I agree. Most if not all utility poles are on municipal grounds with some sort of easement granted to the company using it. It doesn't make sense to let a common carrier use it and then deny access to a competitor if it is not on their land. I think it is fair to make the competitors pay for a share of the installation and maintenance of the utility poles. I think there is similar precedent in that regards with Cell Phone Towers. I think the pricing should be RAND and standardized.

Update your review with the responses from the company. Be fully transparent to future customers whoe might be mislead by the company's products. Don't feel bad if someone loses their job because they weren't doing it properly to begin with. I would go so far as to tell the company that if they keep pushing it I would start investigating the security of their other products and possibly educate them about the Streisand Effect with other companies who have tried to do the same thing.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I think this is more a form of Libel than Parody. Parody is using likeness to something else but not representing it as something else. Think "Eat It" by Weird Al as opposed to "Beat It" by Michael Jackson. The likeness is there in the same music and video concept but the lyrics are different and Weird Al takes attribution for the work. This peace changes the message completely around and gives attribution to someone who is not affiliated with it. A good parody might have a similar sounding name and website. This one is using a legitimate organizations name and website to infer association. This content deserves to be taken down - especially because the creators don't take ownership of it. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if they are sued for defamation and libel as well.

Disabling Auto Refresh is the best thing to happen to slashdot in a long time. Auto-refresh is the worst feature I never wanted.

Jaime Escalante would have been a good poll choice as well considering Slashdot's tagline is News For Nerds. He taught Calculus to minority students in Los Angeles in a school system that chose to babysit rather than educate minority student who it deemed as unlikely to succeed in upper education. He ultimately set records in students taking, passing, and excelling in the AP Calculus Exam. My second option was the Repeal of the Stamp Act because of the irony - purchasing a stamp for one country to celebrate the repeal of a stamp act from another country. :-p

They collect data from multiple sources and they can be more accurate at telling you if a family member is pregnant than a pregnancy exam. They actually have alogrithms that capture shopping habits and based an a seemingly random grouping of purchases they can determine if someone in the family is pregnant. Once they determine this, they send an email or mailer with a discount for pregnancy related products like diapers and baby food. I have heard of a couple of people now who have discovered this the hard way.

There is a lot of rhetoric on this thread about the impending doom of humanity as everything becomes automated. I think generally anytime you have a paradigm or technology shift people speak about the end of the earth or that we will all be replaced by robots. I don't think that automation of society is a bad idea. I do not believe that switching to manufacturing by robots will necessarily equal long term problems for humanity. I think the net effect is that people will move to fields that can not be automated or if the are automated they will come at great expense of time, resources, or other forms of effort.

For example, psychological counseling is traditionally done person to person. I don't know that someone who is struggling with an issue will choose to talk to an inanimate object over a live human being that can express empathy or even share in the life experience a patient is struggling with. I don't know many children that will want to stop playing with other human beings because a robot will be more entertaining. I think the jobs will shift to new fields such as Entertainment and the Arts, Athletics, Social Applications, Creative Pursuits - to be honest I think work will end up feeling a lot less like work.

I think as more of the mundane jobs are pushed off onto robots people and the money that they are involved with will shift to other sections of our economy. If an owner automates all production and no longer employs human beings - he too loses. Henry Ford new this principle all too well and chose to lower the costs of his cars through economies of scale so that he could increase his customer base. I think with Apple, eventually, Cook et al will fully understand this and reembrace humans in other portions of their business.

I think Dark Tangent should sponsor a "Spot the Perp Contest!" Just like Spot the Fed but allow the community to self-police and weed out the perps. Give the winner a free t-shirt, shame the perp on the wall of shame, toss their ass and make it clear that one douchebag doesn't speak for the whole community. Our community should be equal opportunity in its treatment of others just as we are willing to accept ideas from anyone. Women shouldn't avoid conferences because their rights of personal and emotional security will be violated. Everyone should stand up for this. We don't leave a hacker out in the cold because of their ethnicity (Russian hacker Dmitry Skylarov), past indiscretions (Kevin Mitnick), academic status (Christopher Soghoian) so why should gender be any different?!?!

I am fed up with hearing how companies extort each other using NDA's and then litigate them into annihilation. I am glad Barnes & Noble is fighting this. I wish more companies would fight this type of patent and copyright abuse. I think a law should be passed to require companies to publicly identify which patents are infringing by a technology rather than fearmongering. Put up or shut up.

...In particular, the AFL-CIO's Paul Almeida advocated for the internet blacklist, saying 'the First Amendment does not protect stealing goods off trucks'" Isn't this guy just incriminating himself of a crime? Isn't that how the Syndicates operate? "Oh, it just fell off a truck". I remember when I lived in a free country where rights and liberties were protected. It is a sad shame our society is heading in such a wrong direction.

I wish Karma would come back and wipe out all the trolls! I will settle for it one at a time. Perhaps the MAFIAA's will be next. I made it a point never to buy anything with RDRAM in it after those lawsuits RAMBUS filed. Maybe if we are lucky they will go RAMBUST.

I suspect that this is a form of censorship like what we saw in the arab spring. The internet is self-sustaining at this point. There is much angry sentiment against these kinds of laws and much support among technical crowds. While a few greedy and dishonest legislatures may be able to pass laws that attempt to control this behavior (filesharing), there are many more people who have the know-how to bypass it. Perhaps it is time that people who are disconnected start connecting ad-hoc networks to bypass the ISP points of failure. If this can be done to topple dictatorial regimes in the 3rd world, why can't it be done in dictatorial regimes in the 1st world?

Sounds like a burglar's christmas wish come true. Assuming the burglar doesn't post his actions to facebook, I think the privacy implications for this are far worse than what Google's streetview has done.

I was worried they were only going to let on humans that are carryon size.