That's the same argument that folks blinded into thinking that bandwith caps on previously touted "unlimited" internet service is a good thing: when those who use more are charged more, I won't have to pay as much. This is similar to the argument of subsidizing others' extra usage. I reject these arguments, buecause the wishful thinking behind them won't exist. The seller's won't reduce prices to those who use less or agree not to resell later. Instead, the seller's would rather sell lower priced versions with fewer functionality, such as Microsoft Windows home editions or Adobe Photoshop essentials. If you want to full functionality, you'll still need to purchase the higher priced package.
Cybermoola was this stored value card that you could buy at a retail store and use to make online purchases at retailers that accepted the card. It was an alternative to using a credit card and could be given to kids as gifts, etc. I worked for the supermarket chain that was the principal partner for the launch and distributed the traning materials to the employees. The idea, while novel, was a horrible failure. I don't think it lasted three months before it was pulled.
Even before the internet. Most supermarkets (and increasingly other categories of retail stores) have Checkout Coupon printers, which are run by a company called Catalena Marketing. These machines don't spit out coupons just because they like you, they print out coupons based on what you buy, printing coupons for related products or for competing products.
For example, you buy a box of Kelloggs Corn Flakes cereal, a coupon prints out for Post Total cereal. Or you buy a bottle of Advil and a coupon for Tylenol prints out. Or you buy a package of Huggies diapers and a coupon for Luvs diapers prints out.
This is exactly the same as the keyword advertising that this law aims to ban: one brand/product is desired and direct advertisement for a different/competing one is displayed to the consumer. Bet they didn't think of this, did they? And you can bet even more that they won't try to enforce the law this way.
According to reports, the man was already hanfcuffed so I don't think it would be correct stipulate that the first tasing was justified. But lets just assume for a moment that it was.
If the reason that you're tasing the suspect is because he is (in the officer's oppinion) resisting arrest, then using the taser on the suspect is in effect a de facto application of physical punishment for the aledged crime. This is not (and should not be) the role of the police to do, to administer punishment, especially before even being charged with a crime.
That being said, eyewitness accounts have said that the man was already handcuffed. He was also on the ground. At that point, he is not a physical threat to the officers. He might be a threat to the officers "authority" but that is not justification for using the taser on him. The use of force agaist citizens, even those suspected of a crime, must only be applied if there is a clear physical threat to the safety of the officers or the immeidate public. And remember under our justice system, suspects are innocent until they are proven guilty in court.
The officers in this video are either the dumbest cops in the world, to repediately brutalize that young man not only on video but with literally dozens of witnesses. Or they think that because of the uniform they wear, that they are above the law. It doesn't matter which one it is, those animals should be out of a job and in jail. The video did not show everything but there is at least one part where the man is clearly on the floor and is tazed again, sending his body upward in a horiffic spasm.
Try turing the firewall off on the router. This disabled SPI on it (the inherent network protections of NAT remain). I have yet to see a consumer-grade router do SPI (stateful packet inspection) with zero problems.
The cardholder protection doesn't apply to all circumstances - I once had a credit card turn down my request for a refund. The reason, in essence, was that it was my responsibility to read the fine print and know what I was getting into (it was a situation where a "free" service wasn't really free).
If there was something wrong with your purchase (it was broken for instance) and the store refused to take it back, the credit card issuer would likely refund your money. However, given the situation in the article (woman realizes she already owned a similar item), you're probably out of luck.
This isn't a free* (* free = not free) type of service thing. This is a customer, purchasing an item in good faith, and not being happy with the purchase, wanting to return it for a refund, as you are entitled to do, both under the law and the store's return policy.
Under laws governing credit cards in the U.S., you are entitled to a refund for merchandise you have a problem with if it is $50 or more and in your home state (or within 100 miles of your billing address) OR is a store-issed charge card.
Now, the question is, does the store tell customers that they may have their refund requests denied because they might return merchandise too much? If not explicitly, then whatever vague disclaimer about reserving the right to refuse refunds, isn't going to be enough to hold up in a court because it would be considered unfair to the customer that they are not aware of this beforehand.
Maybe even easier is to not shop at the store and tell them the reason why.
All credit card companies offer cardholder protections, including refunding your money if you have a problem with the merchant.
Clearly, denying you a return because you were flagged by a computer database is an abuse of their return policy.
Simply dispute the charge because the store refused to take back the merchandise. You'll get your money back, the store will get a fee for having the purchase charged back, and you'll probablly end up keeping the merchandise (unless your credit card issuer wants it).
Actually, the TV doesn't know anything about activating Macrovision. It doesn't know anything. It doesn't think. It just turns on.
Macrovision isn't some sort of technological breakthrough. It is an exploit of a flaw in how VCRs work compared to how TVs work. The gain function of a TV is designed expecting that the signal that it will receive isn't going to be perfect; it "expects" that there will be static and such in the signal. VCRs are different; it "expects" that the tape will provide a signal that isn't filled with static and such so Macrovision exploits this difference, causing the sound and picture to become undesirable to listen to and watch.
If you hook your DVD player directly up to a TV, everything will be fine. If you hook it up through a VCR, the VCRs gain will kill the signal.
Each consumer has his or her own value of the products that he or she wishes to purchase. Take, for example, a chocolate cake. I want a choclolate cake. I think that a chocolate cake is worth $6 to me. I go to a bakery and the bakery is selling a chocolate cake for $8. Will I buy that cake? No, because the price the seller wants is higher than what I value that cake at. So, I go to another bakery until I find a chocolate cake that is being sold at or below my valulation of $6.
The same thing has happened with music. Thanks to the RIAA's marketing machine, a many Americans now value music at a price lower than the price of a CD. Why? Because of radio and MTV, we have become used to receiving music for free. Therefore, the value of music has become near ZERO. The consumers are no longer willing to purchase a CD at the price that the sellers are selling at. So, they go find the same product at the price they are willing to pay for. In the past, folks just taped off of the radio, made copies of records, tapes, or CDs that others bought, or bought records, tapes, or CDs from used record stores. But here comes the internet, the ultimate distribution system and the price is now virtually ZERO.
Does this mean that consumers are now no longer willing to pay for music. No. Because consumers want music, they still value it higher than zero (if they valued music at $0.00 they would not want it at all). Services like iTunes are the market reacting to what consumers want. Most music buyers would rather pay $2 for the one song they want then $18 for a CD with the one song they want and a disc full of crap. This is the market working exactlly as it should.
NCR isn't any better. I have the misfortune of working with a bunch of NCR's self checkout terminals at the supermarket I work at. They are basically NCR ATMs with checkout terminal hardware attached to them. One of them has been out of service for nearly a month because the NCR technicians can not figure out what is wrong with it and why the self checkout application will not continue booting. Technicians have been tending to the machine at least once a day and have replaced just about every part on it in the hopes that that will solve the problem, which it has not. The system is based on a Pentium II running Windows NT 4 and NCR's SCOT program, which is a buggy mess itself.
Its very interesting that Verizon is now claiming that "your number" is really theirs. Verizon's Wireless devision has been running ads that trump the ability to take "your" cell phone number from another carier to them now. So, in the land of Verizon, "your" number seems to only be yours if your provider is not Verizon. If your provider is Verizon, its their number.
Maybe not totally completing them, but perhaps a statement of something to the effect of: this is your taxable income and this is your tax liability. I would bet that the most "errors" on tax returns are either the wrong amount of taxable income being declared or the wrong tax liability being calcluated. Then the taxpayer would include whatever deductions he or she qualifies for.
Very simple. When you get paid, your employer must keep records of what you received, regardless of the form they paid you in, be it a check, direct deposit, cash, or pounds of seaweed. Then, at the end of the year, your employer sends you a form W-2, which has a total of what you were paid, how much taxes they withheld from your pay to be sent to the government, and what you finally took home with you. This information is also sent to the government (both state and federal). They already have been receiving all of this information, the agencies just haven't been able to do anything useful with it yet.
This isn't really a revolutionary thing happening. The governments have had this information for years but only recently has it been electronic and able to be easily and readilly retrieved and compared to what is declared on a tax return. In the past, if the tax man wanted to check if you were telling the truth, he would have to do it by hand.
Actually, if you read the article, you would have known that the idea wasn't for a small roll of tape but for a small piece of paper-backed tape that you remove to expose the adhesive. Interesting idea but this company already makes paper-backed duct tape (which incidentally I just used to repair my air conditioner system).
The problem is that the "label" will eschew the truth of the DRM system. VHS tapes and DVD discs have "Macrovision Quality Protection" logos on them now, suggesting that without Macrovision, the picture or sound quality would be substandard (which is actually the opposite).
The thing is with Disney is that they release a movie, go to video and pull the video after a while. Then the movie is re-released in theaters and then back to video. And then the video is pulled... etc etc etc. They probablly want DRM schemes in their controll more than any other studio because they can then "turn off" videos of their movies when it is back in the theater.
Yes he is. I had the fortune to attend a talk that he gave at Bell Labs a couple years ago and among other things, he gave a demonstration of Inferno. He is definately a brilliant computer scientist and very humble despite the legacy he will leave behind.
Pratically all of the spam I've been receiving lately has claimed that I've opted-in to it. I certainly have not. I'd like to see one of these spammers "prove" that I've opted-in.
Maybe I should take a ride over to the local courthourse and file some lawsuits.
The "problem" that is expanding now has always been there: ideas aren't scarce. On one hand, this is a terrible problem for content providers because their business are based on creating artifical scarcities where they do not exist. On the other, at the societal level, this is a great problem to have: no longer is information able to be controlled by a select few.
The question now is, should we allow content providers to try to stop the natural evolution of information exchange?
Slashdot Mirror
That's the same argument that folks blinded into thinking that bandwith caps on previously touted "unlimited" internet service is a good thing: when those who use more are charged more, I won't have to pay as much. This is similar to the argument of subsidizing others' extra usage. I reject these arguments, buecause the wishful thinking behind them won't exist. The seller's won't reduce prices to those who use less or agree not to resell later. Instead, the seller's would rather sell lower priced versions with fewer functionality, such as Microsoft Windows home editions or Adobe Photoshop essentials. If you want to full functionality, you'll still need to purchase the higher priced package.
Prior art in one word: Cybermoola.
Cybermoola was this stored value card that you could buy at a retail store and use to make online purchases at retailers that accepted the card. It was an alternative to using a credit card and could be given to kids as gifts, etc. I worked for the supermarket chain that was the principal partner for the launch and distributed the traning materials to the employees. The idea, while novel, was a horrible failure. I don't think it lasted three months before it was pulled.
And here it is: a news article dated the day before the patent application was filed: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/resources/product_reviews/article.php/426631
Even before the internet. Most supermarkets (and increasingly other categories of retail stores) have Checkout Coupon printers, which are run by a company called Catalena Marketing. These machines don't spit out coupons just because they like you, they print out coupons based on what you buy, printing coupons for related products or for competing products.
For example, you buy a box of Kelloggs Corn Flakes cereal, a coupon prints out for Post Total cereal. Or you buy a bottle of Advil and a coupon for Tylenol prints out. Or you buy a package of Huggies diapers and a coupon for Luvs diapers prints out.
This is exactly the same as the keyword advertising that this law aims to ban: one brand/product is desired and direct advertisement for a different/competing one is displayed to the consumer. Bet they didn't think of this, did they? And you can bet even more that they won't try to enforce the law this way.
This is coming from the guy who ran around a stage screaming and flapping his arms about.
According to reports, the man was already hanfcuffed so I don't think it would be correct stipulate that the first tasing was justified. But lets just assume for a moment that it was.
If the reason that you're tasing the suspect is because he is (in the officer's oppinion) resisting arrest, then using the taser on the suspect is in effect a de facto application of physical punishment for the aledged crime. This is not (and should not be) the role of the police to do, to administer punishment, especially before even being charged with a crime.
That being said, eyewitness accounts have said that the man was already handcuffed. He was also on the ground. At that point, he is not a physical threat to the officers. He might be a threat to the officers "authority" but that is not justification for using the taser on him. The use of force agaist citizens, even those suspected of a crime, must only be applied if there is a clear physical threat to the safety of the officers or the immeidate public. And remember under our justice system, suspects are innocent until they are proven guilty in court.
The officers in this video are either the dumbest cops in the world, to repediately brutalize that young man not only on video but with literally dozens of witnesses. Or they think that because of the uniform they wear, that they are above the law. It doesn't matter which one it is, those animals should be out of a job and in jail. The video did not show everything but there is at least one part where the man is clearly on the floor and is tazed again, sending his body upward in a horiffic spasm.
Try turing the firewall off on the router. This disabled SPI on it (the inherent network protections of NAT remain). I have yet to see a consumer-grade router do SPI (stateful packet inspection) with zero problems.
I'm sure his relatives call him up constantly when their computer has problems.
The cardholder protection doesn't apply to all circumstances - I once had a credit card turn down my request for a refund. The reason, in essence, was that it was my responsibility to read the fine print and know what I was getting into (it was a situation where a "free" service wasn't really free).
If there was something wrong with your purchase (it was broken for instance) and the store refused to take it back, the credit card issuer would likely refund your money. However, given the situation in the article (woman realizes she already owned a similar item), you're probably out of luck.
This isn't a free* (* free = not free) type of service thing. This is a customer, purchasing an item in good faith, and not being happy with the purchase, wanting to return it for a refund, as you are entitled to do, both under the law and the store's return policy.
Under laws governing credit cards in the U.S., you are entitled to a refund for merchandise you have a problem with if it is $50 or more and in your home state (or within 100 miles of your billing address) OR is a store-issed charge card.
Now, the question is, does the store tell customers that they may have their refund requests denied because they might return merchandise too much? If not explicitly, then whatever vague disclaimer about reserving the right to refuse refunds, isn't going to be enough to hold up in a court because it would be considered unfair to the customer that they are not aware of this beforehand.
Maybe even easier is to not shop at the store and tell them the reason why.
No. Pay with a credit card.
All credit card companies offer cardholder protections, including refunding your money if you have a problem with the merchant.
Clearly, denying you a return because you were flagged by a computer database is an abuse of their return policy.
Simply dispute the charge because the store refused to take back the merchandise. You'll get your money back, the store will get a fee for having the purchase charged back, and you'll probablly end up keeping the merchandise (unless your credit card issuer wants it).
And you still have to have the lock. If the thief takes the lock with you (like what happened to me 5 years ago - thanks Kryptonite) you're SOL.
I almost made my roommate deaf after screaming at my code.
Actually, the TV doesn't know anything about activating Macrovision. It doesn't know anything. It doesn't think. It just turns on.
Macrovision isn't some sort of technological breakthrough. It is an exploit of a flaw in how VCRs work compared to how TVs work. The gain function of a TV is designed expecting that the signal that it will receive isn't going to be perfect; it "expects" that there will be static and such in the signal. VCRs are different; it "expects" that the tape will provide a signal that isn't filled with static and such so Macrovision exploits this difference, causing the sound and picture to become undesirable to listen to and watch.
If you hook your DVD player directly up to a TV, everything will be fine. If you hook it up through a VCR, the VCRs gain will kill the signal.
"Doesn't work that way in a Capatalist society."
But it does.
Each consumer has his or her own value of the products that he or she wishes to purchase. Take, for example, a chocolate cake. I want a choclolate cake. I think that a chocolate cake is worth $6 to me. I go to a bakery and the bakery is selling a chocolate cake for $8. Will I buy that cake? No, because the price the seller wants is higher than what I value that cake at. So, I go to another bakery until I find a chocolate cake that is being sold at or below my valulation of $6.
The same thing has happened with music. Thanks to the RIAA's marketing machine, a many Americans now value music at a price lower than the price of a CD. Why? Because of radio and MTV, we have become used to receiving music for free. Therefore, the value of music has become near ZERO. The consumers are no longer willing to purchase a CD at the price that the sellers are selling at. So, they go find the same product at the price they are willing to pay for. In the past, folks just taped off of the radio, made copies of records, tapes, or CDs that others bought, or bought records, tapes, or CDs from used record stores. But here comes the internet, the ultimate distribution system and the price is now virtually ZERO.
Does this mean that consumers are now no longer willing to pay for music. No. Because consumers want music, they still value it higher than zero (if they valued music at $0.00 they would not want it at all). Services like iTunes are the market reacting to what consumers want. Most music buyers would rather pay $2 for the one song they want then $18 for a CD with the one song they want and a disc full of crap. This is the market working exactlly as it should.
NCR isn't any better. I have the misfortune of working with a bunch of NCR's self checkout terminals at the supermarket I work at. They are basically NCR ATMs with checkout terminal hardware attached to them. One of them has been out of service for nearly a month because the NCR technicians can not figure out what is wrong with it and why the self checkout application will not continue booting. Technicians have been tending to the machine at least once a day and have replaced just about every part on it in the hopes that that will solve the problem, which it has not. The system is based on a Pentium II running Windows NT 4 and NCR's SCOT program, which is a buggy mess itself.
Its very interesting that Verizon is now claiming that "your number" is really theirs. Verizon's Wireless devision has been running ads that trump the ability to take "your" cell phone number from another carier to them now. So, in the land of Verizon, "your" number seems to only be yours if your provider is not Verizon. If your provider is Verizon, its their number.
Maybe not totally completing them, but perhaps a statement of something to the effect of: this is your taxable income and this is your tax liability. I would bet that the most "errors" on tax returns are either the wrong amount of taxable income being declared or the wrong tax liability being calcluated. Then the taxpayer would include whatever deductions he or she qualifies for.
Very simple. When you get paid, your employer must keep records of what you received, regardless of the form they paid you in, be it a check, direct deposit, cash, or pounds of seaweed. Then, at the end of the year, your employer sends you a form W-2, which has a total of what you were paid, how much taxes they withheld from your pay to be sent to the government, and what you finally took home with you. This information is also sent to the government (both state and federal). They already have been receiving all of this information, the agencies just haven't been able to do anything useful with it yet.
This isn't really a revolutionary thing happening. The governments have had this information for years but only recently has it been electronic and able to be easily and readilly retrieved and compared to what is declared on a tax return. In the past, if the tax man wanted to check if you were telling the truth, he would have to do it by hand.
This does seem more and more like McCarthyism each day.
Senator McCarthy: "In my hand, I have a list of members of the Communist party."
SCO: "In this press release, we announce lines of offending code."
In both cases, each respective list never was made public and the number of entires on each one changed as much as the weather.
Actually, if you read the article, you would have known that the idea wasn't for a small roll of tape but for a small piece of paper-backed tape that you remove to expose the adhesive. Interesting idea but this company already makes paper-backed duct tape (which incidentally I just used to repair my air conditioner system).
The problem is that the "label" will eschew the truth of the DRM system. VHS tapes and DVD discs have "Macrovision Quality Protection" logos on them now, suggesting that without Macrovision, the picture or sound quality would be substandard (which is actually the opposite).
The thing is with Disney is that they release a movie, go to video and pull the video after a while. Then the movie is re-released in theaters and then back to video. And then the video is pulled... etc etc etc. They probablly want DRM schemes in their controll more than any other studio because they can then "turn off" videos of their movies when it is back in the theater.
Yes he is. I had the fortune to attend a talk that he gave at Bell Labs a couple years ago and among other things, he gave a demonstration of Inferno. He is definately a brilliant computer scientist and very humble despite the legacy he will leave behind.
Pratically all of the spam I've been receiving lately has claimed that I've opted-in to it. I certainly have not. I'd like to see one of these spammers "prove" that I've opted-in.
Maybe I should take a ride over to the local courthourse and file some lawsuits.
The "problem" that is expanding now has always been there: ideas aren't scarce. On one hand, this is a terrible problem for content providers because their business are based on creating artifical scarcities where they do not exist. On the other, at the societal level, this is a great problem to have: no longer is information able to be controlled by a select few.
The question now is, should we allow content providers to try to stop the natural evolution of information exchange?