Exactly. And that is just what I got on all my land-lines. Imagine that a *GASP* wired phone!

And I'm still reeling from the news about the Tour de France...

I know this is way off topic and I will try and bring it back on in the end... No promises though...lol

It always amuses me the kerfuffle raised when sports athletes get caught using performance enhancing drugs yet people don't say shit about beauty pageant contestants who have had cosmetic surgery just to win those titles.

It all comes down to "follow the money". It is the same with this C/Net / CBS / Dish story. Follow the money. To CBS Dish is cutting off a revenue stream it sees as essential. Dish is seen by them as cheating the system just as much as Lance did. Dish OTOH doesn't see ads as essential since their service is subscription based. So much like Lance, they don't think they did anything wrong.

How's that for trying to bring it back?

And you want to tell me why again ISPs can't cut off botnet infected machines and warn the customers to clean their crap before allowing them back on the net? If ISPs really cared so much about their networks as they claim they do (the reason they give for usage caps and throttling) then you would think they would want to rid themselves of useless and destructive network chatter such as infected machines. You can't tell me they can't detect a machine sending thousands of page requests a second. You can't tell me they can't detect the command and control server connections.

"Sorry honey, but we waste way too much money on a useless, obsolete service that no one but fraudsters ever uses. In a local emergency, our cell phones have a better chance of working than the land line; and in a wide-scale emergency, you can't use the land-line from the car as we flee the coming Tsunami."

And either never get laid again or more accurately have you cell phone die on you because the power is out and will be out for days. That is assuming no cell tower damage and that the tower has a backup generator and enough gas for the whole event. Many found out both during Hurricane Sandy and the Duratio before that that cell service is very, very spotty at best in times of disaster. Major land-lines are down too but in my experience, they are far less fickle than the cell service in my area.

The problem is the law. There are so many loopholes in it you could drive a Mac truck through them. For example, the whole "if we did business with you before we can contact you again" part. There is no definition of "doing business" and it can include things like they sent you snail-mail spam. It also exempts the most annoying which are the political robocalls. In short, the law itself is contributing to the problem.

And from a user's point of view the interface IS the product.

which completely discounts the fact that he broke into a storage closet, Setup the laptop hooked without authorization to their network to run the scripts that violated the TOS.

Look, he knew what he was doing was wrong and that there would be consequences or he wouldn't have gone to the elaborate route he did to gain access to that closet and network. That, IMO is what caused the wire fraud charge.

Despite the Slashdogma, it is possible to have a Facebook page and not spend your entire day posting your SSN and rapid status updates about what you ate for lunch and how it is propogating through your digestive system.

That is not the default for FB and never was. You have to jump through hoops to set it up so that a small semblance of privacy (or more accurately the illusion of it) is maintained there. And every time they update something the privacy settings for that something is always "Show it to the whole wide world!"

Also, we aren't talking about what is shown to other users but what is shown and recorded forever and tracked by the company behind it. That was a nice bit of sleight of hand you did with that by the way. FB does record, aggregate and sell your user data no matter what your security settings.

Nowhere in TFA does it say the monkey survived. For all we know it came back as chunky salsa...

No, it doesn't do my credit rating any good, but I've yet to see anybody who won't give me a loan when I'm laying 25% down and can show a large account balance.

That is fine if you make enough to show a large balance. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck and are one illness away from bankruptcy.

When's the last time there was no power or cell towers anywhere? 1600's? This is a practical solution if executed right.

June 2012...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2012_North_American_derecho

And I am fine with that as long as the quality goes up which it would have to when you remove the AS-IS clause. Why should software be exempt from the product liability laws?

To use a car analogy, what you said is like questioning the worth of seatbelts. Just because they don't save every life in an accident doesn't mean that it not worth wearing them.

Let's carry your analogy to its conclusion...

The auto industry fought seatbelts tooth and nail and it took Congressional regulation for them to even consider them. That's part of how Ralph Nader earned his name recognition. Much like the software industry is fighting tooth and nail any attempt to make their software safe.

My way to fix this is much more simpler. Simply make the "AS-IS" clause of their EULA null and void and allow the users to sue for the damages when their defective products really hurts real people. A few high profile suits will make them put more of a priority on these vulnerabilities.

I don't own a smartphone and never will. Hell, I got my first cell phone only last year when I was forced to have a way to communicate when on the road and there are no pay phones anymore. I just don't see the draw in these expensive toys. I got the most stupid phone on the planet (and the cheapest non-contract prepaid one to boot) and I use it *GASP* as a phone! Nothing more. I may rarely send a text but all-in-all I can even do without that. Everything I've been reading about those phones leads me to believe they are too invasive to my privacy for my likes. Most of the time my phone is off (not that it is really off without removing the battery). Everything from geolocation for targeted advertising to the phone provider themselves profiting off the phone's always on monitoring is disturbing to me.

Then the stories like this comes along. Anything that can be remotely controlled by you can also be remotely controlled by someone else. Whether that someone else is good or bad is irrelevant. The fact that they can control it is bad enough for me. So now my crotchety ass will have to check to ensure my other household appliances are just as stupid as my phone is.

:blockquote>I don't think anything will solve any type of police misconduct in one fell swoop, but I doubt a supreme court ruling against this crap would hurt.

We are talking about the same SCOTUS that fucked up Citizen's United right? Are you so sure of that statement? Personally, I hope a case involving the recording of cops NEVER comes before them.