Interesting. I can only imagine what its like to be rooting a machine millions of miles off on a distant planet... My favorite quote from the Spaceflight Now story:
"The method we are using right now in running this script -- it's kind of a back door into the flight software -- is a fairly surgical technique to identify the exact problem and deal with that little problem.
"If we are not able to successfully complete our surgical technique, we have larger hammers, we like to say, that we can use in order to solve this problem."/blockquote.
So, in other words, if the scr1ptz0r doesnt 0wnZ Spirit, the will brute force their way in...
Seriously tho, Its a really interesting article and makes me wonder about the challenges of hacking a machine that is, depending on where in orbit earth is in relation to mars, anywhere from 1/2 to 2 1/2 AU away.
They could air the whole thing on NASA TV and have their highest ratings ever.
True enough I guess... But desperate times call for desperate measures... and I so love the Images that Hubbel sends back... some of the most beautiful thigns I have seen.
But hey, if NASA can build a super shuttle and a pair of deep space astroid mining rigs to save us from impending comet disaster, AND manage to send a group ragtag geniuses to the center of the earth, anything is possible...
Sure there is. Remote controlled robots... Hell, they are used to repair deep ocean communication lines and such, explore wrecked ships, and, with the exception of the recent hardware/software issues, have been remote controlled on planets several hundred million miles away for scientific research.
You would think it would be child's play for NASA to send up a pair of remote controlled robots in a simple freight rocket (i.e. Arienne or similar), boost them into proximity, bring them over to Hubble, and perform the repairs remotely.
It may take longer to do the work than it would with a shuttle mission, but it would be a hell of a lot cheaper, and would ensure that Hubble stays around for a lot longer...
What you don't get is MyIE is just IE with some browsing enhancements. It's the same underlying browser.
So what you are saying is that to get the tabbed browsing feature that you mentioned on IE, and which is now included standard in Mozilla and Opera, you actually have to go somewhere else and download thier customized version of IE?
Don't have an Aunt Hilda, but Aunt Linda hasn't found it to be an issue either.:) I'd imagine it's because these security holes are exploited by what? Around.0001% of the sites on the net?
Sure, but I have found literally HUNDREDS of not thousands of random emails with malformed URLs that exploit holes in IE. Now, if you get those in Outlook or Pegasus, and have IE set as your default browser, what happens when Innocent Aunt Linda clicks on those URLs... And remember, that even if Aunt Linda is as technically savvy as you claim to be, 85% of the American population is not, and the number is probably similar when you extrapolate to account for the world's population.
If these things were only.0001% of sites, there are still millions of spams that take advantage of them, and a very large number of people all over the world who dont know better. If that were not the case, then things like identity theft and other internet based cons would not be as proliferate as they are now.
What's the percentage of sites actually offering me PNG files? Now, how many offer up JPG's?
You got a point there.. most use GIF and JPG (JPG for the most part). BUT, there ARE some that use PNG, AND PNG is still an accepted standard for web images. Then again, IE is not famous for being web standards compliant anyway. Embrace and Extend!
Why are a lot of/. readers busting everyone elses to change?
Because this is/. of course! But even beyond that, why is it that pointing out IE weaknesses and security flaws makes people like you so defensive? A lot of IE users read slashdot, and a lot of Mozilla users read slashdot. The difference is, that for the most part, Mozilla is fairly secure. Not perfectly secure, but a LOT more likely to NOT allow Aunt Linda, or Uncle Bill, or John Q Neophyte to just blindly throw away their personal info, or open the door to make their PC a zombie in waiting.
I thought it was 14 year old girls, 60 year old grandmothers, and college students who were responsible for all teh piracy... It cant possibly be one of the Acadamy members!!
Makes ya wonder tho, after all the commercials geared to make the American public feel guilt for pirating movies, how will the MPAA and such be taken seriously now that its been pretty much proven that one of their own is responsible for HUNDREDS of movie screeners getting out into the wild?
That would be like one of the RIAA people being found trading CDs on P2P networks in his off hours...
That situation is proof positive that that small ISP didn't give two shakes about stopping spam. If it got them blacklisted because you weren't given the resources to handle it, the system worked.
Aye, perhaps... but then again, they couldnt really afford to pay any more people.
But in any case, the point still stands that it is not necessarily the ISP's fault. Again to AOL. Probably the largest, or at least in the top ranks of largest ISPs in the world. Until just recently, they had horriffic spammer issues, and guess what? They employ an army of admins. Same with Verizon, att.net, and MANY MANY MANY users from over the pond in Ripe.net land. In fact, the vast majority of all intrusion attempts, port scans, and spam, originated from IPs in ripe.net's neighborhood.
The idea that small ISPs have increased spam risk is rediculous. The spam issue scales with the size of the user base, it does NOT inversely scale with the price of internet service.
If you are on SPEWS or another blacklist then your ISP sucks. Get a better one for email (you can still host your site there just requires slightly more skill to setup) alone, shouldn't cost much unless of course you spam.
Not entirely. I used to work as the sole sysadmin for a small ISP. As such, I was not only the sysadmin, but the assistant security admin, the mail admin, the user admin, the webmaster, part time tech support, and in charge of hardware purchases. There arent enough hours in the day to do everything (hell, mail administration alone can be a full time job) and not all ISPs can afford to hire multiple admins to perform each function.
Does that make one ISP worse than the others? Or are you suggesting that the more expensive ISPs are just better? After all, AOL has one of the highest access chages around, and we all know how well they historically stop spam. In recent months they have become a thousand times better than they used to, but before that, I knew of ISPs who would block the entire AOL.com domain due to the spam issue.
The point of this is, that while I was there, we did manage to get one of our servers on a blacklist. Why? Well, the server in question was a small web server that hosted about 500 personal websites, and a few tiny small-business sites.
Turned out that one of the end users had put formmail.pl in their top level web directory when she was playing around with her website. She gave up on the mail form on her site, but left the perl script there.
Someone found it, and began using it to spam large batches of AOL users from my web server. We did catch it within 24 hours, and removed the formmail.pl script from the site, at which point I had to go through 8 web servers, and well over 2000 websites by myself to find any formmail scripts and other common and easily abused mail scripts to ensure that no one else had done that.
We certainly didnt provide that script, and to be honest, using such was against our TOS for end users. So the user was dealt with, all the spam info I could track down was sent to the spammer's ISP (he/she wasnt that good) and all info was sent to AOL as well, so they could deal with it on their end.
End result? of all the sites on 8 servers, I found exactly two instances of fomrmal.pl. I lost well over 4 full days of production time looking for those files, tracing spam, communicating back and forth with AOL and the spammers ISP, and had to put off several major projects for pretty much a full week.
Were we an ISP that sucks? No. We were a small family run ISP that had a good user base, and a good hosting business, but lacked the funds and office space to pay for multiple admins.
It only takes one careless user to ruin it for everyone. If anyone sucks, the end users do, to some degree or another, but they are the bread and butter of the industry. So you just deal with it and go on about your business.
And besides, more spam is sent through zombie PCs that have been placed on the internet via cable and DSL than through any truely compromised server. In our case, it was an end user simply uploading a file and monkeying around with permissions that caused it. One user out of about 7000. One guy cant police them all... and ultimately, while the ISP and all the ISP's users suffer, the responsibility relies on the one person who started it.
Also, does anyone have a copy of the indemnification agreement? I cant find it anywhere on Novell's site, or at least the actual terms are not readily available...
Seriously though, this made me think about something after reading the article. I havent checked out the specific agreement from Novell, but it is a step in the right direction, IMHO. However, it occured to me that this would be a great way to put a linux company out of business...
As litigous as SCO is, lets say for the sake of arguement that the Novell program takes off, and they get 10,000 new customers under the program.
Then SCO turns around and files suit against 50% of that group. That is now, if I understand it correctly, 5000 lawsuits that Novell will have to contend with, in addition to already pending litigation concerning the purchase of SuSE in the first place.
Seems to me that this program, and others like it, while a Good Thing[tm], could be used against the company providing indemnification. SCO doesnt even have to win, they just have to file enough suits to tie Novell's money up in court for months...
First, $10M US is not that big a pinch really. IBM could throw that kind of cash around without even a blink (kinda like MS throwing $6M to SCO for a "License",) so $10M really shouldn't be too hard to come up with.
In fact, I would like to see a list of people who are contributing to this, and would like to see some big names on that list (hello Red Hat!)
Also, this would be an EXCELLENT time for Novell to step up and put their money where their acquisition is, and back their SuSE purchase by getting in on this as well.
And someone earlier made an excellent comment: where can someone in the general OSS community donate to such a fund? I mean, its one thing for "We the People" to piss and moan about SCO, and then rely on major corps to handle the legal stuff for us (Which is fine for now, but with the way SCO has acted over the last few months, who knows WHO they are gonna sue next), but it would be a much better show of solidarity if we also contributed to this fund, or sone like it, above and beyond the usual contributions to groups like EFF and such.
gives us the gist of it. So yes this very well be Carnivore in action.
So what you are saying is that, in a nutshell, carnivore is nothing more than some clever filters and a 1 pixel image link in an html email??
You know, I seriously doubt that this was Carnivore at work, but props to the feds for making all of us think that it could be.
Hell, Carnivore could even be an elaborate hoax, but stories like this spread the rumor and make it into fact, or at least something that most people think could well be authentic. Just look at the reply count for this thread.
Not that I am saying that Carnivore does exist, I am sure it does. What I am saying tho, is that the government doesnt even need to really use it, as doing something as simple as this (and I personally believe it was probably something as simple as a 1 pixel image link or some such) makes the masses believe that carnivore is watching us.
TiVo CEO Mike Ramsay adds: 'Our aim here is not to litigate everybody... but to further advance and seek commercial relationships so that people recognize the value of our intellectual property, and give us fair compensation.'"
Interesting that the CEO would specificly state that TiVo is NOT interested in the SCO model of revenue through litigation, and goes to pains to stress that much.
Having been in a position where I was required to work on cobalt servers, I can only say, its about damned time.
In their day, I am sure that these little toys were great for a small business looking for a simple end to end solution, and I must admit that the user interface for hosting customers was great, not to mention the fact that a rack of the Cobalt RaQ servers just looks damned cool in a dark server room, but, they were and are an incredible PITA to work on.
Upgrading the software was difficult, installing your own software was difficult since Sun placed things in odd locations, and when one of these things developed problems, you were pretty much left with the MS solution: Shut Up and Reinstall.
So, thank god... besides, now maybe I will be able to snap one up cheap on ebay for my home. I need a new mp3 server;)
Hrmmm... On one hand, the idea of a movie based on I, Robot worrys me, [insert usual concern over Hollywoodization of classic Sci-Fi and Fantasy reading] but the director does have a couple good movies to his name, (i.e. The Crow (the original one, not the crappy sequals) and Dark City), so it may fare well.
Just as long as he doesnt try to do what the Matrix tried to do, and instead follows in the Peter Jackson style of turning classic books from a particular genre into an amazing series of movies.
But is it just me, or does anyone else see a sudden trend in movies about what "could" go wrong in a far more technologically advanced world?
So like, there I was in this Gibson, and it was like, leet d00dz! I was like, looking through these files and was like finding like this stuff, and these files taht were like really leet and I like downloaded them and stuff...
I dunno... on the one hand, script kiddies by the thousands sending in tales of hacking some other kids BBS back in the day... oh wait, most script kiddies arent old enough to know what a BBS is anyway... never mind.
But either way, I will probably pick up a copy when it is released, if for nothing other than the entertainment value.
ya know... how can the world expect MS to actually provide secure code, and meet their own Trusted Computing goals, when they cant even keep their registered domains...
I personally dont use hotmail, but if I were a hotmail user, at least in teh UK, I would be outraged.
Just imagine the hilarity that would ensue if the guy who registered the domain put up a fraudulent hotmail site... he would have access to all those users email, passwords, probably even passport info... in a nutshell, all the stuff Microsoft says is secured and protected by their staff and software.
Seriously tho, I would think that this would have a good effect if it can indeed be proven or at least traced to a particular spammer...
The US and other governments seem to be all gung-ho about prosecuting people who write virus code, and seem to be mostly talk and hot air about the spam problem, perhaps this will get them to actuall take notice and do something about both...
At least this, the idea of spammers writing and releasing viruses to stop RBLs, could be prosecuted as a criminal case instead of the civil matter that spam has historically been.
but after reading that , I dont know. The intro price is 299 for the 20GB version, but I could pay not terribly much more for a similarly equipped iPod, AND have the bonus benefit of sexiness that is the iPod.
Actually I have been looking at these for a while to replace my lil mini-disk player, and after all that, I am still leaning to the iPod.
The Dell looks nice, but it still looks utilitarian... it just doesnt have the smooth lines of the iPod, and the jog dial too...
And yes, I will be buying an older iPod, because the new ones just dont have the smurfiness of the second gen jog dial.
5th -9th grade students... prime stuff for a brain washing, I guess.
How about this: a project that teaches how the recording industry really works.
Have all these kids work over an entire semester on their albums. They should do everything that the RIAA wants to teach them, THEN at the end of the project, have pretend sales of each album going platinum (we are pretending, so why cant their albums be as popular as that boyband crap that RIAA spews these days).
Then, hand each student a pretend check for the total sales of CDs at cost to the retailers. Then reduce the check right in front of little Billy's eyes:
1: take out the teachers percentage (agent) 2: take out the vice pricipal's percentage (lawyers) 3: take out the pricipal's percentage (Studio exec) 4: take out the janitors percentage (other employees who worked on the project) 5: take out the school boards percentage (RIAA dues and other fees as may be required) 6: take out the school district's percentage (taxes) 7: take out the parent's percentage (advertising costs).
In the end, give the student the corrected check for $1.50.
THEN tell them they DO get residuals for airplay. show them a penny and a quarter. Then tell them that for every airplay, and tv spot, the student gets a penny, while the execs pocket a quarter.
THEN demonstrate how if they release a couple songs on the internet for free, more customers are going to be willing to buy their albums.
THEN finally, give them a second project where they do all the work on their own, market using the internet, and have some other company make the CDs for them (like independents do) and show them the difference bewteen record company profits and indy profits.
I am not saying that it is easier one way or another, BUT at least they will all decide to not join boy bands or become the next Brittany Spears.
Sorry you had such a bad experience... but as with anything, there are good and bad ops. Hell, how can you come to \. and complain about people giving you unfriendly replies??
And by the way, all your wi-fi gear, and most likely all your computer gear, AND your 2.4GHz phone are Part 15 devices, and thus NOT licensed, and thus you really do have no legal recourse...
Slashdot Mirror
True enough I guess... But desperate times call for desperate measures... and I so love the Images that Hubbel sends back... some of the most beautiful thigns I have seen.
But hey, if NASA can build a super shuttle and a pair of deep space astroid mining rigs to save us from impending comet disaster, AND manage to send a group ragtag geniuses to the center of the earth, anything is possible...
Sure there is. Remote controlled robots... Hell, they are used to repair deep ocean communication lines and such, explore wrecked ships, and, with the exception of the recent hardware/software issues, have been remote controlled on planets several hundred million miles away for scientific research.
You would think it would be child's play for NASA to send up a pair of remote controlled robots in a simple freight rocket (i.e. Arienne or similar), boost them into proximity, bring them over to Hubble, and perform the repairs remotely.
It may take longer to do the work than it would with a shuttle mission, but it would be a hell of a lot cheaper, and would ensure that Hubble stays around for a lot longer...
So what you are saying is that to get the tabbed browsing feature that you mentioned on IE, and which is now included standard in Mozilla and Opera, you actually have to go somewhere else and download thier customized version of IE?
Sure, but I have found literally HUNDREDS of not thousands of random emails with malformed URLs that exploit holes in IE. Now, if you get those in Outlook or Pegasus, and have IE set as your default browser, what happens when Innocent Aunt Linda clicks on those URLs... And remember, that even if Aunt Linda is as technically savvy as you claim to be, 85% of the American population is not, and the number is probably similar when you extrapolate to account for the world's population.
If these things were only
You got a point there.. most use GIF and JPG (JPG for the most part). BUT, there ARE some that use PNG, AND PNG is still an accepted standard for web images. Then again, IE is not famous for being web standards compliant anyway. Embrace and Extend!
Because this is
I thought it was 14 year old girls, 60 year old grandmothers, and college students who were responsible for all teh piracy... It cant possibly be one of the Acadamy members!!
Makes ya wonder tho, after all the commercials geared to make the American public feel guilt for pirating movies, how will the MPAA and such be taken seriously now that its been pretty much proven that one of their own is responsible for HUNDREDS of movie screeners getting out into the wild?
That would be like one of the RIAA people being found trading CDs on P2P networks in his off hours...
Aye, perhaps... but then again, they couldnt really afford to pay any more people.
But in any case, the point still stands that it is not necessarily the ISP's fault. Again to AOL. Probably the largest, or at least in the top ranks of largest ISPs in the world. Until just recently, they had horriffic spammer issues, and guess what? They employ an army of admins. Same with Verizon, att.net, and MANY MANY MANY users from over the pond in Ripe.net land. In fact, the vast majority of all intrusion attempts, port scans, and spam, originated from IPs in ripe.net's neighborhood.
The idea that small ISPs have increased spam risk is rediculous. The spam issue scales with the size of the user base, it does NOT inversely scale with the price of internet service.
Not entirely. I used to work as the sole sysadmin for a small ISP. As such, I was not only the sysadmin, but the assistant security admin, the mail admin, the user admin, the webmaster, part time tech support, and in charge of hardware purchases. There arent enough hours in the day to do everything (hell, mail administration alone can be a full time job) and not all ISPs can afford to hire multiple admins to perform each function.
Does that make one ISP worse than the others? Or are you suggesting that the more expensive ISPs are just better? After all, AOL has one of the highest access chages around, and we all know how well they historically stop spam. In recent months they have become a thousand times better than they used to, but before that, I knew of ISPs who would block the entire AOL.com domain due to the spam issue.
The point of this is, that while I was there, we did manage to get one of our servers on a blacklist. Why? Well, the server in question was a small web server that hosted about 500 personal websites, and a few tiny small-business sites.
Turned out that one of the end users had put formmail.pl in their top level web directory when she was playing around with her website. She gave up on the mail form on her site, but left the perl script there.
Someone found it, and began using it to spam large batches of AOL users from my web server. We did catch it within 24 hours, and removed the formmail
We certainly didnt provide that script, and to be honest, using such was against our TOS for end users. So the user was dealt with, all the spam info I could track down was sent to the spammer's ISP (he/she wasnt that good) and all info was sent to AOL as well, so they could deal with it on their end.
End result? of all the sites on 8 servers, I found exactly two instances of fomrmal.pl. I lost well over 4 full days of production time looking for those files, tracing spam, communicating back and forth with AOL and the spammers ISP, and had to put off several major projects for pretty much a full week.
Were we an ISP that sucks? No. We were a small family run ISP that had a good user base, and a good hosting business, but lacked the funds and office space to pay for multiple admins.
It only takes one careless user to ruin it for everyone. If anyone sucks, the end users do, to some degree or another, but they are the bread and butter of the industry. So you just deal with it and go on about your business.
And besides, more spam is sent through zombie PCs that have been placed on the internet via cable and DSL than through any truely compromised server. In our case, it was an end user simply uploading a file and monkeying around with permissions that caused it. One user out of about 7000. One guy cant police them all... and ultimately, while the ISP and all the ISP's users suffer, the responsibility relies on the one person who started it.
Those wacky Canadians! What will they think of next? Public Health Care or something?
Also, does anyone have a copy of the indemnification agreement? I cant find it anywhere on Novell's site, or at least the actual terms are not readily available...
And I guess I made a good guess ;)
Yesterday, I posted this comment regarding the $10 Million Defense Fund and today, Novell announces their indemnification plan. I shoulda been an investment banker.
Seriously though, this made me think about something after reading the article. I havent checked out the specific agreement from Novell, but it is a step in the right direction, IMHO. However, it occured to me that this would be a great way to put a linux company out of business...
As litigous as SCO is, lets say for the sake of arguement that the Novell program takes off, and they get 10,000 new customers under the program.
Then SCO turns around and files suit against 50% of that group. That is now, if I understand it correctly, 5000 lawsuits that Novell will have to contend with, in addition to already pending litigation concerning the purchase of SuSE in the first place.
Seems to me that this program, and others like it, while a Good Thing[tm], could be used against the company providing indemnification. SCO doesnt even have to win, they just have to file enough suits to tie Novell's money up in court for months...
Damn me for understanding evil.
Well, so much for that.
This begs a couple thoughts/questions though.
First, $10M US is not that big a pinch really. IBM could throw that kind of cash around without even a blink (kinda like MS throwing $6M to SCO for a "License",) so $10M really shouldn't be too hard to come up with.
In fact, I would like to see a list of people who are contributing to this, and would like to see some big names on that list (hello Red Hat!)
Also, this would be an EXCELLENT time for Novell to step up and put their money where their acquisition is, and back their SuSE purchase by getting in on this as well.
And someone earlier made an excellent comment: where can someone in the general OSS community donate to such a fund? I mean, its one thing for "We the People" to piss and moan about SCO, and then rely on major corps to handle the legal stuff for us (Which is fine for now, but with the way SCO has acted over the last few months, who knows WHO they are gonna sue next), but it would be a much better show of solidarity if we also contributed to this fund, or sone like it, above and beyond the usual contributions to groups like EFF and such.
gives us the gist of it. So yes this very well be Carnivore in action.
So what you are saying is that, in a nutshell, carnivore is nothing more than some clever filters and a 1 pixel image link in an html email??
You know, I seriously doubt that this was Carnivore at work, but props to the feds for making all of us think that it could be.
Hell, Carnivore could even be an elaborate hoax, but stories like this spread the rumor and make it into fact, or at least something that most people think could well be authentic. Just look at the reply count for this thread.
Not that I am saying that Carnivore does exist, I am sure it does. What I am saying tho, is that the government doesnt even need to really use it, as doing something as simple as this (and I personally believe it was probably something as simple as a 1 pixel image link or some such) makes the masses believe that carnivore is watching us.
Feed the paranoia!
TiVo CEO Mike Ramsay adds: 'Our aim here is not to litigate everybody ... but to further advance and seek commercial relationships so that people recognize the value of our intellectual property, and give us fair compensation.'"
Interesting that the CEO would specificly state that TiVo is NOT interested in the SCO model of revenue through litigation, and goes to pains to stress that much.
Having been in a position where I was required to work on cobalt servers, I can only say, its about damned time.
;)
In their day, I am sure that these little toys were great for a small business looking for a simple end to end solution, and I must admit that the user interface for hosting customers was great, not to mention the fact that a rack of the Cobalt RaQ servers just looks damned cool in a dark server room, but, they were and are an incredible PITA to work on.
Upgrading the software was difficult, installing your own software was difficult since Sun placed things in odd locations, and when one of these things developed problems, you were pretty much left with the MS solution: Shut Up and Reinstall.
So, thank god... besides, now maybe I will be able to snap one up cheap on ebay for my home. I need a new mp3 server
Hrmmm... On one hand, the idea of a movie based on I, Robot worrys me, [insert usual concern over Hollywoodization of classic Sci-Fi and Fantasy reading] but the director does have a couple good movies to his name, (i.e. The Crow (the original one, not the crappy sequals) and Dark City), so it may fare well.
Just as long as he doesnt try to do what the Matrix tried to do, and instead follows in the Peter Jackson style of turning classic books from a particular genre into an amazing series of movies.
But is it just me, or does anyone else see a sudden trend in movies about what "could" go wrong in a far more technologically advanced world?
So like, there I was in this Gibson, and it was like, leet d00dz! I was like, looking through these files and was like finding like this stuff, and these files taht were like really leet and I like downloaded them and stuff...
I dunno... on the one hand, script kiddies by the thousands sending in tales of hacking some other kids BBS back in the day... oh wait, most script kiddies arent old enough to know what a BBS is anyway... never mind.
But either way, I will probably pick up a copy when it is released, if for nothing other than the entertainment value.
ya know... how can the world expect MS to actually provide secure code, and meet their own Trusted Computing goals, when they cant even keep their registered domains...
I personally dont use hotmail, but if I were a hotmail user, at least in teh UK, I would be outraged.
Just imagine the hilarity that would ensue if the guy who registered the domain put up a fraudulent hotmail site... he would have access to all those users email, passwords, probably even passport info... in a nutshell, all the stuff Microsoft says is secured and protected by their staff and software.
...turn in my own grandmother...
so would that 250K be in cash, or in Microsoft's favorite currency, vouchers for Microsoft Products??
Well who woulda thunk it?
Seriously tho, I would think that this would have a good effect if it can indeed be proven or at least traced to a particular spammer...
The US and other governments seem to be all gung-ho about prosecuting people who write virus code, and seem to be mostly talk and hot air about the spam problem, perhaps this will get them to actuall take notice and do something about both...
At least this, the idea of spammers writing and releasing viruses to stop RBLs, could be prosecuted as a criminal case instead of the civil matter that spam has historically been.
Damn, what happened to my link?? here it is again:
e tails.aspx/dj_20?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/productd
First, heres a good link to the 20GB version:
20 Gb Dell DJ
but after reading that , I dont know. The intro price is 299 for the 20GB version, but I could pay not terribly much more for a similarly equipped iPod, AND have the bonus benefit of sexiness that is the iPod.
Actually I have been looking at these for a while to replace my lil mini-disk player, and after all that, I am still leaning to the iPod.
The Dell looks nice, but it still looks utilitarian... it just doesnt have the smooth lines of the iPod, and the jog dial too...
And yes, I will be buying an older iPod, because the new ones just dont have the smurfiness of the second gen jog dial.
5th -9th grade students... prime stuff for a brain washing, I guess.
How about this: a project that teaches how the recording industry really works.
Have all these kids work over an entire semester on their albums. They should do everything that the RIAA wants to teach them, THEN at the end of the project, have pretend sales of each album going platinum (we are pretending, so why cant their albums be as popular as that boyband crap that RIAA spews these days).
Then, hand each student a pretend check for the total sales of CDs at cost to the retailers. Then reduce the check right in front of little Billy's eyes:
1: take out the teachers percentage (agent)
2: take out the vice pricipal's percentage (lawyers)
3: take out the pricipal's percentage (Studio exec)
4: take out the janitors percentage (other employees who worked on the project)
5: take out the school boards percentage (RIAA dues and other fees as may be required)
6: take out the school district's percentage (taxes)
7: take out the parent's percentage (advertising costs).
In the end, give the student the corrected check for $1.50.
THEN tell them they DO get residuals for airplay. show them a penny and a quarter. Then tell them that for every airplay, and tv spot, the student gets a penny, while the execs pocket a quarter.
THEN demonstrate how if they release a couple songs on the internet for free, more customers are going to be willing to buy their albums.
THEN finally, give them a second project where they do all the work on their own, market using the internet, and have some other company make the CDs for them (like independents do) and show them the difference bewteen record company profits and indy profits.
I am not saying that it is easier one way or another, BUT at least they will all decide to not join boy bands or become the next Brittany Spears.
"Come on Chief! Into the cone of Silence!"
from a company who has a lot of nebulous claims, and no substance... kind of like my ex-girlfriend.
All talk and no foreplay.
Sorry you had such a bad experience... but as with anything, there are good and bad ops. Hell, how can you come to \. and complain about people giving you unfriendly replies??
And by the way, all your wi-fi gear, and most likely all your computer gear, AND your 2.4GHz phone are Part 15 devices, and thus NOT licensed, and thus you really do have no legal recourse...