The free version is simply adware. You may think it's not too annoying, but getting a pop-up every single day is too much. Maybe if you weren't doing any work you could deal with the surprise interruptions.
If you want to tout their paid version, then go ahead, but their free version is no longer the best. Try AVG.
I liked your first answer better. Some people who can do the job are not great interviewers. Another possibility is that he's just not applying at enough places. I'd say drop the unrelated experience from the resume and just power through those interviews. Take notes immediately after each one to improve your interview performance. Rack up those rejections until you find some place that will advance your career, even if it's not a great place to work. Becoming fearless about interviewing will help you avoid two year stretches in jobs you no longer want to be.
And you'd rather have equipment based on a ratified standard that doesn't interoperate with each other? Seriously, just having the standard doesn't mean everyone will follow it correctly. 802.11n interoperates pretty well now, and I don't expect it to be any better in 2009.
If you're giving legal advice IANAL will not save you. What you should be most worried about is your state bar association prosecuting you for giving legal advice without a license. IANAL just makes it easier to identify that you are not part of the club, and, if you're being helpful and informative, taking business away from attorneys.
If you feel you need to disclaim, do it right. What if they don't know the acronym? You could say, "I am not a lawyer, and nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice," in a footnote. Or, "I am a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer, and nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice." Or, just don't go overboard and don't worry about it. I think the half-way disclaimer is pointless.
... but, I am not a lawyer, and nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice.
They want people to promote it on Wikipedia? (and Slashdot, of course) That is an express desire to be viewed favorably by a wider audience. Nice try in ducking the problem, but that kind of denial isn't helping anyone.
It sounds like you agree that point releases of gNewSense shouldn't get announced on Slashdot.
I disagree that they wouldn't like more mainstream users to try their distro, else why base it on Ubuntu? Even as a project that might want community support, I doubt they have chosen something memorable and appealing within their target audience.
If only their were experts who knew the specification of network switches and how not to expose users to casual snooping, then we could set up a conference where such people get together to share their knowledge of these type of vulnerabilities.
Even if this adult perpetrator knew she was unstable? You must've had it rough. I didn't have any adult bullies in high school, just the stupid jock types my own age.
However, if violating the TOS is the only charge, as the summary suggests, then I reluctantly think she should be let off.
This prevents those sites from using HTTPS, as it makes entering them pretty hard and obvious.
And preventing them from using https does what exactly? The users don't get that great big warning screen that they supposedly require. There's just a missing padlock in the status bar. It's hard to justify a full screen alert with a multistage exception procedure when it's this easy to go around.
Mission solved.
Accomplished. It's mission accomplished and problem solved. Except it isn't.
That means documented evidence showing you lost the amount of money you are trying to recover due to the direct actions of the person you are trying to recover it from.
The RIAA are recovering statutory damages, which are punitive to discourage other from committing the same offense. I'm not saying that the RIAA hasn't bought and paid for the laws which have established these exorbitant penalties, but the application of statutory damages in court is quite common.
I don't think statutory damages are uncalled for in this case, since otherwise they would have no legal recourse against downloaders even if they had incontrovertible proof, but the amounts they can impose are obscene. It's refreshing to see from time to time that something so obviously unfair turns out to be unconstitutional as well. I hope that happens in this case.
That sounds like a fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc
Wrong! There's no assumption of causation. You've butchered a Slashdot favorite (usually phrased as correlation != causation) That's pitiful. I rest my case.
Ha! That wasn't me. It restores my faith in humanity to see a few people think you take cheap shots, and few find you interesting and insightful. But, who am I to say you won't do better some day? I let you have the last word on our long thread, so take your victory and move on.
As for my sig, I choose what goes there. I suggest you don't concern yourself with it, since it doesn't misrepresent you.
At least you won't get the Microsoft search page. Weren't they the original employers of this tactic? And for as much as they've been sued, they were never sued for that one.
Expect more of this, although the apparently the buck stops at your ISP. For Network Solutions it was a bridge too far.
"...under US law I will go to jail if someone uses my open WiFi to download childporn or some such.
No, you won't go to jail, but you might get investigated and have some equipment confiscated, which is still enough reason for most people not to do it.
So I threw up a Linux box at home listening to SSH on port 443, and tunnel out from work using Putty. I just look like encrypted web traffic to the corp security folks."
Sometimes a firewall or network monitor will flag that traffic as abnormal. There's often much more upstream traffic on that link than you would expect from https.
Paranoia sounds about right. Even when there is no measurable harm from using a neighbor's wifi when your service is unavailable, you'll still here people indignant about your "stealing". These fearmongers would be happier if it were criminalized to the point where nobody could share, even if they wanted to.
Before you go completely insane, I will summarize and reiterate some of the concepts you never got.
First and foremost was that what makes the use of open wifi is acceptable or not is social convention. Much like how we feel free to download what we see on a website. You know that the files and the computers they are on are not yours, but intentionally or not, the site owner has made them freely accessible, and by convention we assume that they are OK to use. The alternative is undesirable. The same is true of wifi.
Open wireless routers explicitly authorize clients that associate. The router first advertises that it is not private, then when clients ask permission to join the network, it grants that permission. Spare me the door knob analogy. This is not a door. This is asking to come in and hearing a yes before proceeding.
You would have everybody locking their wireless connections and even those who choose to leave theirs open would not be able to have anyone join, because this would be a criminal act in your world. I would prefer that everyone be allowed to have an open wifi network if they want, and those who don't should simply say so, by turning on encryption, which is available on every access point manufactured today. My position is that people can use their equipment the way they want, including sharing, and your position is that everyone must somehow find the owner and get verbal/written permission. Clearly I am pro-freedom, and you are anti-social.
Is it hard to turn on encryption? Not at all. The installation CD will prompt you enter a password. The built-in setup wizards will prompt you. Some routers come with a default key configured. Professional installers will configure security on your wireless modem if you get it with your DLS/cable service. Basically, if you know security exists, you can set it, and anybody could figure out that it exists just by looking at the box it comes in. At my local computer superstore, there wasn't a single wifi product that did not advertise the security that it supported on the outside of the box. So, all this effort to inform and assist the least technical of users, among those who are still technical enough to buy a wireless router and properly connect it, is not enough for you? Their needs have been fully considered and provided for. End of story.
There will always be people who have trouble understanding and accepting new technology. Fortunately, they are in the minority these days. Your main problem, however, is that you who see immorality where there is none. Don't feel obliged to share your strict upbringing or your deep sense of insecurity with the rest of us.
So, we shall both go forth and do what we feel is right. You'll be knocking on doors admonishing people about their networks, and I'll just let people do what they want. As we say here on Slashdot, good luck with that. Feel free to curse me in your frustration that the world is not as you would like, but remember that you have already used: moron, criminal, a toddler, a hacker, retarded, a sociopath, 11-years-old, a greedy "sonofabitch", a jackass, a gigantic anus, a fucking idiot (all caps), a low-life piece of trash, a disgusting excuse for a human, and CmdrTaco. Hey, that last one hurts, but it all bothers me less then your not being able to distinguish between open wifi and stealing physical property, home invasion, and even rape, none of which can be accomplished with a wireless connection. I sincerely suggest that you continue your education, including critical thinking if that really interests you, because such overuse, and misuse, of terms like fallacy and false dilemma (your favorite) are embarrassing for those of us who know what they mean. Good luck to you.
I welcome any Slashdot readers who get this far to weigh in on which position you think is the most reasonable.
"According to you, if I see a patch of grass near my house with an outlet, it wouldn't be stealing to plug things in there."
Is the outlet on my property? Does the electricity I use cause no additional cost to the outlet owner? The fundamental wrong in your scenario is the cost that he has to pay. Yet again you're analogy is flawed, not because the situation isn't identical, but because the lesson it means to teach does not apply. You have a lot of nerve crying fallacy all the time when all you do is come up with gems like this.
"The ISP and the renter can do whatever they want with their property, including waste it."
...including secure it, if that is their intention.
"Trespass to Land"
Where I live, a fence or signs are required, one sign per mile. The spirit of the law is that the owner has a responsibility to restrict access if they don't want people harmlessly entering their property.
"You're using bandwidth that doesn't belong to you, therefore stealing it. The ISP knows this and doesn't want you doing that, they even put it in their contracts, and the majority of consumers feel the same way. And you are trespassing on a network without permission to accomplish that."
Not stealing. (again) I support any consumer who wants to secure their network. I won't use or otherwise interfere with a network that uses any form of encryption. Not trespassing. (Jesus Christ! Read your own link.)
"You keep clinging to the two wrongs fallacy."
Try zero wrongs. It's not wrong to leave it open, and it's not wrong for me to use it if it is.
"Sure, I could become an expert in securing my foundation with large fences, barbed wire, and signs everywhere..."
Boy, you would sure like this to be something that it isn't. It's one minute to flip an electronic switch, less if you do it during setup. I think we're all getting tired of your lies.
"Now one of the things in KDE's reply that struck me as informative was that bit about porting KDE 3.x to QT 4.0. They could have done that, but then they would probably have ended up with two binary-incompatible versions of KDE 3.x, which would also have been very confusing. So they decided to make a clean break of it and went for KDE 4.0"
He didn't say confusion was the reason not to do more of a straight port. It would always be 4.0, no confusion there. He wanted to give the developers who were implementing other planned features something to do. I can agree with him on that point, but he must've thought it was ready for the distros, otherwise he would have warned them off in no uncertain terms.
Don't you hate these announcements, after something was clearly more of a problem for their users than they expected, that they did nothing wrong? Inspires confidence, doesn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
They also seemed to update their signatures quite often, sometimes once or twice a day even
Too damn often if you get a pop-up ad each time.
The free version is simply adware. You may think it's not too annoying, but getting a pop-up every single day is too much. Maybe if you weren't doing any work you could deal with the surprise interruptions.
If you want to tout their paid version, then go ahead, but their free version is no longer the best. Try AVG.
But the slot hasn't been there for any version of MacBook, so it's not being taken away in this update - no rage.
Besides, Apple needs to give people some reason to spend more on a MacBook Pro. The lighted keyboard wasn't going to do it.
You have the only seniority that matters here:
12369 < 662363
It'll still be in the RSS feed, with no indication that it's an idle article until you reach that awful white on green.
I liked your first answer better. Some people who can do the job are not great interviewers. Another possibility is that he's just not applying at enough places. I'd say drop the unrelated experience from the resume and just power through those interviews. Take notes immediately after each one to improve your interview performance. Rack up those rejections until you find some place that will advance your career, even if it's not a great place to work. Becoming fearless about interviewing will help you avoid two year stretches in jobs you no longer want to be.
And you'd rather have equipment based on a ratified standard that doesn't interoperate with each other? Seriously, just having the standard doesn't mean everyone will follow it correctly. 802.11n interoperates pretty well now, and I don't expect it to be any better in 2009.
If you're giving legal advice IANAL will not save you. What you should be most worried about is your state bar association prosecuting you for giving legal advice without a license. IANAL just makes it easier to identify that you are not part of the club, and, if you're being helpful and informative, taking business away from attorneys.
If you feel you need to disclaim, do it right. What if they don't know the acronym? You could say, "I am not a lawyer, and nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice," in a footnote. Or, "I am a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer, and nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice." Or, just don't go overboard and don't worry about it. I think the half-way disclaimer is pointless.
... but, I am not a lawyer, and nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice.
1) Puns are not usually considered clever. A "gnu"-based pun is unlikely to be an exception.
2) It appears we are the target market: http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Main/HowToHelp
They want people to promote it on Wikipedia? (and Slashdot, of course) That is an express desire to be viewed favorably by a wider audience. Nice try in ducking the problem, but that kind of denial isn't helping anyone.
It sounds like you agree that point releases of gNewSense shouldn't get announced on Slashdot.
I disagree that they wouldn't like more mainstream users to try their distro, else why base it on Ubuntu? Even as a project that might want community support, I doubt they have chosen something memorable and appealing within their target audience.
but is this any better than the last slashdot article on splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen? They also said they were inspired by plants, but at least they had the good sense not to claim it was photosynthesis.
If only their were experts who knew the specification of network switches and how not to expose users to casual snooping, then we could set up a conference where such people get together to share their knowledge of these type of vulnerabilities.
Even if this adult perpetrator knew she was unstable? You must've had it rough. I didn't have any adult bullies in high school, just the stupid jock types my own age.
However, if violating the TOS is the only charge, as the summary suggests, then I reluctantly think she should be let off.
This prevents those sites from using HTTPS, as it makes entering them pretty hard and obvious.
And preventing them from using https does what exactly? The users don't get that great big warning screen that they supposedly require. There's just a missing padlock in the status bar. It's hard to justify a full screen alert with a multistage exception procedure when it's this easy to go around.
Mission solved.
Accomplished. It's mission accomplished and problem solved. Except it isn't.
That means documented evidence showing you lost the amount of money you are trying to recover due to the direct actions of the person you are trying to recover it from.
The RIAA are recovering statutory damages, which are punitive to discourage other from committing the same offense. I'm not saying that the RIAA hasn't bought and paid for the laws which have established these exorbitant penalties, but the application of statutory damages in court is quite common.
I don't think statutory damages are uncalled for in this case, since otherwise they would have no legal recourse against downloaders even if they had incontrovertible proof, but the amounts they can impose are obscene. It's refreshing to see from time to time that something so obviously unfair turns out to be unconstitutional as well. I hope that happens in this case.
That sounds like a fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc
Wrong! There's no assumption of causation. You've butchered a Slashdot favorite (usually phrased as correlation != causation) That's pitiful. I rest my case.
Ha! That wasn't me. It restores my faith in humanity to see a few people think you take cheap shots, and few find you interesting and insightful. But, who am I to say you won't do better some day? I let you have the last word on our long thread, so take your victory and move on.
As for my sig, I choose what goes there. I suggest you don't concern yourself with it, since it doesn't misrepresent you.
At least you won't get the Microsoft search page. Weren't they the original employers of this tactic? And for as much as they've been sued, they were never sued for that one.
Expect more of this, although the apparently the buck stops at your ISP. For Network Solutions it was a bridge too far.
"...under US law I will go to jail if someone uses my open WiFi to download childporn or some such.
No, you won't go to jail, but you might get investigated and have some equipment confiscated, which is still enough reason for most people not to do it.
So I threw up a Linux box at home listening to SSH on port 443, and tunnel out from work using Putty. I just look like encrypted web traffic to the corp security folks."
Sometimes a firewall or network monitor will flag that traffic as abnormal. There's often much more upstream traffic on that link than you would expect from https.
Paranoia sounds about right. Even when there is no measurable harm from using a neighbor's wifi when your service is unavailable, you'll still here people indignant about your "stealing". These fearmongers would be happier if it were criminalized to the point where nobody could share, even if they wanted to.
It only takes a few nutjobs.
Before you go completely insane, I will summarize and reiterate some of the concepts you never got.
First and foremost was that what makes the use of open wifi is acceptable or not is social convention. Much like how we feel free to download what we see on a website. You know that the files and the computers they are on are not yours, but intentionally or not, the site owner has made them freely accessible, and by convention we assume that they are OK to use. The alternative is undesirable. The same is true of wifi.
Open wireless routers explicitly authorize clients that associate. The router first advertises that it is not private, then when clients ask permission to join the network, it grants that permission. Spare me the door knob analogy. This is not a door. This is asking to come in and hearing a yes before proceeding.
You would have everybody locking their wireless connections and even those who choose to leave theirs open would not be able to have anyone join, because this would be a criminal act in your world. I would prefer that everyone be allowed to have an open wifi network if they want, and those who don't should simply say so, by turning on encryption, which is available on every access point manufactured today. My position is that people can use their equipment the way they want, including sharing, and your position is that everyone must somehow find the owner and get verbal/written permission. Clearly I am pro-freedom, and you are anti-social.
Is it hard to turn on encryption? Not at all. The installation CD will prompt you enter a password. The built-in setup wizards will prompt you. Some routers come with a default key configured. Professional installers will configure security on your wireless modem if you get it with your DLS/cable service. Basically, if you know security exists, you can set it, and anybody could figure out that it exists just by looking at the box it comes in. At my local computer superstore, there wasn't a single wifi product that did not advertise the security that it supported on the outside of the box. So, all this effort to inform and assist the least technical of users, among those who are still technical enough to buy a wireless router and properly connect it, is not enough for you? Their needs have been fully considered and provided for. End of story.
There will always be people who have trouble understanding and accepting new technology. Fortunately, they are in the minority these days. Your main problem, however, is that you who see immorality where there is none. Don't feel obliged to share your strict upbringing or your deep sense of insecurity with the rest of us.
So, we shall both go forth and do what we feel is right. You'll be knocking on doors admonishing people about their networks, and I'll just let people do what they want. As we say here on Slashdot, good luck with that. Feel free to curse me in your frustration that the world is not as you would like, but remember that you have already used: moron, criminal, a toddler, a hacker, retarded, a sociopath, 11-years-old, a greedy "sonofabitch", a jackass, a gigantic anus, a fucking idiot (all caps), a low-life piece of trash, a disgusting excuse for a human, and CmdrTaco. Hey, that last one hurts, but it all bothers me less then your not being able to distinguish between open wifi and stealing physical property, home invasion, and even rape, none of which can be accomplished with a wireless connection. I sincerely suggest that you continue your education, including critical thinking if that really interests you, because such overuse, and misuse, of terms like fallacy and false dilemma (your favorite) are embarrassing for those of us who know what they mean. Good luck to you.
I welcome any Slashdot readers who get this far to weigh in on which position you think is the most reasonable.
No, but it does look suspiciously like this.
"According to you, if I see a patch of grass near my house with an outlet, it wouldn't be stealing to plug things in there."
Is the outlet on my property? Does the electricity I use cause no additional cost to the outlet owner? The fundamental wrong in your scenario is the cost that he has to pay. Yet again you're analogy is flawed, not because the situation isn't identical, but because the lesson it means to teach does not apply. You have a lot of nerve crying fallacy all the time when all you do is come up with gems like this.
"The ISP and the renter can do whatever they want with their property, including waste it."
...including secure it, if that is their intention.
"Trespass to Land"
Where I live, a fence or signs are required, one sign per mile. The spirit of the law is that the owner has a responsibility to restrict access if they don't want people harmlessly entering their property.
"You're using bandwidth that doesn't belong to you, therefore stealing it. The ISP knows this and doesn't want you doing that, they even put it in their contracts, and the majority of consumers feel the same way. And you are trespassing on a network without permission to accomplish that."
Not stealing. (again)
I support any consumer who wants to secure their network. I won't use or otherwise interfere with a network that uses any form of encryption.
Not trespassing. (Jesus Christ! Read your own link.)
"You keep clinging to the two wrongs fallacy."
Try zero wrongs. It's not wrong to leave it open, and it's not wrong for me to use it if it is.
"Sure, I could become an expert in securing my foundation with large fences, barbed wire, and signs everywhere..."
Boy, you would sure like this to be something that it isn't. It's one minute to flip an electronic switch, less if you do it during setup. I think we're all getting tired of your lies.
"Now one of the things in KDE's reply that struck me as informative was that bit about porting KDE 3.x to QT 4.0. They could have done that, but then they would probably have ended up with two binary-incompatible versions of KDE 3.x, which would also have been very confusing. So they decided to make a clean break of it and went for KDE 4.0"
He didn't say confusion was the reason not to do more of a straight port. It would always be 4.0, no confusion there. He wanted to give the developers who were implementing other planned features something to do. I can agree with him on that point, but he must've thought it was ready for the distros, otherwise he would have warned them off in no uncertain terms.
Don't you hate these announcements, after something was clearly more of a problem for their users than they expected, that they did nothing wrong? Inspires confidence, doesn't it?