I work in tech support (you may have heard of the company, but its not telco), and not five minutes after reading this on the consumerist, I had someone call in and mention bigwig names and tell me they needed this, that, and the other. Earlier in the day, I'd had a similar call and just went with it, but this time, I put them on hold and escalated it up to the bigwigs in question just to make sure it was legit. It was, and that was that, and they thanked me for following the proper procedure and for making sure it was a legitimate request.
No matter how this story unfolds, I doubt we have the full story here. In the two call centers I've worked for, I've had cops, priests, customers, and stalkers call in trying to get information. We had a number to give them at the first call center, and had them call it period. I miss having that line of defense where I work now.
What annoys me, in general, is that I work on peoples machines that have their XP key printed right on the machine, but the key is for a specific service pack. So, I can't just use a valid XP disk, I have to have that specific disk. I have a legitimate copy with a legitimate key, but tend to have to go torrent the speficic build of Windows. I mean, surely Microsoft understands that since they give out the Service Packs through Windows Update, this isn't a pirating tactic.
I installed Windows 7 beta on my machine a few months back on a second drive. It was a beautiful experience, honestly. It ran much more quickly than Vista had, the only issue I had was one of my two nic cards didn't have a driver that worked. But, since I had a second, that wasn't an issue. I was blown away by how much more quickly everything ran.
I just installed the RC over Vista, and I'm amazed by how much less polished and how unimpressed I am now. My CPU usage does eventually drop, but for the first 20 minutes of booting up, will hover around 85%. Clicking on the Start Menu brings up Start and the programs list, but the thumbnails take a few seconds to load. All in all, its little things like this, and the fact that it does generally seem slower that I notice.
I remember my first Apple experience was a CompUSA. They had the alarms on the things so sensetive that if you even touched one of their macs, the alarm would go off. It really was upsetting, and did make me want to go look at other sections.
(On a side note though, I'm posting this on a MBP, so they didn't completely kill me off)
Personally, I'd kill for IE8 to come back to the Mac. My company's payroll/benefits website requires IE6 or IE7 to login. So, right now, I have to fire up VMWare or find a PC to check my pay stub. I'd prefer my company simply fix the site to work with Safari or Firefox or Opera or ANY browser, but I know thats unlikely to happen, and a Mac version is more likely.
A locally owned company is going to begin installing fiber in our city... But wait... Comcast doesn't want competition since they're the only viable high-speed internet provider in our area, so they're doing their best to tie the company up in lawsuits for years.
I agree, politics play way too much of a role in anything.
My university does teach a Java course as the intro course for any CS concentration. You take it (programming or Java 101, you could say), and then it goes on to what equates to Java 102, where you learn about data structures, and linked lists, and all of the other fun things that programmers should know. But, to be honest, we did not learn much if anything really about pointers. However, the THIRD course you take is a C++ course. You learn about pointers, software engineering principles, and the list goes on. The next semester, you take Intel assembly. So, at the very least, our department sounds like it is doing a bit better with teaching some of these concepts than others are.
However, on the parent's comment on arguing with the TA, I remember when I took the second Java course, our TA was a grad student who hadn't touched Java in 5 or more years himself... it was also the semester our University upgraded to 1.5, and a good number of the functions we learned were depracated. I remember having to argue with him for an hour that BufferedReader and Scanner did both accept input from the keyboard, and that I had not, in fact, made up the scanner method. All kinds of fun.
Our area has been monopolized for years by Comcast or pre-Comcast companies. We finally have a competitor coming in offering FIOS type services (though its not Verizon), and Comcast has done their best to tie them up in court for the next 5 years to get them to just forget about it. Fortunately for us, the new company refuses to allow Comcast to bully them!
GoDaddy is usually about $8 for a domain, and another $8 for privacy service (this goes up and down all the time, I know, based on sales, quantity, and whatnot). I got tired of not knowing if my domain would cost me $5 one year, $18 the next, and so on, since I manage multiple domains with different TLDs. Then, if you ever have to contact their tech support, well... lets just say I hate phone trees. I'm not trying to advocate any one company, but I did my research and found a registrar that charges a flat $15 period, and provides privacy service at no charge to TLDs that allow privacy. Better yet, if you call, you don't get a phone tree, you get a person! They may not be a billion dollar company, and they may not be able to register practically every tld in existence, but they work really well for what they do. GoDaddy otoh is an extremely large company, and can get away with charging double to get private service, and then to be treated like a number and not a customer. I'd prefer to give my money to the smaller guy that provides better service.
For arguments sake, though, I suppose you could argue that since GoDaddy charges $8 for the domain and $8 for privacy, and the company I'm referring to charges $15 for both, you could easily say they're just including the privacy fee in their base fee. They still charge $15 for domains that don't even offer privacy service... So, if you look at it that way, GoDaddy is providing service by allowing you to not pay for this if you don't need it. So, while I prefer getting the service, its not really that bad of a thing that GoDaddy charges that much for it, I just wish they made it a little less painful (say, managing the privacy through godaddy.com and not their third party website).
Overall, I agree with what the parent said about opting out. Having the whois data is not a bad thing, its just that not everyone in the world needs to have access to every detail. I believe the term "principle of least priviledge" applies here.
Overall, I would say that the current system would work in general if the data were restricted as far back as the registry itself, and not just by inputting address forwarding values by the registrar. If you want the rest of the information, I'd say that the registry (or 3rd party registrar) should only give the information out via a request that is mailed in. Or if you're doing it online, require a very small charge to view the full data (say, $0.50, since most CC processors want at least that much, and restrict the amount you can charge to per card for this, to prevent mass inputs of stolen card info). For that matter, you could even have a system in place to accept the requests in online, but require a valid phone number and have the system call back to provide the information. If this were the option that were implemented, I'd say that a recording would even be acceptable; no additional jobs then to staff a call-center, just staff to keep the equipment running. I'd just suggest not having it call immediately (say, 24 hour period?), and only provide so many lookups to a number per month. All of these things are still beatable, but at the very least make it much more difficult to get to the information. Basically, at this point, almost anything would be better than the current system if the information could be blocked if the user wants it. I also would say that at that point, perhaps something could be worked out to verify the whois data IS correct. If someone pays via credit card (paypal does this too), get the contact address/phone from the credit card company. It would block check payments, but that can be done through Paypal too.
Obviously none of my ideas are perfect, and may not be an improvement overall, but I do hate all the junk mail/telemarketing calls/junk email I've gotten in the past due to my info being out there.
a. Convenience (if they can make it easy to get the ringtone, they might get more sales) b. Their market is the crowd that does not know how to do this. While there are plenty of people who use the latest gadgets and know how to do these more complex actions, there are many people who still barely know how to change their ringtone, let alone make their own.
Tennessee did the same, only it was five years in impoverished areas in Tennessee. The kicker? You didn't get your tuition free at the time... the state simply agreed to pay off your loans AFTER your five years were up. And, to date, I've not heard of them actually paying a cent out...
Actually, if I remember correctly (and I very well may not), we had a Microsoft Recruiter on campus late last year, and he was demoing the final release of Vista (not yet released), and I remember him talking about the priority of threads in Vista. He showed us WMP with no other applications running (music played fine, the visualizations ran flawlessly). Then he closed WMP. Opened a program he had written to basically cause increased CPU usage. He then opened task-manager, and then WMP again, and played the same track. Everything on the system slowed, but the song never missed a beat, and the CPU usage was at 100%. He ended the program, CPU usage dropped back to normal, and the song (and visualizations) didn't miss anything.
So, based on this (and how accurate my memory is), I'd say that Vista definitely gives priority to audio over other resources.
I can't imagine how blocking an ad would be copyright infringement, unless you specifically take the page with the ads removed, save it, and re-distribute it as your own.
The thing is, unless the site specfically has a EULA on their main page telling you they're not "licensing you" to block their ads, or your ISP has some such quirk, you're not breaking any laws. Last time I checked, blocking ads was not in the legal books under the definition of theft, as the original post infers.
Granted, if they want to block Firefox users from their website, that's their perogative, and we can't stop them. But their claims that ad-blocking is illegal is just nonsense.
I'm in CS now, and we don't really even have them split up to as defined a point as you do. We have an InfoTech concentration in CS, and thats it. I'm actually taking this concentration, and am hoping I'll get the best of both worlds. I'm getting all the same programming courses that our "programming" concentration gets. However, our programming major requires you to take 12 hours worth of accounting and economics. Our InfoTech concentration has you take electives and security courses. I'm hoping this will help me get a better grasp of what to do in the real world.
I'm in a Comcast town. Back in the 70s it was the Atlanta Cable Company. They came to our small city and said "We'll pay every dime to wire your entire city for cable television. You simply have to agree to not let any other businesses come in and wire the city for cable for 30 years." My city agreed. The non-compete agreement ended a few months ago, and Atlanta Cable became Comcast well over ten years ago. However, Charter is the only other cable company within 100 miles of here, and from what I can tell, Comcast owns 49% of their stock, and makes their decisions for them. So, Charter's not about to come and wire the town.
You mention satellite. Satellite is great. I'd get Dish in a heartbeat, if my landlord allowed it. So, if you want TV (not just downloading off the internet or over-the-air or DVDs), you're stuck with DISH, DirecTV, Comcast, or nothing. Since I can't use Dish, that breaks it down to Comcast or nothing.
We're a fairly big city now, but still only have one DSL provider; BellSouth. BellSouth isn't bad, except that they don't offer any speeds over the generic 768kb connection that is the bare minimum they need to consider it "broadband." So, for high-speed internet in my area, once again, its Comcast or nothing.
So don't say just get real... a lot cities don't have options to go to a competitor when it comes to these situations. And I live IN the city. Don't even get me started on what my friend who lives about 40 miles out has to go through...
Unfortunately, Verizon seems to have a monopoly on good coverage; there isn't another carrier worth using in this area, though we currently have 5 major cellular providers, and are a fairly large city.
Sadly, I wish US Cellular would expand down to here; they use Verizon's towers (as best as I can tell) so they have almost identical coverage to what Verizon can provide, they tend to have better customer service, and cost about the same as Verizon. And sadly, they're within 100 miles of us, but are not quite here.
If most people only have 20% in landline tax, I'm getting screwed somewhere. My service is $12 a month, and I pay $10 a month in taxes, which means I'm paying about 80% in tax rates. I can't imagine my Comcast bill going up to have even 20% of taxes too... I wouldn't be able to afford it for sure. It would take us from $42.95 a month to $52 a month...
Of course, the 40M could include bulk-issued licenses to corporations and manufacturers like Dell. I mean, if they sell Dell 10M licenses for use for two years on their new PCs, it doesn't mean Dell has even given out 1 of them to an actual customer, but its still a license MS sold.
The article says that the MS software was only used in Washington. So, what software is running these boxes everywhere else in the country? I've been using the horrid Comcast guide (and their horrid DVR) since about 2004, and never really even thought about the fact that it wasn't something horrible they created...
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I work in tech support (you may have heard of the company, but its not telco), and not five minutes after reading this on the consumerist, I had someone call in and mention bigwig names and tell me they needed this, that, and the other. Earlier in the day, I'd had a similar call and just went with it, but this time, I put them on hold and escalated it up to the bigwigs in question just to make sure it was legit. It was, and that was that, and they thanked me for following the proper procedure and for making sure it was a legitimate request.
No matter how this story unfolds, I doubt we have the full story here. In the two call centers I've worked for, I've had cops, priests, customers, and stalkers call in trying to get information. We had a number to give them at the first call center, and had them call it period. I miss having that line of defense where I work now.
Not to step on your toes, but to really clarify the point...
Converting 1 SEK to $0.13 USD...
You send the law firm $0.13. They have to pay $0.26 in processing fees, meaning they have to pay the bank $0.13 due to the fees.
Its probably not that simple in real life, but there you go.
What annoys me, in general, is that I work on peoples machines that have their XP key printed right on the machine, but the key is for a specific service pack. So, I can't just use a valid XP disk, I have to have that specific disk. I have a legitimate copy with a legitimate key, but tend to have to go torrent the speficic build of Windows. I mean, surely Microsoft understands that since they give out the Service Packs through Windows Update, this isn't a pirating tactic.
I installed Windows 7 beta on my machine a few months back on a second drive. It was a beautiful experience, honestly. It ran much more quickly than Vista had, the only issue I had was one of my two nic cards didn't have a driver that worked. But, since I had a second, that wasn't an issue. I was blown away by how much more quickly everything ran.
I just installed the RC over Vista, and I'm amazed by how much less polished and how unimpressed I am now. My CPU usage does eventually drop, but for the first 20 minutes of booting up, will hover around 85%. Clicking on the Start Menu brings up Start and the programs list, but the thumbnails take a few seconds to load. All in all, its little things like this, and the fact that it does generally seem slower that I notice.
I remember my first Apple experience was a CompUSA. They had the alarms on the things so sensetive that if you even touched one of their macs, the alarm would go off. It really was upsetting, and did make me want to go look at other sections.
(On a side note though, I'm posting this on a MBP, so they didn't completely kill me off)
One immediately pops into mind for me... Wouldn't this just open up a new means for exploitation?
I am in the IT department, but a different area. It's not something the web devs are overly concerned with.
Personally, I'd kill for IE8 to come back to the Mac. My company's payroll/benefits website requires IE6 or IE7 to login. So, right now, I have to fire up VMWare or find a PC to check my pay stub. I'd prefer my company simply fix the site to work with Safari or Firefox or Opera or ANY browser, but I know thats unlikely to happen, and a Mac version is more likely.
You're right on the money.
A locally owned company is going to begin installing fiber in our city... But wait... Comcast doesn't want competition since they're the only viable high-speed internet provider in our area, so they're doing their best to tie the company up in lawsuits for years.
I agree, politics play way too much of a role in anything.
That explains a lot. My company is all about "security through obscurity," and they also seem to be stuck about ten years in the past...
My university does teach a Java course as the intro course for any CS concentration. You take it (programming or Java 101, you could say), and then it goes on to what equates to Java 102, where you learn about data structures, and linked lists, and all of the other fun things that programmers should know. But, to be honest, we did not learn much if anything really about pointers. However, the THIRD course you take is a C++ course. You learn about pointers, software engineering principles, and the list goes on. The next semester, you take Intel assembly. So, at the very least, our department sounds like it is doing a bit better with teaching some of these concepts than others are.
However, on the parent's comment on arguing with the TA, I remember when I took the second Java course, our TA was a grad student who hadn't touched Java in 5 or more years himself... it was also the semester our University upgraded to 1.5, and a good number of the functions we learned were depracated. I remember having to argue with him for an hour that BufferedReader and Scanner did both accept input from the keyboard, and that I had not, in fact, made up the scanner method. All kinds of fun.
Our area has been monopolized for years by Comcast or pre-Comcast companies. We finally have a competitor coming in offering FIOS type services (though its not Verizon), and Comcast has done their best to tie them up in court for the next 5 years to get them to just forget about it. Fortunately for us, the new company refuses to allow Comcast to bully them!
GoDaddy is usually about $8 for a domain, and another $8 for privacy service (this goes up and down all the time, I know, based on sales, quantity, and whatnot). I got tired of not knowing if my domain would cost me $5 one year, $18 the next, and so on, since I manage multiple domains with different TLDs. Then, if you ever have to contact their tech support, well... lets just say I hate phone trees. I'm not trying to advocate any one company, but I did my research and found a registrar that charges a flat $15 period, and provides privacy service at no charge to TLDs that allow privacy. Better yet, if you call, you don't get a phone tree, you get a person! They may not be a billion dollar company, and they may not be able to register practically every tld in existence, but they work really well for what they do. GoDaddy otoh is an extremely large company, and can get away with charging double to get private service, and then to be treated like a number and not a customer. I'd prefer to give my money to the smaller guy that provides better service.
For arguments sake, though, I suppose you could argue that since GoDaddy charges $8 for the domain and $8 for privacy, and the company I'm referring to charges $15 for both, you could easily say they're just including the privacy fee in their base fee. They still charge $15 for domains that don't even offer privacy service... So, if you look at it that way, GoDaddy is providing service by allowing you to not pay for this if you don't need it. So, while I prefer getting the service, its not really that bad of a thing that GoDaddy charges that much for it, I just wish they made it a little less painful (say, managing the privacy through godaddy.com and not their third party website).
Overall, I agree with what the parent said about opting out. Having the whois data is not a bad thing, its just that not everyone in the world needs to have access to every detail. I believe the term "principle of least priviledge" applies here.
Overall, I would say that the current system would work in general if the data were restricted as far back as the registry itself, and not just by inputting address forwarding values by the registrar. If you want the rest of the information, I'd say that the registry (or 3rd party registrar) should only give the information out via a request that is mailed in. Or if you're doing it online, require a very small charge to view the full data (say, $0.50, since most CC processors want at least that much, and restrict the amount you can charge to per card for this, to prevent mass inputs of stolen card info). For that matter, you could even have a system in place to accept the requests in online, but require a valid phone number and have the system call back to provide the information. If this were the option that were implemented, I'd say that a recording would even be acceptable; no additional jobs then to staff a call-center, just staff to keep the equipment running. I'd just suggest not having it call immediately (say, 24 hour period?), and only provide so many lookups to a number per month. All of these things are still beatable, but at the very least make it much more difficult to get to the information. Basically, at this point, almost anything would be better than the current system if the information could be blocked if the user wants it. I also would say that at that point, perhaps something could be worked out to verify the whois data IS correct. If someone pays via credit card (paypal does this too), get the contact address/phone from the credit card company. It would block check payments, but that can be done through Paypal too.
Obviously none of my ideas are perfect, and may not be an improvement overall, but I do hate all the junk mail/telemarketing calls/junk email I've gotten in the past due to my info being out there.
My guess would be they are going for:
a. Convenience (if they can make it easy to get the ringtone, they might get more sales)
b. Their market is the crowd that does not know how to do this. While there are plenty of people who use the latest gadgets and know how to do these more complex actions, there are many people who still barely know how to change their ringtone, let alone make their own.
I didn't say it was different, simply that Windows is now doing this by default, according to the demonstration we received.
Tennessee did the same, only it was five years in impoverished areas in Tennessee. The kicker? You didn't get your tuition free at the time... the state simply agreed to pay off your loans AFTER your five years were up. And, to date, I've not heard of them actually paying a cent out...
Actually, if I remember correctly (and I very well may not), we had a Microsoft Recruiter on campus late last year, and he was demoing the final release of Vista (not yet released), and I remember him talking about the priority of threads in Vista. He showed us WMP with no other applications running (music played fine, the visualizations ran flawlessly). Then he closed WMP. Opened a program he had written to basically cause increased CPU usage. He then opened task-manager, and then WMP again, and played the same track. Everything on the system slowed, but the song never missed a beat, and the CPU usage was at 100%. He ended the program, CPU usage dropped back to normal, and the song (and visualizations) didn't miss anything.
So, based on this (and how accurate my memory is), I'd say that Vista definitely gives priority to audio over other resources.
I can't imagine how blocking an ad would be copyright infringement, unless you specifically take the page with the ads removed, save it, and re-distribute it as your own.
The thing is, unless the site specfically has a EULA on their main page telling you they're not "licensing you" to block their ads, or your ISP has some such quirk, you're not breaking any laws. Last time I checked, blocking ads was not in the legal books under the definition of theft, as the original post infers.
Granted, if they want to block Firefox users from their website, that's their perogative, and we can't stop them. But their claims that ad-blocking is illegal is just nonsense.
I'm in CS now, and we don't really even have them split up to as defined a point as you do. We have an InfoTech concentration in CS, and thats it. I'm actually taking this concentration, and am hoping I'll get the best of both worlds. I'm getting all the same programming courses that our "programming" concentration gets. However, our programming major requires you to take 12 hours worth of accounting and economics. Our InfoTech concentration has you take electives and security courses. I'm hoping this will help me get a better grasp of what to do in the real world.
I'm in a Comcast town. Back in the 70s it was the Atlanta Cable Company. They came to our small city and said "We'll pay every dime to wire your entire city for cable television. You simply have to agree to not let any other businesses come in and wire the city for cable for 30 years." My city agreed. The non-compete agreement ended a few months ago, and Atlanta Cable became Comcast well over ten years ago. However, Charter is the only other cable company within 100 miles of here, and from what I can tell, Comcast owns 49% of their stock, and makes their decisions for them. So, Charter's not about to come and wire the town.
You mention satellite. Satellite is great. I'd get Dish in a heartbeat, if my landlord allowed it. So, if you want TV (not just downloading off the internet or over-the-air or DVDs), you're stuck with DISH, DirecTV, Comcast, or nothing. Since I can't use Dish, that breaks it down to Comcast or nothing.
We're a fairly big city now, but still only have one DSL provider; BellSouth. BellSouth isn't bad, except that they don't offer any speeds over the generic 768kb connection that is the bare minimum they need to consider it "broadband." So, for high-speed internet in my area, once again, its Comcast or nothing.
So don't say just get real... a lot cities don't have options to go to a competitor when it comes to these situations. And I live IN the city. Don't even get me started on what my friend who lives about 40 miles out has to go through...
Unfortunately, Verizon seems to have a monopoly on good coverage; there isn't another carrier worth using in this area, though we currently have 5 major cellular providers, and are a fairly large city.
Sadly, I wish US Cellular would expand down to here; they use Verizon's towers (as best as I can tell) so they have almost identical coverage to what Verizon can provide, they tend to have better customer service, and cost about the same as Verizon. And sadly, they're within 100 miles of us, but are not quite here.
If most people only have 20% in landline tax, I'm getting screwed somewhere. My service is $12 a month, and I pay $10 a month in taxes, which means I'm paying about 80% in tax rates. I can't imagine my Comcast bill going up to have even 20% of taxes too... I wouldn't be able to afford it for sure. It would take us from $42.95 a month to $52 a month...
Of course, the 40M could include bulk-issued licenses to corporations and manufacturers like Dell. I mean, if they sell Dell 10M licenses for use for two years on their new PCs, it doesn't mean Dell has even given out 1 of them to an actual customer, but its still a license MS sold.
The article says that the MS software was only used in Washington. So, what software is running these boxes everywhere else in the country? I've been using the horrid Comcast guide (and their horrid DVR) since about 2004, and never really even thought about the fact that it wasn't something horrible they created...
Is GuideWorks what I've got as the guide now?