The idea that the owner of a piece of equipment is liable for someone else's unauthorized use of it, simply won't fly.
The fact that the submitter admits that his roommate downloads copyrighted material, allows him to continue using the shared internet connection, and then uses "Ask Slashdot" to ask about liability pretty much means that the owner IS authorizing his roommate to use his ISP in this manner. He's just looking for a way to cover his ass when his roommate gets caught.
If the roommate uses something of yours in a manner that YOU aren't comfortable with then the roommate needs to get his own thing to use as he likes. It's bad enough he is leeching off of the copyright owners, why allow him to leech off you and leave you holding the bag? Looking at his current behavior do you really think he cares about YOUR legal liability? Do you think he will pay your legal fees to contest your liability?
Tell you roommate to pay for his own internet or fuck off. It may be cheaper for you in the end. This is regardless of the prevailing opinion about file sharing on Slashdot.
I just checked and Virgin Mobile's $35/month plan now only have 300 minutes of talk. This is not a problem if you use Google Talk. They used to have an unlimited everything plan for $55/first month, $45/second month, and $35/month after three months. They may still have it, no harm in checking. Virgin Mobile always come up with some nice promotions, just keep an out for them.
I don't know how good their customer service is. I had a prepaid plan when I was working outside the US for 3 months, and while the actual prepaid service was nice the customer service was bizarre and I never fully understood their weird crediting scheme (e.g. get $350 credit after refilling for $25 but only can use the free credit on certain types of calls).
BTW, T-Mobile went out of their way to unlock my brand new phone so I could use a competitor while overseas.
If you like pays as you go, then stick with someone like virgin mobile. I think they have an unlimited data, talk, and messaging plan for like $35 bucks. I have a family plan with 4 people, so it's cheaper for me to stick with T-Mobile (well at least until ATT).
One more thing. T-Mobile had a $5 unlimited web plan that was designed around WAP phones. I had this plan until recently when I foolishly switched to an Android phone. Foolishly meaning I gave up the $5 plan by purchasing the phone through T-Mobile instead of buying one off of E-Bay. I was able to tether to my old phone through bluetooth and enjoy blazing 2G speeds without caps (well it's so slow I doubt its even possible to reach a cap during a single billing cycle).
The only saving grace being that T-Mobile customer service still rocks and they graciously grand fathered me into a nice 4G unlimited plan that's cheaper than the current plan and has a much higher data cap. I sure will miss them after ATT fucks them up.
They won't have to turn it off. They just have to block Smozzy. They can do this now without changing their TOS and without the regular users of SMS/MMS noticing. In fact other than Snozzy airing their complaints on twitter or slashdot, I don't think many will care.
Nice trick. Harkens back to the pre-2G days of the WAP.
Unlimited internet is $20 with a 2GB cap. Once you reached the 2GB cap, you can still browse the internet for free just with a slower connection. I'm sure the slower connection is still faster than using SMS.
The problem is that the victim is often not punished enough by the criminal act.
The victim should NOT be punished for a criminal act performed against them. However the victim may be financially liable for any losses incurred by third-parties who suffered from any negligence of the victim. Also there are laws already on the books in the US that sets standards on how certain types of data should be secured (medical, financial, etc).
I don't know what else you desire. Aggressively prosecuting hackers is a step in the right direction. We have an overabundance of lawyers that take care of the negligence part.
So, if New York were to pass a law requiring all residents of California pay New York income taxes, then Californians would be dodging that tax by trying to get that law overturned?
It appears that you don't fully understand the situation. Amazon has a physical presence in California. Amazon is required by law to collect California sales taxes. Amazon refused to pay said taxes and tried to lobby for a law giving them special status. It is accurate to call Amazon a "tax dodge".
There are other companies that have a physical presence in most of the 50 states and they have no problems collecting the required sales taxes. Apple and QVC are two examples.
Except that defacing a website is exactly trivial. There is time and money lost while the server(s) are down while the IT staff make sure that nothing more serious transpired.
Lame argument. The victim is already punished by the criminal act. There is nothing wrong with "throwing the book" at a "hacker". You haven't proven that the criminal act is less culpable. You only tried to blame the victim for the criminal's action.
Let me put it another way, if the victim was more vigilant with his/her cyber security the hacker would either find another target or work harder to counter the security measures. The victim may change, but the criminal stays the same. The point being that regardless of the victim's actions the hacker is still the criminal and should be punished.
Preventive measures are always a good thing. The lack of preventive measures do not justify the crime.
We don't manufacture anything in North America anymore because we have environmental regulations that cost billions of dollars to comply with...
That is not true. We manufacture a lot in the US. We just ceded the manufacturing of electronic consumer items to the asian market because they enjoy a geographical advantage since most of the electronics and injected plastic foundries are located nearby. It's much cheaper to have the items assembled in Asia and shipped to the US, than shipping the individual parts.
Automobile Manufacturers moved their automobile assembly plants to the US (the southeast in particular) and part manufacturers have relocated near these plants to supply them. A large percentage of commercial aircraft is built in the US again with suppliers located within the country to supply these plants. Sure the textile mills have closed and we buy way too much crap at Walmart that is manufactured overseas, but this doesn't mean the US has fallen behind in manufactured goods. It just means that we produce items with much larger markup than a piece of electronics.
I like our environmental regulations. I guess I'm just old enough to remember all of those EPA superfund cleanup sites that were all over the fucking place during the late 70's and all through the 80's. Anyway the environmental regulations are only a small portion of the manufacturing costs and are being used as a scape goat to gain political points to weaken or even eliminate the EPA. The Kohke brothers are behind this lobbying campaign. Not because they are upset about all the chinese crap at Walmart, but because the EPA had the nerve to tell them not to discharge pollutants into the rivers from their paper plants, or stop clear cutting huge tracts of old growth forests. Kohke brothers own Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster Carpet, not to mention some oil refineries.
I wouldn't put it past the weather channel, but local weather news is even worse. There is a weatherman in North Alabama that will issue his own warnings in order to scoop the other TV station's news show.
The weather channel is so useless that I just monitor NOAA weather and http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ website. I'll never forget the piece of shit reporter from TWC who made a sensational story after a hurricane in Gulf Shores, AL while parked in front of the only neighborhood with standing water. The hurricane had downgraded significantly prior to landfall, and the reporter must have had a need to juice up the story. Anyway there were only a total of 5 houses that had standing water in them, but the reporter gave the impression that it was a regional disaster in the making.
The bottom line is it was expected to strengthen before landfall.
Who predicted this? I looked at the NOAA advisories and the forecast advisory made on Friday morning shows a possible windspeed of 95 KT, and the forecast advisory made on Saturday morning at 5AM EDT shows a prediction of 80 KT wind.
I looked back on Thursday morning at 5AM EDT shows a prediction of 100 KT winds (115 MPH). Here is the relevant section of the forecast discussion on Thursday:
A Hurricane Hunter Aircraft Investigating Irene A Few Hours Ago
Found That The Central Pressure Had Dropped To 950 Mb.
However...Flight-Level And Sfmr-Observed Surface Wind Data
Supported A Current Intensity Of No More Than 100 Kt...And This Is
Probably Generous. It Is Presumed That The Intensification Process
Was Halted By An Eyewall Replacement Event As Suggested By
Microwave Imagery And Aircraft Observations. Since The Environment
Appears To Be Conducive With Weak Shear...Warm Waters...And An
Upper-Level Outflow Anticyclone Over The Hurricane...The Official
Forecast Shows Re-Strengthening Within A Day Or So. After A Couple
Of Days...The Ships Guidance Shows A Significant Increase In
Vertical Shear...So A Steady Decrease In Intensity Is Likely.
However...Since Irene Has Such A Large And Intense Circulation...It
Will Probably Be Rather Slow To Weaken. Given The Limitations In
Our Ability To Predict Intensity Change...There Is Significant
Uncertainty As To Just How Strong Irene Will Be When It Nears The
Eastern And Northeastern U.S. Coast.
Because moon phases and tides are notoriously hard to predict.
What does predicting moon phases and tides have to do with the parent's post? I think we all know he meant that it was lucky that when the storm made landfall it was during low tide. Not that low tide was hard to predict.
Now predicting when and where a hurricane will make landfall and the wind category, resulting storm surge, and flooding from torrential rains IS notorious hard to predict. They make it look easy from all the modeling that they do behind the scenes. It still isn't very accurate and is why most model graphics show an increasing amount of uncertainty the farther from the current storm position.
Real men program directly in binary and enter the code with toggle switches.
I know what you mean. I fell for the columnated paper to write out the fortran 77 code years ago, and after being stuck with all those pads I decided to wait and see how long the text editor fad lasts.;)
Sure its fine if you don't need it to be faster than python (or pypy) but changes like these (yes you could pretended they don't exist and then it may not matter) were to accumulate it could hurt the language rather than make it better.
Java 7 is significantly faster than Python 3, so I don't know where you are getting your information.
Assuming that Java programs do run (insignificantly) slower, it makes C++ and its dev's all that more important.
If speed is really an issue then I would write those portions in C. Anyway I have many lines of C++ code floating around in a lot of embedded systems, and I haven't been harmed while programming in Java (or any other language).
If portability was important and I could take a slight hit in speed, then I would choose Java.
If speed was important and resources are low then I would choose C.
If speed was important and there's a need for OO to manage the complexity then I would chose C++.
If "glue" code needed to be created and speed was not being considered then I would pick Perl, Python, or Ruby (Perl is the language most used for this).
If I needed to make a dynamic website and I wanted to use a web framework to keep my workload manageable I would pick Python or Ruby.
I'd be more worried about paying $9 to $12 a kilogram for bananas than how much iTunes charges for songs. Seriously, I'm surprised the produce section of the local Woolworths did not have a financing department.
I launch (fly? whatever) scientific balloons with a gondola of at least 6000 Lbs. I'm sure the passenger craft will be substantially larger but the principles should be similar enough to design. I've had one balloon fail during flight. It was a tear along the bottom portion of the balloon. Since the balloons I use are zero-pressure helium balloons, the gondola was able to float away from the general population and once the gondola was within a safe landing zone the it was separated from the balloon and parachuted to the ground. They don't pop in the traditional since.
I have three gondola frames where I work that we fly. One is around 20 years old and have flown multiple science missions, one is around 10 years old and have flown at least 4 missions, and the third only flew once (it doesn't have az-ev pointing like the other two). They land pretty much intact and ready for disassembly until the next flight.
This is the company that built Silicon Valley and for decades was the benchmark for tech innovation, and it's so painful to watch them floundering like this.
Too bad those divisions were spun off years ago. HP lost its way with Fiorina and never found it.
What about the other Android powered tablets that are not making their sales goal?
Besides WebOS was bring something unique to the market not yet another android tablet. HP just did a half ass job of building market traction. HP never really did well in the consumer market. They used to have the majority of the laser printer market, yet they allowed others to step in and take market share away. After spinning off all their profitable divisions in the past, I don't think HP really knows what they want.
Maybe it's your bank that should be losing users. If they don't keep up with browser developments, they most likely will be lacking in their security developments as well? Myself I'd expect chrome, safari and the (almost) latest firefox on the list of supported browsers of any bank that I would take seriously.
Why blame the bank? I only consider browsers that manage their updates responsibly and place standards compatibility above eye candy. Not saying I mind UI improvements. As long as the UI improvements don't break compatibility with websites or add ons that gave the browser an edge over the other browsers in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that the submitter admits that his roommate downloads copyrighted material, allows him to continue using the shared internet connection, and then uses "Ask Slashdot" to ask about liability pretty much means that the owner IS authorizing his roommate to use his ISP in this manner. He's just looking for a way to cover his ass when his roommate gets caught.
If the roommate uses something of yours in a manner that YOU aren't comfortable with then the roommate needs to get his own thing to use as he likes. It's bad enough he is leeching off of the copyright owners, why allow him to leech off you and leave you holding the bag? Looking at his current behavior do you really think he cares about YOUR legal liability? Do you think he will pay your legal fees to contest your liability?
Tell you roommate to pay for his own internet or fuck off. It may be cheaper for you in the end. This is regardless of the prevailing opinion about file sharing on Slashdot.
I just checked and Virgin Mobile's $35/month plan now only have 300 minutes of talk. This is not a problem if you use Google Talk. They used to have an unlimited everything plan for $55/first month, $45/second month, and $35/month after three months. They may still have it, no harm in checking. Virgin Mobile always come up with some nice promotions, just keep an out for them.
I don't know how good their customer service is. I had a prepaid plan when I was working outside the US for 3 months, and while the actual prepaid service was nice the customer service was bizarre and I never fully understood their weird crediting scheme (e.g. get $350 credit after refilling for $25 but only can use the free credit on certain types of calls).
BTW, T-Mobile went out of their way to unlock my brand new phone so I could use a competitor while overseas.
Check out the Federal HIPAA regulations for medical records. Here is a site listing their recent enforcements:
HIPAA enforcements
If you like pays as you go, then stick with someone like virgin mobile. I think they have an unlimited data, talk, and messaging plan for like $35 bucks. I have a family plan with 4 people, so it's cheaper for me to stick with T-Mobile (well at least until ATT).
Because not liking JS makes you look cool?
I take the Stephen Stills' approach to programming language: If you can't be with your dream programming language, just use the one you're with. :)
One more thing. T-Mobile had a $5 unlimited web plan that was designed around WAP phones. I had this plan until recently when I foolishly switched to an Android phone. Foolishly meaning I gave up the $5 plan by purchasing the phone through T-Mobile instead of buying one off of E-Bay. I was able to tether to my old phone through bluetooth and enjoy blazing 2G speeds without caps (well it's so slow I doubt its even possible to reach a cap during a single billing cycle).
The only saving grace being that T-Mobile customer service still rocks and they graciously grand fathered me into a nice 4G unlimited plan that's cheaper than the current plan and has a much higher data cap. I sure will miss them after ATT fucks them up.
They won't have to turn it off. They just have to block Smozzy. They can do this now without changing their TOS and without the regular users of SMS/MMS noticing. In fact other than Snozzy airing their complaints on twitter or slashdot, I don't think many will care.
Nice trick. Harkens back to the pre-2G days of the WAP.
Unlimited internet is $20 with a 2GB cap. Once you reached the 2GB cap, you can still browse the internet for free just with a slower connection. I'm sure the slower connection is still faster than using SMS.
The victim should NOT be punished for a criminal act performed against them. However the victim may be financially liable for any losses incurred by third-parties who suffered from any negligence of the victim. Also there are laws already on the books in the US that sets standards on how certain types of data should be secured (medical, financial, etc).
I don't know what else you desire. Aggressively prosecuting hackers is a step in the right direction. We have an overabundance of lawyers that take care of the negligence part.
It appears that you don't fully understand the situation. Amazon has a physical presence in California. Amazon is required by law to collect California sales taxes. Amazon refused to pay said taxes and tried to lobby for a law giving them special status. It is accurate to call Amazon a "tax dodge".
There are other companies that have a physical presence in most of the 50 states and they have no problems collecting the required sales taxes. Apple and QVC are two examples.
Should have read "Except that defacing a website ISN'T exactly trivial."
Need more coffee....
Except that defacing a website is exactly trivial. There is time and money lost while the server(s) are down while the IT staff make sure that nothing more serious transpired.
Lame argument. The victim is already punished by the criminal act. There is nothing wrong with "throwing the book" at a "hacker". You haven't proven that the criminal act is less culpable. You only tried to blame the victim for the criminal's action.
Let me put it another way, if the victim was more vigilant with his/her cyber security the hacker would either find another target or work harder to counter the security measures. The victim may change, but the criminal stays the same. The point being that regardless of the victim's actions the hacker is still the criminal and should be punished.
Preventive measures are always a good thing. The lack of preventive measures do not justify the crime.
That is not true. We manufacture a lot in the US. We just ceded the manufacturing of electronic consumer items to the asian market because they enjoy a geographical advantage since most of the electronics and injected plastic foundries are located nearby. It's much cheaper to have the items assembled in Asia and shipped to the US, than shipping the individual parts.
Automobile Manufacturers moved their automobile assembly plants to the US (the southeast in particular) and part manufacturers have relocated near these plants to supply them. A large percentage of commercial aircraft is built in the US again with suppliers located within the country to supply these plants. Sure the textile mills have closed and we buy way too much crap at Walmart that is manufactured overseas, but this doesn't mean the US has fallen behind in manufactured goods. It just means that we produce items with much larger markup than a piece of electronics.
I like our environmental regulations. I guess I'm just old enough to remember all of those EPA superfund cleanup sites that were all over the fucking place during the late 70's and all through the 80's. Anyway the environmental regulations are only a small portion of the manufacturing costs and are being used as a scape goat to gain political points to weaken or even eliminate the EPA. The Kohke brothers are behind this lobbying campaign. Not because they are upset about all the chinese crap at Walmart, but because the EPA had the nerve to tell them not to discharge pollutants into the rivers from their paper plants, or stop clear cutting huge tracts of old growth forests. Kohke brothers own Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster Carpet, not to mention some oil refineries.
I wouldn't put it past the weather channel, but local weather news is even worse. There is a weatherman in North Alabama that will issue his own warnings in order to scoop the other TV station's news show.
The weather channel is so useless that I just monitor NOAA weather and http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ website. I'll never forget the piece of shit reporter from TWC who made a sensational story after a hurricane in Gulf Shores, AL while parked in front of the only neighborhood with standing water. The hurricane had downgraded significantly prior to landfall, and the reporter must have had a need to juice up the story. Anyway there were only a total of 5 houses that had standing water in them, but the reporter gave the impression that it was a regional disaster in the making.
Who predicted this? I looked at the NOAA advisories and the forecast advisory made on Friday morning shows a possible windspeed of 95 KT, and the forecast advisory made on Saturday morning at 5AM EDT shows a prediction of 80 KT wind.
I looked back on Thursday morning at 5AM EDT shows a prediction of 100 KT winds (115 MPH). Here is the relevant section of the forecast discussion on Thursday:
A Hurricane Hunter Aircraft Investigating Irene A Few Hours Ago Found That The Central Pressure Had Dropped To 950 Mb. However...Flight-Level And Sfmr-Observed Surface Wind Data Supported A Current Intensity Of No More Than 100 Kt...And This Is Probably Generous. It Is Presumed That The Intensification Process Was Halted By An Eyewall Replacement Event As Suggested By Microwave Imagery And Aircraft Observations. Since The Environment Appears To Be Conducive With Weak Shear...Warm Waters...And An Upper-Level Outflow Anticyclone Over The Hurricane...The Official Forecast Shows Re-Strengthening Within A Day Or So. After A Couple Of Days...The Ships Guidance Shows A Significant Increase In Vertical Shear...So A Steady Decrease In Intensity Is Likely. However...Since Irene Has Such A Large And Intense Circulation...It Will Probably Be Rather Slow To Weaken. Given The Limitations In Our Ability To Predict Intensity Change...There Is Significant Uncertainty As To Just How Strong Irene Will Be When It Nears The Eastern And Northeastern U.S. Coast.
What does predicting moon phases and tides have to do with the parent's post? I think we all know he meant that it was lucky that when the storm made landfall it was during low tide. Not that low tide was hard to predict.
Now predicting when and where a hurricane will make landfall and the wind category, resulting storm surge, and flooding from torrential rains IS notorious hard to predict. They make it look easy from all the modeling that they do behind the scenes. It still isn't very accurate and is why most model graphics show an increasing amount of uncertainty the farther from the current storm position.
I know what you mean. I fell for the columnated paper to write out the fortran 77 code years ago, and after being stuck with all those pads I decided to wait and see how long the text editor fad lasts. ;)
Java 7 is significantly faster than Python 3, so I don't know where you are getting your information.
If speed is really an issue then I would write those portions in C. Anyway I have many lines of C++ code floating around in a lot of embedded systems, and I haven't been harmed while programming in Java (or any other language).
If portability was important and I could take a slight hit in speed, then I would choose Java.
If speed was important and resources are low then I would choose C.
If speed was important and there's a need for OO to manage the complexity then I would chose C++.
If "glue" code needed to be created and speed was not being considered then I would pick Perl, Python, or Ruby (Perl is the language most used for this).
If I needed to make a dynamic website and I wanted to use a web framework to keep my workload manageable I would pick Python or Ruby.
I'd be more worried about paying $9 to $12 a kilogram for bananas than how much iTunes charges for songs. Seriously, I'm surprised the produce section of the local Woolworths did not have a financing department.
I launch (fly? whatever) scientific balloons with a gondola of at least 6000 Lbs. I'm sure the passenger craft will be substantially larger but the principles should be similar enough to design. I've had one balloon fail during flight. It was a tear along the bottom portion of the balloon. Since the balloons I use are zero-pressure helium balloons, the gondola was able to float away from the general population and once the gondola was within a safe landing zone the it was separated from the balloon and parachuted to the ground. They don't pop in the traditional since.
I have three gondola frames where I work that we fly. One is around 20 years old and have flown multiple science missions, one is around 10 years old and have flown at least 4 missions, and the third only flew once (it doesn't have az-ev pointing like the other two). They land pretty much intact and ready for disassembly until the next flight.
Maybe they are hoping that Oracle buys them. Worked for Sun. ;)
Too bad those divisions were spun off years ago. HP lost its way with Fiorina and never found it.
What about the other Android powered tablets that are not making their sales goal?
Besides WebOS was bring something unique to the market not yet another android tablet. HP just did a half ass job of building market traction. HP never really did well in the consumer market. They used to have the majority of the laser printer market, yet they allowed others to step in and take market share away. After spinning off all their profitable divisions in the past, I don't think HP really knows what they want.
Why blame the bank? I only consider browsers that manage their updates responsibly and place standards compatibility above eye candy. Not saying I mind UI improvements. As long as the UI improvements don't break compatibility with websites or add ons that gave the browser an edge over the other browsers in the first place.