As much as this might seem to be an adequate response there are some issues:
1) They are allowed to have a virtual monopoly by virtue of agreements with
municipalities that prevent competitors from laying infrastructure.
2) Their are non-amortized, up front, setup costs that have been incurred.
3) In many if not most cases their is a contract term involved.
They have an effective monopoly and should be regulated in the same way the the
Telecoms as well as any other utility with a monopoly position is.
Just in a related note, if I fail to show up for a doctor or dentist appointment
there is Always a charge and has been for some time. This seems equivalent to me.
This is complete and utter BS and really needs to be stopped. My suggestion - if they fail to show in the required window, for Any reason, they are liable to you for a days pay at whatever your current rate is. To document that they did , ideed show up, in the event that the customer truly is not there (a very small probability, IMHO) they would need to show a timed photograph of the door to the residence, another with their truck in the driveway or lot and phone records showing calls being made immediately before arrival (cellular if at all possible, particularly in the case of customerss using their VOIP services) and which go unanswered. And yes even if the calls are not answered they woukld stuill be required to show up at the door, and ring or knock, may even need to require a sound recording for that.
Fuel Oxidation Efficiency in modern engines is normally > 98% This leaves no room for a 50% improvement in fuel economy period. About the only areas remaining for improving fuel economy in modern vehicles are related to reduction of friction in the drive train.
Dual Clutch Automatic Transmissions are on example of a technology improvement that is Actually Effective.
That isn't entirely accurate, there was indeed a consequence. The result of these EBay policy changes was that people, like me, will no longer sell or buy anything using their service. They may be doing far better catering to the Home Shopping Channel demographic and more power to them but that does exclude people like me and many many others.
There have also been numerous (possibly an understatement) cases of abuse by "Trusted Editors" and "Administrators"
Wikipedia is, unfortunately, a prvately owned and commercial product intended to prioduce a profit as opposed to the Scholarly, Open and Free from Undue Influence Academic Resource that it really should be.
If it were non-commercial, with clear and open governance and had clear procedures for appealing actions as well as dealing with "rogue" administrators and other quasi official maintainers then it would be entirely difrferent. Unfortunately that is anything but the case.
A ball pean hammer applied vigorously to the drive spindle will render all but the most wealthy and determined effort to recover data fruitless and even then it is highly unlikely that all or even most of the data would be recoverable.
IMHO, NO, an apology is not enough, at least in this case. This student clearly was reading this book as part of an academic course and had made notes that he needed as part of that coursework. By deleting the book Amazon rendered all of his labour valueless and may well have caused real and possibly irreperable damage to him as a result of his receiving a lower grade in the class being taken. At this late point restoring a copy of the book would likely not repair said damages as it would appear due the timing to have been a summer course that has probably ended. He had entered into a contractual relationship with Amazon to provide the product purchased and relied on the terms and conditions of said purchase to pursue his studies. In willfuly and egregiously breaching that contract Amazon should and hopefuly will be found liable for both consequential and punitive damages.
EBay started as a means for people to sell things to one another person to person, a virtual and nation/world wide classified add section akin to that found in newspapers. This was a good and truely valuable service. What began it's downfall was the transition from what was basicly a P2P service into B2P service.
As it evolved it grew to include an unfortunate collection of scam artists with little to no interference from Ebay. Buyers and Sllers alike were and are @#$%^& over by these people while EBay showed indifference at best.
From there it has further evolved into the Internet version of the Home Shopping Channel while still including the scammers it had aquired along the way. Add to this the fact that EBay has continually tried to squeeze more and more blood from the little guys and you can see they wich to be little more then an collection of online storefronts.
Given the fact that I would never really consider buying something from THSC even though I could be fairly certain of at least getting the questionable item being advertised, why in the world would I consider ordering one from a place that doesn't even offer that faint reassurance? The answer is... I wouldn't! In it's present form the chances of me purchasing something via EBay is precisely ZERO.
PS - I have never sold anything via EBay but did purchase a number of items before it went down the tubes so I am not some disgruntled seller. I also avoided being scammed both through due dilligence but I was probably lucky as well as there have been numerous cases where a seller/buyer with a sterling rep was just setting up for a kill.
1) Open self-destructing DVD
2) Spray said DVD with something that prevents oxygen from reaching the disk,
cheap hairspray seems like a good candidate here but there are probably even
better materials that could be used.
3) Your self-destructing disk fails to degrade?
This is aside from just ripping the, of course.
And perhaps you could then return it demanding a refund because it was defective,
it failed to seld-destruct!
If Microsoft is allowed into this project they will proceed in the monopolistic way they always have
1) First they will cajole/harass/threaten/bribe whoever is necessary to ensure that any OLPCs deployed use Windows
2) At first they will provide what appears to be an extremely attractive package even free if that is what is necessary
3) The FOSS community will be unable to match these offers and will be driven out
4) Next they will begin to provide "updates" that will include things such as DRM
5) The next step is to start charging a relatively modest ammount for content and updates
6) Once critical mass is achieved with regard to their OS monopoly they can and will impose increasinly onerous and expensive licensing terms and pricing being sure to charge just under the ammount that would lead people to abandon their existing investments.
This is not a road to empowerment for the underprivledged it is a road to enslaving them to greedy corporations for the forseeable future. The damage done relative to the potential of FOSS is almost unimaginable consuidering the potentially millions or even billions of people effected.
The first question you should always ask yourself in such situations is... who stands to benefit from this legislation?
To me this seems obvious, businesses, government entities and individuals releasing toxic materials into the environmentg that don't want to be monitored! Does anyone believe that NYC will implement a comprehensive environmental monitoring program throughout the city that will catch any or even a significant proportion of the violations? Seems like a plan to shelter law breakers by making it illegal to detect that they are breaking the law and endangering the health of the public to me. I would hope that anyone involved in such a plan would be removed from office by the voters ASAP and investigated for corruption.
If the intent was truely to ensure that devices of this type were, to a reasonable probablity, accurate why not establish a certification program for them that could include calibration services, ideally at little to no cost for the user? Given sufficient publicity and a means for using the service without undue hardship and I would bet that the vast majority of the users of such devices would gladly participate.
Finally the fact that it is designed to be a Criminal Offense as opposed to a minor civil offense such as a parking ticket adds further weight to the idea that it is intended to shelter violators by intimidating the people who might catch them in their violations!
The behavior of the school president and at least some other portions of the administration were clearly outrageous.
Given that what would be appropriate consequences to the individuals and institution? I off3er the following:
1) Loss of acedemic credentials at the end of the current acedemic year.
2) Loss of all public funding for one or more years.
3) Termination for cause of the president resulting in the forfeiture of retirement benefits.
4) Loss of tenure and or termination for cause of those responsible for overseeing these actions.
5) Termination for the individual who illegaly shared protected medical information.
6) Criminal prosecution of the above individual.
7) Civil proceedings against both involved individuals on the basis of civil rights violations, due proceee violations, Defamation, Slander, Libel (all of these and they are different offences do appear to have been present), etc...
Frankly the state should just put the institution into recievership, relieve the entire administration of their duties pending the outcome of an investigation and appoint an appropriate panel to manage the institution in the meantime.
Seriously soomething like this could indeed cause irreperable harm to this student and he should probably recieve an award commensurate to his anticipate liftime earning (including benefits such as retirement/healthcare/etc...) less the value of a minimum wage job and with punative damages in addition.
What really needs to happen is that exclusive agrements of any kind for utility providers need to be disallowed. Among others:
1) Electricity
2) Natural Gas
3) Phone Service
4) Cable Television
5) Internet Access
Basicly there need to be universal infrastructure installation requirements which would then allow any provider willing to build such an infrastructure to do so without a need for negotiating with every city, town, county and state in the area for permission to do so. Groups of such utilities could also band together to shere the installation costs.
Only a full scale measure such as this would allow true and fair competition. The current trend of allwoing unregulated monopolies is completely in the disinterest of the consumer.
Interesting but did it ever occur to the company that some of the resources that were devoted to you interesting "alarm system" might have been better devoted to correcting the service failings that were so bad that they were driving your customers to conteplate turning to physical violence?
One of the fundamental problems with the American justice system is the extreme weighting in favor of the econmomicly advantaged party. This allows parties such as Microsoft, Best Buy and innumerable others to intentionally break the law, knowing that the price to pursue a legal remedy not to mention the time required will bankrupt any ordinary citizen. The system really needs to be revised to compensate such litigants for not only damages and court costs but also lost wages, travel expenses, attorney's fees, costs for expert witnesses, ie.. any and every expense related to pursuing such cases where they prevail. This should be the absolute minimum judgement with triple and punative damages in addition where willful wrongdoing can be shown. In conjunction with this the penalties for mailicious prosecution (ie. filing baseless lawsuits) needs to be equally severe. Litigants such as the RIAA, MPAA, etc... as well as anyone who engages in such behavior should be unable to just "drop the complaint" without paying any and all such costs and once again being exposed to severe damage awards.
Frankly I am intrigued by the Swedish system that imposes penalties based on the affluence of the convicted party. If the penalty to a corporation for engaging in such behavior was the loss of say 10% of gross revinue they would pay alot more attention to complying with the law and engaging in such scams would become indcredibly risky to them.
Either I misunderstand the intent of the source of the "unbundling" of the OS or I fail to understand the objections. To me it equates to:
1) Consumer selects az PC of their choice
2) If they so desire they can also select to purchase an OS of their choice but must be allowed to chose No OS
3) They can elect to have their OS installed by the vendor if that service is offered or not
4) They can also elect to purchase that OS at the same exact price without a PC purchase (no discounts with purchase!)
IMHO this is exactly what is needed! Joe 6 Pack can select Windows fully installed by paying the appropriate fee while/slashdoters can simply select No OS without paying the MS Tax with options inbetween at the vendors discretion.
Frankly I think this should apply to all of the "Bloatware" that vendors install now (ISP installs, demoware, crippleware, etc....) You should be required to choose to have it installed and once again it would be required to be available seperately at the exact same price as they charge for the factory install (or less considering any installation charges) although shipping charges could apply.
Here's wondering if this isn't related to their recent stealth Windows update that occured without notification and despite configuring it to not allow automatic updates! Contant pop advertisements, everyone needs them whether they want them or not!
I suggest an infrared source detecter coupled to a directional EMP Generator. That should be capable of taking out every single marker on a stretch of road in notime flat!
Slashdot Mirror
As much as this might seem to be an adequate response there are some issues: 1) They are allowed to have a virtual monopoly by virtue of agreements with municipalities that prevent competitors from laying infrastructure. 2) Their are non-amortized, up front, setup costs that have been incurred. 3) In many if not most cases their is a contract term involved. They have an effective monopoly and should be regulated in the same way the the Telecoms as well as any other utility with a monopoly position is. Just in a related note, if I fail to show up for a doctor or dentist appointment there is Always a charge and has been for some time. This seems equivalent to me.
This is complete and utter BS and really needs to be stopped. My suggestion - if they fail to show in the required window, for Any reason, they are liable to you for a days pay at whatever your current rate is. To document that they did , ideed show up, in the event that the customer truly is not there (a very small probability, IMHO) they would need to show a timed photograph of the door to the residence, another with their truck in the driveway or lot and phone records showing calls being made immediately before arrival (cellular if at all possible, particularly in the case of customerss using their VOIP services) and which go unanswered. And yes even if the calls are not answered they woukld stuill be required to show up at the door, and ring or knock, may even need to require a sound recording for that.
Fuel Oxidation Efficiency in modern engines is normally > 98%
This leaves no room for a 50% improvement in fuel economy period.
About the only areas remaining for improving fuel economy in
modern vehicles are related to reduction of friction in the drive
train.
Dual Clutch Automatic Transmissions are on example of a technology
improvement that is Actually Effective.
That isn't entirely accurate, there was indeed a consequence. The result of these EBay policy changes was that people, like me, will no longer sell or buy anything using their service. They may be doing far better catering to the Home Shopping Channel demographic and more power to them but that does exclude people like me and many many others.
There have also been numerous (possibly an understatement) cases of abuse by "Trusted Editors" and "Administrators" Wikipedia is, unfortunately, a prvately owned and commercial product intended to prioduce a profit as opposed to the Scholarly, Open and Free from Undue Influence Academic Resource that it really should be. If it were non-commercial, with clear and open governance and had clear procedures for appealing actions as well as dealing with "rogue" administrators and other quasi official maintainers then it would be entirely difrferent. Unfortunately that is anything but the case.
A ball pean hammer applied vigorously to the drive spindle will render all but the most wealthy and determined effort to recover data fruitless and even then it is highly unlikely that all or even most of the data would be recoverable.
IMHO, NO, an apology is not enough, at least in this case. This student clearly was reading this book as part of an academic course and had made notes that he needed as part of that coursework. By deleting the book Amazon rendered all of his labour valueless and may well have caused real and possibly irreperable damage to him as a result of his receiving a lower grade in the class being taken. At this late point restoring a copy of the book would likely not repair said damages as it would appear due the timing to have been a summer course that has probably ended. He had entered into a contractual relationship with Amazon to provide the product purchased and relied on the terms and conditions of said purchase to pursue his studies. In willfuly and egregiously breaching that contract Amazon should and hopefuly will be found liable for both consequential and punitive damages.
EBay started as a means for people to sell things to one another person to person, a virtual and nation/world wide classified add section akin to that found in newspapers. This was a good and truely valuable service. What began it's downfall was the transition from what was basicly a P2P service into B2P service. As it evolved it grew to include an unfortunate collection of scam artists with little to no interference from Ebay. Buyers and Sllers alike were and are @#$%^& over by these people while EBay showed indifference at best. From there it has further evolved into the Internet version of the Home Shopping Channel while still including the scammers it had aquired along the way. Add to this the fact that EBay has continually tried to squeeze more and more blood from the little guys and you can see they wich to be little more then an collection of online storefronts. Given the fact that I would never really consider buying something from THSC even though I could be fairly certain of at least getting the questionable item being advertised, why in the world would I consider ordering one from a place that doesn't even offer that faint reassurance? The answer is ... I wouldn't! In it's present form the chances of me purchasing something via EBay is precisely ZERO.
PS - I have never sold anything via EBay but did purchase a number of items before it went down the tubes so I am not some disgruntled seller. I also avoided being scammed both through due dilligence but I was probably lucky as well as there have been numerous cases where a seller/buyer with a sterling rep was just setting up for a kill.
1) Open self-destructing DVD 2) Spray said DVD with something that prevents oxygen from reaching the disk, cheap hairspray seems like a good candidate here but there are probably even better materials that could be used. 3) Your self-destructing disk fails to degrade? This is aside from just ripping the, of course. And perhaps you could then return it demanding a refund because it was defective, it failed to seld-destruct!
If Microsoft is allowed into this project they will proceed in the monopolistic way they always have 1) First they will cajole/harass/threaten/bribe whoever is necessary to ensure that any OLPCs deployed use Windows 2) At first they will provide what appears to be an extremely attractive package even free if that is what is necessary 3) The FOSS community will be unable to match these offers and will be driven out 4) Next they will begin to provide "updates" that will include things such as DRM 5) The next step is to start charging a relatively modest ammount for content and updates 6) Once critical mass is achieved with regard to their OS monopoly they can and will impose increasinly onerous and expensive licensing terms and pricing being sure to charge just under the ammount that would lead people to abandon their existing investments. This is not a road to empowerment for the underprivledged it is a road to enslaving them to greedy corporations for the forseeable future. The damage done relative to the potential of FOSS is almost unimaginable consuidering the potentially millions or even billions of people effected.
That's it Comcast is violating my patent on Public Hearing Shaping! I will be slapping them with a Patent Troll suit for millions hahahahahah
The first question you should always ask yourself in such situations is ... who stands to benefit from this legislation?
To me this seems obvious, businesses, government entities and individuals releasing toxic materials into the environmentg that don't want to be monitored! Does anyone believe that NYC will implement a comprehensive environmental monitoring program throughout the city that will catch any or even a significant proportion of the violations? Seems like a plan to shelter law breakers by making it illegal to detect that they are breaking the law and endangering the health of the public to me. I would hope that anyone involved in such a plan would be removed from office by the voters ASAP and investigated for corruption.
If the intent was truely to ensure that devices of this type were, to a reasonable probablity, accurate why not establish a certification program for them that could include calibration services, ideally at little to no cost for the user? Given sufficient publicity and a means for using the service without undue hardship and I would bet that the vast majority of the users of such devices would gladly participate.
Finally the fact that it is designed to be a Criminal Offense as opposed to a minor civil offense such as a parking ticket adds further weight to the idea that it is intended to shelter violators by intimidating the people who might catch them in their violations!
The behavior of the school president and at least some other portions of the administration were clearly outrageous. Given that what would be appropriate consequences to the individuals and institution? I off3er the following: 1) Loss of acedemic credentials at the end of the current acedemic year. 2) Loss of all public funding for one or more years. 3) Termination for cause of the president resulting in the forfeiture of retirement benefits. 4) Loss of tenure and or termination for cause of those responsible for overseeing these actions. 5) Termination for the individual who illegaly shared protected medical information. 6) Criminal prosecution of the above individual. 7) Civil proceedings against both involved individuals on the basis of civil rights violations, due proceee violations, Defamation, Slander, Libel (all of these and they are different offences do appear to have been present), etc... Frankly the state should just put the institution into recievership, relieve the entire administration of their duties pending the outcome of an investigation and appoint an appropriate panel to manage the institution in the meantime. Seriously soomething like this could indeed cause irreperable harm to this student and he should probably recieve an award commensurate to his anticipate liftime earning (including benefits such as retirement/healthcare/etc...) less the value of a minimum wage job and with punative damages in addition.
What really needs to happen is that exclusive agrements of any kind for utility providers need to be disallowed. Among others: 1) Electricity 2) Natural Gas 3) Phone Service 4) Cable Television 5) Internet Access Basicly there need to be universal infrastructure installation requirements which would then allow any provider willing to build such an infrastructure to do so without a need for negotiating with every city, town, county and state in the area for permission to do so. Groups of such utilities could also band together to shere the installation costs. Only a full scale measure such as this would allow true and fair competition. The current trend of allwoing unregulated monopolies is completely in the disinterest of the consumer.
All I can say is this makes me even more happy that Fry's built a store in my area offering an alternative to BB(S)!
Interesting but did it ever occur to the company that some of the resources that were devoted to you interesting "alarm system" might have been better devoted to correcting the service failings that were so bad that they were driving your customers to conteplate turning to physical violence?
One of the fundamental problems with the American justice system is the extreme weighting in favor of the econmomicly advantaged party. This allows parties such as Microsoft, Best Buy and innumerable others to intentionally break the law, knowing that the price to pursue a legal remedy not to mention the time required will bankrupt any ordinary citizen. The system really needs to be revised to compensate such litigants for not only damages and court costs but also lost wages, travel expenses, attorney's fees, costs for expert witnesses, ie.. any and every expense related to pursuing such cases where they prevail. This should be the absolute minimum judgement with triple and punative damages in addition where willful wrongdoing can be shown. In conjunction with this the penalties for mailicious prosecution (ie. filing baseless lawsuits) needs to be equally severe. Litigants such as the RIAA, MPAA, etc... as well as anyone who engages in such behavior should be unable to just "drop the complaint" without paying any and all such costs and once again being exposed to severe damage awards. Frankly I am intrigued by the Swedish system that imposes penalties based on the affluence of the convicted party. If the penalty to a corporation for engaging in such behavior was the loss of say 10% of gross revinue they would pay alot more attention to complying with the law and engaging in such scams would become indcredibly risky to them.
Either I misunderstand the intent of the source of the "unbundling" of the OS or I fail to understand the objections. To me it equates to: 1) Consumer selects az PC of their choice 2) If they so desire they can also select to purchase an OS of their choice but must be allowed to chose No OS 3) They can elect to have their OS installed by the vendor if that service is offered or not 4) They can also elect to purchase that OS at the same exact price without a PC purchase (no discounts with purchase!) IMHO this is exactly what is needed! Joe 6 Pack can select Windows fully installed by paying the appropriate fee while /slashdoters can simply select No OS without paying the MS Tax with options inbetween at the vendors discretion.
Frankly I think this should apply to all of the "Bloatware" that vendors install now (ISP installs, demoware, crippleware, etc....) You should be required to choose to have it installed and once again it would be required to be available seperately at the exact same price as they charge for the factory install (or less considering any installation charges) although shipping charges could apply.
Here's wondering if this isn't related to their recent stealth Windows update that occured without notification and despite configuring it to not allow automatic updates! Contant pop advertisements, everyone needs them whether they want them or not!
I suggest an infrared source detecter coupled to a directional EMP Generator. That should be capable of taking out every single marker on a stretch of road in notime flat!