Seriously. It's borderline fraudulent. There are laws to protect consumers, this should be added to it.
I have personally mailed in dozens of rebates in my lifetime. I have received less than half of these back. Sure, some probably got lost in the mail. But even though the USPS does suck, their success rate in delivering an envelope to its destination is still well over 90%. So what happened to the other 40% of my rebates?
Now I'm not gonna hire an attorney over a $20 rebate I never got, and they know this, so they can sit there and go "eeny meeny miny moe" and pick out every other rebate request and toss it in the trash.
They (the gov) don't even have to outlaw rebates. Just make it false advertising to put prices in ads or store displays with the rebate amount already subtracted.
If you're going to violate any secrecy agreements that you've signed, be smart enough to get a throw-away email address or use an anonymous remailer.
And use that throwaway Hotmail account from a cybercafe or a hotel lobby. It's amazing how many supposedly computer knowledgable people think Hotmail is anonymous. Hello? IP address?
Best of all would be wardriving, or a Hotmail throwaway + Mixmaster remailer chain... but this is beyond most people.
I RTFA but I'm still not clear on what the outcome of all this is. So this Jain guy gamed the system, rode the dot-com bubble and made tens of millions $, got in some trouble with regulators but settled it, and now he's sitting pretty, aside from some negative press?
So I guess the lesson is that the stock market is a con job and capitalism sucks?
Back in the early 21st century, I used to browse fuckedcompany.com every day. I knew many people who made mucho $$ during the bubble but I missed out on it, so reading about all the bankrupt dotcoms made me feel better. A little bit.
Back then fuckedcompany.com was like Slashdot - thousands of posts, hundreds of thousands of readers per day. But a few years later the site dwindled down to nothing and there were hardly any posts. That's when I knew the tech meltdown was over and now it's time to buy NAZ again;)
Everybody needs a roof over their heads in Japan too. Last time I looked, their real estate market hasn't recovered from their spectacular bust 10+ years ago.
I remember seeing only about 20% mozilla and 80% IE on windows or something for a slashdotting. Pretty disgraceful (not all of that can be "we have to use it at work").
Well if Slashdot actually got its own site to render properly in FireFox, that percentage might go up.:o
Well, I understand what you're saying, but I think there must be a workaround because Valueweb (hosting provider) offers SSL certificates for $160 a month to shared host customers.
Ok so once I obtain a free SSL cert, how do I install it on my website? I have a shared hosting plan on Valuweb.... it's not like I have root access to the box or Apache.
I guess I could ask Valueweb to install it for me, but they sell their own Thawte or Geotrust SSL certs. For $160 a year. Think they'll install my free cert for free? (I honestly don't know)
Well, there's a philosophy with the military brass that they HAVE to go high-tech. Reasoning is, America has more money and more high tech than anyone, it's our only true advantage over our adversaries, so we have to keep pushing it and find a technological edge.
The former Soviet bloc had more troops than us, China has WAY more troops than us, both match us in tanks bombs and artillery, so we needed to develop better stuff than them. To a large degree this has paid off, although the amount of money spent has been tremendous. But things like GPS guided bombs, stealth aircraft and high tech command-and-control systems do give our troops an advantage.
Even though the military does do stupid things on occasion, give them some credit. If a system is truly unwieldy and flops miserably during testing, it won't get adopted for field use. The fact that they're constantly looking at new high tech stuff, trying to find something useful, means that they will have lot of flops too. But one thing you can say about U.S. military for sure - they're not stagnant.
where have you been? Military's been running Windows for a long long time now. Way back when, it made the headlines when a Navy destroyer (or was that a cruiser) got stuck out in the ocean because the NT computer running the ship crashed.
I've never heard of them before this story broke, I don't know anyone who's heard of them, so how did they end up with my credit card# and SS# which is now compromised?
And yes, I live in California and yes I've RTFA, this is just an angry response not a true question.
LOL.... you think US is in a decline, what do you think the Europe has been in for the past 60 years?
There was a time when Britain was actually Great, the mightest power on earth. And it wasn't all that long ago that Germany was producing the most advanced technology in the world. But you f00ls decided to bomb the crap out of each other. And succeeded.
You can get together and union all you want, your declining and aging population will ensure your irrelavance in the future. America will never have this problem thanks to the constant influx of amigos from south of the border. Viva America!
Wow, that was a really really good and interesting article... if I had mod points I'd mod parent up.
It's an awesome idea, but it'd cost so much to develop that no government would want to do it. Never mind the fact that once it gets built, it would make so much money hauling up cargo so fast that it'd pay for itself in no time.
What kind of money are we talking about here? I'm guessing maybe $100 billion total, from development to prototype to working cargo-hauler. We should've just done that instead of going to Iraq........
MicroMeteoroid and Orbital Debris (MMOD) shield - "Composed of five layers of graphite-fiber composites separated by foam spacers, the MMOD is the outermost section of Nautilus's hull. Schneider's crew's original TransHab design had more stopping power than did aluminum three inches thick. Ground-testing of Bigelow's MMOD has shown that it can stop impacts by 5/8-inch-diameter aluminum pellets fired at it at 6.4 kilometers a second, several times as fast as a rifle bullet. No rigid spacecraft design can match this performance, and it's one of the reasons Nautilus has an expected life span of at least 15 years."
Do you know what the scientific consensus 30 years ago was? 50? 100? Some of things said by verrry important leading figures in science, backed by "scientific consensus", turn out to be dead wrong or even just laughable in hindsight. 30 years ago it was man-induced global cooling, right? 100 years ago it was the impossibility of heavier-than-air flight, as proclaimed by mighty names in science. Newspapers loved to quote them and make fun of the idiots trying to build airplanes. (but to be fair, they WERE easy to make fun of because most of them were crackpots that failed miserably)
One of my favorites is from 1917. The winter that year was much wetter than usual in Western United States. Scientists, very respectable ones at big universities, announced that the great guns going off in France (WW1 you know) were responsible for this weather phenomenon. This was widely circulated in leading newspapers and backed by SCIENTIFIC CONCENSUS. LOL
But today of course things are different, because science has advanced so much. Today when scientists proclaim a concensus, it cannot be wrong because of their modern instruments and advanced techniques. ROTFLMAO
Kind of reminds you of the patent office guy saying we should close.
Now I believe in science. For instance the scientific consensus behind the germ theory of disease, the atomic model (as opposed to earth wind water fire), etc. are absolutely correct. When scientists get their hands on something, manipulate it, experiment with it left and right, with repeatable results - they can produce MARVELOUS discoveries. Hey, they got us to the Moon... well them and some clever engineers. Problem is, when they DON'T have all the data, when they CAN'T experiment with it or get their hands on it, they STILL make bold assertions even though they still pretty much don't know what the hell they're talking about. Why? Because they're human and quite often, human beings have swollen heads and they're full of shit. Oh and they're greedy and fearful fuckers too. Greedy as in wanting government grants and cozy tenures, and fearful as in if I go against the current political wind, I'll end up joining the unemployment line. But this is really a rant against human beings in general - humans ARE a virus.
'Tracker' Site Loses Piracy Judgment By Jon Healey, Times Staff Writer
The major Hollywood studios have drawn their first blood in court against a popular new type of online piracy, obtaining a $1-million judgment against a website that steered people to downloadable copies of bootlegged movies.
Edward Webber, operator of LokiTorrent.com, agreed not only to pay the damages to studios and shut down his site, but also to give the Motion Picture Assn. of America voluminous records his site has collected over the last two years.
These records could lead investigators to tens of thousands of people who distributed and downloaded unauthorized copies of digital goods, said John G. Malcolm, head of the MPAA's anti-piracy efforts.
Malcolm said the site had more than 750,000 registered users and helped distribute more than 35,000 movies, songs and other items.
"It will have a lot of records as to who these people are and what they provided, and that information will be of great interest to our members," Malcolm said. He said the MPAA would turn over information to prosecutors "in appropriate cases," but did not elaborate.
Webber did not respond to a request for comment. His website describes him as a 28-year-old computer-network consultant in New England whose main hobby is building websites. He agreed to the judgment to settle the lawsuit the MPAA brought against him, but there was no indication Thursday that he could afford to pay the $1 million in damages.
The judgment, which a federal judge in Dallas signed Thursday, came less than three months after the MPAA launched an international crackdown on "tracker" sites for people using the BitTorrent file-sharing software. The effort in December also targeted people offering bootlegged Hollywood movies on powerful computer servers connected to eDonkey, the most widely used file-sharing network.
Also Thursday, the MPAA announced that it had filed a second wave of lawsuits against BitTorrent tracker sites in the United States and more lawsuits against individual file sharers. The organization also said it filed more notices asking Internet providers to shut down eDonkey servers on their networks and lawsuits against four websites that sold file-sharing programs. The MPAA also prompted authorities in Austria to raid operators of BitTorrent trackers and eDonkey servers. Malcolm declined to say how many individuals or sites were reached by the crackdown.
BitTorrent has skyrocketed in popularity over the last year because it can deliver large files faster than other file-sharing technologies. But the software has no built-in method for finding files; instead, users rely on people who run tracker websites such as LokiTorrent that act as directories.
These tracker sites compile links to digital files that are being shared online as "torrents," the format used by the BitTorrent software. The links connect users to the Internet addresses of the people supplying copies of the file.
Charles S. Baker, Webber's attorney, said at least parts of LokiTorrent were defensible in court. In particular, he said, Webber offered to drop links to any pirated goods that copyright owners found on the site.
But the studios had plenty of money for legal fees, and "there was nobody coming to the table willing to write a check for him to defend this lawsuit," Baker said. "Like a lot of David vs. Goliath situations, he's got stones to throw, but he didn't have any money to go get a slingshot."
Slashdot Mirror
I have personally mailed in dozens of rebates in my lifetime. I have received less than half of these back. Sure, some probably got lost in the mail. But even though the USPS does suck, their success rate in delivering an envelope to its destination is still well over 90%. So what happened to the other 40% of my rebates?
Now I'm not gonna hire an attorney over a $20 rebate I never got, and they know this, so they can sit there and go "eeny meeny miny moe" and pick out every other rebate request and toss it in the trash.
They (the gov) don't even have to outlaw rebates. Just make it false advertising to put prices in ads or store displays with the rebate amount already subtracted.
Sieg Heil = Yay, Victory
And use that throwaway Hotmail account from a cybercafe or a hotel lobby. It's amazing how many supposedly computer knowledgable people think Hotmail is anonymous. Hello? IP address?
Best of all would be wardriving, or a Hotmail throwaway + Mixmaster remailer chain... but this is beyond most people.
So I guess the lesson is that the stock market is a con job and capitalism sucks?
Back then fuckedcompany.com was like Slashdot - thousands of posts, hundreds of thousands of readers per day. But a few years later the site dwindled down to nothing and there were hardly any posts. That's when I knew the tech meltdown was over and now it's time to buy NAZ again ;)
Everybody needs a roof over their heads in Japan too. Last time I looked, their real estate market hasn't recovered from their spectacular bust 10+ years ago.
Well if Slashdot actually got its own site to render properly in FireFox, that percentage might go up. :o
Now compare their relative footprints when installed (or even the size of the downloads). Pound for pound, Opera is faster, lighter and does more
I don't know about footprints, but here are the sizes for the full install files I have:
Opera 7.11j - 12.5 MB
Moz Firefox - 4.7 MB
Firefox is lighter at least in this regard.
Multiply $5 by several thousand unsatisfied customers and you get $10,000, which is hardly enough to pain Bill Gates.
3 replies and link already slashdotted....
Well, I understand what you're saying, but I think there must be a workaround because Valueweb (hosting provider) offers SSL certificates for $160 a month to shared host customers.
I guess I could ask Valueweb to install it for me, but they sell their own Thawte or Geotrust SSL certs. For $160 a year. Think they'll install my free cert for free? (I honestly don't know)
The former Soviet bloc had more troops than us, China has WAY more troops than us, both match us in tanks bombs and artillery, so we needed to develop better stuff than them. To a large degree this has paid off, although the amount of money spent has been tremendous. But things like GPS guided bombs, stealth aircraft and high tech command-and-control systems do give our troops an advantage.
Even though the military does do stupid things on occasion, give them some credit. If a system is truly unwieldy and flops miserably during testing, it won't get adopted for field use. The fact that they're constantly looking at new high tech stuff, trying to find something useful, means that they will have lot of flops too. But one thing you can say about U.S. military for sure - they're not stagnant.
well whatever, I don't know much about optics so I'll not rebuttal you. But I sure as hell won't be replacing my eye with a USB webcam anytime soon.
Dude, for a military procurement, this is a screaming bargain. Those stories about Pentagon buying $600 toilet seats, well some of them are true.
where have you been? Military's been running Windows for a long long time now. Way back when, it made the headlines when a Navy destroyer (or was that a cruiser) got stuck out in the ocean because the NT computer running the ship crashed.
Did you know that back in the 60's, the first spy satellite (Corona) was disguised as a NASA scientific mission? Well.......
Novell has a marketing department? O_O I didn't know that and I'm an old time CNE3!
And yes, I live in California and yes I've RTFA, this is just an angry response not a true question.
There was a time when Britain was actually Great, the mightest power on earth. And it wasn't all that long ago that Germany was producing the most advanced technology in the world. But you f00ls decided to bomb the crap out of each other. And succeeded.
You can get together and union all you want, your declining and aging population will ensure your irrelavance in the future. America will never have this problem thanks to the constant influx of amigos from south of the border. Viva America!
It's an awesome idea, but it'd cost so much to develop that no government would want to do it. Never mind the fact that once it gets built, it would make so much money hauling up cargo so fast that it'd pay for itself in no time.
What kind of money are we talking about here? I'm guessing maybe $100 billion total, from development to prototype to working cargo-hauler. We should've just done that instead of going to Iraq........
MicroMeteoroid and Orbital Debris (MMOD) shield - "Composed of five layers of graphite-fiber composites separated by foam spacers, the MMOD is the outermost section of Nautilus's hull. Schneider's crew's original TransHab design had more stopping power than did aluminum three inches thick. Ground-testing of Bigelow's MMOD has shown that it can stop impacts by 5/8-inch-diameter aluminum pellets fired at it at 6.4 kilometers a second, several times as fast as a rifle bullet. No rigid spacecraft design can match this performance, and it's one of the reasons Nautilus has an expected life span of at least 15 years."
Do you know what the scientific consensus 30 years ago was? 50? 100? Some of things said by verrry important leading figures in science, backed by "scientific consensus", turn out to be dead wrong or even just laughable in hindsight. 30 years ago it was man-induced global cooling, right? 100 years ago it was the impossibility of heavier-than-air flight, as proclaimed by mighty names in science. Newspapers loved to quote them and make fun of the idiots trying to build airplanes. (but to be fair, they WERE easy to make fun of because most of them were crackpots that failed miserably)
One of my favorites is from 1917. The winter that year was much wetter than usual in Western United States. Scientists, very respectable ones at big universities, announced that the great guns going off in France (WW1 you know) were responsible for this weather phenomenon. This was widely circulated in leading newspapers and backed by SCIENTIFIC CONCENSUS. LOL
But today of course things are different, because science has advanced so much. Today when scientists proclaim a concensus, it cannot be wrong because of their modern instruments and advanced techniques. ROTFLMAO
Kind of reminds you of the patent office guy saying we should close.
Now I believe in science. For instance the scientific consensus behind the germ theory of disease, the atomic model (as opposed to earth wind water fire), etc. are absolutely correct. When scientists get their hands on something, manipulate it, experiment with it left and right, with repeatable results - they can produce MARVELOUS discoveries. Hey, they got us to the Moon... well them and some clever engineers. Problem is, when they DON'T have all the data, when they CAN'T experiment with it or get their hands on it, they STILL make bold assertions even though they still pretty much don't know what the hell they're talking about. Why? Because they're human and quite often, human beings have swollen heads and they're full of shit. Oh and they're greedy and fearful fuckers too. Greedy as in wanting government grants and cozy tenures, and fearful as in if I go against the current political wind, I'll end up joining the unemployment line. But this is really a rant against human beings in general - humans ARE a virus.
Russia is the answer!
'Tracker' Site Loses Piracy Judgment
By Jon Healey, Times Staff Writer
The major Hollywood studios have drawn their first blood in court against a popular new type of online piracy, obtaining a $1-million judgment against a website that steered people to downloadable copies of bootlegged movies.
Edward Webber, operator of LokiTorrent.com, agreed not only to pay the damages to studios and shut down his site, but also to give the Motion Picture Assn. of America voluminous records his site has collected over the last two years.
These records could lead investigators to tens of thousands of people who distributed and downloaded unauthorized copies of digital goods, said John G. Malcolm, head of the MPAA's anti-piracy efforts.
Malcolm said the site had more than 750,000 registered users and helped distribute more than 35,000 movies, songs and other items.
"It will have a lot of records as to who these people are and what they provided, and that information will be of great interest to our members," Malcolm said. He said the MPAA would turn over information to prosecutors "in appropriate cases," but did not elaborate.
Webber did not respond to a request for comment. His website describes him as a 28-year-old computer-network consultant in New England whose main hobby is building websites. He agreed to the judgment to settle the lawsuit the MPAA brought against him, but there was no indication Thursday that he could afford to pay the $1 million in damages.
The judgment, which a federal judge in Dallas signed Thursday, came less than three months after the MPAA launched an international crackdown on "tracker" sites for people using the BitTorrent file-sharing software. The effort in December also targeted people offering bootlegged Hollywood movies on powerful computer servers connected to eDonkey, the most widely used file-sharing network.
Also Thursday, the MPAA announced that it had filed a second wave of lawsuits against BitTorrent tracker sites in the United States and more lawsuits against individual file sharers. The organization also said it filed more notices asking Internet providers to shut down eDonkey servers on their networks and lawsuits against four websites that sold file-sharing programs. The MPAA also prompted authorities in Austria to raid operators of BitTorrent trackers and eDonkey servers. Malcolm declined to say how many individuals or sites were reached by the crackdown.
BitTorrent has skyrocketed in popularity over the last year because it can deliver large files faster than other file-sharing technologies. But the software has no built-in method for finding files; instead, users rely on people who run tracker websites such as LokiTorrent that act as directories.
These tracker sites compile links to digital files that are being shared online as "torrents," the format used by the BitTorrent software. The links connect users to the Internet addresses of the people supplying copies of the file.
Charles S. Baker, Webber's attorney, said at least parts of LokiTorrent were defensible in court. In particular, he said, Webber offered to drop links to any pirated goods that copyright owners found on the site.
But the studios had plenty of money for legal fees, and "there was nobody coming to the table willing to write a check for him to defend this lawsuit," Baker said. "Like a lot of David vs. Goliath situations, he's got stones to throw, but he didn't have any money to go get a slingshot."