I'm probably going to get down-voted to hell, but I'm not sure what this counter experiment is trying to prove... we all already knew it is easy to take from Jonathan's card.
When people noticed that money was disappearing off Jonathan's card $100 at a time, most people thought it was an uninformed, karma-less nobody stealing from the card. It is incredible that the transactions are due to some educated do-gooder imposing his beliefs onto the donors of Jonathan's card.
I've read many of Sam's comments before, and respect them as thoughtful and intelligent. However, just because you don't like the idea of "yuppies buying yuppies coffee", doesn't mean that you should try to destroy Jonathan's card. Some people feel good and more connected with others by adding to and taking from Jonathan's card.
By taking money out of the system, you are in effect going against donors wishes and imposing your own beliefs on them. It is almost like taking from the vault of a charity that you dislike and giving the proceeds to your charity of choice. Its less atrocious than pocketing the money and buying an iPad, but obviously still bad.
EDIT: I feel sorry for Jonathan and his good intentions.
I agree with you except on one point. Sam is exactly the kind of person I thought was taking the money and I think most people probably suspected the same thing. I thought it was someone sitting around watching the twitter feed stealing money 150$ at a go. Someone who looked at this, possibly silly probably naive, social project and said 'This is stupid and I'm gonna show them how stupid it is.' I also knew that this person would eventually write a blog post about how smart they were for figuring out how to steal from people giving away money and how the project wasn't just foolish it was immoral.
Re #4: I don't mind the name "leaky"! I took it to mean that you guys are leaking the information that insurance providers don't want consumers to easily get, to the consumers.
I can confirm that Brother printers stop working even though the toner still prints perfect pages. I couldn't believe that a company would program a functional product to suicide, so I did some searching on the subject. There used to be a hack that was possible to get Brother printers to continue printing by covering an "eye" on the printer (http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/forums/laser/39806). However, the new Brothers (like my HL2270DW) no longer have this exploit available.
I feel that a company that would deliberately program its toner to stop functioning, is questionable on moral grounds. It is purposeful destruction of value. It hurts the environment and is wasteful.
I was able to get this to work on an HL2140 last year. I just taped a small piece of construction paper over the eye on the cartridge and it happily went about printing for quite some time- I made it through an entire ream before the quality degraded. Since then, I always cover the eye on new cartridges before I insert them and use the quality of the prints, not the printer itself, to let me know when to buy more toner.
Ah yes, you're right. The hole was supposed to be on the toner, but the hole no longer existed on the toner required by my printer (judging by toner/hack pictures I found online and threads discussing the hack for my make). Glad it worked out for you. Don't replace your printer!
"Troll" as in I'm pretty sure she was making the story up. Judging by her perfect writing style and the degree of tech-literacy necessary for her to find the narrative to begin with.
Heard of one game manufacturer that willfully distributed a version of their game on torrent. The torrented version of the game came bundled with a live webcam virus. They then made a website to stream the pirates on webcam. Ouch.
Interesting, but I'm surprised the guy sounds so angry. PageRank gets credit for being an engineering feat not a mathematical wonder... When people refer to PageRank as "elegant" they are commenting on its simplicity of concept.
