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Slashback: Bankruptcy, SUVdiving, Singalongs
Not like that un-American GPL. agentZ writes "The first Microsoft government customer to buy access to the Windows source code is Russia according to this CNet story. Interesting to note FAPSI, one of their intelligence agencies, authorized the purchase. Perhaps they're looking for vulnerabilities in the U.S. Government's dependence on Microsoft?"
The difference between Chapter 11 and The End. prostoalex writes "In regards to a recent heated discussion on whether tech companies can make it out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, XO Communications, the telecom company of the dot-com era, seems to be doing quite well after filing Chapter 11. The article on Internet.com also mentions another company, Covad Communications, picking up customers and more business after filing for Chapter 11."
There's hope in PCI Land. Regarding the Slashdot post of a few days ago about the PCI-SIG ("The End of the Free PCI Device List"), PCI-SIG Chairman Tony Pierce writes
"YourVote.com Supporters:Thank you for making us aware of your concerns regarding Jim Boemler's online Vendor and Device Lists for the PCI technology.
There has been a misunderstanding between PCI-SIG and Jim - PCI-SIG officers are currently working with Jim to resolve the issues as quickly as possible. We respect Jim Boemler's work and are committed to support the PCI specification efforts industry-wide. We are confident that we will come to an amicable resolution.
We are pleased to see the strong industry support for PCI technologies and value your response to the issues. We understand this site has been a very valuable tool and are working together to find a solution to make sure that the tool is available to the public in some way.
Thank you for your support over the years. We will be sure to keep you informed as we come to resolution in this situation."
This lowers Finland on my list of vacation spots. E-Tray writes "It seems that Finnish equivalents of American RIAA, Teosto, which represents songwriters and publishers, and Gramex, which represents music producers and artists, want to force Finnish day nurseries to pay royalties every time nursery staff sings along with kids. Previously Teosto enforced a law that taxi drivers have to pay royalties if they play music while a customer is in the backseat."
Would still rather see a statement signed in blood. Error27 writes "Earlier this week, Slashdot linked to a Maureen O'Gara article that claimed SCO was probably going to try charge Linux users $96 per CPU. More than one person thought SCO's denial was, "Awfully ambiguous". Hopefully this article clears up any doubts. Essentially, SCO will continue to charge IBM but not RedHat or SCO's UnitedLinux partners."
Perhaps I can volunteer my dad's Suburbans? Finally, joe jennings writes
"A few months ago you ran a story about the cars my team and I skydived with and crashed into the desert. This is a bit of an update.Next month, we're going to blow up my Nissan Pathfinder. Its twisted remains will be welded to a steel beam and planted on a plot of land in the mojave desert. We're starting "suv ranch," a tribute to gas guzzlers, a dying trend (we hope).
I intend to thoroughly document the project and will post images and quicktime videos on gaspig.com."
For those to lazy to type in 10 characters: Clicky
Ummm.... last time I checked you still couldn't export crypto outside the U.S. - won't this kinda kill the purchase ??? Sorry I couldn't add more but am already running late
Teosto, which represents songwriters and publishers, and Gramex, which represents music producers and artists, want to force Finnish day nurseries to pay royalties every time nursery staff sings along with kids.
Yeah... that's going to be enforceable. What are they going to do, interview the kids as they come out of day care? We thought we had it bad with the RIAA. Sheesh!
Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?
In finland, do they have Fair Use? Because Nursery Rymes and such would be the stereotypical fair use type deal, I mean, it should be argued that that's for educational purposes, which is generally covered under fair use. It's specifically menchioned as an exception here.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
"The Soviet Union? I though you guys broke up?"
"Yeees, thats what ve wanted ve wanted you to think! Ha ha, haa hahaha!"
umm, isn't the recreational use of airplanes- which use a lot of gas and pollute a lot more than the worse suv's- including to dump suv's out of them, a lot worse than the suv's themselves?
And one can't but wonder why it hasn't occured to them that the best way to do it is not to send a cease & decist letter in the first place... What a load of hogwash. The tool was already available to the public in some way untill they started interfering, and now they're looking for a way to make sure that... *sigh*
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
Well as much as I liked seeing skydiving vehicles in the odd James Bonf Flick and all I don't see this as an good way to protest SUV's.
1. You need to gas the planes to get the cars up into the wild blue yonder. MORE POLLUTION.
2. Crashing theme into the desert. I am sure that this does wonders for the native wildlife and natural look of the desert. Just cause it is empty space doesn't mean we have to throw trashed cars into it. Even if you remove all the hydrocarbons and glass, it's still junk.
3. Then blowing up a Nissan Pathfinder. Hmmm, releasing smoke and debris and further polluting the enviroment. Could have recycled the metal into something else.
I am all about making a statement about SUV's and pollution. But you doing things like driving a small car, riding a bike, using the bus. But spending money, resources, and then further polluting the air with a Jack Ass like stunt. Just don't make much sense to me.
Put0
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Bloomberg says it's just a chance to LOOK at the code (by visiting Redmond perhaps or having them visit you?) But News.com reports that MS will let governments BUILD their own custom versions (doesn't say whether by MS or by themselves). Which is it? There's a big difference there.
And also is it access to ALL the source code, or just the security-related bits?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Within a couple of years, non-democratic governments will have a copy of the source code of Windows, and some governments, that have been cooperating with local companies to do industrial espionage, will also have it.
The old argument that Linux is less secure because evil hackers can see the source code now also applies to Windows. Except that the good guys can't see the Windows source code. I wonder what they're hiding.
Lars Dybdahl.
north korea has nukes and russia has the windows source code.
i don't know which is worse. seriously.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Discrimination is legal, as long as
MSDOS: 20+ years without remote hole in the default install
The SUV is simply the icon of the overconsumerist society that we've become.
Consume, consume, consume and fuck the rest of the world. That seems to be the American way these days.
Damn sheeple...
.02
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
First off, SCO is asking for a fee for the use of a few old UNIX ABI libraries. Last time I checked, no Linux vendor (at a Red Hat level) shipped them. IBM does ship them, so IBM pays. If Red Hat decides to ship them, I'm sure Red Hat will pay. If SCO decides to waive the fee for its UnitedLinux partners, that's perfectly fine. Differing charges enable you to buy a Western Digital hard drive from one vendor for $50 less than another vendor. Don't argue; you benefit from this practice whether you want to believe it or not. If SCO wants to add an incentive to cozying up with UnitedLinux, more power to 'em.
(We'll forget about the fact that UnitedLinux based distros are extremely expensive already and don't need anything else to make them MORE expensive. Adding a SCO ABI library license fee to what you already have to pay for UnitedLinux distros does little more than make the system more expensive to buy.)
As for your second to the last comment, I have no earthly idea where you get that "Red Hat's Success" == "SCO Rapes Red Hat for License Fees". If Red Hat doesn't ship SCO's ABI libraries, exactly what do you think they're going to use to suck money out of Red Hat? The UNIX trademark? If you read the article (or knew any UNIX history) you'd know that Ray Noorda gave the UNIX trademark to the Open Group back when Novell owned UNIX. SCO doesn't own the trademark: they license it, as does everyone else who wants the word "UNIX" associated with their OS.
(Good grief, why do I bother responding to these posts?...)
This is absolutely ridiculous and non-enforcable. It even screams for civil disobedience, if something like this gets passed. Nobody will take the law serious anymore, if too many crazy laws are made. Even people I know who don't know anything about mp3s and P-t-P software, are becoming more and more pissed off at things like copyright protection and excessive prices for music that tends to get worse (cfr. bland, faceless, uninspired, synthethical pre-fab pop 'sensations' that are pushed and hyped everywhere these days).
It also goes to show (again) that many people involved in the music business are in it rather for the love of money than the love of music.
(Which is -in a horrible way- understandable when you make and sell 'artists' as 'products').
And pollution is just one of the arguments against SUVs.
The pollution problem is a cumulative effect. The most effective way to cut pollution is to pollute less on our twice daily commutes by driving more efficient vehicles more often. It's not by out and out banning any one type of vehicle. California made great progress over the last 10 years, and their system should be copied. However, it's clear that it was only a first step, and it now needs to be taken farther through more widespread adoption, and more stringent efficiency regulations.
"I hope that every parent who has kids in Finland in day care sends them to the head office of this organisation."
And what's next, sending our kids to hell so they can bother satan? ...I think I'll pass :-)
Not that I have kids... (Partly because I'm 20, but mostly because I post on slashdot.)
My Sig: SEGV
In spring of 99 there were a few programmers from Russia hanging out at Novell, looking through code to make sure that there weren't any "back doors" in the code that could potentially give the US government access to Russian servers. I was told this was a requirement before they would buy certain Novell software. I would think that previously they would have imposed similar requirements on Microsoft as well.
I know some fairly well-placed programmers who have worked on XP and Win2k, and even they didn't have access to the complete source code the way governments will.
So we should ask ourselves what Microsoft gains from an unofficial general release of their code. I think there's a lot of speculation that can be done here, and it becomes very paranoid very quickly. In the reasonable realm, I think two things are possible:
1) Microsoft cries "uncle" when their source is plastered all over the net. They start lawyers and a few bots looking through thousands of lines of GPLed code looking for similarities. They then sue the writers of the code for stealing MS code and using it in GPL software (which would be very, very clearly against the law).
2) They use the illicitly released code as an experiment. They know it can't start showing up in applications, because they haven't released it legally, and nobody wants to be sued (for an essentially legitimate reason) by a company with billions and billions in the bank. So they see how often code like it shows up. How much people mimic their code. How people try to stretch the limits of the law to use some of MS's techniques. Or if people are simply uninterested. Letting it be released illegally seems to be a great way to test the waters for a legal release of protected source code, Apple-style.
3) The third possibility is that Microsoft knows that their code will be stolen, but that doesn't scare them quite as much as the prospect of losing tens of thousands of government computers to OSS.
For our sake, I hope that it's 2 or 3...
~Shylock0
Comments and questions welcome. Flames ignored.
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
Maybe nannys should sing Metallica songs in protest?
Hey, we could *all* have a day where we sing "Enter Sandman" out loud in public places and refuse to pay.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
You can keep me from teaching and singing songs to people by cutting my throat. Failing that, stay the fuck out of my way.
Music is an Art form, not a business. It comes from and belongs to the people. Your greed is one step less than that of the money-changers that Christ threw out of the temple. I am not alone. Our numbers are growing. Enjoy your yachts and cocaine now, because we have you in our sights and mark my words, we will take you down.
c-hack.com |
Oh come now. The Humvee may be bad compared to a Metro, but I bet it still gets better gas mileage and lower emissions out of the Chevy 350 it has under the hood than any of the millions of 60's,70's and early 80's vehicles on the road. Cripes, there are probably a thousand times as many high-school and college student tweaked Camaros and Mustangs on the road than Hummers, each getting much worse mileage and belching emissions like a nut, not to mention the fact they all leak something.
.sig: Now legally binding!
being sold for a few bugs on every corner in Moscow
Still thinking about Windows quality are we?
(Or is everyone on Slashdot too young to get that joke?)
Sure he was making a fuss. He had *his* eyes on the rest of that hot-dog.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I'll comment on XO Communications...
They have been billing our company roughly $54 a month, for 3 years for services we never ordered and do not desire. Namely, web hosting space.
Then, after multiple letters to their billing, then legal offices, they have the nerve to stick a collecter on us.
Last time I talked to the collector, I said, you want the money, sue us! Because the counter claim will include a federal charge of "false billing by mail" and other collection violations under Georgia law.
He said, "they won't sue you, they just hope you are dumb enough to pay."
Hrm, I wonder just how many "bad debts" they have been writing off each year on the books. Or how much they have in "accounts receivable".
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
From:= 14839
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID
Bumper Mentality
By Stephanie Mencimer, Washington Monthly
December 20, 2002
Have you ever wondered why sport utility vehicle drivers seem like such assholes? Surely it's no coincidence that Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, tours Washington in one of the biggest SUVs on the market, the Cadillac Escalade, or that Jesse Ventura loves the Lincoln Navigator.
Well, according to New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher's new book, "High and Mighty," the connection between the two isn't a coincidence. Unlike any other vehicle before it, the SUV is the car of choice for the nation's most self-centered people; and the bigger the SUV, the more of a jerk its driver is likely to be.
According to market research conducted by the country's leading automakers, Bradsher reports, SUV buyers tend to be "insecure and vain. They are frequently nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they are apt to be self-centered and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbors and communities. They are more restless, more sybaritic, and less social than most Americans are. They tend to like fine restaurants a lot more than off-road driving, seldom go to church and have limited interest in doing volunteer work to help others."
He says, too, that SUV drivers generally don't care about anyone else's kids but their own, are very concerned with how other people see them rather than with what's practical, and they tend to want to control or have control over the people around them. David Bostwick, Chrysler's market research director, tells Bradsher, "If you have a sport utility, you can have the smoked windows, put the children in the back and pretend you're still single."
Armed with such research, automakers have, over the past decade, ramped up their SUV designs to appeal even more to the "reptilian" instincts of the many Americans who are attracted to SUVs not because of their perceived safety, but for their obvious aggressiveness. Automakers have intentionally designed the latest models to resemble ferocious animals. The Dodge Durango, for instance, was built to resemble a savage jungle cat, with vertical bars across the grille to represent teeth and big jaw-like fenders. Bradsher quotes a former Ford market researcher who says the SUV craze is "about not letting anything get in your way, and at the extreme, about intimidating others to get out of your way."
Not surprisingly, most SUV customers over the past decade hail from a group that is the embodiment of American narcissism: baby boomers. Affluent and often socially liberal, baby boomers have embraced the four-wheel-drive SUV as a symbol of their ability to defy the conventions of old age, of their independence and "outdoorsiness," making the off-road vehicle a force to be reckoned with on the American blacktop.
But as Bradsher declares in his title, this baby boomer fetish is considerably more harmful than the mere annoyance of yet another Rolling Stones tour or the endless commercials for Propecia. In their attempt to appear youthful and hip, SUV owners have filled the American highways with vehicles that exact a distinctly human cost, frequently killing innocent drivers who would have survived a collision with a lesser vehicle. Bradsher quotes auto execs who concede that the self-centered lifestyle of SUV buyers is apparent in "their willingness to endanger other motorists so as to achieve small improvements in their personal safety."
After covering the auto industry for six years, Bradsher is an unabashed critic of sport-utility vehicles and the automakers that continue to churn them out knowing full well the dangers they pose. He doesn't equivocate in his feeling that driving an SUV is a deeply immoral act that places the driver's own ego above the health and safety of those around him, not to mention the health of the environment. Ironically, and though most supposedly safety-conscious owners don't realize it, SUVs even imperil those who drive them.
Road Rodeo
Ask a typical SUV driver why he drives such a formidable vehicle, and he'll invariably insist that it's for safety reasons - the kids, you know - not because he's too vain to get behind the wheel of a sissy Ford Windstar. Automakers themselves know otherwise - their own market research tells them so.
But Bradsher makes painfully clear that the belief in SUV safety is a delusion. For decades, automakers seeking to avoid tougher fuel economy standards have invoked the fiction that the bigger the car, the safer the passenger. As a result, most Americans take it on faith that the only way to be safe on the highway is to be driving a tank (or the next best thing, a Hummer). Bradsher shatters this myth and highlights the strange disconnect between the perception and the reality of SUVs.
The occupant death rate in SUVs is 6 percent higher than it is for cars - 8 percent higher in the largest SUVs. The main reason is that SUVs carry a high risk of rollover; 62 percent of SUV deaths in 2000 occurred in rollover accidents. SUVs don't handle well, so drivers can't respond quickly when the car hits a stretch of uneven pavement or "trips" by scraping a guardrail. Even a small bump in the road is enough to flip an SUV traveling at high speed. On top of that, SUV roofs are not reinforced to protect the occupants against rollover; nor does the government require them to be.
Because of their vehicles' size and four-wheel drive, SUV drivers tend to overestimate their own security, which prompts many to drive like maniacs, particularly in inclement weather. And SUV drivers - ever image-conscious and overconfident - seem to hate seat belts as much as they love talking on their cell phones while driving. Bradsher reports that four-fifths of those killed in roll-overs were not belted in, even though 75 percent of the general driving population now buckles up regularly.
While failing to protect their occupants, SUVs have also made the roads more dangerous for others. The "kill rate," as Bradsher calls it, for SUVs is simply jaw-dropping. For every one life saved by driving an SUV, five others will be taken. Government researchers have found that a behemoth like the four-ton Chevy Tahoe kills 122 people for every 1 million models on the road; by comparison, the Honda Accord only kills 21. Injuries in SUV-related accidents are likewise more severe.
Part of the reason for the high kill rate is that cars offer very little protection against an SUV hitting them from the side - not because of the weight, but because of the design. When a car is hit from the side by another car, the victim is 6.6 times as likely to die as the aggressor. But if the aggressor is an SUV, the car driver's relative chance of dying rises to 30 to 1, because the hood of an SUV is so high off the ground. Rather than hitting the reinforced doors of a car with its bumper, an SUV will slam into more vulnerable areas and strike a car driver in the head or chest, where injuries are more life-threatening.
But before you get an SUV just for defensive purposes, think again. Any safety gains that might accrue are cancelled out by the high risk of rollover deaths, which usually don't involve other cars.
Ironically, SUVs are particularly dangerous for children, whose safety is often the rationale for buying them in the first place. Because these beasts are so big and hard to see around (and often equipped with dark-tinted glass that's illegal in cars), SUV drivers have a troubling tendency to run over their own kids. Just recently, in October, a wealthy Long Island doctor made headlines after he ran over and killed his 2-year-old in the driveway with his BMW X5. He told police he thought he'd hit the curb.
To illustrate the kind of selfishness that marks some SUV drivers, Bradsher finds people who rave about how they've survived accidents with barely a scratch, yet neglected to mention that the people in the other car were all killed. (One such woman confesses rather chillingly to Bradsher that her first response after killing another driver was to go out and get an even bigger SUV.)
The tragedy of SUVs is that highway fatalities were actually in decline before SUVs came into vogue, even though Americans were driving farther. This is true largely for one simple reason: the seatbelt. Seatbelt usage rose from 14 percent in 1984 to 73 percent in 2001. But seatbelts aren't much help if you're sideswiped by an Escalade, a prospect that looms yet more ominously as SUVs enter the used-car market. Not surprisingly, last year, for the first time in a decade, the number of highway deaths actually rose.
No Roads Scholars Here
Bradsher blames government for failing to adequately regulate SUVs, but doesn't fully acknowledge the degree to which it has encouraged SUV production by becoming a major consumer of them. Law enforcement and public safety agencies in particular seem enamored of the menacing vehicles, a fact on proud display when officers finally apprehended the alleged snipers in the Washington, D.C., area and transported them to the federal courthouse in a parade of black Ford Explorers and Expeditions.
Judging from the number of official SUVs on the road today, law enforcement officials - those most likely to know firsthand the grisly effects of a rollover - are enthusiastic customers. Like the rest of America, police departments seem to believe that replacing safe, sturdy cars with SUVs is a good idea, though it's hard to imagine a more dangerous vehicle for an officer conducting a high-speed chase.
Government's taste for SUVs isn't limited to cops and firemen. There's hardly a city in America where the mayor's chauffeured Lincoln Town Car hasn't been replaced by an SUV. In Virginia, where state officials recently discovered that SUVs were wrecking their efforts to meet clean-air regulations, a few noted sheepishly that perhaps local governments should sell their own fleets, which had ballooned to 250 in Fairfax County alone. (A Fairfax County official told The Washington Post that public safety officials needed four-wheel drive and large cargo spaces to transport extra people and emergency equipment through snow or heavy rain - proof that even law enforcement officials misunderstand SUV safety records.)
As Bradsher details, because of their weight, shoddy brakes, and off-road tires, SUVs handle poorly in bad weather and have trouble stopping on slick roads. What's more, they're generally so poorly designed as not to be capable of carrying much cargo, despite the space. A contributing factor in the Ford Explorer-Firestone tire debacle was that drivers weren't told that their Explorers shouldn't carry any more weight than a Ford Taurus. The extra weight routinely piled in these big cars stressed the tires in a way that made them fall apart faster and contributed to the spate of rollover deaths.
I have a hunch that government officials' justification for buying SUVs is mostly a ruse for their real motivation, which is the same as any other SUV owner's: image. Officials can safely load up their fleets with leather-seated SUVs, whereas using taxpayer dollars to buy themselves, say, a fleet of BMW coupes would get them crucified (even though Detroit considers SUVs luxury vehicles and designs them accordingly). Police departments may claim that they need an SUV to accommodate SWAT teams or canine units, but there is no reason that Sparky the drug dog wouldn't be just as comfortable in the back of a nice safe Chevy Astrovan.
The same is true for nearly everyone who drives an SUV today. Of course, not every SUV owner is gripped by insecurity and a death wish - plenty of otherwise reasonable people seem to get seduced by power and size (see sidebar).
But if soccer moms and office-park dads really need to ferry a lot of people around, they could simply get a large car or a minivan, which Bradsher hails as a great innovation for its fuel efficiency, safety, and lower pollution. (And minivans don't have a disproportionately high kill rate for motorists or pedestrians when they get into accidents.) According to industry market research, minivan drivers also tend to be very nice people. Minivans are favored by senior citizens and others (male and female, equally) who volunteer for their churches and carpool with other people's kids. But that's the problem. SUV owners buy them precisely because they don't want the "soccer mom" stigma associated with minivans.
While Bradsher does a magnificent job of shattering the myths about SUVs, he has a difficult time proposing a solution. Sport utility vehicles have become like guns: Everyone knows they're dangerous, but you can't exactly force millions of Americans to give them up overnight. And because the SUV is single-handedly responsible for revitalizing the once-depressed American auto industry, the economy is now so dependent on their production that it would be nearly impossible to get them off the road.
Bradsher suggests regulating SUVs like cars rather than as light trucks, so that they would be forced to comply with fuel-efficiency standards and safety regulations. He also proposes that the insurance industry stop shifting the high costs of the SUV dangers onto car owners by raising premium prices for SUVs to reflect the amount of damage they cause. But these ideas, commendable though they are, fall short of a perfect answer.
Clearly, the best solution would be for Americans to realize the danger of SUVs and simply stop buying them. Social pressure can be a powerful determinant on car choices, as seen in Japan, the one country where SUVs have not caught on because of cultural checks that emphasize the good of the community over that of the individual. There are signs that perhaps public sentiment is beginning to shift against SUV drivers here, too, as activists have begun to leave nasty flyers on SUV windshields berating drivers for fouling the environment and other offenses.
But for a true reckoning to take place, image-obsessed Americans will need to fully understand the SUV's true dangers - including to themselves - before they will willingly abandon it to the junkyard. Spreading that message against the nation's biggest advertiser - the auto industry - will be tough work. Drivers can only hope that Bradsher's book will cut through the chatter.