The wording is confusing, but read it at least twice. It really says the only people excluded from the new ToS are those who signed up through Netscape and have not downloaded updates or software since before Feb 5th, 2004. Check out these delicious quotes from the ToS that further confirm the devilry:
Quote 1:
Each time you use an AIM Product, you reaffirm your acceptance of the then-current Terms of Service. If you do not wish to be bound by these Terms of Service, you may discontinue using the AIM Products.
Quote 2:
AOL may change the Terms of Service at any time and in its sole discretion. The modified Terms of Service will be effective immediately upon posting and you agree to the new posted Terms of Service by continuing your use of the AIM Products. AOL will provide at least 30-days' notice before any material changes take effect. If you do not agree with the modified Terms of Service, your only remedy is to discontinue using the AIM Products and cancel your registration.
Your Intellectual Property Rights. Google does not claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload, transmit or store in your Gmail account. We will not use any of your content for any purpose except to provide you with the Service.
That comes from the gmail terms of use. What you say in gmail belongs to you. Sure they can parse it and toss in their adds on the side and have to release it under subpoena (next paragraph in the ToS), but they can't publish it or anything like that. It is not, as many people incorrectly interpret, simply a matter of Google promising they won't use your emails illicitly. They have legally bound themselves not too.
I'm sure AOL isn't really interested in what 12 year olds gossip about or finding criminals, but these new terms still place your words in the possession of AOL Time Warner. Focus on this part:
You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.
AOL can make money off of what you say or do while using their client and they can cut you off. I know engineers who use AOL to assist with telecommuting. If they did something dumb like mention that "the new ShinyDooDad 2000 is going to replace all of its cams with widgets, fixing all the problems of the 1000," we might see AOL suddenly start a ShinyDooDad subsidiary.
Bottom line: If Google sold an email, they'd get a nifty fine, probably a handsome lawsuit, and a rather sharp slap on the wrist. If AOL sold an instant message, they'd just have to declare the profit on their 1040 or whatever corporations use for taxes
Go check again. It wasn't the main story, but it was on their website. Everybody loves volcanoes, although those who don't live here tend to downplay the coolness, just because they're jealous they don't have one of their own.
Geologists think it's cut back a bit. The last estimate I heard was about 5 m^3/s, which is a dump truck every 2 seconds. It sounds impressive, but the initial eruption displaced about 3 billion cubic meters of mountain top (0.7 cubic miles according to one source I found). Of course, that little ash burst could have been things opening up a little more. Looking at the sugarbowl camera and the video from the channel 8 chopper, it looks like this might even have come from a new vent. It's really hard to tell though, between the angle and the lighting.
According to the USGS, the volume of the extruded lava and uplift is a little over half the size of the dome that grew from 1980-1986, and this is in just 5 months. About two weeks ago, it's highest point was just 100 feet short of "Shoestring Notch," the lowest point on the south rim. Since then it's been crumbling significantly, though, and may be shorter. I think we've got a pretty good shot of seeing something peeking in a year or two if it keeps up.
This is totally the work of HAARP. Allow me to enlighten you by slashdotting the first poor bastard to be unlucky enough to pop up in the google results.
I was talking to my dad on the phone about the mountain because my sister had told him she thought it was blowing ash again, so I checked the volcano cam. Nothing. Apparently I managed to hit it in the five minute window between when it popped and the next webcam update. So I missed the whole thing. It was glowing in the dark about an hour ago though.
Kind of a tricky issue. I don't like it everytime I hear about the FCC telling a business how to run itself. On the other hand, they've got customers paying not only to be able to make calls, but to be able to receive calls, regardless of how their friend/relative/business client is calling.
Blocking VoIP calls seems like kind of a poor reaction. It's not going to stop VoIP. At best it's going to piss off customers. More importantly, it doesn't address the larger issue that telecommunications is evolving. If they hope to survive that evolution, they need to spend more energy getting into a position to take advantage of technologies, and less energy trying to prevent "natural selection" of technologies.
Now, I'm not in the habit of installing programs of ill repute just so I can examine their legality and morality, so bear with me and correct me if I'm in error on any of this.
According to their user agreement, Isearch does some things I would definitely describe as "malware," but does not appear to send personal information to a third party without notice, which I would say is a fairly safe definition of "spyware." It's actions include pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitial ads, redirection of certain URLs and "conveniently without your input" installs additional software (Section 2). The next section states explicitly states that iSearch does not collect personal information, but they and their affiliates may collect anonymous info.
It's clear this program is crap. You are right that users need to take responsibility for what they install. However, while iSearch is truthful about what their program does, they are also attempt to be misleading. They aren't doing anything (as far as I can tell) that is illegal, but it is slimy, lowdown, and rotten and totters on the edge of unethical. They are playing with words and hiding the truth in the abundance of words typical of EULA's to fool users into installing a product they do not want.
Furthermore, the fact that iSearch is not breaking the law does not change the fact that neither are these anti-malware companies. They simply compile lists of distasteful programs and label them as they see fit: adware, malware, spyware, etc. If they're careful to present clear definitions of those terms, they shouldn't even have to worry about iSearch's claim that spyware is a loosely defined term. Then iSearch wouldn't even really have a slander case against them.
My fluid mechanics prof suggested we should take one of the many dimensionless used in fluids, thermodynamics, and heat transfer, and perform some sort of simple, lame operation like multiply by time over time or divide one dimensionless number by another, call it the *Insert Last Name Here* Number/Factor, and publish it.
I spent three days of productive work time listening to polyphonic ringtone versions of speed metal, trying to find exactly the ringtone that expressed my personality
What a disgusting person. 3 days picking out a stupid sound? I think she has officially redefined shallow. It's stupid enough to see a woman agonizing for half an hour over whether to wear the seafoam or the aqua colored turtlneck. We're talking about a 10 second freaking sound clip you stupid yuppie. "Three days of productive work time?" Does that mean you get to charge a client for this BS? Then she presumes that it's perfectly fine for her phone to go off in a meeting, where other people are hopefully trying to get some work accomplished, and if not, desperately hoping the meeting won't lengthened by some dumb broad taking a break to say "Can you hear me now?" 10 times over while pacing around the room looking for better reception.
Then the next paragraph goes on to babble about the artistic value of a ringtone because it "teaches us how songs work." Anybody who buys into that crap needs to go read Maddox's latest article on impressionable idiots, right now.
You know, I would totally pay $1 for a song that I like. I'd probably pay $1.25, maybe $1.50. There's a lot of CD's where I'm not interested in the whole album. I have yet to buy a single song online, however, because of the stupid DRM crap. If can't manage my music the way I see fit, I ain't buying it. I can live without those songs. I can stick to buying CD's I really like and ripping them, so I can listen wherever I want and just use the disc as a backup.
I'm probably reading this wrong, but when iTunes and Napster say I can copy the music I rent (as far as I can tell it's more like renting than buying) up to 10 times, I think, "Great. So I have to buy my music all over again every 5 years?" I typically reformat my PC once a year, copying all of my music to a file server, then back. Either the flunked the grammar section while they partied their way through business school or it's a bum rap. Given that we're talking about the music industry, my instinct is to assume the latter.
I went to Madame Butterfly a couple weeks ago as part of the required fine arts class I'm taking. Since there were a lot of students who were unfamiliar with opera, the last thing they did before the overture was ask everyone to turn their phones off. About 5 minutes later during the hush between the overture and the actual beginning of the act, from the upper balcony, a ring echoed across the entire hall. I would be willing to bet the only thing that saved the dumb student from a righteous opera-nerd beating was the wondrous novelty of hearing a phone make a normal electronic ringing sound, rather than play a really distorted rendition of whatever hip hop song happened to be popular at the moment. Like the opera, it was special because it's something you don't hear every day.
Mod me down? Troll? Typically such actions are reserved for comments that detract from the discussion. Even if I'm stupid, I'm still providing an opportunity for others to educate the stupid half of Slashdot.
From reading the article, it sounded like the plan was to determine the mass by measuring very precisely the force exerted by gravity on the mass. In that case, gravity is very important, because it will affect the measured force. Perhaps I'm misinterpreting the description of the method in the article, but I'm certainly not trolling.
Even before the utility of having a fundementally defined unit of mass drives the necessity, I would think mere intellectual enthusiasm would. I'm honestly surprised that we hadn't already defined it. I can imagine a group of physicist and chemists somewhere coming to a group realization that one of the units they use the most isn't really anything.
Presumably this method would take into account somehow the actual gravitational force, since it varies pretty significantly depending on where you are?
To add to what others have said (it depends on temperature and pressure), it also depends on purity, and I'm almost positive, ever so slightly on ionization.
The system is designed so that 4 computers handle the primary decisions and the fifth is a backup. My understanding is if one of the four yields a different result, it's treated as a minority report (just like the Tom Cruise movie) and disregarded. If they tie, it's considered a malfunction (probably double checked first) and the fifth computer makes the call. Bear in mind this is speculation.
Christianity and mystical Christianity. That's like comparing apples and...well, rotten apples. The grandparent made a statement about Christian beliefs in general. There is a wide range of beliefs held by people who still maintain the divinity of Jesus and there for call themselves Christians. As has previously been stated, though, Christianity has no generally accepted stance on the possibility of intelligent life on other planets. Many Christians like to speculate, however, and only few propose that if there is, they must be demons. There's also no references in the Bible to life on other planets (although no doubt there's a group of fundementalists somewhere out there who can spin verses either proving there is or there isn't).
One thing you should consider before making a fool of yourself by presuming the teachings of a religion I am assuming you don't accept, is that the many of people you're discussing this with (myself included) do accept those teachings and (hopefully) know something about them. I can tell you that the Catholics in particular have no doctrine addressing the issue.
Thanks for fixing that. Dang I'm tired. I honestly had no idea off the top of my head how to say Jew, and switched the possessive and dative, but I don't know why I typed Christus.
Well, as long as we're talking about a Type III civilization here, perhaps they fused some (ok, a lot!) of the hydrogen they didn't plan on using into carbon. That should leave them a few more galaxies to spare.
Everybody knows that dark is what happens when something fills up with light. (By the way, I googled the poor bastard I just linked to. Do your worst.)
For years, we all knew that lightbulbs emit light. Science has now proven this false. Lightbulbs, and other sources of light suck in darkness. In fact, when a lightbulb becomes full of dark, it stops working and has a dark spot on it. Candles are an even better example, since the wick clearly turns black as it is progressively exposed to dark.
Dark also has mass, which causes it to generate heat from friction as it is sucked in. Because lightbulbs are made of clear glass, the dark can go in easier than it can for a candle and there is less heat. For this reason, you don't want to touch a candle while it is sucking dark.
I remember a great old Scifi movie (with the usual commentary by Mike, Servo, and Crow on MST3K) called The Deadly Mantis. It's about a giant preying mantis (that can fly) trapped in the antartic ice but freed when the ice shelf it's in breaks up. Of course, the first thing it does is waste the air force base, then heads south to take out Washington DC. Fortunately, there's an expert on bugs or radioactive mutations, or wearing suits on the big screen or something like, who follows it into a tunnel and kills it in some creatively unspectacular fashion that I don't remember. It ends with him getting the girl, who is, of course, only in the movie in order to be "gotten" by the hero. Now we've unleashed this terror upon ourselves.
MST3K fans will remember this as the episode where Bobo blows up the earth, followed by Crow's immortal words, "It was as though millions of monkeys cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced."
I find that funnier after I think about it. It would have been better though if you had actually matched the first letters to the original: Iesus Christus, Regnum Iewibus (INRI). Sorry to all the grammar nazis if I got my declensions wrong. I know even mistakes in Latin are unacceptable on Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
The wording is confusing, but read it at least twice. It really says the only people excluded from the new ToS are those who signed up through Netscape and have not downloaded updates or software since before Feb 5th, 2004. Check out these delicious quotes from the ToS that further confirm the devilry:
Quote 1:
Quote 2:
That comes from the gmail terms of use. What you say in gmail belongs to you. Sure they can parse it and toss in their adds on the side and have to release it under subpoena (next paragraph in the ToS), but they can't publish it or anything like that. It is not, as many people incorrectly interpret, simply a matter of Google promising they won't use your emails illicitly. They have legally bound themselves not too.
I'm sure AOL isn't really interested in what 12 year olds gossip about or finding criminals, but these new terms still place your words in the possession of AOL Time Warner. Focus on this part:
AOL can make money off of what you say or do while using their client and they can cut you off. I know engineers who use AOL to assist with telecommuting. If they did something dumb like mention that "the new ShinyDooDad 2000 is going to replace all of its cams with widgets, fixing all the problems of the 1000," we might see AOL suddenly start a ShinyDooDad subsidiary.
Bottom line: If Google sold an email, they'd get a nifty fine, probably a handsome lawsuit, and a rather sharp slap on the wrist. If AOL sold an instant message, they'd just have to declare the profit on their 1040 or whatever corporations use for taxes
Go check again. It wasn't the main story, but it was on their website. Everybody loves volcanoes, although those who don't live here tend to downplay the coolness, just because they're jealous they don't have one of their own.
Geologists think it's cut back a bit. The last estimate I heard was about 5 m^3/s, which is a dump truck every 2 seconds. It sounds impressive, but the initial eruption displaced about 3 billion cubic meters of mountain top (0.7 cubic miles according to one source I found). Of course, that little ash burst could have been things opening up a little more. Looking at the sugarbowl camera and the video from the channel 8 chopper, it looks like this might even have come from a new vent. It's really hard to tell though, between the angle and the lighting.
According to the USGS, the volume of the extruded lava and uplift is a little over half the size of the dome that grew from 1980-1986, and this is in just 5 months. About two weeks ago, it's highest point was just 100 feet short of "Shoestring Notch," the lowest point on the south rim. Since then it's been crumbling significantly, though, and may be shorter. I think we've got a pretty good shot of seeing something peeking in a year or two if it keeps up.
This is totally the work of HAARP. Allow me to enlighten you by slashdotting the first poor bastard to be unlucky enough to pop up in the google results.
Almost as amazing but much less nerdy ...
I was talking to my dad on the phone about the mountain because my sister had told him she thought it was blowing ash again, so I checked the volcano cam. Nothing. Apparently I managed to hit it in the five minute window between when it popped and the next webcam update. So I missed the whole thing. It was glowing in the dark about an hour ago though.
Kind of a tricky issue. I don't like it everytime I hear about the FCC telling a business how to run itself. On the other hand, they've got customers paying not only to be able to make calls, but to be able to receive calls, regardless of how their friend/relative/business client is calling.
Blocking VoIP calls seems like kind of a poor reaction. It's not going to stop VoIP. At best it's going to piss off customers. More importantly, it doesn't address the larger issue that telecommunications is evolving. If they hope to survive that evolution, they need to spend more energy getting into a position to take advantage of technologies, and less energy trying to prevent "natural selection" of technologies.
Now, I'm not in the habit of installing programs of ill repute just so I can examine their legality and morality, so bear with me and correct me if I'm in error on any of this.
According to their user agreement, Isearch does some things I would definitely describe as "malware," but does not appear to send personal information to a third party without notice, which I would say is a fairly safe definition of "spyware." It's actions include pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitial ads, redirection of certain URLs and "conveniently without your input" installs additional software (Section 2). The next section states explicitly states that iSearch does not collect personal information, but they and their affiliates may collect anonymous info.
It's clear this program is crap. You are right that users need to take responsibility for what they install. However, while iSearch is truthful about what their program does, they are also attempt to be misleading. They aren't doing anything (as far as I can tell) that is illegal, but it is slimy, lowdown, and rotten and totters on the edge of unethical. They are playing with words and hiding the truth in the abundance of words typical of EULA's to fool users into installing a product they do not want.
Furthermore, the fact that iSearch is not breaking the law does not change the fact that neither are these anti-malware companies. They simply compile lists of distasteful programs and label them as they see fit: adware, malware, spyware, etc. If they're careful to present clear definitions of those terms, they shouldn't even have to worry about iSearch's claim that spyware is a loosely defined term. Then iSearch wouldn't even really have a slander case against them.
My fluid mechanics prof suggested we should take one of the many dimensionless used in fluids, thermodynamics, and heat transfer, and perform some sort of simple, lame operation like multiply by time over time or divide one dimensionless number by another, call it the *Insert Last Name Here* Number/Factor, and publish it.
Then the next paragraph goes on to babble about the artistic value of a ringtone because it "teaches us how songs work." Anybody who buys into that crap needs to go read Maddox's latest article on impressionable idiots, right now.
You know, I would totally pay $1 for a song that I like. I'd probably pay $1.25, maybe $1.50. There's a lot of CD's where I'm not interested in the whole album. I have yet to buy a single song online, however, because of the stupid DRM crap. If can't manage my music the way I see fit, I ain't buying it. I can live without those songs. I can stick to buying CD's I really like and ripping them, so I can listen wherever I want and just use the disc as a backup.
I'm probably reading this wrong, but when iTunes and Napster say I can copy the music I rent (as far as I can tell it's more like renting than buying) up to 10 times, I think, "Great. So I have to buy my music all over again every 5 years?" I typically reformat my PC once a year, copying all of my music to a file server, then back. Either the flunked the grammar section while they partied their way through business school or it's a bum rap. Given that we're talking about the music industry, my instinct is to assume the latter.
I went to Madame Butterfly a couple weeks ago as part of the required fine arts class I'm taking. Since there were a lot of students who were unfamiliar with opera, the last thing they did before the overture was ask everyone to turn their phones off. About 5 minutes later during the hush between the overture and the actual beginning of the act, from the upper balcony, a ring echoed across the entire hall. I would be willing to bet the only thing that saved the dumb student from a righteous opera-nerd beating was the wondrous novelty of hearing a phone make a normal electronic ringing sound, rather than play a really distorted rendition of whatever hip hop song happened to be popular at the moment. Like the opera, it was special because it's something you don't hear every day.
Mod me down? Troll? Typically such actions are reserved for comments that detract from the discussion. Even if I'm stupid, I'm still providing an opportunity for others to educate the stupid half of Slashdot.
From reading the article, it sounded like the plan was to determine the mass by measuring very precisely the force exerted by gravity on the mass. In that case, gravity is very important, because it will affect the measured force. Perhaps I'm misinterpreting the description of the method in the article, but I'm certainly not trolling.
Well put! Thanks. A good reason, but I remain surprised it hasn't happened yet.
Even before the utility of having a fundementally defined unit of mass drives the necessity, I would think mere intellectual enthusiasm would. I'm honestly surprised that we hadn't already defined it. I can imagine a group of physicist and chemists somewhere coming to a group realization that one of the units they use the most isn't really anything.
Presumably this method would take into account somehow the actual gravitational force, since it varies pretty significantly depending on where you are?
To add to what others have said (it depends on temperature and pressure), it also depends on purity, and I'm almost positive, ever so slightly on ionization.
The system is designed so that 4 computers handle the primary decisions and the fifth is a backup. My understanding is if one of the four yields a different result, it's treated as a minority report (just like the Tom Cruise movie) and disregarded. If they tie, it's considered a malfunction (probably double checked first) and the fifth computer makes the call. Bear in mind this is speculation.
Christianity and mystical Christianity. That's like comparing apples and...well, rotten apples. The grandparent made a statement about Christian beliefs in general. There is a wide range of beliefs held by people who still maintain the divinity of Jesus and there for call themselves Christians. As has previously been stated, though, Christianity has no generally accepted stance on the possibility of intelligent life on other planets. Many Christians like to speculate, however, and only few propose that if there is, they must be demons. There's also no references in the Bible to life on other planets (although no doubt there's a group of fundementalists somewhere out there who can spin verses either proving there is or there isn't).
One thing you should consider before making a fool of yourself by presuming the teachings of a religion I am assuming you don't accept, is that the many of people you're discussing this with (myself included) do accept those teachings and (hopefully) know something about them. I can tell you that the Catholics in particular have no doctrine addressing the issue.
Thanks for fixing that. Dang I'm tired. I honestly had no idea off the top of my head how to say Jew, and switched the possessive and dative, but I don't know why I typed Christus.
Well, as long as we're talking about a Type III civilization here, perhaps they fused some (ok, a lot!) of the hydrogen they didn't plan on using into carbon. That should leave them a few more galaxies to spare.
Everybody knows that dark is what happens when something fills up with light. (By the way, I googled the poor bastard I just linked to. Do your worst.)
For years, we all knew that lightbulbs emit light. Science has now proven this false. Lightbulbs, and other sources of light suck in darkness. In fact, when a lightbulb becomes full of dark, it stops working and has a dark spot on it. Candles are an even better example, since the wick clearly turns black as it is progressively exposed to dark.
Dark also has mass, which causes it to generate heat from friction as it is sucked in. Because lightbulbs are made of clear glass, the dark can go in easier than it can for a candle and there is less heat. For this reason, you don't want to touch a candle while it is sucking dark.
I remember a great old Scifi movie (with the usual commentary by Mike, Servo, and Crow on MST3K) called The Deadly Mantis. It's about a giant preying mantis (that can fly) trapped in the antartic ice but freed when the ice shelf it's in breaks up. Of course, the first thing it does is waste the air force base, then heads south to take out Washington DC. Fortunately, there's an expert on bugs or radioactive mutations, or wearing suits on the big screen or something like, who follows it into a tunnel and kills it in some creatively unspectacular fashion that I don't remember. It ends with him getting the girl, who is, of course, only in the movie in order to be "gotten" by the hero. Now we've unleashed this terror upon ourselves.
MST3K fans will remember this as the episode where Bobo blows up the earth, followed by Crow's immortal words, "It was as though millions of monkeys cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced."
I find that funnier after I think about it. It would have been better though if you had actually matched the first letters to the original: Iesus Christus, Regnum Iewibus (INRI). Sorry to all the grammar nazis if I got my declensions wrong. I know even mistakes in Latin are unacceptable on Slashdot.