I mean, if they take it off the air they'll just replace it with worlds blankiest blank anyway.
Exactly. I haven't even seen it yet, but I predict that whatever they put on to replace the Simpsons will have a looooooooooooong way to go to top that "Let's Get A Midget A Date!" show they're putting on next week, and I'm not sure I want to hang around to find out just exactly how trashy Fox can get.
Actually, you have to prove that the statement is false; prove that it was intended to cause harm; and prove that the statement in fact inflicted harm that was directly responsible for noticeable damage to the recipient's reputation and/or finances.
Actually, that's still not enough. You have to show that the defendant either knew or reasonably should have known that the statement was false when he/she made it - if I reasonably believed at the time that what I was saying was true, then you're out of luck, even if the remainder of your points are applicable to the case. Simply being a falsehood isn't enough - it has to be a malicious falsehood.
You've obviously never worked for The Storyteller. The Storyteller will call a meeting, ostensibly as a means of assessing progress on the project du jour, and then turn it into a one man show about what he did on his vacation to Bimini, how his brother-in-law is particularly worthless, why he decided to go with forest green instead of black on his new car, the great/horrible movie he saw over the weekend, and so forth. Then, about 57 minutes into his one hour meeting, he'll glance at his watch and realize that time's almost up, at which point, he'll say something like "So, is everybody on track for this week?", which is everyone else's cue to lie about how well things are going. After all, The Storyteller didn't call this meeting to hear about your problems - he called it to tell you about some aspect of his personal life, and thereby tell you about his problems...
You can't just send data through the transformer and expect it to work well..... The transformer acts like a low pass filter (a good thing), and it weakens the higher frequency signals.
And to expand further, this is why Amperion is going the route they're going, because to get the signal past the transformer, you usually wind up resorting to things like optical bridges, which gets expensive fast, especially in locales where there's one transformer for every four or five houses....
Heh. I got my NYS barcode to decode. I cropped the image with the scanner so that only the barcode got scanned, not the whole back of the license, and I did it at 600 dpi - the end result was an 1842x348 GIF file, which is larger than the instructions say to use, but it worked, so what the fuck, right? Anyway, I didn't do any tweaking beyond that, so give it a whirl.
But in case you don't get it to work, here's what's on the back of your license:
Name=
Address=
City=
State=
Zipcode=
Driver License Number=
Driver Classification Code=
Driver Restriction Code=
Driver Endorsements Code=
License Expiration Date=
License Issued Date=
Date of Birth=
Sex=
Height=
Eye Color=
Social Security Number=
Organ Donor=
Pretty much what's on the front of the license, in other words. Interestingly, even though there's a field for SSN, it's actually empty, at least on my barcode - there's a space for a SSN, but no SSN actually there.
But what about just driving by my house and just happen to pick up a signal of me saying "I am going to bomb such and such" or "yes, mrs. doe. I will kill your husband"?
That's the sort of thing that the Fourth Amendment - for the moment, anyway - doesn't allow. They have to have a reason to be there, and they have to have a reason to be listening to you, and with those reasons, they then have to get a warrant, otherwise it's an illegal search - see, e.g., Kyllo v. United States. They can't simply "go fishing" by rolling up and down the streets of your neighborhood with a scanner to see what they might "just happen" to pick up.
Obviously, the devil is in the details in this kind of thing, though. Suppose for a minute that the FBI has a warrant to listen in to the wireless transmissions of your neighbor, the reputed mobster. And while so doing, they accidentally catch your baby monitor as it broadcasts you speaking about your plans to blow up the White House, or whatever. Clearly, they'll want to investigate further, but they still need to go get a warrant to do any further listening, or they risk having everything they hear being tossed out of court when they come to arrest you later on. Basically, any time you have a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as in your own home, the police are required to obtain a warrant to do any kind of electronic surveillance, as per Katz v. United States...
So how (exactly, please) is receiving the SatTV signal illegal?
It's not the "receiving" that's illegal - standing outside with a metal coathanger held to the sky will cause you to "receive" satellite signals. It's the "try to do something with it" part that will get you in trouble.
But what you get are people who don't understand the difference, and who try to parse the fact that simply owning a piece of metal that might act as a natural antenna causes them to "receive" signals without having to do anything therefore makes it legal to take those signals and do something with them. Arguments that it's passing through my property, therefore it's mine to do with as I please, are just silly - the pizza guy's car doesn't become yours just because he parks in your driveway when he's making a delivery. You cannot refuse to pay the cab driver for a ride to the airport just because you think he was going that way anyway - that's theft of service, same as taking satellite TV without paying for it.
Silver oxidizes as well - this is why you have to drag out the forks and polish them from time to time. Or you would, if you had any actual silverware;)
Anyway, like the other poster said, forming a colloidal suspension by sticking either copper or silver in grease ought to prevent much of the oxidation in both cases...
I doubt the margins on this product are huge, so it's not economically viable to test every batch in an external lab.
True, but given the potential cost of this fiasco, it would have made sense to at least occasionally pull some random samples out and test them. You don't have to test every batch, but it's playing with fire to not test any of the batches...
What does "morality" have to do with anything business-related, particularly when it is a question of effectiveness?
Shattering the kneecaps of people who don't pay back money that they borrow is an extremely effective means of insuring timely loan repayment, yet it's still illegal. Discuss.
Maybe "effectiveness" in advancing one's goals is not the sole criterion for judging the the rightness or wrongness of some action. Perhaps it's not even the most important one. I suspect that if you stop and think about it, you'll probably conclude that most people wouldn't be very happy in a world where "effectiveness" was the only judgement call we had to make, and notions of "morality" were not in play. Should I ask my neighbor if I can borrow his hedge clippers, and then respect his wishes, whatever they may be? Or should I just shoot him and take them? Which choice is likely to be more effective in realizing my goal of getting hold of the hedge clippers?
If I choose "A", he might say no, and then I'll have no clippers. If I choose "B"...well, he won't be saying no, will he?
The objections you and the others bring up are not new, nor original.
Nor have they ever been addressed in a satisfactory manner, which is why you keep hearing them over and over. One thing you say is painfully obvious - SPEWS doesn't give a damn about what anyone thinks, and that is why I fully expect its user base to eventually begin declining in favor of solutions that are less indiscriminate about laying waste to internet traffic.
Whether you've heard it all before or not, let us make no mistake about it - the only leverage the maintainers and users of SPEWS have exists because of the practice (and/or the threat thereof) of targeting the innocent multitudes and punishing them for the sins of a few. I find that the people I know who use SPEWS and support its mission are generally sensible, decent people, whose basic hatred of all things spammy has blinded them to the fact that the ends (punishing spammers) are simply being used to justify the means (punishing those judged to be guilty by association) - a principle that none of them would accept in any other area than this. Yet they are all too willing to set aside basic notions of decency in their childish desire to lash out at anyone even remotely associated with those they deem evil. And the result is clear - those who strongarm uninvolved third parties, claiming guilt by association, in order to further some quixotic anti-spam quest, are, to my mind, morally and ethically no better than those spammers who hijack innocent users' machines in order to dump unwanted emails on others by the millions. No better at all.
Use SPEWS if you like - it's your system, and along with you and SPEWS not caring what I think, I certainly don't care what you think, nor do I care what the SPEWS maintainers think. But don't pretend you have some claim to the moral high ground here - you don't, and anyone who's invested a moment's thought in this can see why.
No one forces anyone to refuse mail from any other provider.
No one forces anyone to join unruly mobs either, and yet they form anyway. Funny thing, that.
Your analogy is completely invalid.
Bullshit. You were the one comparing these ISPs to an "apartment building full of crackheads", when the whole point is that the building ISN'T full of crackheads - if it were, nobody would be bitching. The whole point to the complaints is that SPEWS is actively targeting the people in the building who aren't the crackheads, so I guess you don't know what you're talking about. Have you even read the objections that people are presenting, or are you so damn sure of your rightness that no dissenting voice will even be entertained?
Actually, I guess the mods have already answered that question for you...
Actually, a better analogy is that someone is out there encouraging a mob to surround the apartment building and not let anyone in or out, because they've decided that *one* of the residents there is a crackhead. And dammit, we won't have landlords renting to crackheads, so out come the pitchforks and torches.
Try that kind of thing in real life and see what it gets you. See how far you get by arguing that every person in the mob joined voluntarily, and hence you're not really culpable for inciting a riot....
By definition, half of all their customers are using "above average" bandwidth.
Errr, no - you're thinking of the median value, not the average. Example: ISP X has six subscribers. Five of them download 1 GB per month, and the sixth downloads 20 GB per month. Average usage is therefore just over 4 GB per month, but only one of those users is above average.
Macworld isn't making the article available on their website, but you piqued my curiosity enough to go looking for it. Alienware, which makes the Athlon and P4 systems that Macworld apparently used for its testing, has made excerpts available here.
Who should I believe - Macworld, or some guy with bare feet? Hmmm............
And here I was, thinking I would get a real study - perhaps a little economics, maybe some demographics, possibly a well-constructed survey or two. Something, anything that justifies the headline on this thing. Instead, I discovered that you could have just as easily slapped this headline on top of the goatse.cx guy and come up with something almost as meaningful, content-wise.
Good for you, but I think you and I both know that there are plenty of people out there who will take a connection and a DHCP lease from an apparently open access point, no questions asked.
The attacker must:
Be on your local network
Already have control of your DHCP server
Why would I do all that when I can simply allow unsuspecting Powerbook users to connect to my wi-fi hub? Be nasty surprise for the Mac-using wardrivers out there, wouldn't it?
It really doesn't matter how many people they have if those people can't afford what's for sale. For China to have something resembling a Western standard of living, they'll be required to increase the size of their economy about sixfold. That's a fairly tall order, one that won't come about overnight, and one that probably won't come about at all until they finally figure out that Western-style open political systems are part and parcel of Western standards of living.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. I haven't even seen it yet, but I predict that whatever they put on to replace the Simpsons will have a looooooooooooong way to go to top that "Let's Get A Midget A Date!" show they're putting on next week, and I'm not sure I want to hang around to find out just exactly how trashy Fox can get.
Actually, that's still not enough. You have to show that the defendant either knew or reasonably should have known that the statement was false when he/she made it - if I reasonably believed at the time that what I was saying was true, then you're out of luck, even if the remainder of your points are applicable to the case. Simply being a falsehood isn't enough - it has to be a malicious falsehood.
You've obviously never worked for The Storyteller. The Storyteller will call a meeting, ostensibly as a means of assessing progress on the project du jour, and then turn it into a one man show about what he did on his vacation to Bimini, how his brother-in-law is particularly worthless, why he decided to go with forest green instead of black on his new car, the great/horrible movie he saw over the weekend, and so forth. Then, about 57 minutes into his one hour meeting, he'll glance at his watch and realize that time's almost up, at which point, he'll say something like "So, is everybody on track for this week?", which is everyone else's cue to lie about how well things are going. After all, The Storyteller didn't call this meeting to hear about your problems - he called it to tell you about some aspect of his personal life, and thereby tell you about his problems...
And to expand further, this is why Amperion is going the route they're going, because to get the signal past the transformer, you usually wind up resorting to things like optical bridges, which gets expensive fast, especially in locales where there's one transformer for every four or five houses....
But in case you don't get it to work, here's what's on the back of your license:
Name=
Address=
City=
State=
Zipcode=
Driver License Number=
Driver Classification Code=
Driver Restriction Code=
Driver Endorsements Code=
License Expiration Date=
License Issued Date=
Date of Birth=
Sex=
Height=
Eye Color=
Social Security Number=
Organ Donor=
Pretty much what's on the front of the license, in other words. Interestingly, even though there's a field for SSN, it's actually empty, at least on my barcode - there's a space for a SSN, but no SSN actually there.
That's the sort of thing that the Fourth Amendment - for the moment, anyway - doesn't allow. They have to have a reason to be there, and they have to have a reason to be listening to you, and with those reasons, they then have to get a warrant, otherwise it's an illegal search - see, e.g., Kyllo v. United States. They can't simply "go fishing" by rolling up and down the streets of your neighborhood with a scanner to see what they might "just happen" to pick up.
Obviously, the devil is in the details in this kind of thing, though. Suppose for a minute that the FBI has a warrant to listen in to the wireless transmissions of your neighbor, the reputed mobster. And while so doing, they accidentally catch your baby monitor as it broadcasts you speaking about your plans to blow up the White House, or whatever. Clearly, they'll want to investigate further, but they still need to go get a warrant to do any further listening, or they risk having everything they hear being tossed out of court when they come to arrest you later on. Basically, any time you have a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as in your own home, the police are required to obtain a warrant to do any kind of electronic surveillance, as per Katz v. United States...
Typically, yes. Otherwise, they'd never bother with surveillance warrants in the first place - they'd just set up an antenna with no oversight at all.
It's not the "receiving" that's illegal - standing outside with a metal coathanger held to the sky will cause you to "receive" satellite signals. It's the "try to do something with it" part that will get you in trouble.
But what you get are people who don't understand the difference, and who try to parse the fact that simply owning a piece of metal that might act as a natural antenna causes them to "receive" signals without having to do anything therefore makes it legal to take those signals and do something with them. Arguments that it's passing through my property, therefore it's mine to do with as I please, are just silly - the pizza guy's car doesn't become yours just because he parks in your driveway when he's making a delivery. You cannot refuse to pay the cab driver for a ride to the airport just because you think he was going that way anyway - that's theft of service, same as taking satellite TV without paying for it.
No. And if your neighbors might be wondering the same thing, I suggest you don't buy a cordless phone. Or a cell phone.
Silver oxidizes as well - this is why you have to drag out the forks and polish them from time to time. Or you would, if you had any actual silverware ;)
Anyway, like the other poster said, forming a colloidal suspension by sticking either copper or silver in grease ought to prevent much of the oxidation in both cases...
True, but given the potential cost of this fiasco, it would have made sense to at least occasionally pull some random samples out and test them. You don't have to test every batch, but it's playing with fire to not test any of the batches...
Shattering the kneecaps of people who don't pay back money that they borrow is an extremely effective means of insuring timely loan repayment, yet it's still illegal. Discuss.
Maybe "effectiveness" in advancing one's goals is not the sole criterion for judging the the rightness or wrongness of some action. Perhaps it's not even the most important one. I suspect that if you stop and think about it, you'll probably conclude that most people wouldn't be very happy in a world where "effectiveness" was the only judgement call we had to make, and notions of "morality" were not in play. Should I ask my neighbor if I can borrow his hedge clippers, and then respect his wishes, whatever they may be? Or should I just shoot him and take them? Which choice is likely to be more effective in realizing my goal of getting hold of the hedge clippers?
If I choose "A", he might say no, and then I'll have no clippers. If I choose "B"...well, he won't be saying no, will he?
Nor have they ever been addressed in a satisfactory manner, which is why you keep hearing them over and over. One thing you say is painfully obvious - SPEWS doesn't give a damn about what anyone thinks, and that is why I fully expect its user base to eventually begin declining in favor of solutions that are less indiscriminate about laying waste to internet traffic.
Whether you've heard it all before or not, let us make no mistake about it - the only leverage the maintainers and users of SPEWS have exists because of the practice (and/or the threat thereof) of targeting the innocent multitudes and punishing them for the sins of a few. I find that the people I know who use SPEWS and support its mission are generally sensible, decent people, whose basic hatred of all things spammy has blinded them to the fact that the ends (punishing spammers) are simply being used to justify the means (punishing those judged to be guilty by association) - a principle that none of them would accept in any other area than this. Yet they are all too willing to set aside basic notions of decency in their childish desire to lash out at anyone even remotely associated with those they deem evil. And the result is clear - those who strongarm uninvolved third parties, claiming guilt by association, in order to further some quixotic anti-spam quest, are, to my mind, morally and ethically no better than those spammers who hijack innocent users' machines in order to dump unwanted emails on others by the millions. No better at all.
Use SPEWS if you like - it's your system, and along with you and SPEWS not caring what I think, I certainly don't care what you think, nor do I care what the SPEWS maintainers think. But don't pretend you have some claim to the moral high ground here - you don't, and anyone who's invested a moment's thought in this can see why.
No one forces anyone to join unruly mobs either, and yet they form anyway. Funny thing, that.
Your analogy is completely invalid.
Bullshit. You were the one comparing these ISPs to an "apartment building full of crackheads", when the whole point is that the building ISN'T full of crackheads - if it were, nobody would be bitching. The whole point to the complaints is that SPEWS is actively targeting the people in the building who aren't the crackheads, so I guess you don't know what you're talking about. Have you even read the objections that people are presenting, or are you so damn sure of your rightness that no dissenting voice will even be entertained?
Actually, I guess the mods have already answered that question for you...
Try that kind of thing in real life and see what it gets you. See how far you get by arguing that every person in the mob joined voluntarily, and hence you're not really culpable for inciting a riot....
"I've got an operating system in my pants!"
Sorry, that just slipped out ;)
Unless all the values are the same - then nobody will be above average ;)
Errr, no - you're thinking of the median value, not the average. Example: ISP X has six subscribers. Five of them download 1 GB per month, and the sixth downloads 20 GB per month. Average usage is therefore just over 4 GB per month, but only one of those users is above average.
Macworld isn't making the article available on their website, but you piqued my curiosity enough to go looking for it. Alienware, which makes the Athlon and P4 systems that Macworld apparently used for its testing, has made excerpts available here.
Who should I believe - Macworld, or some guy with bare feet? Hmmm............
Way to go, Slapdash. Two thumbs down.
Good for you, but I think you and I both know that there are plenty of people out there who will take a connection and a DHCP lease from an apparently open access point, no questions asked.
Be on your local network
Already have control of your DHCP server
Why would I do all that when I can simply allow unsuspecting Powerbook users to connect to my wi-fi hub? Be nasty surprise for the Mac-using wardrivers out there, wouldn't it?
It really doesn't matter how many people they have if those people can't afford what's for sale. For China to have something resembling a Western standard of living, they'll be required to increase the size of their economy about sixfold. That's a fairly tall order, one that won't come about overnight, and one that probably won't come about at all until they finally figure out that Western-style open political systems are part and parcel of Western standards of living.