Not sure why, but this reminds me of some of my favourite SMAC quotes:
I think, and my thoughts cross the barrier into the synapses of the machine, just as the good doctor intended. But what I cannot shake, and what hints at things to come, is that thoughts cross back. In my dreams, the sensibility of the machine invades the periphery of my consciousness: dark, rigid, cold, alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen.
Commissioner Pravin Lal
"Man and Machine"
The Warrior's bland acronym, MMI, obscures the true horror of this monstrosity. Its inventors promise a new era of genius, but meanwhile unscrupulous power brokers use its forcible installation to violate the sanctity of unwilling human minds. They are creating their own private army of demons.
I think the greater crime here was the taking of the domains, even though they were paid up and entirely uninvolved in the disputed transactions. I would have liked to have pursued this in the New Jersey courts, but really didn't have time to take it up at the time. I was just thinking about this the other day. Maybe I should re-visit the issue.
I believe that "taking" of this nature is illegal and would have liked to have had a day in court to find out for sure.
I completely agree. This is what I meant by blatantly infringing the terms of service of their merchant services provider - you simply can't levee additional charges on a customer to compensate you for a chargeback; you have to seek legal redress if you lose the arbitration.
To be honest I'd never heard of registerfly before this slashdot story, and I had the impression they were smaller than they are. All I know is that if we tried to pull a stunt like that we'd probably now be looking to integrate a "pay by cheque" method into our carts..
If the use was fraudulent, as the merchant I have absolutely no way to know that--that's why I'm asking Visa/Mastercard for authorization. If they authorize the charge then they think it's legitimate, too, so why should the merchant somehow be expected to think otherwise or be held responsible for 100% of the chargeback?
You have to look at it from the other perspective though - like any merchant I'm sure you receive your share of obvious frauds (the ones you delete without even turning on your brain - 400 units of $expensive_product to Lagos etc). Maybe you're honest enough to still decline them if you knew you'd get the money, but lets face it many aren't.
At the end of the day, the merchant knows their business, and is by far the best situation to spot fraud attempts, and I don't have any problem with the majority of the risk being taken by us.
What gets to me is the total lack of interest from merchant service providers. I do think it would be better if they bore a small percentage of the risk; 10% at most, maybe 5%. Then they might actually start to care, and if they care then maybe the police would.
Some friends of mine still tell a story from pre-internet days: an obviously fraudulent order was reported to the police, who actually took action(!) Two police officers dressed as couriers delivered a fake parcel and nicked the thief when he signed for it.
This is what really gets me about internet/mail-order fraud. The risks would be huge if the police gave a shit, since frequently it is blatantly obvious, and the thief has given the place and time he's going to receive the goods, and all that has to be done is turn up and put cuffs on him. No-one cares though.
Your surely not trying to claim that people read digg for the comments..? The mind boggles!
I would have thought you'd have a higher percentage of people RTFAing on Digg, simply because there isn't really anything else they'd want to do there Certianly applies to all (five or so) people I know who visit Digg.
Just curious, but there seem to be a number of posts about these guys playing fast and loose with peoples credit cards; has anyone tried to complain to whoever provides their card services (or Visa/MasterCard directly)? What parent describes is a blatant violation of the contract they will have signed to allow them to accept card payments, and the card companies and merchant services providers have very little patience for small businesses doing this sort of thing.
But you miss the BIG PICTURE - MAN is evil, and more importantly CAPITALISM is unnatural and the USS are the Great Satan!
sigh.. do you always form your judgements on an idea based on the opinions of it's nuttiest supporters. Yes there are vocal people who believe pretty much what you say - given that you don't respect their opinions (who does?) why do you let them influence your thinking on this issue?
It's like saying open source is made by evil anarchists because some idiot teenager DOSed SCO's website.
It seems a little strange how atheists are very keen to strike down the pointless values of religion, yet still believe in many aspects which have no basis.
Is a fair point. Have you ever heard of humanism? You could probably characterise it as a religion without either God or spirituality. I've always found it rather attractive, I'm not exactly sure why.
Oh, I dunno... Did it scare anyone away from Microsoft when the Cubans were using Windows?
Ah, but that was Microsoft gallantly educating the poor benighted communists in the joys of capitalist freedom. This shows that OSS is a communist fifth column inside the USA.
Bull. Plenty of people who know about it spent money to get it fixed. Not all managers are fools. At my work, we got no extra money to fix Y2K bugs. We were just expected to work harder and get the bugs fixed in time.
Fair enough - I know no more than I saw on the news. But why haven't these people come out strongly to defend the money they spent? The general reaction afterwards seemed to be a general embarrassed shrug.
I'm just suspicious - if it looks like a con job, walks like a con job and quacks like a con job, it seems reasonable to ask if it was in fact a con job. If it wasn't, it seems reasonable that someone would be able to provide evidence to refute the allegation.
There was a really interesting article What's wrong with intelligent design in the Christian Science Monitor (for any who don't know the publication, ignore the name, it's not what you think).
The problem with this argument is that it requires making the case that intelligent design is not science. And the intelligibility of that task depends on the possibility of drawing a line between science and non-science. The prospects for this are dim. Twentieth-century philosophy of science is littered with the smoldering remains of attempts to do just that.
...
I think there are two reasons why people shy away from this way of viewing the matter. First, if you call intelligent design "poor science," then it seems you've allowed intelligent design a foot in the door by accepting that it's science. Science versus non-science seems like a much sharper dichotomy than better versus worse science. The first holds out the prospect of an "objective" test, while the second calls for "subjective" judgment. But there is no such test, and our reliance on judgment is inescapable. We should be less proprietorial about the unhelpful moniker "science" but insist that only the best science be taught in our schools.
But what you are asking us [ie people who know crap all about Y2K] to believe is that the fear was so intense that every important computer system everywhere was patched. The obvious doubt is that this seems very unlikely; that kind of efficiency is not frequent in human affairs.
Since the only people who really know about it are the people who made money out of it, it's hard to accept a claim of "we all just did our jobs and saved the world."
It's defined as a discrepancy between expected and actual outcomes.
Well the actual word you used previously was "incongruity." This can simply mean "not congruent" but I think can also carry a heavier implication - not only does it not fit, but it is in sharp opposition to what was expected. This is the meaning that the word takes in the irony definition I think.
I had a little look into definitions myself, and I found this usage note for 'ironic' on answers.com.
USAGE NOTE The words ironic, irony, and ironically are sometimes used of events and circumstances that might better be described as simply "coincidental" or "improbable," in that they suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly. Thus 78 percent of the Usage Panel rejects the use of ironically in the sentence In 1969 Susie moved from Ithaca to California where she met her husband-to-be, who, ironically, also came from upstate New York. Some Panelists noted that this particular usage might be acceptable if Susie had in fact moved to California in order to find a husband, in which case the story could be taken as exemplifying the folly of supposing that we can know what fate has in store for us. By contrast, 73 percent accepted the sentence Ironically, even as the government was fulminating against American policy, American jeans and videocassettes were the hottest items in the stalls of the market, where the incongruity can be seen as an example of human inconsistency.
I didn't expect that, so perhaps sun on my wedding day was ironic.
I think you'd need something extra to qualify as irony - if you'd specifically planned an indoor wedding to avoid the rain, or had provided all your guests with umbrellas, then it might be ironic.
Going back to Alanis, the only ironic thing about the song was that it didn't actually contain any examples of irony: ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife isn't ironic, it's just stupid. If you find out the next day that a spoon would have done the job.. that's irony. (this is lifted from some stand-up guy's routine, but his name escapes me)
I don't think it's something that can, or even should be fixed. The important thing is to stop the big players abusing their position (fuzzy definition though that is).
While it's nice to blame Walmart or Tesco or whoever for everything, it needs to be remembered that a business does not have an automatic right of survival just because it's small and expensive;)
A small business needs to have a reason for people to use them, just like anyone else. Businesses go to the wall all the time, every one is not a tragedy.
But please do explain to me how something others provide to you can be your right?
It requires a shift in perception - you are looking at a nation purely as an association of individuals, equal and free to enter contracts. Looked at like this then Healthcare (and also many other things such as security and policing I would argue) cannot be viewed as rights.
But not everyone looks at things like this, particularly Europeans. If you conceive of a society as a whole, it is a small step to see inequalities that are more than just differing rewards in a free market. Letting people die for lack of healthcare *that can easilly be afforded by society as a whole* is wrong from this viewpoint. Healthcare becomes a right.
So what's your definition of a "legitimate religion," and why doesn't Scientology fit it?
A religion that is not clearly illegitimate. There is no easy definition of what makes a religion legitimate, but there are clearly illegitimate religions. Scientology being a prime example.
Except that there are tons of people that have done just that, put OS X on non-vanilla boxes, and I'm pretty sure, a ton of those people ended up going out and buying a real mac because they enjoyed it so much.
Lets see, average weight of a geek, say 150lb. 2 tons = 4000lb, so to make your statement literally true there would need to be around 26-27 people who've installed OS X on PC hardware, and 13-14 who've then gone out and bought a Mac.
That seems likely to be higher than the real figure to me, maybe they're all very fat?
Agree BUT it's actually a good article for it's target market - companies engaging in low-level spam who don't think of themselves as spammers.
What we're talking about are companies (probably small or small-ish) who have lax email newsletter policies. You may think of them as spammers, but they don't - spammers are those sending viagra and porn, they are sending interesting information about their company to people who are mostly interested.
You don't convince companies like that by shouting YOU'RE A SPAMMER at them. They won't bother to listen, because they know they're not. Gently explaining to them exactly where they are going wrong is an approach that may actually work.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you nicked a box set from a shop, then you haven't taken any goods - ie not theft, it's a civil offence of copyright infringment.
I agree it's a nitpick and not a justification for copying Vista, but it is a llegitimate response to the "Copyright is Theft" slogan.
Not sure why, but this reminds me of some of my favourite SMAC quotes:
Commissioner Pravin Lal"Man and Machine"
Commissioner Pravin Lal
"Report on Human Rights"
I'm pretty sure that Intel Macs can boot from USB 2.0 as well - they're cheaper and compatible with a wider range of computers.
I completely agree. This is what I meant by blatantly infringing the terms of service of their merchant services provider - you simply can't levee additional charges on a customer to compensate you for a chargeback; you have to seek legal redress if you lose the arbitration.
To be honest I'd never heard of registerfly before this slashdot story, and I had the impression they were smaller than they are. All I know is that if we tried to pull a stunt like that we'd probably now be looking to integrate a "pay by cheque" method into our carts..
You have to look at it from the other perspective though - like any merchant I'm sure you receive your share of obvious frauds (the ones you delete without even turning on your brain - 400 units of $expensive_product to Lagos etc). Maybe you're honest enough to still decline them if you knew you'd get the money, but lets face it many aren't.
At the end of the day, the merchant knows their business, and is by far the best situation to spot fraud attempts, and I don't have any problem with the majority of the risk being taken by us.
What gets to me is the total lack of interest from merchant service providers. I do think it would be better if they bore a small percentage of the risk; 10% at most, maybe 5%. Then they might actually start to care, and if they care then maybe the police would.
Some friends of mine still tell a story from pre-internet days: an obviously fraudulent order was reported to the police, who actually took action(!) Two police officers dressed as couriers delivered a fake parcel and nicked the thief when he signed for it.
This is what really gets me about internet/mail-order fraud. The risks would be huge if the police gave a shit, since frequently it is blatantly obvious, and the thief has given the place and time he's going to receive the goods, and all that has to be done is turn up and put cuffs on him. No-one cares though.
Your surely not trying to claim that people read digg for the comments..? The mind boggles!
I would have thought you'd have a higher percentage of people RTFAing on Digg, simply because there isn't really anything else they'd want to do there Certianly applies to all (five or so) people I know who visit Digg.
Just curious, but there seem to be a number of posts about these guys playing fast and loose with peoples credit cards; has anyone tried to complain to whoever provides their card services (or Visa/MasterCard directly)? What parent describes is a blatant violation of the contract they will have signed to allow them to accept card payments, and the card companies and merchant services providers have very little patience for small businesses doing this sort of thing.
sigh.. do you always form your judgements on an idea based on the opinions of it's nuttiest supporters. Yes there are vocal people who believe pretty much what you say - given that you don't respect their opinions (who does?) why do you let them influence your thinking on this issue?
It's like saying open source is made by evil anarchists because some idiot teenager DOSed SCO's website.
Ah, but that was Microsoft gallantly educating the poor benighted communists in the joys of capitalist freedom. This shows that OSS is a communist fifth column inside the USA.
Can't you tell the difference?
Fair enough - I know no more than I saw on the news. But why haven't these people come out strongly to defend the money they spent? The general reaction afterwards seemed to be a general embarrassed shrug.
I'm just suspicious - if it looks like a con job, walks like a con job and quacks like a con job, it seems reasonable to ask if it was in fact a con job. If it wasn't, it seems reasonable that someone would be able to provide evidence to refute the allegation.
...
It's well worth a read.
But what you are asking us [ie people who know crap all about Y2K] to believe is that the fear was so intense that every important computer system everywhere was patched. The obvious doubt is that this seems very unlikely; that kind of efficiency is not frequent in human affairs.
Since the only people who really know about it are the people who made money out of it, it's hard to accept a claim of "we all just did our jobs and saved the world."
Oh fuck. I swear I thought Venus was a girl..
Well the actual word you used previously was "incongruity." This can simply mean "not congruent" but I think can also carry a heavier implication - not only does it not fit, but it is in sharp opposition to what was expected. This is the meaning that the word takes in the irony definition I think.
I had a little look into definitions myself, and I found this usage note for 'ironic' on answers.com.
I think you'd need something extra to qualify as irony - if you'd specifically planned an indoor wedding to avoid the rain, or had provided all your guests with umbrellas, then it might be ironic.
Going back to Alanis, the only ironic thing about the song was that it didn't actually contain any examples of irony: ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife isn't ironic, it's just stupid. If you find out the next day that a spoon would have done the job.. that's irony. (this is lifted from some stand-up guy's routine, but his name escapes me)
sign.. rain on your wedding day obviously. Maybe this qualifies as ironic?
For fucks sake Alanis, how many times. Sunshine on your wedding day is only ironic if you're marrying a weather man and he sets the date.
Otherwise it's just bloody annoying.
I don't think it's something that can, or even should be fixed. The important thing is to stop the big players abusing their position (fuzzy definition though that is).
;)
While it's nice to blame Walmart or Tesco or whoever for everything, it needs to be remembered that a business does not have an automatic right of survival just because it's small and expensive
A small business needs to have a reason for people to use them, just like anyone else. Businesses go to the wall all the time, every one is not a tragedy.
Imagine standing on a pile of turtles so big that you can't see the bottom.
It requires a shift in perception - you are looking at a nation purely as an association of individuals, equal and free to enter contracts. Looked at like this then Healthcare (and also many other things such as security and policing I would argue) cannot be viewed as rights.
But not everyone looks at things like this, particularly Europeans. If you conceive of a society as a whole, it is a small step to see inequalities that are more than just differing rewards in a free market. Letting people die for lack of healthcare *that can easilly be afforded by society as a whole* is wrong from this viewpoint. Healthcare becomes a right.
More like a joint stock venture..
A religion that is not clearly illegitimate. There is no easy definition of what makes a religion legitimate, but there are clearly illegitimate religions. Scientology being a prime example.
Lets see, average weight of a geek, say 150lb. 2 tons = 4000lb, so to make your statement literally true there would need to be around 26-27 people who've installed OS X on PC hardware, and 13-14 who've then gone out and bought a Mac.
That seems likely to be higher than the real figure to me, maybe they're all very fat?
Agree BUT it's actually a good article for it's target market - companies engaging in low-level spam who don't think of themselves as spammers.
What we're talking about are companies (probably small or small-ish) who have lax email newsletter policies. You may think of them as spammers, but they don't - spammers are those sending viagra and porn, they are sending interesting information about their company to people who are mostly interested.
You don't convince companies like that by shouting YOU'RE A SPAMMER at them. They won't bother to listen, because they know they're not. Gently explaining to them exactly where they are going wrong is an approach that may actually work.