Have you ever looked at your check in a restaurant and noticed that the waiter forgot to charge you for something your ordered and ate? What do you do? I tell the waiter so they can add it to the check.
Yes, that is the reasonably expected human behaviour. (Note, the analogy I developed further down in my post is different in many important detals.) I don't disagree with you.
It may have been silly of me to try a car analogy, *sarcasm* those work perfectly for everything, usually *sarcasm*.
You'd sneer and leave the resaurant without paying what you owe.
No, that's not what I'd do, sorry to disappoint you;)
You'd pat yourself on the back while the restaurant owner struggles to pay his workers and keep the doors open.
So a multimillion dollar company made an error amounting to the loss of a small amount of money and you're comparing it to a restaurant barely managing to operate?
In my example, there is a moral choice on the table. I made it one wa and you made it the other way. Who is the better man?
Since you're conjuring up lots of unsubstantiated points about me, let me suppose by this sentence that you're some christian who plays the morality game just because there is some big sicko up in the skies who would punish you if you ever violated his will, freewill nonwithstanding. I do not believe that this is who you are, because I keep in mind that conjecture is often wrong. Who is the better man now?
My take on the Amazon issue is simple. Excerpt from the email they sent after the error has been discovered:
Because these items have already shipped to you, you can either keep
the items and we will charge you the amount you should have been
charged or you can return the items - at no cost to you - to
Amazon.com within 30 days. Please note that we can only accept the
return of unopened items in their original condition.
I think it is quite unlikely that someone who received their items didn't open it upon receipt, or at least not the majority. I also think that the email should have been worded in a different tone. To develop the Parent's analogy, when the waiter rushes out to the parking lot after me, because he had discovered what I thought was a nice promotion to be an error, call me weird, but I'd at least expect kinder words. The legality we all know is that I'm under no obligation to pay up, at least according to my local laws, but when the waiter tells me to either return the meal in it's original condition, or pay I'd not feel any moral obligation to pay up, because my morality tells me that they have no right to _demand_ anything, because although I paid less than what it would normally cost to dine at the restaurant, but the error has been made on their part and as a customer I don't see how they could reasonably make a mistake and hold their customer responsible for their own mistakes. Those are the companies promptly going out of business.
I'd add that most likely I'd still pay if I thought the waiter isn't just trying to con me, but most likely I'd never visit that restaurant again. My point is, that I perfectly understand those people who would refuse to comply with the demand, both in the Amazon and the fictional restaurant case. Both legally and morally, the right side is the customer's. Morally it's less clear cut, but when dealing with morals you have to take proportions into account. A multimillion dollar company makes a small mistake ending up in a small financial loss to him, and ends up pushing the mistake's cost at the customers. This in turn ends up costing them more, just based on the bad publicity alone. I don't really feel sorry for them. There are small operating costs of business, a broken glass or a broken server to be replaced. These things happen, just like small errors. To retain goodwill a company usually just incorporates these small errors into it's budget and lives with it, not tries to demand money from specific customers for them.
...and they sold it for the price they specified. The problem is their fault and why should a customer care or be responsible for the problem on Amazon's end?
If a guy sells his car while drunk for a small amount of money, or gambles it away while drunk, it's his fault entirely not the buyers.
There has been certain studies linking the existence of certain celestrial bodies to the general lux levels observed on the planet during what people would refer to as 'day'.
I'm phasing out GoDaddy for my registrar needs too. I've been aware for a while now that they suck, but there is a difference between something not worth the money and something I would spend money on to express my views on their unethical practices.
I haven't registered a new domain with GoDaddy for a while now, but because of this incident, I will be transferring my remaining domains from GoDaddy to someplace else ASAP.
I am conscious about which company I'm supporting with my money. I take it as a moral obligation to be aware of the issues surrounding a company at least on a basic level and that is a factor in most of my purchasing decisions if it's not a really trivial amount of money. Maybe it doesn't matter to Sony that I'm not buying from them any more or to Godaddy now, but it is my money to decide about after all and I can only hope that more and more people make a conscious decision about a company, because companies only change when the market forces them to. If consumers demand them to be "moral", they'll have to be in order to survive, or at least make their customers believe that. That is why it is important to know more about companies than just a cursory slogan.
It should be downright bloody illegal to do what Godaddy did. Or if not illegal, it should have serious repecussions for them as a registrar up to the point of dropping their registrar status.
Besides, Myspace's effort was entirely useless. Those usernames/passwords were already compromised, Fjodor's site was just one that had it from the many places it can be found. The sensible thing would have been a forced password reset for the users involved not trying to coerce a registrar.
My position is that unless a legal, court ordered action is forced on the registrar, it should be forbidden to drop anything. And in the case there is content that shouldn't be public on the site, that is a _hosting_ issue not a domain issue. Go bugger the hosting company with legal documents.
After all, to Bush, the Constitution is "just a god damned piece of paper".
It IS just a god damned piece of paper, unless you the people, citizens of the USA, uphold it and force everyone to uphold it, including and especially your president.
it's not technically a watermark in the usual sense of that term, but the encoding process does strip out a unique series of bits from the file. The missing information is a minuscule portion of the overall file
The warez guys will do what every torrent user does, build the file they want from more sources. They will strip all conflicting bits from the file and substitute the missing ones. Yeah, this does make it so that they need two or more sources, but it's certainly doable.
Well according to my anecdotal evidence coming from an ex security admin at a bank who was giving a lecture on bank security on a security themed conference, banks have a certain percentage of loss every year due to online activites. The loss they suffer is tuned to the line that spending more on security would cost more than the current losses they suffer.
Anyway, I highly doubt that this was the largest ever online robbery, maybe it was the largest phishing attack.
As far as I know, there are some laws that apply based on nationality instead of sovereign territory. Australia has a law like that to discourage underage sex tourism to Thailand, so they are able to prosecute australian citizens.
Still, this is very different from what the US is doing when it has neither juristiction nor citizenship.
2. My problem was with your reasoning, not the facts of the case.
3. That's true, but it's not murder either. I'd require both huge damages and huge numbers of people defrauded in order to sentence someone comparable to a murder conviction, if I were in the position to write the law. My problem was with the reasoning that defrauding lots of people for small amounts is comparable to murder, if the number of people involved is high enough. It's quite a complex issue I'd think, but my general rule of thumb is that inconveniencing lots of people to a small degree is much less worse than ruining/ending a single person's life.
I take it, that you never violated any laws, like these:
You may not drive barefooted.
Dominoes may not be played on Sunday.
It is illegal to wear a fake moustache that causes laughter in church.
Putting salt on a railroad track may be punishable by death.
Boogers may not be flicked into the wind.
It is legal to drive the wrong way down a one-way street if you have a lantern attached to the front of your automobile.
You may not have an ice cream cone in your back pocket at any time.
Masks may not be worn in public.
Women are able to retain all property they owned prior to marriage in the case of divorce. However, this provision does not apply to men.
My point is, just because something is illegal, it is not immoral and it should not automatically follow that people agree with the particular law or usag e of the law! Because you see, there are plenty of laws in effect, but not _enforced_.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, we don't use the f-word in this house!
I can't decide whether your post is a good example of subtle sarcasm or whether you're really are serious. I'm kinda hoping it's sarcasm.
It may have been silly of me to try a car analogy, *sarcasm* those work perfectly for everything, usually *sarcasm*. No, that's not what I'd do, sorry to disappoint you
Since you're conjuring up lots of unsubstantiated points about me, let me suppose by this sentence that you're some christian who plays the morality game just because there is some big sicko up in the skies who would punish you if you ever violated his will, freewill nonwithstanding. I do not believe that this is who you are, because I keep in mind that conjecture is often wrong. Who is the better man now?
My take on the Amazon issue is simple. Excerpt from the email they sent after the error has been discovered: I think it is quite unlikely that someone who received their items didn't open it upon receipt, or at least not the majority. I also think that the email should have been worded in a different tone. To develop the Parent's analogy, when the waiter rushes out to the parking lot after me, because he had discovered what I thought was a nice promotion to be an error, call me weird, but I'd at least expect kinder words. The legality we all know is that I'm under no obligation to pay up, at least according to my local laws, but when the waiter tells me to either return the meal in it's original condition, or pay I'd not feel any moral obligation to pay up, because my morality tells me that they have no right to _demand_ anything, because although I paid less than what it would normally cost to dine at the restaurant, but the error has been made on their part and as a customer I don't see how they could reasonably make a mistake and hold their customer responsible for their own mistakes. Those are the companies promptly going out of business.
I'd add that most likely I'd still pay if I thought the waiter isn't just trying to con me, but most likely I'd never visit that restaurant again. My point is, that I perfectly understand those people who would refuse to comply with the demand, both in the Amazon and the fictional restaurant case. Both legally and morally, the right side is the customer's. Morally it's less clear cut, but when dealing with morals you have to take proportions into account. A multimillion dollar company makes a small mistake ending up in a small financial loss to him, and ends up pushing the mistake's cost at the customers. This in turn ends up costing them more, just based on the bad publicity alone. I don't really feel sorry for them. There are small operating costs of business, a broken glass or a broken server to be replaced. These things happen, just like small errors. To retain goodwill a company usually just incorporates these small errors into it's budget and lives with it, not tries to demand money from specific customers for them.
...and they sold it for the price they specified. The problem is their fault and why should a customer care or be responsible for the problem on Amazon's end?
If a guy sells his car while drunk for a small amount of money, or gambles it away while drunk, it's his fault entirely not the buyers.
There has been certain studies linking the existence of certain celestrial bodies to the general lux levels observed on the planet during what people would refer to as 'day'.
"MS-DOS - without a remote hole in the default installation for 26 years."
I know both of them!
I'm looking forward to my 45 second murder sentence, after which I'll sign an agreement saying that I'll never do that again.
As I said I'm looking forward my another 45 second murder sentence, after which I'll sign an agreement saying that I'll never do it yet again.
As I said...
I'm phasing out GoDaddy for my registrar needs too. I've been aware for a while now that they suck, but there is a difference between something not worth the money and something I would spend money on to express my views on their unethical practices.
I haven't registered a new domain with GoDaddy for a while now, but because of this incident, I will be transferring my remaining domains from GoDaddy to someplace else ASAP.
I am conscious about which company I'm supporting with my money. I take it as a moral obligation to be aware of the issues surrounding a company at least on a basic level and that is a factor in most of my purchasing decisions if it's not a really trivial amount of money. Maybe it doesn't matter to Sony that I'm not buying from them any more or to Godaddy now, but it is my money to decide about after all and I can only hope that more and more people make a conscious decision about a company, because companies only change when the market forces them to. If consumers demand them to be "moral", they'll have to be in order to survive, or at least make their customers believe that. That is why it is important to know more about companies than just a cursory slogan.
The next few thousand registered usernames on myspace will strangely resemble something like:
...
';DROP database;select * from x where '=
';DROP database;--
\';\'\';DROP database;--
It is very strange indeed.
It should be downright bloody illegal to do what Godaddy did. Or if not illegal, it should have serious repecussions for them as a registrar up to the point of dropping their registrar status.
Besides, Myspace's effort was entirely useless. Those usernames/passwords were already compromised, Fjodor's site was just one that had it from the many places it can be found. The sensible thing would have been a forced password reset for the users involved not trying to coerce a registrar.
My position is that unless a legal, court ordered action is forced on the registrar, it should be forbidden to drop anything. And in the case there is content that shouldn't be public on the site, that is a _hosting_ issue not a domain issue. Go bugger the hosting company with legal documents.
Here is a crazy question: why don't you just change the constitution?
Do you have a mechanism for that? In my country it requires 4/5th of parlament's support. What about the USA?
When breaking DRM, are you talking about DMCA? That does not exist in Europe you know...
Well according to my anecdotal evidence coming from an ex security admin at a bank who was giving a lecture on bank security on a security themed conference, banks have a certain percentage of loss every year due to online activites. The loss they suffer is tuned to the line that spending more on security would cost more than the current losses they suffer.
Anyway, I highly doubt that this was the largest ever online robbery, maybe it was the largest phishing attack.
So it turns out that a slashdot title is a gross oversimplification/mischaracterization of an issue? Say it ain't so!
Don't you hate it when stupid feel-good political codewords penetrate into mainstream usage?
"We need to stay the course"
Next year EA will announce that "we need to protect our gaming freedom from the terrorist competition"
Still, this is very different from what the US is doing when it has neither juristiction nor citizenship.
1. It was just a hyperbole
2. My problem was with your reasoning, not the facts of the case.
3. That's true, but it's not murder either. I'd require both huge damages and huge numbers of people defrauded in order to sentence someone comparable to a murder conviction, if I were in the position to write the law. My problem was with the reasoning that defrauding lots of people for small amounts is comparable to murder, if the number of people involved is high enough. It's quite a complex issue I'd think, but my general rule of thumb is that inconveniencing lots of people to a small degree is much less worse than ruining/ending a single person's life.
So if a reasonably well known person, like a media personality annoys enough people, you can use the death penalty on him?
My point is, just because something is illegal, it is not immoral and it should not automatically follow that people agree with the particular law or usag e of the law! Because you see, there are plenty of laws in effect, but not _enforced_.