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Comment Re:Grad school employees and professors (Score 1) 351

It is a moot point in my state at least since teachers aren't salaried. So this whole salaried vs non-salaried argument is not going to be an issue in my state should they follow suit.

Nobody has answered the main thrust of my post though...

Where is the incentive to come up with new ideas and material when those ideas and material are going to be taken from you without compensation above what you would have gotten anyway? That is a question that remains whether the person is salaried or not.

Comment Re:Grad school employees and professors (Score 1) 351

I can see a K-12 school system asking teachers to assign copyrights to creative works that are relevant to their jobs, but not to things that are irrelevant. A 2nd grade teacher who does art work that isn't related to teaching 2nd graders shouldn't have to quit her job to keep the copyrights on her paintings. On the other hand, it is reasonable to tell new-hire or renewing-contract teacher who creates worksheets for use in the classroom that things she creates in the future will belong to the district.

And just how is that promoting anything school related off the clock? Many teachers spend hours off the clock developing innovative ways to teach their subjects. Often times their work load is such that they can't possibly complete their tasks without the extra hours. I see silly things like this rule stifling creative thinking more than promoting it.

Comment Re:I don't get it (Score 1) 98

1) While that is a legit concern, I don't see how it's a "privacy" violation. It's not you, so how is your privacy being affected? Also, you can remove auto-tags. Not to mention, accidental tags (or maliciously/jokingly incorrect tags) were possible years before, with or without auto-tagging.

Privacy may be incorrect but reputation certainly isn't given that potential employers are increasingly using the damned thing for evaluation purposes. And you can only remove the tags IF you have an account and are aware of the tag.

2) The issue of auto-tagging has literally nothing to do with using your photo for commercial purposes.

It has everything to do with commercial purposes. You are forgetting that FB is nothing more than a data warehouse that they use to aggregate then sell to advertisers. If tagging allows them to combine you with someone else that is valuable data whether you are on FB or not.

3) + 4): I don't see how these concerns are even about Facebook, let alone auto-tagging (to which they're not even tangentially related). Does it also upset you that people can publish your name or photos in a blog without your permission? I never opted in to Google but searching me by name turns up all sorts of things about me that I didn't explicitly approve. Why is this not an outrage?

It is an outrage and Google does provide a means of "removing" yourself from their searches unlike FB. Once you are tagged, bagged on FB there is no way to get unassociated from their data aggregation. Everything from your political views to favorite color is evaluated, cataloged and stored forever for later re-evaluation for its potential to make FB money. That, after all, is why they exist.

Comment Re:Product awards from a commercial site compromis (Score 3, Interesting) 123

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?

Comment Re:I'd hate to be... (Score 1) 173

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.

Comment Re:Robo lawsuit trolling (Score 2) 281

"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.

Comment Re:Google Voice call screening (Score 4, Informative) 281

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.

Comment Re:Nope (Score 1) 443

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.

Comment Re:Can't let every consumer dictate what privacy i (Score 1) 101

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.

Comment Re:I'm curious to see how many retailers actually (Score 1) 732

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.

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