Yes, but do you own your phone? A lot of people get their phone with their service contract rather than buying the phone itself.
I agree that if you buy a phone it should be your own property and you should be able to modify it as you wish, but I don't think the same holds true if you merely have your phone as part of a contract deal.
In most cases you do own the phone, the phone's a loss leader to get you to sign up with the telco's wireless service under contract. Such contracts generally include penalties for cancelling early, but those are penalties for breaking the contract. They may cover the phone's cost, but they aren't specifically noted as such and that makes all the difference. You own the phone, but you have obligations under contract. If you cancel early you pay the penalty, if not you don't.
Also even if you stay with your current provider and you're at a point they deem you worthy of an upgrade you don't always have to return the old phone. If you truly didn't own the phone returning the old one would be a requirement to get an "upgrade" for free. What you basically end up doing though is sign a new contract with them and the "upgrade" phone is another loss leader.
What you're thinking of are situations where you rent the phone. I don't know that I've ever heard of a wireless telco offering a rental phone. Renting is quite common on cable/DSL modems and cable boxes though. In those cases you have to return the modem or cable box when you cancel service, even if you don't pay a penalty. If you fail to return it you have to pay for it. See the difference?
Basically the telcos want you to believe you don't own the phone so they can lock you in to their service. The reality is quite different and I doubt this telco's going to get very far in the courts.
When I reached the eminence of university staff myself, I was amused by how shocked colleagues purported to be by ordinary student misdemeanours. What we did was light-hearted fun, what they do is a crime...
This seems to be a common thing with people of all walks of life. People will also say they're shocked, shocked!!, that middle school kids are having sex/drinking/etc. but if they stopped to look back to when they were in school they'll remember that they had classmates doing those things at those ages.
While I don't condone academic cheating, some professors are so unreasonable in their assignments that the outcome is inevitable. (In my experience most of the proffesors giving unreasonable assignments also didn't grade on a curve and weren't just trying to push us to do more than we thought we could.) The result was groups of friends working together quietly, breaking the programming down into sections that each got working, then everyone would share. I don't know if the professors knew about it or not but most of the TAs did and didn't really care. Now in classes where assignments were reasonable, even if they were difficult and pushed our boundaries, the TAs cared about cheating a lot and punished those who cheated quite drastically.
I think part of the problem may be that many of the professors who give unreasonable assignments are used to dealing with graduate students and graduate classes where assignments are tougher (and expected to be by any realistic grad student.) They don't want to teach undergrad courses but end up being forced to and they either take out their frustration on the students or just don't bother taking into consideration that most undergrads aren't ready for graduate level work.
Then you have the professors who are absolute geniuses, and always have been. They end up teaching 100 level courses and do a horrible job simply because they've never been at that level, or if they were it didn't take them long to get past it. Basically they're almost incapable of teaching the basics because to them the basics are just common sense and everyone should have born knowing them. Most of these professors will listen if you talk to them though and will do all they can to help. I had one like this and I went to talk to him (amusingly about 8-9 friends from the class tagged along since they'd heard I was going but they all just stood around and let me do the talking, thanks guys!). He was quite receptive to what I had to say and he did make changes that helped tremendously. In the end the students were able to learn the course material, the professor learned how to teach at that level better and those of us involved in talking to him learned that at least some professors will listen to what you have to say and act on it.:) (For the record in this particular class the entire class failed to score above a 50 on the first test. We were given the test again as an open-book, open-note test and the highest score went up to only 60. The professor had let one of the TAs make out the test and for whatever reason they made it so that even graduate students would have been hard-pressed to pass it. Said TA lost their assistantship and the CS department refused to allow them to be a TA in any course ever again. I think they finally got a GRA instead.)
If the poisioning is over material that is normally non-paid, that's a problem.
If it's content that is normally paid for...I don't see any problem.
Maybe someone can make an argument I understand...
I think the (unstated so far) concern is that the MPAA/RIAA (if they are behind this) might not be satisfied to stop with just poisoning torrents of illegal stuff. If their ultimate goal is to discredit Bittorrent and discourage people from using it then it's quite conceivable that they may move on to putting out poisoned torrents of legal stuff as well, all in an effort to make Bittorrent look bad. And really, given their past actions, I could see them doing just that so this does concern me. It woule be very hard to prove they were behind it and expensive to sue them to make them stop and they know it.
And all the pirate groups have to do is a bit more work to find where the activation code is called and change the jump to go to another location. Doing the same with the verification code will let them stick in their own activation sequence or disable it. Certainly not easy but doesn't require corporate espionage at all. There are some very clever coders out there going by some of the protection schemes they get around.
You just can't stop those who are determined to pirate your product no matter what. They'll always find some way to do it, all activation codes do is annoy and inconvenience your real customers, which was the point of the original poster.
Limewire doesn't have to do this to avoid trouble under the recent Supreme Court ruling. SCOTUS found that the two companies could still be held accountable for some of the infringement because they encouraged it in their marketing. If Limewire's not been encouraging downloads of illegal songs with their client they should be fine. If they have they're already screwed and this is unlikely to help much.
I assume that anybody can declare a file shareable. But the *user* is the one who has to make this declaration.
This means LimeWire is not encouraging nor participating in violation of copyright.
Thus Limewire hopes to survive the lawsuits to come.
Actually it probably will open them up to better attack. By adding in code to prevent sharing of unlicensed material but allowing each user to decide on licensing now the RIAA can (quite rightfully) say they have the ability to block their works from being shared but since it's still happening they can be help liable. Remember what happened with Napster once they tried to implement code to block licensed songs, it was never good enough for the RIAA and Napster finally collapsed.
Frankly the RIAA is going to take this as an admission of guilt on the part of Limewire's makers. They have probably put themselves in far more danger than if they'd kept the status quo.
Perhaps other, similar industries are doing a better job of self regulation?
Nope, just about as bad (or good) as the video game industry.
I honestly don't know. For TV, there is the V-chip. For movies, the theatre and video stores are supposed to check ID before allowing a child to see or rent a movie. I believe blockbuster and hollywood video do a decent job on that for video games and movies.
The V-Chip has to be in new TVs but it doesn't have to be activated by default, it's up to the person who buys the TV to activate it and set whatever settings they feel are appropriate. Theaters and video stores are not required by law to check ID before allowing someone to watch/rent a R rated movie. Most of them have policies requiring this, but they are not laws. At movie theaters in particular this is hard to enforce because kids simply buy a ticket to a different movie rated appropriately for their age group then sneak into the R rated one they really want to see. With all the megaplexes nowadays this is way too easy but it'd also be extremely hard to stop without annoying the hell out of all the legit moviegoers as well. The rental stores do a much better job but there are still cases where R rated movies get rented by kids. A lot of that is simply that the employees don't give a damn and don't enforce the policies like they're supposed to.
I'd be interested to find out if stores like Target, Wal-Mart, etc. that sell R Rated DVD movies are checking ID. If not, then I would think they should be busted. Maybe I'll send my 10 year old intto Fry's to try to buy an R rated DVD and see what happens.
He'll likely be denied but not because of any law, all those stores have policies forbidding R rated movies to be sold to those underage. Wal-mart's registers will actually prompt when an R rated movie is scanned (same for M rated games). This doesn't always help though, if the employee simply doesn't give a shit they'll just tell the register that the person buying is old enough and process the sale anyway. If there are complaints they might get fired but there are rarely complaints. (I worked at a Wal-mart for two years so I have some first-hand experience.)
Parents don't help the situation any though. I can't tell you how many times a kid was sent in to buy something they weren't supposed to (even cigarettes and alcohol) only to be refused and then the parents come in pissed as hell that we wouldn't sell the movie/game/cigarettes/beer/etc. to their kids and made them come in to buy it themselves. I always checked ID for everything that was age-restricted but I know a lot of fellow employees didn't for much beyond beer and cigarettes and a few didn't for those either. We actually had more people complain to management about our denying sales to their underage kids than we did the opposite.
Don't forget the grandmother who's suing Rockstar and Take Two over the Hot Coffee debacle. Her complaint is that she didn't realize there would be such explicit sexual content in the game when she bought it for her 14 year old grandson. Do note that the M rating explicitely says 17+ on the box and the game also had a sub-warning of "strong sexual content" on it when she bought it. In my experience the problem is that parents buy these games for their kids, often refusing to listen to an explanation of what the ratings mean (this happened to me many times) then get mad later on when they realize it's not suitable for their kids -- exactly what they were told when they bought it. New laws won't stop this, they'll only cause businesses to get sued and fined when the parents are at fault. Don't think for a minute that a parent who actually bought the game and was warned only to figure out what they were trying to tell them months later won't sue/press charges against the retailer claiming they let the kid buy it instead of the parent. Stores would have to start keeping videotapes of every purchase for months just to protect themselves.
So go ahead and send him in, if he comes back out with it you might be able to get an employee fired but otherwise you won't be able to do anything, there are no laws enforcing the sale of R rated movies to kids.
To give a good example of what you're talking about, first the Wikipedia entry on Star Trek. Compare that to Memory Alpha, a Star Trek Wiki. There's detailed information on every series, races, ships, technology, you name it.
As usual a dead link on a Slashdot news article. This would be great if (a) it loaded, and (b) it doesn't have flash all over the place live tv.com
Since you're unfamiliar with what TVTome was like before Cnet bought it and made it TV.com let me just explain that this is the whole point. TVTome had a very light interface with minimal graphics. Many pages were text only in fact. All the info was there, loads of it and it was a the best resource for TV series on the net.
Then Cnet bought it and made it TV.com. It has flash all over the place as you noted, it loads slowly (even when not being slashdotted), a lot of the info is missing and the site, frankly, sucks. That's why someone's making a replacement for TVtome.
Your right, it is mostly my fault.. But my system is setup to handle as many editors as I need, just like wiki. I just need to get enough people to help out..
Getting people to help out isn't the real problem, your problem is you have no mechanism for telling if they'll be good help or not. At least in a Wiki you can identify the users who consistantly contribute good info/edits/etc. With your current format people can't contribute until you make them an editor. What do you do if you allow someone to be an editor then they start vandalizing your site anyway BTW?
I have had this site for 4-5 years now, and this is the second version of it. The first version was very open, just like wiki, anyone could make changes when ever they wanted, it was great since I didn't have to edit anything, AT FIRST.. Then we had people adding wrong information, and kept messing everything up, so I spent a lot of time cleaning up after people and making sure the information was correct.
Why were you the only one who could go through and clean up stuff that was wrong? I contribute to a Star Trek Wiki, everything I edit gets added to my watch list. I check that regularly to see what's been modified and take a look at it. If the info was modified to no longer be correct I fix it or revert the edit. Pretty much every contributor on the site does the same thing. The community polices itself and it is working quite well in fact. The admins only have to be involved to ban IPs/users who are vandalizing, then the community will go reverse the edits. (Actually we'll reverse them sooner until it becomes obvious that the person's going to keep changing them back until they're banned. Then we report the abuse to an admin and wait for the ban, then go back in and reverse the edits.)
I guess there is no perfect solution, unless you can hire lots of people from india to handle all of the information and editing for your site, for cheap and you have enough money to pay for it, and get a guantee that it is correct.
No, a better solution is to trust the community to take an interest in the site and keeping the content correct. If you had the vast majority of people adding incorrect info or vandalizing your original site then apparently there's not a very large community that cares about your content. Also, and I don't say this to be mean, you sound like a control freak. In all your posts on this you imply that only you really knows what is correct and incorrect. You're adding more burden to yourself because of this. I may be wrong on that, but that's how you're coming across.
It is hard to find people you can trust when they are strangers, we usually need people to show us that they can be trusted, but you never know.. It is also hard to find good help for free.
Both problems are easily solved in a Wiki. You take a look at contributors and find who's doing a good job, you know you can trust them because they already have a track record. You can give them more authority to help watch for others making bad edits/redirects/etc. Also they're already working for free when it's a Wiki so there's not a problem there.
Wikis are by no means perfect but they do solve the two problems you list.
Look, it's not that big a deal is it? When Amazon bought imdb we all thought they'd ruined it but actually it's still pretty good. I get the feeling tv.com have held back a lot of the tvtome content until they've had a chance to review it - they're a better target to sue than tvtome - but there's still plenty there.
It's still a big deal. A lot of the content missing are goofs/nitpicks/cultural reference items (at least for the shows I used TVTome for, namely all the Star Trek series). Not all the notes made it intact either, none of those had any potential to create a lawsuit unless it's now against the law to note that such and such actor has now played a character in so many different Star Trek series. (Some of the missing notes are exactly like that along with other equally innocent stuff.)
Overlooking the lack of content the site has Fancy Widget Syndrome. Apparently TV.com thinks people are far, far more interested in the average viewer rating for a show/season of that show/episode than anything else about it. The rating bars are all graphical and fucking huge! The also seem to think that everyone wants lots of fancy, flashy graphics and widgets on every page. All of this makes it difficult to get the information you actually came there for, unless you visit to look at flashy graphics and viewer ratings. You also can no longer pull up a complete episode listing on one page. At best you can get one season at a time per page. With all the fancy widgets/graphics/flash/crap on the pages now it takes a good 10 times as long just to view the entire episode listing of a series.
I gave the site a chance when the transition occurred but the number of things they did wrong far outnumbered they things they did right (not hard seeing as I haven't noticed anything they did right to be frank) and I refuse to go back to it. Frankly I wouldn't mind seeing the venture fail and cost CNet a lot of money in the process. CNet took the absolute best TV resource out there and utterly destroyed it.
Also as another person noted, TVTome had a nice light, unobtrusive interface with very few graphics. Pages loaded nice and quickly, you could view entire episode lists on one page, etc. All of that's long gone now and the new site suffers tremendously for it.
However, proving who was the copyright holder of a paragraph, which was originally written by one person, then modified by, say three others, would probably make this too complicated to work on a large scale.
It's pretty much impossible, TVTome didn't note who submitted what information. The only people who could edit existing info were editors for a show. Users could add notes to counter mistakes already posted but that was it. Also all posts had to be approved by the editor for the show before they were added.
I am fairly certain that signing up for a TVTome account did not say anything about your giving them copyright to your contributions. I have refused to contribute since CNet bought them out and made the bastard child that is TV.com so I know I'm not bound by CNet's TOS, no matter what they may want to think. Also the first I found out about the move was when it occurred, I never received any E-mail from TVTome and I didn't visit the site's homepage since I had bookmarked the few shows I was interested in and just went straight to them. I would hope that they at least announced the move on the homepage but I can't say for sure because I didn't visit it.
Also, in my case, I'm not going to contribute to any site the TVTome creators setup. They sold out the site once (to horrible effect I might add), why wouldn't they do it again? I've found a nice wiki that covers the series I'm interested in and contribute there. All my contributions are covered by a Creative Commons liscense and since the wiki tracks changes people can see that it was me who contributed it.
To counter that with my own anecdotal evidence, I've used File Vault on my laptop since Panther was released and have never had the slightest problem.
I certainly hope you never have any problems but I would also say you're lucky. I've seen several Macs spontaneously reset a user password, including the admin and root passwords (not all at once on any single machine though). I've had to boot from install CDs to reset passwords far too many times in cases where it wasn't just a "I forgot my password" problem.
Just last week I had an X-serv I was setting up spontaneously reset the root password. Anyone who's set these up knows that the installation asks for a password for the admin user and uses the same password for root. There's no option in the setup to set them seperately. After install and booting up I could log in as the admin user but not as root. I had to boot from the install CD to reset root's password. That was a first (never had a server pull that little stunt) and it worried me quite a bit. For those who haven't dealt with X-servs and Mac OS X Server, the root user is enabled by default, you don't have to take extra steps to activate it like you do on the client version so that wasn't the problem either.
Frankly I don't understand how they do this but I've had enough cases occur that I can verify nothing was done to change the password to be certain that it's a glitch and not stupid users. It's totally random and I can't reproduce it (and apparently neither can Apple or they'd have fixed it) but it does happen.
Does File Vault rely on the user password in a way that if it's reset from CD that all the encypted data is lost? If so I'd say every Mac running File Vault's a horrible accident waiting to happen.
To be fair here the looters are starting to get in the way of search and rescue. There are reports of them shooting at rescue helicopters, officers and even people just trying to escape the destruction.
The people who really need their viewpoint adjusted are the looters, especially the ones shooting at rescue helicopters. If they weren't doing that then it wouldn't be necessary to bother with them at this point.
Unfortunately, the RIAA goes about it in such a thuggish way that it's just an embarassment, and makes it impossible to support them. It's like saying that guns are dangerous and some people might have some without a license, and then breaking into every house within five blocks and performing a search. The ends here just do not justify the means.
Not to mention that all the money from the settlements go straight into the RIAA coffers. None of it goes back to the record labels even, much less the artists. So not only are they going about this the wrong way, they're further victimizing the artists. Do you think anyone who has to settle for several thousand dollars (or more) with the RIAA, even if guilty, are going to be buying any music in the coming years? I suspect that even if they could actually afford to after the settlement that they won't be terribly inclined to support the companies who are part of the RIAA.
Down the road? Gas (87 octane unleadded) just went up 15 cents overnight.
Same here (in east Tennessee). It went up 16 cents yesterday and another 8 or so today. My Dad somehow heard that it was going up first thing Tuesday morning and warned me so I was able to fill up before the big jump, but that's only a temporary measure and from everything I'm hearing in the news this is only the beginning. They're estimating over $3 a gallon as the national average in a few weeks.
I know someone who signed up for MSN messenger using his Yahoo! mail address. He can't transfer files at all using his yahoo address. However, when he uses his hotmail account, he has no problems.
What types of files? I use a non-MSN/Hotmail address and transferring files works fine except for types MSN has decided are evil, such as jpgs. Since I use Trillian people can send me jpgs still but if you're talking to someone who has the MSN client it will refuse to allow them to accept the transfer. On my end it just sits there like it's waiting for them to accept. Actually this didn't occur until the most recent version of MSN Messenger either.
What blows my mind is MSN seems to think.exe files are a-ok, but.jpg files are evil incarnate. Gotta love their security mindset.
How does reading plain text let someone into your computer?
It doesn't and didn't. The article explains what was going on. The e-card directed the victim to a website to view it. That website (run by Perez incidentally) then exploited a security hole in IE and installed the spyware in the background without warning.
This case does nicely show why e-cards are so potentially dangerous though.
If the Supreme Court decision, in its recent case regarding P2P software, is followed the makers of software may be responsbile for the illegal use of their products. All it takes is a reasonable (for some value of reasonable) chance that users will put your software to illegal uses and you get a ticket to jail or years of penury as you attempt to pay off the civil penalties that may be assessed against you. Now all it will take is for the FBI to discover that some "potential terrorist" used this software and Mr. Perez can kiss his rights to trial, an attorney, etc. goodbye thanks to THE PATRIOT Act.
Sheeze, read the article before you troll. Someone else has already commented on how you've misinterpreted the SCOTUS decision so I'll comment on how none of what you say applies in this case.
First off the guy advertised the program solely as a product to spy on your lover or other people and did so by spamming. Secondly the software was not something the purchaser downloaded and installed on a machine on their own, it sent out an e-card, which directed the recepient/victim to visit a web site run by Perez. Said website then exploited a security hole in IE and installed the spyware in the background without any warning to the victim. Finally the software sent a copy of everything it recorded (and it even logged keystrokes) to Perez as well as the people who paid to spy on someone with it.
The FBI isn't going to need the PATRIOT Act to bust this guy and this guy's not the least bit innocent. He promptly dissapeared after they seized his computers, so it's pretty clear he knew what he was doing was illegal as well.
It must not be the same article, this one plainly explains that not only did he write the software and spam to advertise it, he ran the servers that the e-cards directed victims to and silently installed the spyware in the background without warning using an exploit in IE. He also had the software send him a copy of everything as well as to the idiots who paid him to infect others with it. So he wrote the code, spammed to get customers for the code and then ran the servers that hijacked the victims computers. It's pretty clear cut that he wasn't an innocent coder! It's very plainly a case of someone breaking laws and finally getting caught.
On a side not, this company started in 2001 - took 4 years for the FBI to notice & catch him. Kind of funny.
What I find amusing is that the feds were tipped off to what he was doing by a complaint about his spam. If he hadn't spammed to advertise his scummy product he might have gotten away with it a while longer.
How does an e-card install malicious software??? I suspect that perhaps what is going on is that he set up the server that served the e-cards, in order to infect users who opened the cards. If that's the case, he didn't just write the software, he installed it on computers without owners' and users' permission.
You are correct, the article explains this. People who bought the program had it send an e-card message to the person they wanted to spy on. The person receiving the e-card then visited a website, run by the same guy who wrote the software, and the program installed itself in the background without warning them.
He also had things setup so that the software sent him copies of everything it sent the people who paid to spy on someone with it. He used spam to advertise his program as well (in fact the article says it was a spam complaint that tipped authorities off on what he was doing.) And finally he promptly vanished after he knew the feds were on to him and seized his computers. Obviously he knew he was going to be charged.
The end users are scumbags for using the service, but it's the guy who wrote it and put it up on the website and caused victims' computers to be compromised who is the guilty party here. This has nothing to do with distributing software.
Don't forget the part towards the end where it points out that the author received all the info from the program that the scumbags who paid to have it sent to someone did. The program even monitored everything typed on the keyboard. Also he spammed to advertise the software and after the feds seized his computers promptly dissapeared. They guy's not a victim here, he's getting what he deserves.
Adding to the problem is the perception that geeks are not socially adept and therefore are not able to be managers. Given some of the egregious spelling and grammer errors that I see here on/., to say nothing of the flaming and religious wars, we geeks are at least partially responsible for that viewpoint of upper management.
That's some serious non-sequitors you have going there. What grammar a person uses and how they spell when posting on places like/. is not any type of indicator of how they will write otherwise, much less how socially adept they are. The same goes for the flame and religious wars./. just isn't a place where you're going to run what you type through a spell checker, a grammar checker, proof read it a few times or even have someone else proof read it. (That last one we do seem to have, but we tend to refer to them as spelling and grammar nazis.) It's just not important enough to bother. No one writes everything perfectly the first try, but most of us, even most geeks, are quite capable of making sure the finished product is written well when it's important to do so.
If management is basing their opinions on geeks social and writing skills on their postings on/., or other similar sites, then they've got a major problem. It's quite likely that they'll jump to (incorrect) conclusions in other areas as well, areas that it's important they not do so. That's a lot of where the whole concept of clueless bosses (aka PHBs) comes from -- management that does indeed jump to conclusions incorrectly because they can't be bothered, or simply can't tell, what is really important and what's not.
Which would you rather have as an employee? I know I'd pick the geek spelling poorly on/. as long as he spells fine when it counts. I can very much do without people who jump to conclusions without proper facts.
Unfortunately it does seem that in most companies upper management prefers to hire management that jumps to conclusions readily. Why this is I have no real clue (seeing as I haven't tried to get a MBA I can't legitmately comment on the idea that MBA programs create this kind of attitude) but it hurts companies a lot. Sadly the companies hurt the worst by it seem to have all upper management that's the same way so they never realize it until it's too late.
* My doctor still insisted I was totally ok. He said that the antibiotics couldn't have possibly fixed my joint pains. Even if it weren't Lyme, hadn't he heard of "reactive arthritis." Fortunately I was able to arrange for my own antibiotics until I was able to see a doctor who wasn't a fucking moron. That other doctor ran some more blood tests and agreed with me.
Sadly, she's not covered by my ins., but she's worth going to since she isn't clueless.
I'm not one to encourage lawsuits generally but given the severity of the lapse it might be worthwhile looking into suing for malpractice. If nothing else it could (hopefully) either 1. Cause the doctor to start being more careful or 2. Get him out of the business so he doesn't end up killing someone.
At the least I'd report him to your insurance company. They might not care, but then again they might and might do something about it.
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I agree that if you buy a phone it should be your own property and you should be able to modify it as you wish, but I don't think the same holds true if you merely have your phone as part of a contract deal.
In most cases you do own the phone, the phone's a loss leader to get you to sign up with the telco's wireless service under contract. Such contracts generally include penalties for cancelling early, but those are penalties for breaking the contract. They may cover the phone's cost, but they aren't specifically noted as such and that makes all the difference. You own the phone, but you have obligations under contract. If you cancel early you pay the penalty, if not you don't.Also even if you stay with your current provider and you're at a point they deem you worthy of an upgrade you don't always have to return the old phone. If you truly didn't own the phone returning the old one would be a requirement to get an "upgrade" for free. What you basically end up doing though is sign a new contract with them and the "upgrade" phone is another loss leader.
What you're thinking of are situations where you rent the phone. I don't know that I've ever heard of a wireless telco offering a rental phone. Renting is quite common on cable/DSL modems and cable boxes though. In those cases you have to return the modem or cable box when you cancel service, even if you don't pay a penalty. If you fail to return it you have to pay for it. See the difference?
Basically the telcos want you to believe you don't own the phone so they can lock you in to their service. The reality is quite different and I doubt this telco's going to get very far in the courts.
While I don't condone academic cheating, some professors are so unreasonable in their assignments that the outcome is inevitable. (In my experience most of the proffesors giving unreasonable assignments also didn't grade on a curve and weren't just trying to push us to do more than we thought we could.) The result was groups of friends working together quietly, breaking the programming down into sections that each got working, then everyone would share. I don't know if the professors knew about it or not but most of the TAs did and didn't really care. Now in classes where assignments were reasonable, even if they were difficult and pushed our boundaries, the TAs cared about cheating a lot and punished those who cheated quite drastically.
I think part of the problem may be that many of the professors who give unreasonable assignments are used to dealing with graduate students and graduate classes where assignments are tougher (and expected to be by any realistic grad student.) They don't want to teach undergrad courses but end up being forced to and they either take out their frustration on the students or just don't bother taking into consideration that most undergrads aren't ready for graduate level work.
Then you have the professors who are absolute geniuses, and always have been. They end up teaching 100 level courses and do a horrible job simply because they've never been at that level, or if they were it didn't take them long to get past it. Basically they're almost incapable of teaching the basics because to them the basics are just common sense and everyone should have born knowing them. Most of these professors will listen if you talk to them though and will do all they can to help. I had one like this and I went to talk to him (amusingly about 8-9 friends from the class tagged along since they'd heard I was going but they all just stood around and let me do the talking, thanks guys!). He was quite receptive to what I had to say and he did make changes that helped tremendously. In the end the students were able to learn the course material, the professor learned how to teach at that level better and those of us involved in talking to him learned that at least some professors will listen to what you have to say and act on it. :) (For the record in this particular class the entire class failed to score above a 50 on the first test. We were given the test again as an open-book, open-note test and the highest score went up to only 60. The professor had let one of the TAs make out the test and for whatever reason they made it so that even graduate students would have been hard-pressed to pass it. Said TA lost their assistantship and the CS department refused to allow them to be a TA in any course ever again. I think they finally got a GRA instead.)
If it's content that is normally paid for...I don't see any problem.
Maybe someone can make an argument I understand...
I think the (unstated so far) concern is that the MPAA/RIAA (if they are behind this) might not be satisfied to stop with just poisoning torrents of illegal stuff. If their ultimate goal is to discredit Bittorrent and discourage people from using it then it's quite conceivable that they may move on to putting out poisoned torrents of legal stuff as well, all in an effort to make Bittorrent look bad. And really, given their past actions, I could see them doing just that so this does concern me. It woule be very hard to prove they were behind it and expensive to sue them to make them stop and they know it.Does that help a bit?
You just can't stop those who are determined to pirate your product no matter what. They'll always find some way to do it, all activation codes do is annoy and inconvenience your real customers, which was the point of the original poster.
Limewire doesn't have to do this to avoid trouble under the recent Supreme Court ruling. SCOTUS found that the two companies could still be held accountable for some of the infringement because they encouraged it in their marketing. If Limewire's not been encouraging downloads of illegal songs with their client they should be fine. If they have they're already screwed and this is unlikely to help much.
This means LimeWire is not encouraging nor participating in violation of copyright.
Thus Limewire hopes to survive the lawsuits to come. Actually it probably will open them up to better attack. By adding in code to prevent sharing of unlicensed material but allowing each user to decide on licensing now the RIAA can (quite rightfully) say they have the ability to block their works from being shared but since it's still happening they can be help liable. Remember what happened with Napster once they tried to implement code to block licensed songs, it was never good enough for the RIAA and Napster finally collapsed.
Frankly the RIAA is going to take this as an admission of guilt on the part of Limewire's makers. They have probably put themselves in far more danger than if they'd kept the status quo.
Parents don't help the situation any though. I can't tell you how many times a kid was sent in to buy something they weren't supposed to (even cigarettes and alcohol) only to be refused and then the parents come in pissed as hell that we wouldn't sell the movie/game/cigarettes/beer/etc. to their kids and made them come in to buy it themselves. I always checked ID for everything that was age-restricted but I know a lot of fellow employees didn't for much beyond beer and cigarettes and a few didn't for those either. We actually had more people complain to management about our denying sales to their underage kids than we did the opposite.
Don't forget the grandmother who's suing Rockstar and Take Two over the Hot Coffee debacle. Her complaint is that she didn't realize there would be such explicit sexual content in the game when she bought it for her 14 year old grandson. Do note that the M rating explicitely says 17+ on the box and the game also had a sub-warning of "strong sexual content" on it when she bought it. In my experience the problem is that parents buy these games for their kids, often refusing to listen to an explanation of what the ratings mean (this happened to me many times) then get mad later on when they realize it's not suitable for their kids -- exactly what they were told when they bought it. New laws won't stop this, they'll only cause businesses to get sued and fined when the parents are at fault. Don't think for a minute that a parent who actually bought the game and was warned only to figure out what they were trying to tell them months later won't sue/press charges against the retailer claiming they let the kid buy it instead of the parent. Stores would have to start keeping videotapes of every purchase for months just to protect themselves.
So go ahead and send him in, if he comes back out with it you might be able to get an employee fired but otherwise you won't be able to do anything, there are no laws enforcing the sale of R rated movies to kids.
To give a good example of what you're talking about, first the Wikipedia entry on Star Trek. Compare that to Memory Alpha, a Star Trek Wiki. There's detailed information on every series, races, ships, technology, you name it.
Then Cnet bought it and made it TV.com. It has flash all over the place as you noted, it loads slowly (even when not being slashdotted), a lot of the info is missing and the site, frankly, sucks. That's why someone's making a replacement for TVtome.
Your right, it is mostly my fault.. But my system is setup to handle as many editors as I need, just like wiki. I just need to get enough people to help out.. Getting people to help out isn't the real problem, your problem is you have no mechanism for telling if they'll be good help or not. At least in a Wiki you can identify the users who consistantly contribute good info/edits/etc. With your current format people can't contribute until you make them an editor. What do you do if you allow someone to be an editor then they start vandalizing your site anyway BTW? I have had this site for 4-5 years now, and this is the second version of it. The first version was very open, just like wiki, anyone could make changes when ever they wanted, it was great since I didn't have to edit anything, AT FIRST.. Then we had people adding wrong information, and kept messing everything up, so I spent a lot of time cleaning up after people and making sure the information was correct. Why were you the only one who could go through and clean up stuff that was wrong? I contribute to a Star Trek Wiki, everything I edit gets added to my watch list. I check that regularly to see what's been modified and take a look at it. If the info was modified to no longer be correct I fix it or revert the edit. Pretty much every contributor on the site does the same thing. The community polices itself and it is working quite well in fact. The admins only have to be involved to ban IPs/users who are vandalizing, then the community will go reverse the edits. (Actually we'll reverse them sooner until it becomes obvious that the person's going to keep changing them back until they're banned. Then we report the abuse to an admin and wait for the ban, then go back in and reverse the edits.) I guess there is no perfect solution, unless you can hire lots of people from india to handle all of the information and editing for your site, for cheap and you have enough money to pay for it, and get a guantee that it is correct. No, a better solution is to trust the community to take an interest in the site and keeping the content correct. If you had the vast majority of people adding incorrect info or vandalizing your original site then apparently there's not a very large community that cares about your content. Also, and I don't say this to be mean, you sound like a control freak. In all your posts on this you imply that only you really knows what is correct and incorrect. You're adding more burden to yourself because of this. I may be wrong on that, but that's how you're coming across.
Wikis are by no means perfect but they do solve the two problems you list.
Overlooking the lack of content the site has Fancy Widget Syndrome. Apparently TV.com thinks people are far, far more interested in the average viewer rating for a show/season of that show/episode than anything else about it. The rating bars are all graphical and fucking huge! The also seem to think that everyone wants lots of fancy, flashy graphics and widgets on every page. All of this makes it difficult to get the information you actually came there for, unless you visit to look at flashy graphics and viewer ratings. You also can no longer pull up a complete episode listing on one page. At best you can get one season at a time per page. With all the fancy widgets/graphics/flash/crap on the pages now it takes a good 10 times as long just to view the entire episode listing of a series.
I gave the site a chance when the transition occurred but the number of things they did wrong far outnumbered they things they did right (not hard seeing as I haven't noticed anything they did right to be frank) and I refuse to go back to it. Frankly I wouldn't mind seeing the venture fail and cost CNet a lot of money in the process. CNet took the absolute best TV resource out there and utterly destroyed it.
Also as another person noted, TVTome had a nice light, unobtrusive interface with very few graphics. Pages loaded nice and quickly, you could view entire episode lists on one page, etc. All of that's long gone now and the new site suffers tremendously for it.
I am fairly certain that signing up for a TVTome account did not say anything about your giving them copyright to your contributions. I have refused to contribute since CNet bought them out and made the bastard child that is TV.com so I know I'm not bound by CNet's TOS, no matter what they may want to think. Also the first I found out about the move was when it occurred, I never received any E-mail from TVTome and I didn't visit the site's homepage since I had bookmarked the few shows I was interested in and just went straight to them. I would hope that they at least announced the move on the homepage but I can't say for sure because I didn't visit it.
Also, in my case, I'm not going to contribute to any site the TVTome creators setup. They sold out the site once (to horrible effect I might add), why wouldn't they do it again? I've found a nice wiki that covers the series I'm interested in and contribute there. All my contributions are covered by a Creative Commons liscense and since the wiki tracks changes people can see that it was me who contributed it.
Just last week I had an X-serv I was setting up spontaneously reset the root password. Anyone who's set these up knows that the installation asks for a password for the admin user and uses the same password for root. There's no option in the setup to set them seperately. After install and booting up I could log in as the admin user but not as root. I had to boot from the install CD to reset root's password. That was a first (never had a server pull that little stunt) and it worried me quite a bit. For those who haven't dealt with X-servs and Mac OS X Server, the root user is enabled by default, you don't have to take extra steps to activate it like you do on the client version so that wasn't the problem either.
Frankly I don't understand how they do this but I've had enough cases occur that I can verify nothing was done to change the password to be certain that it's a glitch and not stupid users. It's totally random and I can't reproduce it (and apparently neither can Apple or they'd have fixed it) but it does happen.
Does File Vault rely on the user password in a way that if it's reset from CD that all the encypted data is lost? If so I'd say every Mac running File Vault's a horrible accident waiting to happen.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-5 247845,00.html
To be fair here the looters are starting to get in the way of search and rescue. There are reports of them shooting at rescue helicopters, officers and even people just trying to escape the destruction.The people who really need their viewpoint adjusted are the looters, especially the ones shooting at rescue helicopters. If they weren't doing that then it wouldn't be necessary to bother with them at this point.
Unfortunately, the RIAA goes about it in such a thuggish way that it's just an embarassment, and makes it impossible to support them. It's like saying that guns are dangerous and some people might have some without a license, and then breaking into every house within five blocks and performing a search. The ends here just do not justify the means. Not to mention that all the money from the settlements go straight into the RIAA coffers. None of it goes back to the record labels even, much less the artists. So not only are they going about this the wrong way, they're further victimizing the artists. Do you think anyone who has to settle for several thousand dollars (or more) with the RIAA, even if guilty, are going to be buying any music in the coming years? I suspect that even if they could actually afford to after the settlement that they won't be terribly inclined to support the companies who are part of the RIAA.
Down the road? Gas (87 octane unleadded) just went up 15 cents overnight. Same here (in east Tennessee). It went up 16 cents yesterday and another 8 or so today. My Dad somehow heard that it was going up first thing Tuesday morning and warned me so I was able to fill up before the big jump, but that's only a temporary measure and from everything I'm hearing in the news this is only the beginning. They're estimating over $3 a gallon as the national average in a few weeks.
What blows my mind is MSN seems to think .exe files are a-ok, but .jpg files are evil incarnate. Gotta love their security mindset.
This case does nicely show why e-cards are so potentially dangerous though.
First off the guy advertised the program solely as a product to spy on your lover or other people and did so by spamming. Secondly the software was not something the purchaser downloaded and installed on a machine on their own, it sent out an e-card, which directed the recepient/victim to visit a web site run by Perez. Said website then exploited a security hole in IE and installed the spyware in the background without any warning to the victim. Finally the software sent a copy of everything it recorded (and it even logged keystrokes) to Perez as well as the people who paid to spy on someone with it.
The FBI isn't going to need the PATRIOT Act to bust this guy and this guy's not the least bit innocent. He promptly dissapeared after they seized his computers, so it's pretty clear he knew what he was doing was illegal as well.
It must not be the same article, this one plainly explains that not only did he write the software and spam to advertise it, he ran the servers that the e-cards directed victims to and silently installed the spyware in the background without warning using an exploit in IE. He also had the software send him a copy of everything as well as to the idiots who paid him to infect others with it. So he wrote the code, spammed to get customers for the code and then ran the servers that hijacked the victims computers. It's pretty clear cut that he wasn't an innocent coder! It's very plainly a case of someone breaking laws and finally getting caught. On a side not, this company started in 2001 - took 4 years for the FBI to notice & catch him. Kind of funny. What I find amusing is that the feds were tipped off to what he was doing by a complaint about his spam. If he hadn't spammed to advertise his scummy product he might have gotten away with it a while longer.
He also had things setup so that the software sent him copies of everything it sent the people who paid to spy on someone with it. He used spam to advertise his program as well (in fact the article says it was a spam complaint that tipped authorities off on what he was doing.) And finally he promptly vanished after he knew the feds were on to him and seized his computers. Obviously he knew he was going to be charged.
The end users are scumbags for using the service, but it's the guy who wrote it and put it up on the website and caused victims' computers to be compromised who is the guilty party here. This has nothing to do with distributing software. Don't forget the part towards the end where it points out that the author received all the info from the program that the scumbags who paid to have it sent to someone did. The program even monitored everything typed on the keyboard. Also he spammed to advertise the software and after the feds seized his computers promptly dissapeared. They guy's not a victim here, he's getting what he deserves.
If management is basing their opinions on geeks social and writing skills on their postings on /., or other similar sites, then they've got a major problem. It's quite likely that they'll jump to (incorrect) conclusions in other areas as well, areas that it's important they not do so. That's a lot of where the whole concept of clueless bosses (aka PHBs) comes from -- management that does indeed jump to conclusions incorrectly because they can't be bothered, or simply can't tell, what is really important and what's not.
Which would you rather have as an employee? I know I'd pick the geek spelling poorly on /. as long as he spells fine when it counts. I can very much do without people who jump to conclusions without proper facts.
Unfortunately it does seem that in most companies upper management prefers to hire management that jumps to conclusions readily. Why this is I have no real clue (seeing as I haven't tried to get a MBA I can't legitmately comment on the idea that MBA programs create this kind of attitude) but it hurts companies a lot. Sadly the companies hurt the worst by it seem to have all upper management that's the same way so they never realize it until it's too late.
Sadly, she's not covered by my ins., but she's worth going to since she isn't clueless.
I'm not one to encourage lawsuits generally but given the severity of the lapse it might be worthwhile looking into suing for malpractice. If nothing else it could (hopefully) either 1. Cause the doctor to start being more careful or 2. Get him out of the business so he doesn't end up killing someone.At the least I'd report him to your insurance company. They might not care, but then again they might and might do something about it.