but it is understandable that someone will accept something no questions asked if they're poor and they can make a profit.
There are very few things that cannot be used for illegal activities or cause something bad to happen.
"It should be worong for users to advertise that P2P can be used for trading copyrighted materials"
The users don't have to anymore, the RIAA is gererating more than enough advertising for them
My pocket Constitution says I have the right to bear(bare) arms but the guy at the door won't let me in without sleeves. -Larry the Cable Guy
that seemed funnier before I went looking for the quote.
Damn RITA*, if they took all the money the spend telling people that there are easy ways to get their content/crap for free they might be able to hire real song writers and real singers, the ones who don't lip-sync.
Yes, "piracy" does exist, but they want to use it as the fall guy for their dropping profits, they can't admit their creatiions are so bad they suck and blow at the same time. Maybe they're spending too much sueing people and printing 'anti-piracy' on everything warning the people who went out and bought a CD that "piracy" exists. This last week I purchased the SW-E3 soundtrack, used of course, with the bonus DVD video soundtrack collection and the FBI anti-piracy warning is printed on everything. I can understand having it one the back of the case, but not on the disks, that just makes them look ugly. I wonder when they're going to realize that the paying customers are not going give away what they spend their hard earned money on. They pay less attention to P2P and focus on the leaks within the industry. The tens of thousands of copies downloaded with P2P apps arn't going to be there if they stop the first copy from getting out.
Stop sueing the Internet!!! Since they claim people are sharing and trading thier music with it, it must be possible for them to use this Internet thing to make a profit, and no, legal settlements don't count. iTunes and the like are a start, but the content they sell is of very low quality and DRM-ed. They're not selling a song, they're just letting you rent a low quality demo version, I don't use them for this reason and the limited library. Enough people have a broadband connection and will probably be willing to wait a few more seconds for a version worth listening to, at leats 320+kbpsVBR.
*forget about RIAA, it's really the RITA, Recording Industry Trust on America
or so the cover story says
They need it for something while your applying(could be for loans), but you can(and should) request a student ID number for use everywhere your SSN would be used, registering for classes, meal plan, some other stuff.
Just because it was on a webserver doesn't mean it was easy to find. Unless your a concerned student who searches for your name and the first group or two of your SSN.
Restrict what's in your webspace!
What I'd be concerned about is did the "now retired faculty member" know the directory where they put the file was on a public server or was the file put there and then someone did a chmod 755 on the dir, possibly after they retired by the replacement who didn't know any better. The school I'm at has school.edu/dept/whatevertheywant I know some departments use it for public and private storage, yes bad idea, with password protected files&dirs. If the same happened there it's possible someone made a location public without checking the contents of all the sub dirs. I've heard of this happening too many times, schools need to have clearly labeled dedicated internal network storage and separate webspace. Once they start getting mixed up there's the chance a file will accidentally get copied or moved to the wrong place for all to see. The problem is "public" and "private" are too close when listed alphabetically. If those labels are used it's too easy for someone using a windows interface to accidentally drag&drop something to the wrong location when it looks like:
~admissions_office
lunch_menus
office_supplies
private
public
schedules
warez(maybe not)
"The employee has procrastinated working on it, and goes to print at 4:57. There's something wrong with the printer or their system."
"It's the best lock money can buy, but it has one flaw, the door has to be closed!" -Seinfeld
The problems need to be better compared to things the average person can understand.
"It's the best printer money can buy, it's only flaw is that there needs to be paper in the tray."
It's no more the job of IT to keep the printers full than it is to keep the supply closet stocked with pens.
The line between something being the responsibility of IT and the office staff needs to be made very very clear. It's the responsibility of the person who finds/causes a problem with the printer or their PC to report it immediately so it can be fixed. It's not IT's problem when Bob can't print because someone accidentally changed the printer's setting earlier in the day and didn't tell someone who can fix it. Even if it takes someone in IT 20sec to reset the printer's settings, someone has to let them know. When you have a leaky sink, the local plumber doesn't use the force to know your sink is leaking, he waits until he gets a call.
yes, that makes PERFECT sense
No, it's not ensuring their job security. The interaction with the end users/students is the least important part of their job. I don't know what else high school janitors have to do, maybe disinfect every classroom and fix broken things, there are probably enough routine daily tasks that ensure them keeping their job, no it doesn't include the occasional spilled soda and dropped candy bar. IT staff has to deal with maintaining everything the end users/common office minions doesn't even know exists. I'm sure your IT staff wouldn't like it when the testing of the latest piece of major software or windows patches or new thing that might make the standard drive image crash has to be put off because some fool of an intern in marketing got some virus and/or spyware while goofing off playing some flash game instead of doing whatever marketing does and they loose a day cleaning up after them. Don't confuse network operations(IT) with a HelpDesk or damage control. Even then their main reason for being there is to be experts on and help with the company's mission critical applications, not virus/spyware removal. What happens when someone finds a way to setup a rouge WAP? Depending on the size of the company it might take a while to find and that's possible to happen in companies with and without IT depts.
You could enforce a "the Internet is a privlage" policy. In most cases all your average employee needs is access to the corporate network for internal email and whatever resources they job requires and maybe a select few sites of affiliates/partners/clients which can be allowed by firewall. When a virus is traced back to someone, instead of giving them a slower machine and possibly lowering productivity cut off their Internet access, it will raise their productivity by removing the big distraction that is the Internet.
"I never understood the fascination with her. Not by you, but by the media in general. It seemed like all of a sudden she was famous for being some trust fund baby."
I believe her "fame" started with a video?
So she didn't follow a password rules, using names of people or things close to you. I recall reading that the phone ID number was faked, same as spoofing caller ID info, and the T-Mobie allowed the phone&number to act as username and pword. Could have been another device she had and provider other then T-Mobile.
I'm sure enough people have had their phones "hacked" or accidentally given away their account info to some "verify your information" email.
He should be punished harshly for making bomb threats and hacking ISPs and DoS-ing a phone company as a way of crying about his fraudulent being closed.
"but it was some seriously good eating meat." now I'm getting hungry "certified angus" I wonder how long until everyone else realizes that "angus" is only refering to the color of the cow's hide. It has nothing to do with the taste or quality of the meat, only that it's over 50% black, think Gateway boxes only a little more black.