Complaining that someone was using an unsecured, free AP as theft of services is like saying someone should have to close their eyes if they hang around outside your store at night as to avoid taking advantage of your free lights.
(someone has to have a better one than that, let's see it!)
What it boils down to is that if they want people to have to buy something to use the WAP then secure it in a way as to assure that happens, don't complain because you're too lazy to do something proactive to control it. It isn't hard. People fire up a browser , first page is a redirect on which they have to enter the "password du jour" which, as mentioned above, could easily be printed on the reciepts or even on a small sign next to the cash register.
"I hooked up on MySpace and it went bad, bad enough my parents found out. The guys in jail but I'm still they're blaming me for putting up a MySpace page looking for hookups,who can I blame? Oh yeah. MySpace did it by not stopping the guy I e-mailed. We should also sue MicroSoft for not predator filtering e-mail in outlook"
Or...
"Our daughter is no slut. There's no way that unless someone or something else facilitated it she would never get in a situation like that. Where is she now? She was really upset so she's spending the night at her friends.. um.. Marsha or somethings like that's house. We can't get a quote for you right now from her because she said Marsha's phone was out..."
Maybe I'm wrong, I'll admit that. But if I were betting money I know where it would be. Yes, the guy is a creep and criminal for doing this, but the parents should have been aware of the childs surfing habits. There is no excuse now a days and enough software that you could both track and control a browser. At the very least they should have known about her MySpace site, and her e-mail.
There is a study at http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/464830 on the topic of having pets about babies and if it affects them. In this study it was found that having a couple pets about a baby helped decrease the chance of the child being allergic to that pet later in life.
More to back up the "That which does not kill me only makes me stronger" theory.
Don't deny... We've seen you, after long nights out with those tramps OpenBSD and Ubuntu. You get sauced and feel lonely cause you still don't get as many dates as that slut Windows, and next thing you know you're going home with anybody at the bar that will buy you a drink at last call.
It's OK, we still love you, and we know that you're self image issues will work out eventually.
What we are at this point seeing are the first steps in a cycle of balance.
India has been in a horrible financial condition. It's got large amounts of debt and it's trying to work it's way out of them. This comes with financial assistance from the international community. You have many of these poorer nations not able to afford the subsidies anymore for farmers , which means more people migrating to the cities for the promises of these fantastic tech jobs.
Problem is the cities aren't ready to handle all these people, and the government isn't ready to handle all this displaced workforce. Result? SLUM TOWN!
Uh Oh, now the international community is on nations to provide a base level of support for their people. They don't want sweat shops and shanty towns of workers paid pennies on the dollar of what others get. India has to rely for a good deal on it's own people to solve this problem for themselves because they don't have the money to. If they want to they have to start taxing these companies more, which means.... costs go up. On an individual level? How to get out of the slum, you have to get paid more so you can afford to live there, you demand more pay.. they demand more for your contracting.. Costs rise...
Suddenly all those cost benefits from outsourcing start evaporating.
From my personal perspective.. yay. This is far more effective a way to "keep jobs here" than trying to legislate some mandate for companies to do so. In this case, the "free market economy" is actually doing it's job.
How many times will Sony need to push forth a predominantly vendor specific (although a couple other blu-ray vendors exist, we all know this is mostly a Sony standard) format for something before learning better? Or is Sony trying to corner the market on niche markets?
1. Betamax 2. Memory sticks 3. Minidisc 4. UMD
How many times? How many other Sony formats am I missing? I know I have to be missing at least one.
I can usderstand requiring network capabilities as 90% of what people use computers for now outside progamming/web/grphic design seems to be all about network interaction. (Overglorified graphical terminal)
What I am waiting to see is the other shoe to fall and the requirement be extended to "A connection to the internet", and worse "An unrestricted connection to the internet" which would end up being solely for snooping, "license enforcement", and other DRM "checking home".
Admiral Balmer has New Technology which will allow him to display exactly how a Microsoft XP wing can navigate in and destroy the googleplex through a vent port which is coincidentally about the size of a womprat hole.
Unfortunately as they fly in to do this Emperor Page will proudly proclaim that thanks to the workforce administration styles of Darth Brin they now face the wrath of a FULLY OPERATIONAL GOOGLEPLEX.
To which Admiral Balmer will exclaim... "It's a TRAP!"
(sorry... it's early for me... caffeine hasn't really kicked my better judgement out of bed yet.)
Although there was a Laserdisc centric game which I cannot remember the name of which used footage from Lupin III (anime) for it's content. That was the most interesting because to this day I can still hum the music from it.
A) I will concurr with the call of sub par journalism with a definite anti-MS slant.
B) More importantly, how many other OS's written that far back are still being actively supported? I'm not sure, is the Mac OS from that day still supported by Apple and being actively maintained?
The company I work at stop doing patches for software when it's more than 2 major releases old. Period. By that call 98 should have been phased out the minute XP was released (98... 2000... XP) I think MS has kept the patient alive too long as it is, let it die.
They seriously wrestled over this issue... On a big pile of money... with the cute girls the Chinese government sent over.
Who can blame them for this decision? sheesh
Or as a friend said "They're still abiding by the core company philosophy if by 'good' you mean a huge pile of money.. and 'evil' being a smaller pile of money. They are doing no evil"
The ability to simply redefine for yourself what words mean to make youself into an angel, Bill Clinton would be proud:)
The EFF is painting a picture of people who are pirating for teh sake of pirating becauase they feel it's the right thing to do. None of the people I know who actively copy movies and songs have every mentioned once screwing any institution. For them it's "I can watch this new movie at home, on my big screen TV, with my popcorn and drink and not fork over $25 for my wife and I to go to a theater and probably have a better experience" or "This let's me have tons of music I wouldn't go buy just so I can listen to it and see if I like it" and things like that. There's no magical army of "copyfighters" out there. Just people who want free media.
The MPAA and RIAA and various other organizations have it wrong in thinking that they will out-litigate these people because simply put, these people know what they're doing is illegal and choose to do it anyway.
I do agree with the concept that they need to make it possible for people to buy media in a conducive manner without an undo cost and they will make money. ITMS and several others are proving it's possible.
The MPAA can go ask the software industry exactly how profitable "stamping our piracy" has been for em. Or they can ask them how much inexpensive downloads have helped good software spread.
Did they note the suspicious remains of a Father-son-daughter "routine expedition" nearby? Any three fingered lizard men? Strange pylon with crysatls inside?
If they had, they would be called on the carpet too, and probably with a greater fervor as the people calling them on it would be their own direct users.
As it is I would call Slashdot the Margerine of Evil... Evil Light... diet evil... Tastes like evil.. but not evil enough
The motto was not "Be only as evil as you absolutely have to be".
It was not "Be evil only if it's for a debatable greater good"
It was not "Be evil if it's the law of the land and you want to expand your profit base into it"
If they want to live up to a black and white motto like "Don't be evil" then they have to walk that walk.
Saying that censoring the results and sites helps by getting some information to the people is a horrible attempt at justification. The people are already getting censored search results from Microsoft and Yahoo, why do they need a third set of censored search results? They don't. But does Google want a slice of the censored search results profit pie? You betcha!
Bottom of the equation for Google at this point:
Profit > Ethics
Which would not be that big a thing for any company, except that they made a VERY BIG DEAL out of the ethical "Don't be evil" motto as the reason they were better than all these other tech companies they are competing against. That is until "Don't be evil" became.. well.. inconvenient
Maybe they should ammend it to :
Don't be evil *
(* - Some restrictions defined by profitability may apply)
This is nice PR and a nice spin attempt. The question is what follow through it will see. Maybe i'm just too dyed in the wool of my cynicism but right now the only "wrestling with the problem" they are doing is rolling around on a pile of money they are making through compromising thier ethical stance.
It will boil down to which is more important, profits or ethics. They're a publically held company which makes me think ethics won't win.
Praise them when/if they do the right thing. Not when/if they consider doing the right thing.
Else I will consider a devout life. I will consider doing more charity work. I will consider devoting all my financial resources to helping the poor and underprivlidged.
And then I will ask to be cannonized myself.. WHEE.. I'm a saint!
Actually I think over at http://www.ulc.org/ you can buy/donate your way to sainthood, but that's another story.
Slashdot Mirror
Complaining that someone was using an unsecured, free AP as theft of services is like saying someone should have to close their eyes if they hang around outside your store at night as to avoid taking advantage of your free lights.
(someone has to have a better one than that, let's see it!)
What it boils down to is that if they want people to have to buy something to use the WAP then secure it in a way as to assure that happens, don't complain because you're too lazy to do something proactive to control it. It isn't hard. People fire up a browser , first page is a redirect on which they have to enter the "password du jour" which, as mentioned above, could easily be printed on the reciepts or even on a small sign next to the cash register.
P.S. - You let your 14 year old daughter go out on a date.. unsupervised.. one-on-one.. with a boy.. genius.
I read the artice.. here's what I see....
"I hooked up on MySpace and it went bad, bad enough my parents found out. The guys in jail but I'm still they're blaming me for putting up a MySpace page looking for hookups,who can I blame? Oh yeah. MySpace did it by not stopping the guy I e-mailed. We should also sue MicroSoft for not predator filtering e-mail in outlook"
Or...
"Our daughter is no slut. There's no way that unless someone or something else facilitated it she would never get in a situation like that. Where is she now? She was really upset so she's spending the night at her friends.. um.. Marsha or somethings like that's house. We can't get a quote for you right now from her because she said Marsha's phone was out..."
Maybe I'm wrong, I'll admit that. But if I were betting money I know where it would be. Yes, the guy is a creep and criminal for doing this, but the parents should have been aware of the childs surfing habits. There is no excuse now a days and enough software that you could both track and control a browser. At the very least they should have known about her MySpace site, and her e-mail.
There is a study at http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/464830 on the topic of having pets about babies and if it affects them. In this study it was found that having a couple pets about a baby helped decrease the chance of the child being allergic to that pet later in life.
More to back up the "That which does not kill me only makes me stronger" theory.
Ah Tux...
Don't deny... We've seen you, after long nights out with those tramps OpenBSD and Ubuntu. You get sauced and feel lonely cause you still don't get as many dates as that slut Windows, and next thing you know you're going home with anybody at the bar that will buy you a drink at last call.
It's OK, we still love you, and we know that you're self image issues will work out eventually.
Love,
Us
What we are at this point seeing are the first steps in a cycle of balance.
India has been in a horrible financial condition. It's got large amounts of debt and it's trying to work it's way out of them. This comes with financial assistance from the international community. You have many of these poorer nations not able to afford the subsidies anymore for farmers , which means more people migrating to the cities for the promises of these fantastic tech jobs.
Problem is the cities aren't ready to handle all these people, and the government isn't ready to handle all this displaced workforce. Result? SLUM TOWN!
Uh Oh, now the international community is on nations to provide a base level of support for their people. They don't want sweat shops and shanty towns of workers paid pennies on the dollar of what others get. India has to rely for a good deal on it's own people to solve this problem for themselves because they don't have the money to. If they want to they have to start taxing these companies more, which means.... costs go up. On an individual level? How to get out of the slum, you have to get paid more so you can afford to live there, you demand more pay.. they demand more for your contracting.. Costs rise...
Suddenly all those cost benefits from outsourcing start evaporating.
From my personal perspective.. yay. This is far more effective a way to "keep jobs here" than trying to legislate some mandate for companies to do so. In this case, the "free market economy" is actually doing it's job.
How many times will Sony need to push forth a predominantly vendor specific (although a couple other blu-ray vendors exist, we all know this is mostly a Sony standard) format for something before learning better? Or is Sony trying to corner the market on niche markets?
1. Betamax
2. Memory sticks
3. Minidisc
4. UMD
How many times? How many other Sony formats am I missing? I know I have to be missing at least one.
I can usderstand requiring network capabilities as 90% of what people use computers for now outside progamming/web/grphic design seems to be all about network interaction. (Overglorified graphical terminal)
What I am waiting to see is the other shoe to fall and the requirement be extended to "A connection to the internet", and worse "An unrestricted connection to the internet" which would end up being solely for snooping, "license enforcement", and other DRM "checking home".
We're building a site based on other people giving us all our content in the form of their :
a) vying for attention/hookups
b) vying for attention due to need for depression therapy
c) People looking to hookup for action (legal or not)
Then we're going to double dip it up by charging a search engine to be the best place to search for hookups and emo-kids...
Something about the phrase "coming and going" leaps to mind but I can't put the whole analogy out there that easily. heh
Will Myspace stock drop the next time Merck develops an Emo proofing anti-depressant for kids?
Now to locate one of these running parallel to Earth and use it for my base of operations when I take over...
Oh yezzzzzzz
The more I look at Myspace and see what it's doing to a good segment of society the less and less I think "Internet for all" is such a great idea.
Call my crazy and all I'm ready for it.
Would be a "Galaxy of Starcraft" to do to the remainer of SWG, AO, adn EvE what WoW did to EQ/DaoC/the rest of the fantasy mmog genre.
I would also like to see a solid well produced starcraft sequel before any MMOG offering from it.
Admiral Balmer has New Technology which will allow him to display exactly how a Microsoft XP wing can navigate in and destroy the googleplex through a vent port which is coincidentally about the size of a womprat hole.
Unfortunately as they fly in to do this Emperor Page will proudly proclaim that thanks to the workforce administration styles of Darth Brin they now face the wrath of a FULLY OPERATIONAL GOOGLEPLEX.
To which Admiral Balmer will exclaim... "It's a TRAP!"
(sorry... it's early for me... caffeine hasn't really kicked my better judgement out of bed yet.)
I actually liked the second one "space ace" more.
Although there was a Laserdisc centric game which I cannot remember the name of which used footage from Lupin III (anime) for it's content. That was the most interesting because to this day I can still hum the music from it.
Things I would want from a mobile device:
1) Phone
2) PDA
3) MP3 player
4) Camera
Things I DON'T want in a mobile device:
1) Smells
2) Life philosophy
3) Being locked into one service provider
It's funny how how 5 years ago my want list would have made me a cuttng edge geek, and now it makes me a luddite.
Was the guy who made this press release doing so on the deck of a ship with a big "Mission accomplished" sign behind him?
Any chance there?
Don't forget beer. Oklahomans also flock into Texas to buy beer which is not held to the 3.2% content by volume law Oklahome has, IIRC.
A) I will concurr with the call of sub par journalism with a definite anti-MS slant.
B) More importantly, how many other OS's written that far back are still being actively supported? I'm not sure, is the Mac OS from that day still supported by Apple and being actively maintained?
The company I work at stop doing patches for software when it's more than 2 major releases old. Period. By that call 98 should have been phased out the minute XP was released (98... 2000... XP) I think MS has kept the patient alive too long as it is, let it die.
They seriously wrestled over this issue... On a big pile of money... with the cute girls the Chinese government sent over.
:)
Who can blame them for this decision? sheesh
Or as a friend said "They're still abiding by the core company philosophy if by 'good' you mean a huge pile of money.. and 'evil' being a smaller pile of money. They are doing no evil"
The ability to simply redefine for yourself what words mean to make youself into an angel, Bill Clinton would be proud
The EFF is painting a picture of people who are pirating for teh sake of pirating becauase they feel it's the right thing to do. None of the people I know who actively copy movies and songs have every mentioned once screwing any institution. For them it's "I can watch this new movie at home, on my big screen TV, with my popcorn and drink and not fork over $25 for my wife and I to go to a theater and probably have a better experience" or "This let's me have tons of music I wouldn't go buy just so I can listen to it and see if I like it" and things like that. There's no magical army of "copyfighters" out there. Just people who want free media.
The MPAA and RIAA and various other organizations have it wrong in thinking that they will out-litigate these people because simply put, these people know what they're doing is illegal and choose to do it anyway.
I do agree with the concept that they need to make it possible for people to buy media in a conducive manner without an undo cost and they will make money. ITMS and several others are proving it's possible.
The MPAA can go ask the software industry exactly how profitable "stamping our piracy" has been for em. Or they can ask them how much inexpensive downloads have helped good software spread.
Small enough to have been a pet it seems.
Did they note the suspicious remains of a Father-son-daughter "routine expedition" nearby? Any three fingered lizard men? Strange pylon with crysatls inside?
Slashdot has never, IIRC, claimed to not be Evil.
If they had, they would be called on the carpet too, and probably with a greater fervor as the people calling them on it would be their own direct users.
As it is I would call Slashdot the Margerine of Evil... Evil Light... diet evil... Tastes like evil.. but not evil enough
The motto was not "Be only as evil as you absolutely have to be".
It was not "Be evil only if it's for a debatable greater good"
It was not "Be evil if it's the law of the land and you want to expand your profit base into it"
If they want to live up to a black and white motto like "Don't be evil" then they have to walk that walk.
Saying that censoring the results and sites helps by getting some information to the people is a horrible attempt at justification. The people are already getting censored search results from Microsoft and Yahoo, why do they need a third set of censored search results? They don't. But does Google want a slice of the censored search results profit pie? You betcha!
Bottom of the equation for Google at this point:
Profit > Ethics
Which would not be that big a thing for any company, except that they made a VERY BIG DEAL out of the ethical "Don't be evil" motto as the reason they were better than all these other tech companies they are competing against. That is until "Don't be evil" became.. well.. inconvenient
Maybe they should ammend it to :
Don't be evil *
(* - Some restrictions defined by profitability may apply)
This is nice PR and a nice spin attempt. The question is what follow through it will see. Maybe i'm just too dyed in the wool of my cynicism but right now the only "wrestling with the problem" they are doing is rolling around on a pile of money they are making through compromising thier ethical stance.
It will boil down to which is more important, profits or ethics. They're a publically held company which makes me think ethics won't win.
Woah there chief....
Praise them when/if they do the right thing. Not when/if they consider doing the right thing.
Else I will consider a devout life.
I will consider doing more charity work.
I will consider devoting all my financial resources to helping the poor and underprivlidged.
And then I will ask to be cannonized myself.. WHEE.. I'm a saint!
Actually I think over at http://www.ulc.org/ you can buy/donate your way to sainthood, but that's another story.