rriven - Slashdot User

Verizon Sued After Tech Punches Customer In Face 493

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @12:28PM from the can-you-hit-me-now dept.

suraj.sun writes "A Verizon customer filed a lawsuit after the tech the company sent out got a little punchy. Instead of fixing the customer's problem, the tech allegedly hit him in the face. The New York Post says the tech attacked the customer after he asked to see some ID before allowing access to the apartment. From the article, '"You want to know my name? Here's my name," Benjamin snarled, slapping his ID card into Isakson's face, according to Isakson's account of the December 2008 confrontation. "The guy essentially snapped. He cold-cocked me, hit me two or three solid shots to the head while my hands were down," said Isakson, a limo driver. He said the pounding bloodied his face and broke his glasses. But things got uglier, Isakson said, when Benjamin squeezed him around the neck and pressed him up against the wall. "He's prepared to kill me," Isakson said. "That's all I could think of." The customer broke free and ran away. The Verizon tech then chased the customer until he was subdued by a neighbor who was an off-duty cop.'"

Submission + - EFF Busts Illegitimate Subdomain Patent (infozine.com)

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Wednesday June 17, 2009 @11:10AM

eldavojohn writes: "Unlike a lot of community support protection programs, the EFF's Patent Busting Project is starting to bear real fruit instead of just leveling the finger at companies. The USPTO is revoking an illegitimate patent granted in 2004 that sounds like automatically assigning subdomains. Sites like Wordpress, LiveJournal or basically anyone with generated subdomains have been doing this for quite some time. If you have some extra cash, now's the time to pony up a few bucks so the EFF can continue on as one of the few organizations genuinely protecting your interests."

Comment Re:Not the programming (Score 2, Informative) 334

by rriven on Sunday May 03, 2009 @04:12PM (#27808699) Attached to: The Problem With Cable Is Television

Dish Network has the Family Pack for $19.99. That gets you 55 channels. Sure most are family orientated but you also get channels like:

DO IT YOURSELF
FOX NEWS CHANNEL
Outdoor Channel
RFDTV
THE SCIENCE CHANNEL

Or The Welcome Pack for $9.99 (23 channels)

Comedy Central
Home & Garden
Oxygen
AMC
TBS
MTV2
Boomerang
Discovery Kids
Learning Channel
MSNBC

Dish Network is moving to the small packages and it sells pretty good.

Comment Re:Come on (Score 1) 1582

by rriven on Wednesday April 01, 2009 @01:17PM (#27420313) Attached to: Slashdot Launches User Achievements

I was hoping OMG PONIES!!! would make a comeback today. :(

Same here I was a slashdot reader but i missed OMGPONIES!!!

I feel so left out and cold

Comment Re:Linux on PS3? (Score 1) 425

by rriven on Monday March 09, 2009 @02:11PM (#27124187) Attached to: Emulation Explosion On the PS3 Via Linux

The guys who created the Rouge Equifax Signing Certificate used 200+ PS3 to help find the MD5 collision.

We had more than 200 PS3s at our disposal, located at the "PlayStation Lab" of Arjen Lenstra's Laboratory for Cryptologic Algorithms at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/

There are tons more you can do with a PS3 than play games.

Comment Re:Surely (Score 1) 497

by rriven on Sunday February 08, 2009 @05:02PM (#26775869) Attached to: How Do I Start a University Transition To Open Source?

Speaking from experience: Microsoft site licenses for its products for academic institution cost $0

I dont think that you are speaking from Experience.

Micrsoft would never give away Server 2008, Vista, VS 2008 for a whole school for free. On the page you linked to you need to click on 'Compare Subscriptions'

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/academic/bb676724.aspx

and you will see that the cheapest they offer is $399 a year. That only gives you online access.

Each department needs to sign up for MSDNAA. The CS dept. cant use its software keys for the Math or Engineering dept.

The ACM club at my school sells Vista, and VS 2008 for $20 each. If my school did the 3 years online and media for $1437, it would only take 24 students a year to buy Visual Stuido and it pays for itself.

Sure it is not free, but you are not losing money on it.

Comment Re:Misplaced priorities? (Score 5, Informative) 342

by rriven on Friday January 30, 2009 @11:24PM (#26674611) Attached to: Google Unofficially Announces GDrive By Leaked Code

They only offer at most 95% per month, MINUS pre-scheduled downtimes, and non-scheduled downtimes that are "exempt". Honestly, 90% uptime per month real. The key is that these numbers are not real, because of the possible exemptions and everything, so a real SLA is unknown.

You could not be more wrong:

Enterprise-class service â" Google Apps includes a 99.9% uptime SLA.* Phone support is available for critical issues.

*The 99.9% uptime SLA for Google Apps is offered to organizations using Google Apps Premier Edition, as described in the Google Apps Premier Edition Terms of Service

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/messaging.html

Sure it is only 3 nines but that is way better than the 90% you said

Comment Re:Just wondering.. (Score 1) 591

by rriven on Wednesday January 07, 2009 @02:26AM (#26354459) Attached to: DTV Coupon Program Out of Money

Don't do this. Wasting public money is not smart.

You don't need a coupon to buy one. it is just a coupon.

We sell the DTV Pal box http://www.dtvpal.com/ If you wanted to and had the money we would let you buy every unit we have. The gov does not make them, or sell them. Private companies make and sell them, in the process they make some money.

We have customers who have one coupon and they buy 2 or 3

The coupon makes it easier for grandpa on Social Security to afford one.

Comment Re:I hope they win (Score 1) 77

by rriven on Saturday November 22, 2008 @09:50PM (#25861587) Attached to: BluWiki Seeks iPodHash Author, Hopes for Help From EFF

When mine broke I decided that just because of itunes i was going to look for a different brand. It seemed like it installed 10 windows services always had updates and then the whole give you Safari unless you opted out.

That was when I said no more

My brother says it is 100 times better on his Macbook Pro. So i guess it is not all bad.

Submission + - Blu-ray won't play Profile 2.0 Discs 4

Submitted by

Reservoir Hill

on Saturday January 12, 2008 @03:15PM

Reservoir Hill writes: "Blu-ray may have taken a commanding lead in the next-generation format war but Betanews is reporting that early supporters of Blu-ray will be left out in the cold when the Blu-ray Disc Association introduces BD Profile 2.0, expected to arrive in October. Unlike HD DVD, which mandated features such as local storage, a second video and audio decoder for picture-in-picture, and a network connection from the very beginning, the companies behind Blu-ray took a different approach to keep costs down. "We should have waited another year to introduce Blu-ray to the public, but the format war changed the situation," said one manufacturer. Representatives at the Blu-ray booth at CES said that the PlayStation 3 is currently the only player they would recommend, due to upcoming changes to the platform. Asked if they were concerned about a backlash from early adopters who supported the format from the beginning, one representative said: "They knew what they were getting into.""

Submission + - Facebook and PGP (sans.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 24, 2007 @04:06PM

An anonymous reader writes: SANS Internet storm center writes: "Facebook has taken a step in the right direction by adding the ability to add a link to your public PGP key. It also allows you to see which of your friends have keys. Hopefully it will also spread the word about PGP and allow for a more secure/safer social networking site. Granted, with PGP, there is a level of trust needed. However, it is still a step in the right direction and affords the benefit of no need to go searching public key servers looking for the key you need." Link to said application: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?api_key=a98cc1399afbb000b568826ba5e0eecb

Submission + - Facebook Names Defendents in Hacking Suit (informationweek.com)

Submitted by

eldavojohn

on Tuesday December 18, 2007 @10:34AM

eldavojohn writes: "Facebook filed a suit in June against ten companies and ten unknown individuals but recently it amended that suit to name Brian Fabian, Josh Raskin, and Ming Wu, as well as 1564476 Ontario Limited, Istra Holdings Inc., and SlickCash as defendants. From the article, 'Facebook alleges that during the 15 day period between June 1, 2007 and June 15, 2007, the defendants tried to access information on Facebook's servers over 200,000 times using "an automated script that attempted to harvest information from other Facebook users."' I wonder how a completely open social networking site would protect data from companies like SlickCash if all the information is, well, open?"

Submission + - Wikipedia COO was Convicted Felon (theregister.co.uk) 4

Submitted by on Sunday December 16, 2007 @12:45PM

An anonymous reader writes: From the Register:

"For more than six months, beginning in January of this year, Wikipedia's million-dollar check book was balanced by a convicted felon. When Carolyn Bothwell Doran was hired as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Florida-based Wikimedia Foundation, she had a criminal record in three other states — Virginia, Maryland, and Texas — and she was still on parole for a DUI (driving under the influence of alcohol) hit and run that resulted in a fatality. Her record also included convictions for passing bad checks, theft, petty larceny, additional DUIs, and unlawfully wounding her boyfriend with a gun shot to the chest."

Should Wikipedia Allow Mathematical Proofs? 469

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday December 16, 2007 @10:04AM from the great-now-i-can-fail-wikipedia-too dept.

Beetle B. writes "An argument has arisen over whether Wikipedia should allow pages that provide proofs for mathematical theorems (such as this one). On the one hand, Wikipedia is a useful source of information and people can benefit from these proofs. On the other hand, how does one choose which proofs to include and which not to? Should Wikipedia just become a textbook that teaches mathematics? Should it just state the bare results of theorems and not provide proofs (except as external links)? Or should they take an intermediate approach and formulate a criterion for which proofs to include and which to exclude?"

Submission + - RIAA ups ante, argues MP3's from CD's unauthorized (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

NewYorkCountryLawyer

on Monday December 10, 2007 @11:14PM

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "In an Arizona case against a defendant who has no legal representation, Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA is now arguing — contrary to its lawyers' statements to the United States Supreme Court in 2005 MGM v. Grokster — that the defendant's ripping of personal MP3 copies onto his computer is a copyright infringement. At page 15 of its brief (pdf) it states the following: "It is undisputed that Defendant possessed unauthorized copies....Virtually all of the sound recordings .... are in the ".mp3" format for his and his wife's use.....Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs' recordings into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies....""

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