My understanding of it is that it's more to catch employees who slip products into the bags of friends than it is to catch random shoplifters. I guess Best Buy and its ilk were having a lot of trouble with employees taking out products in the trash, using friends to slip stuff out the door, and so on.
What's next? "Knights Templar call for far-reaching tort reform"? "Jedi Knights file civil suit against Empire for breach of verbal contract in Dantooine destruction"?* Sheesh. Just go kick the guy's ass -- isn't that more in keeping with this particular conflict?
* I'm embarrassed to have been able to cast this particular sentence as fast as I could type. Pardon me, I must now go freshen the tape on my glasses.
Come on -- Google is huge, but it's still a fairly young company in largely uncharted territory. They screwed up, and instead of playing hardball about it, they copped to the mistake, gave their customers back more than they bought, and apologized. There is no other company of that size that I know of that has ever done that (without being ordered by a court to do so). Of course it never should have happened. But companies are run by people, people make dumb mistakes sometimes, and the measure of a person OR company is how they recover from stuff like this. This is as good as you can possibly expect (if not better) from a huge corporation. They're actually not evil.
Nor are many other corporations who are just trying to get by, but the whole admission of guilt thing seems to be beaten out of people in business school for some reason. Or for several understandable reasons. Whatever. They done good here, and we needn't nitpick about whether it should have happened in the first place.
... from buying services (a gift certificate or classes or something) from a brick-and-mortar store that then closes? This happens all the time. We arrived to arrange our first cooking classes at a store around here to find bulldozers disassembling the place. It was a bummer, but there wasn't anything we could do about it (and I expect the owners of the place would have preferred to be profitable enough to stay afloat and honor our gift certificate). I just don't think there should be any special expectation that because something is digital and/or a subsidiary of a larger, healthier company that it exist forever.
I have a mouse for the laptop and a Kensington trackball (the big one with four buttons and the scroll ring) for my desktop. I am a graphic designer, as well. I used to carry the trackball around in my laptop bag, but I find that the mouse is a lot easier to travel with.
I'd have trackballs for all my computers if I could afford it -- I got the trackball when I was having wrist problems, and while those have cleared up even with more mouse use again, I still much prefer the trackball (though it's not so good for Tiger Woods golf). And the scroll ring is awesome -- it's one of the more intuitive additions to an input device I've ever personally experienced.
You're right -- I'm not arguing anything on behalf of other browsers (particularly IE -- as a guy who lives and breathes CSS all day, that alone has me hating IE). I'm just saying that the anyman's browser needs to provide protection IF it offers it. You could certainly make the password saving function an option you turn on instead of have to turn off. But that kind of hides it from new users who don't know where to look (or that there's anything to look for). I think better encryption defaults (like the creation of an administrative password as mentioned elsewhere) might be a better tactic.
Those sites are just social sites like myspace and other stuff and who cares if someone gets your password for that.
You'd probably begin to care after someone "hacks" your MySpace page and posts distasteful or illegal language or images. Explaining all of that to a police officer or a judge and jury is rife with peril.
But the other point I think is pertinent here is that Firefox is really going for the common man crowd -- you don't buy a full-page ad in the New York Times if you want only geeks. So knowing that the average joe will be using Firefox and will happily save sensitive information if encouraged to do so (as one is with Firefox), that particular feature really has to be pretty rock-solid (or at the very least, not vulnerable to a pretty basic and classic javascript exploit).
Don't get me wrong -- I love Firefox and use it almost exclusively. But this is the kind of thing that, whether truly a hazard to most users or not, can scare people away if it is carelessly presented to the public. Or if it really is a risk.
Actually, why would they? China has proven itself to be quite pragmatically self-serving when it comes to money, and if more people are making money in China (above board or below), that's more money going into the general pot through purchasing power. So even if there are spammers in China reaping the rewards of an outgoing-only setup to bilk consumers, they're still spending more than other citizens on groceries, cars, homes, electronics, and so on. Just a guess, though -- I'm certainly no sociologist or economist.
There are now so many more people using desktops for cheap servers -- music, video, other files. I know fewer and fewer people who don't have something like this going on, even among those who are less technically inclined. So I don't see desktops going away unless manufacturers really start bringing down the price of actual servers or those networkable storage things (which are only good for storage, though I guess that's mostly what homes would be doing with a server on the network anyway).
As New Zealanders use British spellings ("harbour" instead of "harbor," "encyclopaedia" instead of "encyclopedia, " "manouevre" instead of "move," "bobby" instead of "pig"), their per-byte cost of any given document is going to be lower than that of Americans, clearly narrowing the cost gap between OOo and Office.
Of course, such savings might be offset by skilful use of British spellings, which may be learnt from your don as long as you don't bunk off too much and end up mincing about with your headmaster.
(And yes, I'm from Chicago and have never been to the UK. I had to look up everything in that second paragraph. How much of a geek am I?)
Okay, we could all see THAT comment coming. And most of us even instinctively thought it, I'll wager. But if you stop and think about it, it's very unlikely that the incentives to switch "back" to Word were worth it.
This group was already using OpenOffice -- they knew what they had, decided it didn't fit their needs, and switched back. It's not like they decided not to adopt it -- it was already a crucial part of their workflow. I can't imagine that rolling out 500 seats of anything (and doing all the translation of any files in OOo-specific formats to Office formats) is a quick decision one makes based on such minor "kickbacks" as being able to use Office at home, too.
Mod me down, but Microsoft does make some products that some people prefer. Heck, many people prefer them (regardless of how we geeks feel about it). Sometimes that preference is a matter of taste, and sometimes it's based on specific practical requirements. Assuming that because someone switched TO Office from OpenOffice there must have been kickbacks ignores the perceived and/or real merits of Office and the shortcomings of OpenOffice (and there are some), and basically accuses the organization who switched of being easily bought.
The PDF press release from the ODF Alliance is peppered with a lot of things like "open formats such as ODF..." To me, that sounds like Japan has decided to encourage open formats, and the ODF Alliance is spinning it to be about them.
I don't know, as was asked by others around here, whether OOXML would qualify for the same treatment by Japan -- I suspect it would, though (as would other formats), therefore making this press release little more than a bunch of spin.
I "upgraded" to Yahoo Music Jukebox about five to six months ago when I reinstalled Windows. I just went to what I thought would be MusicMatch and found this Yahoo thing -- I thought it would be roughly the same, but it stinks. The constant badgering to upgrade to the premium service is hard to take. Sadly, iTunes stinks just as much in different ways.
I think you're missing a key point -- an e-mail has a subject line, while a phone number or a letter mailed by post does not. Even without reading the contents of the message (and I don't believe for a minute that they don't -- call me paranoid), you can see what the message is about. Not true of a phone call or letter.
Also, as stated elsewhere, any web address has a direct relationship to the contents of a web page. This is more information than just a phone number or address on a letter.
Personally, I'm not sure why they're being so lazy -- generally courts will give warrants fairly easily. And it's not the time lag involved in obtaining a warrant, either -- I think you can get a warrant after the fact if time is of the essence. Given other actions of our current government, I'm more inclined to believe that they want as little paper trail related to some of these searches as possible. I don't typically tend toward such paranoid thinking, but past behavior offers a strong suggestion of current and future behavior.
Point taken. The stuff I've seen (on TV, I'd like to add, in case my wife is reading) gets pretty close to the line, though. Negotiating what will be done for how much, and so on. I am not an attorney or a policeman, so I'll admit I was making some assumptions that you rightly call me on here. But still, in this area and others, I get very uncomfortable with some of the tactics used by law enforcement -- there seems to be a somewhat cavalier attitude (at least in my community) about how the police track down drug dealers and prostitutes and so on. The general feeling seems to be that they're scumbags and therefore you can cheat a bit on how you get them.
And that's why I see a difference between the Geek Squad thing and other forms of actual entrapment, and why I barked back (if a little incorrectly) -- if I have a picture of my wife in a bathing suit as my desktop image, for example, that does not constitute entrapment any more than it gives the Geek Squad guys carte blanche to everything on my computer. Even if you are presented with temptation, if you step over the line YOU are wrong, not the people presenting the temptation.
Exclusive use of YOUR stuff. It's not their stuff, it's your stuff. Until you explicitly give it to them, it's yours. They don't get to have it. That's the theoretical end of things.
Moreover, though, thanks to DRM, a lot of music files can only legally be installed on a certain number of computers. If I have an mp3 on my system that gets copied by the Geek Squad, suddenly I can't copy it somewhere else because twenty copies of it exist out there in the wild without my knowledge. Explain that to the RIAA when they come for you for file sharing.
It's not entrapment. Entrapment would be forcing them or coercing them to commit the crime, often with another illegal act. Prostitution sting operations, for example, are often very close to (or over the line of) entrapment, as the police plant streetwalkers (an illegal act) in order to catch another illegal act.
There is nothing like that here -- it's a computer with stuff on it, and their job is not to grab that stuff, it's to fix the computer. End of story.
How about a folder called "Music"? Can they steal from that because it's labeled as such?
Living ethically is a lot easier when you have enough ethics to avoid doing bad things for reasons better than "I might get caught."
No -- that's probably not what he meant. "Deported" in this context is pretty specific, particularly given that he seems to indicate that the kid who made the threat was from the Middle East.
Re:Safety isn't first
on
Explosives Camp
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
How do you deport someone in the program if one of the requirements is U.S. citizenship? Where do you deport them TO?
I know you can have joint citizenship, but can you be subject to immediate revocation of your American citizenship AND immediate deportation without a hearing? More to the point, can you do that to a minor?
I don't mean to call your statement into question (okay, I guess I do, but I don't mean it as a personal attack) -- this just doesn't seem to add up somehow.
and weakens earlier Massachusetts support for the Open Document Format.
It weakens ODF's potential for exclusive adoption in Massachusetts. It would be very unlikely that a state (particularly one as large as Massachusetts) would ever completely refuse to accept documents in a format as soon-to-be-common (like it or not) as OOXML.
Granted if they did it, they'd have a better chance of getting private vendors to use ODF than, say, Montana. But you've got to figure that as OOXML gets slowly adopted, there are going to be a lot of outside vendors (not to mention other states) with whom Massachusetts will have to interact who will make the jump to OOXML. And if you think the conversion from old Word to new Word is rife with peril, the conversion from ODF to OOXML and back would likely cause quite a bit of inefficiency and lost data.
This is nothing new, nor is it malicious. Ham-handed, perhaps, but not malicious. And yes, I really do believe that -- mod away. Microsoft has plenty of data about users, competitors, and so on -- the sheer volume of chaff they'd have to deal with if they really were tracking our movements would grind even them to a halt.
I do appreciate the irony that the article about Microsoft's pushy tactics is full of landmines that barf popups whenever you happen to mouse over them.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding of it is that it's more to catch employees who slip products into the bags of friends than it is to catch random shoplifters. I guess Best Buy and its ilk were having a lot of trouble with employees taking out products in the trash, using friends to slip stuff out the door, and so on.
What's next? "Knights Templar call for far-reaching tort reform"? "Jedi Knights file civil suit against Empire for breach of verbal contract in Dantooine destruction"?* Sheesh. Just go kick the guy's ass -- isn't that more in keeping with this particular conflict?
* I'm embarrassed to have been able to cast this particular sentence as fast as I could type. Pardon me, I must now go freshen the tape on my glasses.
It's Office Open XML, not Open Office XML. Love it or hate it, getting the name wrong does nothing for the credibility of Slashdot.
Come on -- Google is huge, but it's still a fairly young company in largely uncharted territory. They screwed up, and instead of playing hardball about it, they copped to the mistake, gave their customers back more than they bought, and apologized. There is no other company of that size that I know of that has ever done that (without being ordered by a court to do so). Of course it never should have happened. But companies are run by people, people make dumb mistakes sometimes, and the measure of a person OR company is how they recover from stuff like this. This is as good as you can possibly expect (if not better) from a huge corporation. They're actually not evil.
Nor are many other corporations who are just trying to get by, but the whole admission of guilt thing seems to be beaten out of people in business school for some reason. Or for several understandable reasons. Whatever. They done good here, and we needn't nitpick about whether it should have happened in the first place.
... from buying services (a gift certificate or classes or something) from a brick-and-mortar store that then closes? This happens all the time. We arrived to arrange our first cooking classes at a store around here to find bulldozers disassembling the place. It was a bummer, but there wasn't anything we could do about it (and I expect the owners of the place would have preferred to be profitable enough to stay afloat and honor our gift certificate). I just don't think there should be any special expectation that because something is digital and/or a subsidiary of a larger, healthier company that it exist forever.
I have a mouse for the laptop and a Kensington trackball (the big one with four buttons and the scroll ring) for my desktop. I am a graphic designer, as well. I used to carry the trackball around in my laptop bag, but I find that the mouse is a lot easier to travel with.
I'd have trackballs for all my computers if I could afford it -- I got the trackball when I was having wrist problems, and while those have cleared up even with more mouse use again, I still much prefer the trackball (though it's not so good for Tiger Woods golf). And the scroll ring is awesome -- it's one of the more intuitive additions to an input device I've ever personally experienced.
It's been done.
You're right -- I'm not arguing anything on behalf of other browsers (particularly IE -- as a guy who lives and breathes CSS all day, that alone has me hating IE). I'm just saying that the anyman's browser needs to provide protection IF it offers it. You could certainly make the password saving function an option you turn on instead of have to turn off. But that kind of hides it from new users who don't know where to look (or that there's anything to look for). I think better encryption defaults (like the creation of an administrative password as mentioned elsewhere) might be a better tactic.
You'd probably begin to care after someone "hacks" your MySpace page and posts distasteful or illegal language or images. Explaining all of that to a police officer or a judge and jury is rife with peril.
But the other point I think is pertinent here is that Firefox is really going for the common man crowd -- you don't buy a full-page ad in the New York Times if you want only geeks. So knowing that the average joe will be using Firefox and will happily save sensitive information if encouraged to do so (as one is with Firefox), that particular feature really has to be pretty rock-solid (or at the very least, not vulnerable to a pretty basic and classic javascript exploit).
Don't get me wrong -- I love Firefox and use it almost exclusively. But this is the kind of thing that, whether truly a hazard to most users or not, can scare people away if it is carelessly presented to the public. Or if it really is a risk.
Actually, why would they? China has proven itself to be quite pragmatically self-serving when it comes to money, and if more people are making money in China (above board or below), that's more money going into the general pot through purchasing power. So even if there are spammers in China reaping the rewards of an outgoing-only setup to bilk consumers, they're still spending more than other citizens on groceries, cars, homes, electronics, and so on. Just a guess, though -- I'm certainly no sociologist or economist.
There are now so many more people using desktops for cheap servers -- music, video, other files. I know fewer and fewer people who don't have something like this going on, even among those who are less technically inclined. So I don't see desktops going away unless manufacturers really start bringing down the price of actual servers or those networkable storage things (which are only good for storage, though I guess that's mostly what homes would be doing with a server on the network anyway).
Landing at mach one still sounds pretty fast -- better aim for water! Oh, wait ...
It's all about the numbers, baby.
As New Zealanders use British spellings ("harbour" instead of "harbor," "encyclopaedia" instead of "encyclopedia, " "manouevre" instead of "move," "bobby" instead of "pig"), their per-byte cost of any given document is going to be lower than that of Americans, clearly narrowing the cost gap between OOo and Office.
Of course, such savings might be offset by skilful use of British spellings, which may be learnt from your don as long as you don't bunk off too much and end up mincing about with your headmaster.
(And yes, I'm from Chicago and have never been to the UK. I had to look up everything in that second paragraph. How much of a geek am I?)
Okay, we could all see THAT comment coming. And most of us even instinctively thought it, I'll wager. But if you stop and think about it, it's very unlikely that the incentives to switch "back" to Word were worth it.
This group was already using OpenOffice -- they knew what they had, decided it didn't fit their needs, and switched back. It's not like they decided not to adopt it -- it was already a crucial part of their workflow. I can't imagine that rolling out 500 seats of anything (and doing all the translation of any files in OOo-specific formats to Office formats) is a quick decision one makes based on such minor "kickbacks" as being able to use Office at home, too.
Mod me down, but Microsoft does make some products that some people prefer. Heck, many people prefer them (regardless of how we geeks feel about it). Sometimes that preference is a matter of taste, and sometimes it's based on specific practical requirements. Assuming that because someone switched TO Office from OpenOffice there must have been kickbacks ignores the perceived and/or real merits of Office and the shortcomings of OpenOffice (and there are some), and basically accuses the organization who switched of being easily bought.
Is anyone else here terrified at the thought of an army of supermice?
The PDF press release from the ODF Alliance is peppered with a lot of things like "open formats such as ODF ..." To me, that sounds like Japan has decided to encourage open formats, and the ODF Alliance is spinning it to be about them.
I don't know, as was asked by others around here, whether OOXML would qualify for the same treatment by Japan -- I suspect it would, though (as would other formats), therefore making this press release little more than a bunch of spin.
I "upgraded" to Yahoo Music Jukebox about five to six months ago when I reinstalled Windows. I just went to what I thought would be MusicMatch and found this Yahoo thing -- I thought it would be roughly the same, but it stinks. The constant badgering to upgrade to the premium service is hard to take. Sadly, iTunes stinks just as much in different ways.
I think you're missing a key point -- an e-mail has a subject line, while a phone number or a letter mailed by post does not. Even without reading the contents of the message (and I don't believe for a minute that they don't -- call me paranoid), you can see what the message is about. Not true of a phone call or letter.
Also, as stated elsewhere, any web address has a direct relationship to the contents of a web page. This is more information than just a phone number or address on a letter.
Personally, I'm not sure why they're being so lazy -- generally courts will give warrants fairly easily. And it's not the time lag involved in obtaining a warrant, either -- I think you can get a warrant after the fact if time is of the essence. Given other actions of our current government, I'm more inclined to believe that they want as little paper trail related to some of these searches as possible. I don't typically tend toward such paranoid thinking, but past behavior offers a strong suggestion of current and future behavior.
Point taken. The stuff I've seen (on TV, I'd like to add, in case my wife is reading) gets pretty close to the line, though. Negotiating what will be done for how much, and so on. I am not an attorney or a policeman, so I'll admit I was making some assumptions that you rightly call me on here. But still, in this area and others, I get very uncomfortable with some of the tactics used by law enforcement -- there seems to be a somewhat cavalier attitude (at least in my community) about how the police track down drug dealers and prostitutes and so on. The general feeling seems to be that they're scumbags and therefore you can cheat a bit on how you get them.
And that's why I see a difference between the Geek Squad thing and other forms of actual entrapment, and why I barked back (if a little incorrectly) -- if I have a picture of my wife in a bathing suit as my desktop image, for example, that does not constitute entrapment any more than it gives the Geek Squad guys carte blanche to everything on my computer. Even if you are presented with temptation, if you step over the line YOU are wrong, not the people presenting the temptation.
Exclusive use of YOUR stuff. It's not their stuff, it's your stuff. Until you explicitly give it to them, it's yours. They don't get to have it. That's the theoretical end of things.
Moreover, though, thanks to DRM, a lot of music files can only legally be installed on a certain number of computers. If I have an mp3 on my system that gets copied by the Geek Squad, suddenly I can't copy it somewhere else because twenty copies of it exist out there in the wild without my knowledge. Explain that to the RIAA when they come for you for file sharing.
It's not entrapment. Entrapment would be forcing them or coercing them to commit the crime, often with another illegal act. Prostitution sting operations, for example, are often very close to (or over the line of) entrapment, as the police plant streetwalkers (an illegal act) in order to catch another illegal act.
There is nothing like that here -- it's a computer with stuff on it, and their job is not to grab that stuff, it's to fix the computer. End of story.
How about a folder called "Music"? Can they steal from that because it's labeled as such?
Living ethically is a lot easier when you have enough ethics to avoid doing bad things for reasons better than "I might get caught."
No -- that's probably not what he meant. "Deported" in this context is pretty specific, particularly given that he seems to indicate that the kid who made the threat was from the Middle East.
How do you deport someone in the program if one of the requirements is U.S. citizenship? Where do you deport them TO?
I know you can have joint citizenship, but can you be subject to immediate revocation of your American citizenship AND immediate deportation without a hearing? More to the point, can you do that to a minor?
I don't mean to call your statement into question (okay, I guess I do, but I don't mean it as a personal attack) -- this just doesn't seem to add up somehow.
It weakens ODF's potential for exclusive adoption in Massachusetts. It would be very unlikely that a state (particularly one as large as Massachusetts) would ever completely refuse to accept documents in a format as soon-to-be-common (like it or not) as OOXML.
Granted if they did it, they'd have a better chance of getting private vendors to use ODF than, say, Montana. But you've got to figure that as OOXML gets slowly adopted, there are going to be a lot of outside vendors (not to mention other states) with whom Massachusetts will have to interact who will make the jump to OOXML. And if you think the conversion from old Word to new Word is rife with peril, the conversion from ODF to OOXML and back would likely cause quite a bit of inefficiency and lost data.
This is nothing new, nor is it malicious. Ham-handed, perhaps, but not malicious. And yes, I really do believe that -- mod away. Microsoft has plenty of data about users, competitors, and so on -- the sheer volume of chaff they'd have to deal with if they really were tracking our movements would grind even them to a halt.
I do appreciate the irony that the article about Microsoft's pushy tactics is full of landmines that barf popups whenever you happen to mouse over them.