you consider that Vancouver is 229 feet elevation and Halifax is 477 feet. So it's uphill all the way. They could probably get over a million MPG on the return trip.
Yep, because we all know that second hand smoke is more dangerous than first hand smoke. The scientific establishment has proven that homeopathy is true.
The less of a poison you get the more powerful its effects.
Therefore the less alcohol and coffee you drink, the more bad effects you will get.
Those poor schmucks that only drink one or two beers or coffees a day are bound to get cancer and cirrhosis for sure!
Moderation in all things? Not for me. I want to live long and disease free. I'll take it all firsthand and let the ignorant worry about dying from barely detectable contamination.
Just because this guy was a member of the "Department of Homeland Security's privacy advisory committee" doesn't mean he got special privilages.
No!
That isn't the American way.
This applies to you,.. and you,.. and everybody. And you over there with brown skin, yes, even you too! We can all just walk through the security checkpoints without ID and say with conviction "I am the CEO of a large corporation, now step aside and let me through!." And of course the TSA guys will just step aside. I know because I just yell at them in the airport and they back down like cowards. If you don't believe me just try it the next time you fly.
Disclaimer. The above action was completed by a professional politicion on a pre-setup security course with advance notice and approval from the Secretary General of the Republican party.
DISCLAIMER YMMV, but please be carefull when dealing with TSA. Please do not do anything to draw attention to yourself and please do not say you saw it here on slashdot. If worse becomes worse, plead ignorance and act like the dumbest person that ever lived. This is the best advice from many previous totalitarian societies for dealing with a police state. Act as stupid as you can because if you acknowledge anything it will be used against you. Your best defense is to be the stupidest person on earth.
Yeah I know. My PayPal acount has been flagged for suspicious activity three time this month already and each time I had to reset my password and re-enter all my credit card information.
Nobody in this whole thread seems to understand how it works. The grocery store is -not- collecting individually identifyable data to offer you personal discounts. They are collecting aggregate data to maximize profits. And maximizing profits always means that -overall- everybody pays more. They might have your address and phone number, but that's just for selling to other companies, not their primary mission with the discount cards. So they can sell your information to others and thats just more gravy for them.
Here's how it works. You analyze the buying habits and notice that asparagus sells especially well when it's on sale for 25 percent off. That tells you that a lot of people who wouldn't ordinarily buy asparagus do buy it when it's on sale. Looking at the numbers you see that maybe you can adjust the sale price upwards to 10 percent off instead of 25 percent off.
On the other hand you notice that sales of artichokes never seem to go well no matter how much you discount it, possibly because nobody buys artichokes based on the price. People who buy artichokes will pay whatever the price is and people who don't normally buy artichokes won't buy them on sale because they just don't like artichokes. That tells you to stop the artichoke sales and raise the normal price. Artichoke lovers are going to pay up no matter how high it goes.
In either case the net result is to raise the -overall- selling price which maximizes profits.
Let's take another item, some new exotic tropical fruit like that Japanese pear/apple. Nobody buys it at the current (high) price but you notice that after the sale, quite a few come back for more at the normal price. In this case it might generate more sales to lower the normal price slightly so that the new converts will buy more. And you might have a few more sales days with lesser discounts to attract more converts.
If you think the store cards are there to benefit you at the cost of profits to the store you just don't understand capitolism and free markets. The whole purpose of those cards is to identify which products can tolerate increased prices and which might gain market share by sales. But it's definately not to lower the profit margin or benefit any individual.
In -all- cases, the data mining is there to maximize profits which by definition means to get the consumer to pay more money overall than they otherwise would.
So if you think it's a good thing to go ahead and help them do their dirty work against you, then you deserve what you get in return, but I guarantee you, it won't be lower -overall- prices and it won't be less aggressive advertising. They are just trying to trick the consumers into helping them maximize profits and maximizing profits by defintion means getting you to pay more than you otherwise would.
Oh, I noticed that you thought you spotted the flaw in my argument, that they could just use aggregate anonymous sales figures to do the same thing. Well, uhh...yeah but. Now they can track how many non-cardholders come from out of the area and what the preferences of their local regular customers are. This gives them much more granular data. They can adjust prices to whatever the market will bear in individual stores. They can cross-reference people who use their card when visiting out of town relatives and so on. Now they can actually track a little bit of word of mouth.
Finally, if you think any for-profit business will ever knowingly do anything to get less money from you, then you just don't understand the free (or regulated) market. All that haggling for a new or used car isn't done for your benefit, it's done because it maximizes profit and maximizing profit by definition means making everybody pay more in aggregate, than they otherwise would.
Sorry to repeat myself over and over, but too many people think the big corporations just want to keep prices low and help everybody pay less, even when they could maximize profits and make a lot more money. In reality, the big companies will try to make as much money as they can and that always means charging as much as the market will bear in addition to any other cost-cutting measures like outsourcing or supplying from third world countries.
Woo Hoo!! I can tell what hour of the day it is now without looking at the sun. This is really cool ancient technology, especially since I can't find a reasonably priced watch that can tell me what time it is.
I'm tired of watches that give me weather reports and time zone data and underwater depth readings and everything but the time of day. This is the one for me. Not very granular, but at least a step in the right direction.
I disagree most vigorously. The phrase "A man's home is his castle" originated in feudal Europe when most people were not free but some semblance of privacy was respected. Privacy is -not- of modern origin but has been the bulwark of freedom and the last bastion of freedom througout history. Just because it's possible to invade privacy more easily now does not mean it has always been so. Just look at the fact that you can kill a man for entering your home (in the US anyway), with no questions asked. Your house is your castle and you can expect privacy. That has always been the law of the land. To say that it is a luxery and not equated with freedom is disengenuous. It's even written into the constitution fo the United States. Read the fourth amendment.
Here's another article that exposes older privacy laws of England, France, Norway, and Sweden. Those countries are arguably as free, or nowdays more free than the United States.
No, the right to privacy is not a modern luxery. To the contrary, the lack of privacy is a modern invention and not practiced to anywhere near the modern extent in previous eras. The parent post should be modded down as ill-informed malarky.
I'll believe it when I can walk up to an ATM bank machine and just say "withdraw $200.00 from account XXXXXX and give it to me now" and if I get the money and it's correctly withdrawn from the right account then it passes the Turing test. I predicted that would not happen in our lifetime (back in 1990) and I've been proven correct so far.
I got a D on that essay question (back in 1990) about the state of AI and voice recognition because the professor believed that voice recognition was just around the corner and we'd all be just talking to ATM machines, like talking to COMPUTER on star trek, by the year 2000.
We all know how it works when you just have to say one word on the VR system when you call customer support. Usually you end up pressing some number or it doesn't know what you want and you get a human after many miserable attempts at speaking "one" or "service" or any other common word that it just doesn't recognize.
The state of AI today is what you get on those Voice Recognition systems which is always, let me repeat that, -ALWAYS- foobar.
I'll say it now and I'll say it again in another ten years, and again in another twenty years, "AI is smoke and mirrors! It can't be done in our lifetimes and especially not with the ignorant computation they use now."
Nobody will ever try to make a computer learn like a human child and give it the input it needs for years to learn things, but until they start modeling real life I don't think they'll get anywhere.
In fact I'll make a prediction. The Turing Test will not be passed for fifty years. I mean the real Turing Test, not some simulation of chess experts that don't know anything about anything other than the very narrow field of chess they programmed into the computer "AI" system.
Anybody can program Eliza type stuff and add some pointers to a database of general stuff, but getting it to really understand things is almost impossible using current proramming techniques. Neural network programming is just another buzzword. Don't fall for it because it won't help either.
The secret sauce is programming a system that can learn and change it's response over time depending on accumulated knowledge. And that requires a knowledge base backend, which is really the hard part. The knowledge database has to be fast enough to run through not hundreds, but millions of iterations of searching to dredge up relevent facts and compose an intelligent response, and this just can't be done within a few seconds using any current or contemplated technology in the forseeable future.
"then I had something as simple as my taillights on my truck stolen, and realized how crappy it feels."
I remember how awful it was when somebody stole my headlight. I was in the car out in the parking lot one cold night, just letting the engine warm up when some nasty thief came up and used my headlight to check something in his wallet. Damned thieves have no right to steal my light!
Yes, I agree. Microsoft's $50,000,000,000 in cash can only pay 10,000 new workers $100,000 a year for five years before it runs out. Of course if Microsoft continues to generate income in the billions per year range they might last a few centuries more before the money runs out. But one can't be too careful with billions and billions of dollars. After all Microsoft didn't get all that cash by paying top wages to the best and brightest.
I'm going to start a clothing store but all my products will be copywrited. Of course the buyers will own their clothing, but I'll charge a small royalty each time they wear the clothes. And, even better, the wearers will become my agents and have to charge a royalty to everybody who sees them. The EULA will specify that they agree to collect my royalties for me, but in their favor, the EULA will also prohibit saying anything bad about my clothing without my express written consent. Furthermore, I'll patent this business method so nobody else can do the same thing without paying me a hefty licensing fee.
Whats all this I hear about missing risks? Is that supposed to be a bad thing? If you want to find risks you could take up parachuting or hang gliding but I think most of us would prefer to miss risks. I think missing risks is a good thing.
Excuse me, but thats missing Disks, not missing Risks.
I think you misunderstand the purpose and reason for a union (as in "trade union" or "workers union"). No union ever provided, in the past or now, protection against being fired for cause.
That is not the reason a union exists. The purpose of a union is to provide collective barganing power, not to protect individual rights. This is the most important thing to realize as you educate yourself.
Your misunderstanding is very common and exploited by the Republican party of the US, but the misunderstanding is a grievous myth. Unions do not protect anybody from being fired if they screw up. They can only fire you for a just cause which is specified in the contract. The contract says the union employee will show up on time, perform the job to requirements and so on.
In reality a union employee can be terminated for pretty much anything the employer wishes if the employer wants to get rid of a particular employee. It can be punching in a minute late, sub-par job performance, insubordination, or any of a number of things. But a union employee has zero protection from the union if the employer wants to terminate him for just cause.
They only real protection the union members gain is by making a contract that says the company must pay everybody in the union the same negotiated wages for doing the same job. This means the union cannot summarily fire you in order to replace you with somebody who works for less. This is what unions are for!
The trendy way to get around this is to outsource. Outsourcing has the advantage of also working against non-union employees.
Does anybody know what.Net was supposed to be, in plain English? I know it was some kind of framework that enhanced innovation and complimented content delivery services or something, but I never heard a real expalnation that made any sense.
Nice try but I'm amazed at the misconceptions of all the posters so far. geekwench came the closest but in court as in horseshoes, close doesn't count.
The real problem is that he was charged with a crime he probably didn't commit. he -WASN'T- charged with the crime he did commit which is "Unauthorized Access". See:
for an article by a real lawyer about it. Further links are provided at groklaw.net.
In this case I think the judge is right and the prosecution screwed up royally. They need to charge him with the crime he committed and not some other crime that may have been committed by his customers or associates.
But one thing I -DO- agree with in many previous posts is that the CAN-SPAM act is simply legalizing spam and making it harder to prosecute.
You can legally send spam advertizing teen sluts and action wives as long as the pictures they send you really do confirm that they look like teen sluts and action wives. Then just have an opt-out list and you're perfectly legal. There is no requirement that the opt-out list actually works other than that list can't email you again. No problem there. Just start up a new list every day and name your new business $RAYDAYenterprises.com or something like that so you get 21enterprises or 351mustang or 23skidoo or whatever. As long as its a different list you're covered under the law because the law says nothing about removing "removees" from any other list or not giving or selling "removees" email addresses.
The CAN-SPAM act is basically a call-to-arms for spammers to march headfirst into battle. And your spam filter is the only thing between you and the spammers and the law that protects the spammers.
Re:what about those poor people
on
FTC Defines Spam
·
· Score: 1
Well it depends. If it's the wife of assasinated:
1) Secretary of Finance 2) Chief Director of Foreign Accounts Payable 3) Head of International Investments Agency
then you say you need at least a hundred gajillion bazillion dollars to become interested.
But if he/she is the (not assasinated):
A) Minister of National Insurance Payments Division B) Comptroller of State Bank Finances C) Under Secretary of Lost Moneys
then tell them you need to see a bazillion gajillion dollars upfront first.
Then and only then do you start negotiations. And don't let them snow you with poor relatives and legal issues and what not. Collect the first hundred billion in ernest money before you commit to anything. After that you take them to the cleaners for everything they're worth.
Re:This is stupid, and doomed to make things worse
on
FTC Defines Spam
·
· Score: 1
I agree its stupid because it just defines the parameters of legal spam for the spammers. But I disagree that legislation won't work. It worked for the junk FAX problem and it worked for the telemarketing phone problem. I can now use my phone and answer it with confidence that it is not a telemarketer.
The big difference with spam is that there is no law against it. Only laws that define it (which simply provides the spammers with all the information they need to circumvent the (yes you) CAN-SPAM act. Oh they claim to make it illegal and punishable by up to 3000 days in jail and a $50000.00 fine. That's great, but as long as the punishment is just a cost of doing business and the qualifications for actually being convicted are so narrow and exclusive as to be nil, whats the deterrent?
The real solution is to make it illegal and give a harsh sentence for violators. And to do that you have to define spam. There is only one definition that will ever work. Its the same definition we use for sexual harrasment. If the victim (reciever) thinks its spam, then its spam! Period.
Some people argue that you can't track them down. Well then how the hell do you think they get money from their victims? That money must go somewhere. Its really easy to track them down. Just buy a sample of their product and trace the money flow. The money always goes somewhere. If they can track money freom charity to terrorists they can track the money from joe victim to spammer. Then just follow the money and arrest the recipient of the money. Thats all there is to it.
My solution of making it illegal would stop the flow of spam dead cold, in its tracks. The problem would simply cease to exist.
Lest you think the problem is international, 99.9% of all spammers are U.S. fly by night companies. The rest are so insignificant that I could live with the one spam a month I'd get from them.
Slashdot Mirror
you consider that Vancouver is 229 feet elevation and Halifax is 477 feet. So it's uphill all the way. They could probably get over a million MPG on the return trip.
Please don't tell me I have to reset my password and re-enter all my credit card information for the fourth time this month!
Yep, because we all know that second hand smoke is more dangerous than first hand smoke. The scientific establishment has proven that homeopathy is true.
The less of a poison you get the more powerful its effects.
Therefore the less alcohol and coffee you drink, the more bad effects you will get.
Those poor schmucks that only drink one or two beers or coffees a day are bound to get cancer and cirrhosis for sure!
Moderation in all things? Not for me. I want to live long and disease free. I'll take it all firsthand and let the ignorant worry about dying from barely detectable contamination.
Just because this guy was a member of the "Department of Homeland Security's privacy advisory committee" doesn't mean he got special privilages.
No!
That isn't the American way.
This applies to you,.. and you,.. and everybody. And you over there with brown skin, yes, even you too! We can all just walk through the security checkpoints without ID and say with conviction "I am the CEO of a large corporation, now step aside and let me through!." And of course the TSA guys will just step aside. I know because I just yell at them in the airport and they back down like cowards. If you don't believe me just try it the next time you fly.
Disclaimer. The above action was completed by a professional politicion on a pre-setup security course with advance notice and approval from the Secretary General of the Republican party.
DISCLAIMER
YMMV, but please be carefull when dealing with TSA. Please do not do
anything to draw attention to yourself and please do not say you saw it here on slashdot. If worse becomes worse, plead ignorance and act like the dumbest person that ever lived. This is the best advice from many previous totalitarian societies for dealing with a police state. Act as stupid as you can because if you acknowledge anything it will be used against you. Your best defense is to be the stupidest person on earth.
Tell that to the many Paypal victims...
Yeah I know. My PayPal acount has been flagged for suspicious activity three time this month already and each time I had to reset my password and re-enter all my credit card information.
Nobody in this whole thread seems to understand how it works. The grocery store is -not- collecting individually identifyable data to offer you personal discounts. They are collecting aggregate data to maximize profits. And maximizing profits always means that -overall- everybody pays more. They might have your address and phone number, but that's just for selling to other companies, not their primary mission with the discount cards. So they can sell your information to others and thats just more gravy for them.
Here's how it works. You analyze the buying habits and notice that asparagus sells especially well when it's on sale for 25 percent off. That tells you that a lot of people who wouldn't ordinarily buy asparagus do buy it when it's on sale. Looking at the numbers you see that maybe you can adjust the sale price upwards to 10 percent off instead of 25 percent off.
On the other hand you notice that sales of artichokes never seem to go well no matter how much you discount it, possibly because nobody buys artichokes based on the price. People who buy artichokes will pay whatever the price is and people who don't normally buy artichokes won't buy them on sale because they just don't like artichokes. That tells you to stop the artichoke sales and raise the normal price. Artichoke lovers are going to pay up no matter how high it goes.
In either case the net result is to raise the -overall- selling price which maximizes profits.
Let's take another item, some new exotic tropical fruit like that Japanese pear/apple. Nobody buys it at the current (high) price but you notice that after the sale, quite a few come back for more at the normal price. In this case it might generate more sales to lower the normal price slightly so that the new converts will buy more. And you might have a few more sales days with lesser discounts to attract more converts.
If you think the store cards are there to benefit you at the cost of profits to the store you just don't understand capitolism and free markets. The whole purpose of those cards is to identify which products can tolerate increased prices and which might gain market share by sales. But it's definately not to lower the profit margin or benefit any individual.
In -all- cases, the data mining is there to maximize profits which by definition means to get the consumer to pay more money overall than they otherwise would.
So if you think it's a good thing to go ahead and help them do their dirty work against you, then you deserve what you get in return, but I guarantee you, it won't be lower -overall- prices and it won't be less aggressive advertising. They are just trying to trick the consumers into helping them maximize profits and maximizing profits by defintion means getting you to pay more than you otherwise would.
Oh, I noticed that you thought you spotted the flaw in my argument, that they could just use aggregate anonymous sales figures to do the same thing. Well, uhh...yeah but. Now they can track how many non-cardholders come from out of the area and what the preferences of their local regular customers are. This gives them much more granular data. They can adjust prices to whatever the market will bear in individual stores. They can cross-reference people who use their card when visiting out of town relatives and so on. Now they can actually track a little bit of word of mouth.
Finally, if you think any for-profit business will ever knowingly do anything to get less money from you, then you just don't understand the free (or regulated) market. All that haggling for a new or used car isn't done for your benefit, it's done because it maximizes profit and maximizing profit by definition means making everybody pay more in aggregate, than they otherwise would.
Sorry to repeat myself over and over, but too many people think the big corporations just want to keep prices low and help everybody pay less, even when they could maximize profits and make a lot more money. In reality, the big companies will try to make as much money as they can and that always means charging as much as the market will bear in addition to any other cost-cutting measures like outsourcing or supplying from third world countries.
In Soviet USSA -everything- watches you!
Woo Hoo!! I can tell what hour of the day it is now without looking at the sun. This is really cool ancient technology, especially since I can't find a reasonably priced watch that can tell me what time it is. I'm tired of watches that give me weather reports and time zone data and underwater depth readings and everything but the time of day. This is the one for me. Not very granular, but at least a step in the right direction.
I disagree most vigorously. The phrase "A man's home is his castle" originated in feudal Europe when most people were not free but some semblance of privacy was respected. Privacy is -not- of modern origin but has been the bulwark of freedom and the last bastion of freedom througout history. Just because it's possible to invade privacy more easily now does not mean it has always been so. Just look at the fact that you can kill a man for entering your home (in the US anyway), with no questions asked. Your house is your castle and you can expect privacy. That has always been the law of the land. To say that it is a luxery and not equated with freedom is disengenuous. It's even written into the constitution fo the United States. Read the fourth amendment.
m endments.html
3 /overview.htm
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/a
Here's another article that exposes older privacy laws of England, France, Norway, and Sweden. Those countries are arguably as free, or nowdays more free than the United States.
http://www.privacyinternational.org/survey/phr200
No, the right to privacy is not a modern luxery. To the contrary, the lack of privacy is a modern invention and not practiced to anywhere near the modern extent in previous eras. The parent post should be modded down as ill-informed malarky.
I'll believe it when I can walk up to an ATM bank machine and just say "withdraw $200.00 from account XXXXXX and give it to me now" and if I get the money and it's correctly withdrawn from the right account then it passes the Turing test. I predicted that would not happen in our lifetime (back in 1990) and I've been proven correct so far.
I got a D on that essay question (back in 1990) about the state of AI and voice recognition because the professor believed that voice recognition was just around the corner and we'd all be just talking to ATM machines, like talking to COMPUTER on star trek, by the year 2000.
We all know how it works when you just have to say one word on the VR system when you call customer support. Usually you end up pressing some number or it doesn't know what you want and you get a human after many miserable attempts at speaking "one" or "service" or any other common word that it just doesn't recognize.
The state of AI today is what you get on those Voice Recognition systems which is always, let me repeat that, -ALWAYS- foobar.
I'll say it now and I'll say it again in another ten years, and again in another twenty years, "AI is smoke and mirrors! It can't be done in our lifetimes and especially not with the ignorant computation they use now."
Nobody will ever try to make a computer learn like a human child and give it the input it needs for years to learn things, but until they start modeling real life I don't think they'll get anywhere.
In fact I'll make a prediction. The Turing Test will not be passed for fifty years. I mean the real Turing Test, not some simulation of chess experts that don't know anything about anything other than the very narrow field of chess they programmed into the computer "AI" system.
Anybody can program Eliza type stuff and add some pointers to a database of general stuff, but getting it to really understand things is almost impossible using current proramming techniques. Neural network programming is just another buzzword. Don't fall for it because it won't help either.
The secret sauce is programming a system that can learn and change it's response over time depending on accumulated knowledge. And that requires a knowledge base backend, which is really the hard part. The knowledge database has to be fast enough to run through not hundreds, but millions of iterations of searching to dredge up relevent facts and compose an intelligent response, and this just can't be done within a few seconds using any current or contemplated technology in the forseeable future.
"then I had something as simple as my taillights on my truck stolen, and realized how crappy it feels."
I remember how awful it was when somebody stole my headlight. I was in the car out in the parking lot one cold night, just letting the engine warm up when some nasty thief came up and used my headlight to check something in his wallet. Damned thieves have no right to steal my light!
Friend, you got your dig syntax backwards. You specify the domain first and the DNS RR second, like this:
dig hackiis6.com mx
You were looking up the hackiis6.com RR type for mx. which doesn't exist becaue there's no domain mx. which has RR type hackiis6.com
and therefore nothing to return.
When you do it right you do get an MX record but I don't know how to post the full dig output on slashdot.
The RR is:
hackiis6.com. 300 IN MX 10 mail.banneretcs.com.
BTW, I've just discovered a marevlous refutation of Godel's incompletelness therom but I dont't have time to include it with this post.
Yes, I agree. Microsoft's $50,000,000,000 in cash can only pay 10,000 new workers $100,000 a year for five years before it runs out. Of course if Microsoft continues to generate income in the billions per year range they might last a few centuries more before the money runs out. But one can't be too careful with billions and billions of dollars. After all Microsoft didn't get all that cash by paying top wages to the best and brightest.
It means that if you bypass the said security apparatus then you are not violating the said patent.
I'm going to start a clothing store but all my products will be copywrited. Of course the buyers will own their clothing, but I'll charge a small royalty each time they wear the clothes. And, even better, the wearers will become my agents and have to charge a royalty to everybody who sees them. The EULA will specify that they agree to collect my royalties for me, but in their favor, the EULA will also prohibit saying anything bad about my clothing without my express written consent. Furthermore, I'll patent this business method so nobody else can do the same thing without paying me a hefty licensing fee.
Whats all this I hear about missing risks? Is that supposed to be a bad thing? If you want to find risks you could take up parachuting or hang gliding but I think most of us would prefer to miss risks. I think missing risks is a good thing.
Excuse me, but thats missing Disks, not missing Risks.
Ohhh... Never mind.
I think you misunderstand the purpose and reason for a union (as in "trade union" or "workers union"). No union ever provided, in the past or now, protection against being fired for cause.
That is not the reason a union exists. The purpose of a union is to provide collective barganing power, not to protect individual rights. This is the most important thing to realize as you educate yourself.
Your misunderstanding is very common and exploited by the Republican party of the US, but the misunderstanding is a grievous myth. Unions do not protect anybody from being fired if they screw up. They can only fire you for a just cause which is specified in the contract. The contract says the union employee will show up on time, perform the job to requirements and so on.
In reality a union employee can be terminated for pretty much anything the employer wishes if the employer wants to get rid of a particular employee. It can be punching in a minute late, sub-par job performance, insubordination, or any of a number of things. But a union employee has zero protection from the union if the employer wants to terminate him for just cause.
They only real protection the union members gain is by making a contract that says the company must pay everybody in the union the same negotiated wages for doing the same job. This means the union cannot summarily fire you in order to replace you with somebody who works for less. This is what unions are for!
The trendy way to get around this is to outsource. Outsourcing has the advantage of also working against non-union employees.
Does anybody know what .Net was supposed to be, in plain English? I know it was some kind of framework that enhanced innovation and complimented content delivery services or something, but I never heard a real expalnation that made any sense.
They ought to have a sticker saying "electromagnetism is a theory not a fact" too. Oh wait, then they might have to stop electrocuting prisoners.
Nice try but I'm amazed at the misconceptions of all the posters so far. geekwench came the closest but in court as in horseshoes, close doesn't count.
0 91956894
The real problem is that he was charged with a crime he probably didn't commit. he -WASN'T- charged with the crime he did commit which is "Unauthorized Access". See:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20041217
for an article by a real lawyer about it. Further links are provided at groklaw.net.
In this case I think the judge is right and the prosecution screwed up royally. They need to charge him with the crime he committed and not some other crime that may have been committed by his customers or associates.
But one thing I -DO- agree with in many previous posts is that the CAN-SPAM act is simply legalizing spam and making it harder to prosecute.
You can legally send spam advertizing teen sluts and action wives as long as the pictures they send you really do confirm that they look like teen sluts and action wives. Then just have an opt-out list and you're perfectly legal. There is no requirement that the opt-out list actually works other than that list can't email you again. No problem there. Just start up a new list every day and name your new business $RAYDAYenterprises.com or something like that so you get 21enterprises or 351mustang or 23skidoo or whatever. As long as its a different list you're covered under the law because the law says nothing about removing "removees" from any other list or not giving or selling "removees" email addresses.
The CAN-SPAM act is basically a call-to-arms for spammers to march headfirst into battle. And your spam filter is the only thing between you and the spammers and the law that protects the spammers.
Well it depends. If it's the wife of assasinated:
1) Secretary of Finance
2) Chief Director of Foreign Accounts Payable
3) Head of International Investments Agency
then you say you need at least a hundred gajillion bazillion dollars to become interested.
But if he/she is the (not assasinated):
A) Minister of National Insurance Payments Division
B) Comptroller of State Bank Finances
C) Under Secretary of Lost Moneys
then tell them you need to see a bazillion gajillion dollars upfront first.
Then and only then do you start negotiations. And don't let them snow you with poor relatives and legal issues and what not. Collect the first hundred billion in ernest money before you commit to anything. After that you take them to the cleaners for everything they're worth.
I agree its stupid because it just defines the parameters of legal spam for the spammers. But I disagree that legislation won't work. It worked for the junk FAX problem and it worked for the telemarketing phone problem. I can now use my phone and answer it with confidence that it is not a telemarketer.
The big difference with spam is that there is no law against it. Only laws that define it (which simply provides the spammers with all the information they need to circumvent the (yes you) CAN-SPAM act. Oh they claim to make it illegal and punishable by up to 3000 days in jail and a $50000.00 fine. That's great, but as long as the punishment is just a cost of doing business and the qualifications for actually being convicted are so narrow and exclusive as to be nil, whats the deterrent?
The real solution is to make it illegal and give a harsh sentence for violators. And to do that you have to define spam. There is only one definition that will ever work. Its the same definition we use for sexual harrasment. If the victim (reciever) thinks its spam, then its spam! Period.
Some people argue that you can't track them down. Well then how the hell do you think they get money from their victims? That money must go somewhere. Its really easy to track them down. Just buy a sample of their product and trace the money flow. The money always goes somewhere. If they can track money freom charity to terrorists they can track the money from joe victim to spammer. Then just follow the money and arrest the recipient of the money. Thats all there is to it.
My solution of making it illegal would stop the flow of spam dead cold, in its tracks. The problem would simply cease to exist.
Lest you think the problem is international, 99.9% of all spammers are U.S. fly by night companies. The rest are so insignificant that I could live with the one spam a month I'd get from them.