While it is perfectly valid to point out that they're trying to charge the terms after the point of sale on purchased-in-stores software, this article is about business licenses, which, I assure you, are licenses. The company sits down with MS and hammers out an agreement, and then they both sign it.
No one walked into a store and out with a box, it's not an install EULA, or even a shrinkwrap license, and I have no problem with MS trying to keep people from reselling them. They are almost always company or site licenses, or at the leaat have deep discounts. MS has no problem getting paid half price for each license if you'll go ahead and buy 50 at a time. Letting companies break those apart and sell each one is rightly objected to.
OTOH, bankruptcy laws apparently allow this, so I don't see what MS can do. Instead of objecting to this practice entirely, I suggest they object to any alteration of the terms. If it was a site license for 50 computers, by god it's still a site license for 50 computer. You can't break it up or use it at more sites.
No, this isn't the same thing as OEM licenses, which can be resold, no matter what MS says. Yes, they are bought at a discount, but the important thing there is that they are then sold to individuals who didn't agree to any special terms during the purchase, and thus the Right of First Sale is in effect. (Because EULAs are complete gibberish, and it's even more gibberish than usual to try to apply them when people aren't running the software.)
Of course, MS is free to ban reselling OEM licenses to end users, but that makes no sense.
Well, even sans the 'automatically attack other people' problem, the idea of an auto-attack system is goofy unless you have a lot of ammo.
Otherwise the other side is just going to hurtle some rocks at you, or, hell, aim a firehose at you. And eventually invent a dirt catapult, where soldiers can just load up with a shovel, it squeezes tennis-ball size clods of it together, and hurtles them repeatedly three hundred feet towards the tank. Two electromagnets, one to smash the ball and the other to pull back a spring, and then release and repeat. Have a grate so large rocks can't get in that you dump out manually. You could run it off a car battery, or whatever portable power the military uses.
Let the other side waste their ammo shooting down something that costs.003 cents worth of electricity to shoot at them. And, unlike a traditional mortar system, it would be very hard to detect the origin, because of the lack of an explosion at the firing.
It's not, as IBM pointed out, IBM's job to find places that it did or didn't copy.
As a defendant, their job is solely to disprove the other side's case.
SCO doesn't have a case. I don't mean that their claims have no merit, although they don't. I mean they have literally not actually made a case. They have refused to sit down and say 'This is our code, and this is where you illegally copied it into Linux.'.
Ah, there's a solution to that that makes them infringe the patent less.
Simply give the customer 10,000 rentals a year. If they are late, for every month, charge them a fee of one rental.
Tada. It's not unlimited rentals, and there are late fees, although these fees are in reduced services instead of cash. (And there's a ton of prior art for reducing services instead of cash fines. Businesses have been doing that for fifty years.)
Of course, there is no way in hell anyone could ever rent 10,000 movies a year if they only get five at a time and have to use the postal service, and the max punishment can't possibly interfer with anything, so the whole limit is pointless.
But that's what happens when you claim a difference between 'unlimited' and 'limited' and try to patent 'unlimited' while everyone else is doing 'limited'. You run the risk of other people just upping their limits so high they are meaningless, but still exist.
If they argue that limit is meaingless and does infringe the patent...give people 500 a year. That is an actual limit, but one that's one and a half movies a night, which is way more than any reasonable person needs, especially considering that you still have the mail turn-around to cope with. Still charge the fine of losing a rental a month. (Which is, in fact, far less rentals than you lost by not getting new ones.)
Alternately, you could rent people 'five movies' for an entire year for a rather high price, but assert that if they don't like one of them, they could send it back in the enclosed package and get a different movie for the rest of the year, and if they didn't like that one, they could send it back and get a new one, etc...;)
See, what they wanted to do was patent charging people merely to gain free access to a movie library, but there's no way in hell that would stand up in court. That has prior art going back hundreds of years to people buying seats in a theatre and thus seeing every show for free. So they decided to throw crap about late fees and unlimited rentals into the patent, which made it work, but also seriously reduces what they can stop others from doing.
You know, you're exactly right. Libraries are prior art here.
If you don't live in a certain county in this state (Georgia), but are often there and want to check things out from the library, you can usually pay a small yearly fee that is roughly equal to the average taxes the library gets from a person.
For that fee, you can check out as many things as you want. Let's just consider DVDs, to make it identical to Netflix. And, to make it more like Netflix, I've seen libraries that make delivieries to places like nursing homes.
And libraries often have the ability to pay fees off in canned food or have them 'forgiven' in other ways, so obviously the idea of not having late fees is already well-known, if not well-used.
And I don't know about you, but I can reserve things over the internet, and all libraries have that. I'm sure some library somewhere that delivers has a way to check out things online.
So, to recap: For a small yearly fee, you can check out as many DVDs as you want, up to the maximum the library allows. When you bring one back, you can get a new one. These are delivered at your door, assuming you can convince the library you 'deserve' it and they do that sort of thing.
Library differences from Netflix:
You can check out a lot more DVDs. Not important
Yearly fee instead of monthly. Even less important
Late fees. Usually, but not always. So let's just consider the 'not always'.
Granted, this is a patent on a business model, which is not what libraries really have.
You've hit the nail on the head for a total reform of the system. I love it.
Patents should only be valid if you could have kept the process a trade secret without requiring NDAs from all your customers.
This would not only get rid of stupid-ass ones like NetFlix's, it would get rid of software ones(1), and it would get rid of stupid shit like patented connectors.
You're supposed to patent a process. I think we should raise the bar and only let you patent a process the customer isn't involved in, whether it be it by asking for new rentals, or by executing the software on their machine, or using your connector to connect things.
If they are involved, and you want to keep a secret, you have to NDA them and keep it a trade secret. Or let everyone do it, at least the public part of it.
For everyone who thinks this is 'unfair', the point of patents isn't to be fair to inventors. The point of patents is solely to give incentive to opening up secret processes that a person might discover and keep for itself 100 years, or at least within one shop, like some blacksmith shops did during the middle ages. We want someone who invents a new, cheaper way of cutting potato chips to patent that, so in 17 years everyone can do it. Or sooner if they're willing to pay.
If the process cannot be kept secret from the customers, than there is no damn point to allow a patent at all.
1) No, the courts have held that EULAs aren't enough to protect a trade secret. You can't say 'You will protect the trade secrets within' in an EULA anymore than you can say 'You will not tell anyone any trade secrets you might see within' before a company tour. You actually have to get signed contracts from people to enforce NDAs, and, more to the point for companies that think EULAs are that, you have to keep track of who has access to said secrets, or it's not a 'trade secret'.
Yes, but I was talking about a tool that specifically would walk the bootup sequence and say 'Everything here I know about'.
And even with binary kernel modules, it would be possible. The part that doesn't get compiled should be signed, and the part that does could have its source's signature checked and recompiled.
And, it's a weird thought, but basically I'm asking for the 'signed boot loading' that things like the XBox and Tivos do. But not for malicious purposes to keep users from messing with their box. Instead, to keep others from messing with their box. Hence we can just give warnings when you manually check, instead of automatically checking and stopping execution. So if you want to apply some obscure kernel patch, whatever. Just be aware your kernel is not going to pass a signature test, because clean source won't compile to it.
This also should be coupled with a signature scanner within the OS. (Or, in fact, the same scanner.) It just needs to be able to run from the boot CD also, in a completely automated manner, so people who suspect that some malware is on their computer can boot up before going to sleep, and select 'System Check', and be presented with some meaningful information in the morning.
Ideally, it would even be smart enough to get online (Possibly even reading the config of the Linux install.) and check the signatures of updates, and download uncorrupted updated packages to replace bad ones.
And this is pretending that the malware situtation on Linux ever got 1/10th as bad on Windows that, for example Linux malware would replace/sbin/init with something that loads a custom kernel module and starts a hidden process.
If malware was actually a problem in Linux, there would be a rather trivial CD boot select that said 'Check my boot path for malware', that would compare the files involved in the boot process on the disk to the files on the CD, or, if you've upgraded, check their signatures.
With the option that, if they were ever tampered with, it'd go and get new one.
This wouldn't find all malware, but it would stop it from executing at any point in the boot process. Obviously, if you were stupid you could still track it down and click on it, although the Unix concept that you don't normally install programs in your own directories (unless you have to) would help stop that, as would the idea that . is not in the path by default. (Otherwise they'd trojan 'ls'.)
If kernel module rootkits ever caught on, this CD mode could even, if you weren't using a pre-installed kernel (Which signature checks would catch), go and mount your disk and check your source CRC from kernel.org, delete existing files minus your config, extract the real tarball, and recompile it itself, just in case there was a patch applied to the kernel source. (A kernel module, of course, would have been caught by the boot sequence check.)
Granted, there would be a few places malware could hide, files that normally are edited by the user but run during startup/login, like.bashrc, or cron jobs. It should strip out any obviously innoculous lines like setting shell variables, and present these to the user.
And, of course, there are probably other non-obvious places that programs can be launched from. Some programs let you specify things like external filters or whatever in their configs, and that would be a great place to hid. However, these locations would be slowly but surely tracked down, learned, and presented to the user too, or even removed.
And good luck doing any of this on Windows. Microsoft might be able to pull it off. But no one else.
He's not blowing 'the bell curve'. Whatever 'curve' they are grading by, it isn't a 'bell curve'.
In fact, he is exactly predicted by the bell curve, which merely say that, in most distributions where values are decided by a bunch of little random chances that are summed together, that most people will group up in the middle, with both tappering down to make a 'bell' if you graph it.
You'd actually get exactly the same 'blowing of the curve' if people took on multiple choice test and filled the answers in randomly. Most people people, assuming a 100 question test and four choices, would get 20-30 right, but a few would get down to 0 and a few would get up to 50 (or higher) and 'blow the curve'.
20 years would, like, the maximum for a rape in the first place in most places, so you know the GP is a complete liar to imply that is a standard sentence for prison rape.
Hell, in some places you'd have to rape a child to get 20 years.
Sendmail is normally installed and managed by sysadmins (indeed, the configuration is so convoluted most people can't touch it) who will be vigilant and patch this thing quickly.
No it's not. Sendmail is installed and managed by sysadmins when required to do so by company policy or a legacy setup that they don't dare touch.
Anyone who voluntarily decides to use sendmail, in this day and age, for no reason deserves getting hit with whatever bugs still lurk in that marvelous pile of crap. Sendmail continually gives open source software a bad name with its bugs.
Use postfix, I love it. Use exim, I've never used it but I heard it's very good. Use courier, if you can get around their package-building anality. Hell, use qmail, but be sure to find a patch version.
Do not, for the love of God, use sendmail. I don't care if it's the 'standard'. The standard is walking, but I have no sympathy for people who decide to walk down the middle of the highway.
The biggest problem with obsecenity laws previously was that gay porn could be considered obscene in states with sodomy laws. Since SCOTUS deemed that sodomy laws are unconstitutional gay porn is now legal.
The states are checked in defining what sex is. Again see the supreme court ruling on sodomy laws.
Uh, no. You're very very confused if you think only images of illegal acts can be defined as obscene. That would make...well...nothing obscene except bestiality and incest. Which would be nice, but is sadly not how the law works. The state are checked in making certain sexual acts illegal, not from calling them sex, or including them as conduct which counts as 'sex' for the purpose of obscenity.
Since you apparently don't know what I'm talking about, read this. Notice that it defines sex, including things that are not normally defined as sex, like 'Acts involving excretory functions'. Notice the law is, in fact, the Miller test.
Furthermore your analysis of the Miller test is totally off base. The community has control over all three prongs of the test, but subject to appeal. The community gets to apply its standards, pass its laws, and its jurors decide whether the material has redeeming value (both prosecution and defense will present surveys and witnesses describing how the material measures up to the SLAPS test).
It has 'control' only in the technical sense in that the trial is taking place in the community. However, the point is there is two subjective tests, and one objective. The objective one is 'Is this sexual act mentioned in the law?', and the community has control of the law. One subjective one is 'community standard'. Only the community has input on that, too. Can't bring in outside experts unless you want to assert the locals are lying or something, because it frankly doesn't matter what they think about the material.
The other subjective one is 'Does it lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value' and that is a 'reasonable person' question. That is not decided by the 'community'. Outside experts can come in and testify they found meaning in it.
Any community that feels like it and can pass laws can game the law and the 'community standards' in such a way that all lacking-in-value images are banned, like, as I said, driver's license photos. They merely have to define whatever is in them as 'sexual conduct', which, as I pointed out, in my state already includes things that aren't sex, and they have to be willing to testify that such things violate community standards. It really is that simple.
A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.
That's what I mean. If they collect you, and learn before releasing you that you are wanted in another state, they have to turn you over, they cannot release you.
This does not require them to go out and find you. It only goes into effect if you are 'found', which in actual practice means 'detained by law enforcement', although there are probably a few other circumstances where it could legally be argued to apply, like you show up in person to some other aspect of the government, like the DMV.
In theory, it should apply if the other state goes and tracks you down, and points local law enforcement at you. But cops have many ways to willingly not 'find' you if they want, although they normally just grab you and hand him over.
Interestingly, I thought they had to do it for any reason, even if you're a material witness and not even charged with a crime. What, exactly, does 'Treason, Felony, or other Crime' mean? (Do states even charge people with Treason?)
The English rule of the American colonies had, by the time of the revolution, been marked by decades of neglect alternating with excessive taxes and levies, designed to enrich the English government at the expense of its citizens.(1)
As discontent grew, other things that Englishmen wouldn't stand for, like transporting malcontents back to England for mock trials and other civil right violations, started in earnest.
I don't actually know what was going on in English parliament at the time, who were traditionally the ones to stand up for the rights of citizens, but I assume this was ignored because, as was pointed out a few times during the revolution, Americans didn't actually have any representation there.
1) Whether or not these were worse than the rules that people in England were living under is a side issue. They were new and different rules. It's easy to make people keep paying X, it's hard to make them start paying X.
The American revolution was because Englishmen, who had traditionally had various rights under the government, were being subjected to random laws by Parliament and, yes, the King. The King had seriously started to micromanage internal American affairs by that time. Parliament could have stopped him, but didn't care, because, hey, they didn't represent those people.
American history gets this completely wrong by failing to point out this was not the norm. English citizens had a huge list of rights by that time. English citizens living in the American colonies merely found those right infringed, and, what's more, infringed without their even being able to comment on it.
The exact same thing has happened with all other English colonies that consider themselves 'English'. They start demanding the rights that Englishmen have, like their own Parliment.
And there are three places the rights in the US Constitution come from. The evolved English ones (Freedom of speech, trial by jury, habeus corpus, seach and seizure restrictions), the fairly new principles of Locke, (which were evolved from the English ones, just not actual English traditions yet) like freedom of religion, and uniquely American objection to English practices like quartering soldiers in houses, the least mentioned, and probably leat important, Bill of Rights.
No, you're slightly confused. It it not 'Ah, no.'.
The President has committed a felony, barring some miraculous 11th hour magical interpetation of authorization to use military force that neither I, nor, I believe, you, believe is plausible.(1)
Because he is president, he cannot be charged with this felony without an impeachment by Congress. That does not mean he has not committed it. He could, for example, be charged after January, 2009, as he cannot possibly be president at that time.
However, nothing stops anyone else who participated from being arrested. There is an interesting question whether the Vice President can be outright arrested, or must also be impeached, but certainly anyone else can be arrested.(2) Like the agents actually doing the wiretaps.
1) He also has some absurd concept about 'Commander in Chief', but that's because he's an idiot who can't read. He's the Commander in Chief of the military. This does not give him any authority, or ability to infringe the rights of, any people not in the military. He's not my commander in chief, anymore than J. Random General is my general. He's not even the 'United State's Commander in Chief', as some people will mistakenly say. He's the United State's military's Commander in Chief. Or, most specifically, the Army and Navy's, which is why the Air Force and Marines are still officially part of one of those, I forget which. (This isn't entirely moot. We could end up with control of random troups under US control and the President would not be their Commander in Chief. So far, though, we've always had control of them them via our military, so it's the same thing, but if, absurdly, NASA, a civilian agency, ever started sending NATO troups somewhere, the president would not be their Commander in Chief. OTOH, he controls NASA anyway, so maybe it is moot.)
2) OTOH, there is an interesting fact that anyone in the executive branch can be impeached and removed from their position, or even barred from ever holding public office again. That just doesn't have to happen for them to be arrested, unlike the president.
Okay - lets assume that we arm every citizen of the British Isles, and that the government tries to push this bill through. Now what? Do we get a rag tag army together, march up to the gates in front of Downing street and start shooting at people, until they send the tanks in? What will that achieve?
Okay, I don't know much English history, but even I know that's happened several times before. You've done it for certain monarchs, you've done it against certain monarchs, you've done it because you wanted a war, you've done it because you didn't want that war anymore, you've done it because you wanted higher pay, you've done it because you apparently hadn't invented TV yet and were bored.
English history can probably be best explained by people getting so annoyed at the current government they've started shoving in the queue and ended up with someone else in charge. Often getting immediately pissed at that guy and installing the former guy back in place within the decade.
Hell, it would have happened in the American revolution if anyone here could have figured out how to get a few hundred thousand people from here over there to march on the government. Sadly, the logicistics of that failed, so we just had to start our own country.
At least in America, we have the excuse of not revolting because we only tried that once and it failed. You guys seem to do it every hundred years, and you manage to do it and keep the 'same' government.
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No one walked into a store and out with a box, it's not an install EULA, or even a shrinkwrap license, and I have no problem with MS trying to keep people from reselling them. They are almost always company or site licenses, or at the leaat have deep discounts. MS has no problem getting paid half price for each license if you'll go ahead and buy 50 at a time. Letting companies break those apart and sell each one is rightly objected to.
OTOH, bankruptcy laws apparently allow this, so I don't see what MS can do. Instead of objecting to this practice entirely, I suggest they object to any alteration of the terms. If it was a site license for 50 computers, by god it's still a site license for 50 computer. You can't break it up or use it at more sites.
No, this isn't the same thing as OEM licenses, which can be resold, no matter what MS says. Yes, they are bought at a discount, but the important thing there is that they are then sold to individuals who didn't agree to any special terms during the purchase, and thus the Right of First Sale is in effect. (Because EULAs are complete gibberish, and it's even more gibberish than usual to try to apply them when people aren't running the software.)
Of course, MS is free to ban reselling OEM licenses to end users, but that makes no sense.
Why the fuck would they be rebelling if they wanted to create a theocracy?
Otherwise the other side is just going to hurtle some rocks at you, or, hell, aim a firehose at you. And eventually invent a dirt catapult, where soldiers can just load up with a shovel, it squeezes tennis-ball size clods of it together, and hurtles them repeatedly three hundred feet towards the tank. Two electromagnets, one to smash the ball and the other to pull back a spring, and then release and repeat. Have a grate so large rocks can't get in that you dump out manually. You could run it off a car battery, or whatever portable power the military uses.
Let the other side waste their ammo shooting down something that costs .003 cents worth of electricity to shoot at them. And, unlike a traditional mortar system, it would be very hard to detect the origin, because of the lack of an explosion at the firing.
As a defendant, their job is solely to disprove the other side's case.
SCO doesn't have a case. I don't mean that their claims have no merit, although they don't. I mean they have literally not actually made a case. They have refused to sit down and say 'This is our code, and this is where you illegally copied it into Linux.'.
Simply give the customer 10,000 rentals a year. If they are late, for every month, charge them a fee of one rental.
Tada. It's not unlimited rentals, and there are late fees, although these fees are in reduced services instead of cash. (And there's a ton of prior art for reducing services instead of cash fines. Businesses have been doing that for fifty years.)
Of course, there is no way in hell anyone could ever rent 10,000 movies a year if they only get five at a time and have to use the postal service, and the max punishment can't possibly interfer with anything, so the whole limit is pointless.
But that's what happens when you claim a difference between 'unlimited' and 'limited' and try to patent 'unlimited' while everyone else is doing 'limited'. You run the risk of other people just upping their limits so high they are meaningless, but still exist.
If they argue that limit is meaingless and does infringe the patent...give people 500 a year. That is an actual limit, but one that's one and a half movies a night, which is way more than any reasonable person needs, especially considering that you still have the mail turn-around to cope with. Still charge the fine of losing a rental a month. (Which is, in fact, far less rentals than you lost by not getting new ones.)
Alternately, you could rent people 'five movies' for an entire year for a rather high price, but assert that if they don't like one of them, they could send it back in the enclosed package and get a different movie for the rest of the year, and if they didn't like that one, they could send it back and get a new one, etc... ;)
See, what they wanted to do was patent charging people merely to gain free access to a movie library, but there's no way in hell that would stand up in court. That has prior art going back hundreds of years to people buying seats in a theatre and thus seeing every show for free. So they decided to throw crap about late fees and unlimited rentals into the patent, which made it work, but also seriously reduces what they can stop others from doing.
Libraries often charge fees if you do not live in the area.
If you don't live in a certain county in this state (Georgia), but are often there and want to check things out from the library, you can usually pay a small yearly fee that is roughly equal to the average taxes the library gets from a person.
For that fee, you can check out as many things as you want. Let's just consider DVDs, to make it identical to Netflix. And, to make it more like Netflix, I've seen libraries that make delivieries to places like nursing homes.
And libraries often have the ability to pay fees off in canned food or have them 'forgiven' in other ways, so obviously the idea of not having late fees is already well-known, if not well-used.
And I don't know about you, but I can reserve things over the internet, and all libraries have that. I'm sure some library somewhere that delivers has a way to check out things online.
So, to recap: For a small yearly fee, you can check out as many DVDs as you want, up to the maximum the library allows. When you bring one back, you can get a new one. These are delivered at your door, assuming you can convince the library you 'deserve' it and they do that sort of thing.
Library differences from Netflix:
You can check out a lot more DVDs. Not important
Yearly fee instead of monthly. Even less important
Late fees. Usually, but not always. So let's just consider the 'not always'.
Granted, this is a patent on a business model, which is not what libraries really have.
Patents should only be valid if you could have kept the process a trade secret without requiring NDAs from all your customers.
This would not only get rid of stupid-ass ones like NetFlix's, it would get rid of software ones(1), and it would get rid of stupid shit like patented connectors.
You're supposed to patent a process. I think we should raise the bar and only let you patent a process the customer isn't involved in, whether it be it by asking for new rentals, or by executing the software on their machine, or using your connector to connect things.
If they are involved, and you want to keep a secret, you have to NDA them and keep it a trade secret. Or let everyone do it, at least the public part of it.
For everyone who thinks this is 'unfair', the point of patents isn't to be fair to inventors. The point of patents is solely to give incentive to opening up secret processes that a person might discover and keep for itself 100 years, or at least within one shop, like some blacksmith shops did during the middle ages. We want someone who invents a new, cheaper way of cutting potato chips to patent that, so in 17 years everyone can do it. Or sooner if they're willing to pay.
If the process cannot be kept secret from the customers, than there is no damn point to allow a patent at all.
1) No, the courts have held that EULAs aren't enough to protect a trade secret. You can't say 'You will protect the trade secrets within' in an EULA anymore than you can say 'You will not tell anyone any trade secrets you might see within' before a company tour. You actually have to get signed contracts from people to enforce NDAs, and, more to the point for companies that think EULAs are that, you have to keep track of who has access to said secrets, or it's not a 'trade secret'.
Not to mention that someone can have a legit number, and still be doing what they're not supposed to be doing.
And even with binary kernel modules, it would be possible. The part that doesn't get compiled should be signed, and the part that does could have its source's signature checked and recompiled.
And, it's a weird thought, but basically I'm asking for the 'signed boot loading' that things like the XBox and Tivos do. But not for malicious purposes to keep users from messing with their box. Instead, to keep others from messing with their box. Hence we can just give warnings when you manually check, instead of automatically checking and stopping execution. So if you want to apply some obscure kernel patch, whatever. Just be aware your kernel is not going to pass a signature test, because clean source won't compile to it.
This also should be coupled with a signature scanner within the OS. (Or, in fact, the same scanner.) It just needs to be able to run from the boot CD also, in a completely automated manner, so people who suspect that some malware is on their computer can boot up before going to sleep, and select 'System Check', and be presented with some meaningful information in the morning.
Ideally, it would even be smart enough to get online (Possibly even reading the config of the Linux install.) and check the signatures of updates, and download uncorrupted updated packages to replace bad ones.
And this is pretending that the malware situtation on Linux ever got 1/10th as bad on Windows that, for example Linux malware would replace /sbin/init with something that loads a custom kernel module and starts a hidden process.
Why do you think MS bought VPC?
With the option that, if they were ever tampered with, it'd go and get new one.
This wouldn't find all malware, but it would stop it from executing at any point in the boot process. Obviously, if you were stupid you could still track it down and click on it, although the Unix concept that you don't normally install programs in your own directories (unless you have to) would help stop that, as would the idea that . is not in the path by default. (Otherwise they'd trojan 'ls'.)
If kernel module rootkits ever caught on, this CD mode could even, if you weren't using a pre-installed kernel (Which signature checks would catch), go and mount your disk and check your source CRC from kernel.org, delete existing files minus your config, extract the real tarball, and recompile it itself, just in case there was a patch applied to the kernel source. (A kernel module, of course, would have been caught by the boot sequence check.)
Granted, there would be a few places malware could hide, files that normally are edited by the user but run during startup/login, like .bashrc, or cron jobs. It should strip out any obviously innoculous lines like setting shell variables, and present these to the user.
And, of course, there are probably other non-obvious places that programs can be launched from. Some programs let you specify things like external filters or whatever in their configs, and that would be a great place to hid. However, these locations would be slowly but surely tracked down, learned, and presented to the user too, or even removed.
And good luck doing any of this on Windows. Microsoft might be able to pull it off. But no one else.
In fact, he is exactly predicted by the bell curve, which merely say that, in most distributions where values are decided by a bunch of little random chances that are summed together, that most people will group up in the middle, with both tappering down to make a 'bell' if you graph it.
You'd actually get exactly the same 'blowing of the curve' if people took on multiple choice test and filled the answers in randomly. Most people people, assuming a 100 question test and four choices, would get 20-30 right, but a few would get down to 0 and a few would get up to 50 (or higher) and 'blow the curve'.
Hell, in some places you'd have to rape a child to get 20 years.
Of course, this doesn't stop exploits from perusing the browser cache.
No it's not. Sendmail is installed and managed by sysadmins when required to do so by company policy or a legacy setup that they don't dare touch.
Anyone who voluntarily decides to use sendmail, in this day and age, for no reason deserves getting hit with whatever bugs still lurk in that marvelous pile of crap. Sendmail continually gives open source software a bad name with its bugs.
Use postfix, I love it. Use exim, I've never used it but I heard it's very good. Use courier, if you can get around their package-building anality. Hell, use qmail, but be sure to find a patch version.
Do not, for the love of God, use sendmail. I don't care if it's the 'standard'. The standard is walking, but I have no sympathy for people who decide to walk down the middle of the highway.
The states are checked in defining what sex is. Again see the supreme court ruling on sodomy laws.
Uh, no. You're very very confused if you think only images of illegal acts can be defined as obscene. That would make...well...nothing obscene except bestiality and incest. Which would be nice, but is sadly not how the law works. The state are checked in making certain sexual acts illegal, not from calling them sex, or including them as conduct which counts as 'sex' for the purpose of obscenity.
Since you apparently don't know what I'm talking about, read this. Notice that it defines sex, including things that are not normally defined as sex, like 'Acts involving excretory functions'. Notice the law is, in fact, the Miller test.
Furthermore your analysis of the Miller test is totally off base. The community has control over all three prongs of the test, but subject to appeal. The community gets to apply its standards, pass its laws, and its jurors decide whether the material has redeeming value (both prosecution and defense will present surveys and witnesses describing how the material measures up to the SLAPS test).
It has 'control' only in the technical sense in that the trial is taking place in the community. However, the point is there is two subjective tests, and one objective. The objective one is 'Is this sexual act mentioned in the law?', and the community has control of the law. One subjective one is 'community standard'. Only the community has input on that, too. Can't bring in outside experts unless you want to assert the locals are lying or something, because it frankly doesn't matter what they think about the material.
The other subjective one is 'Does it lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value' and that is a 'reasonable person' question. That is not decided by the 'community'. Outside experts can come in and testify they found meaning in it.
Any community that feels like it and can pass laws can game the law and the 'community standards' in such a way that all lacking-in-value images are banned, like, as I said, driver's license photos. They merely have to define whatever is in them as 'sexual conduct', which, as I pointed out, in my state already includes things that aren't sex, and they have to be willing to testify that such things violate community standards. It really is that simple.
A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.
That's what I mean. If they collect you, and learn before releasing you that you are wanted in another state, they have to turn you over, they cannot release you.
This does not require them to go out and find you. It only goes into effect if you are 'found', which in actual practice means 'detained by law enforcement', although there are probably a few other circumstances where it could legally be argued to apply, like you show up in person to some other aspect of the government, like the DMV.
In theory, it should apply if the other state goes and tracks you down, and points local law enforcement at you. But cops have many ways to willingly not 'find' you if they want, although they normally just grab you and hand him over.
Interestingly, I thought they had to do it for any reason, even if you're a material witness and not even charged with a crime. What, exactly, does 'Treason, Felony, or other Crime' mean? (Do states even charge people with Treason?)
The English rule of the American colonies had, by the time of the revolution, been marked by decades of neglect alternating with excessive taxes and levies, designed to enrich the English government at the expense of its citizens.(1)
As discontent grew, other things that Englishmen wouldn't stand for, like transporting malcontents back to England for mock trials and other civil right violations, started in earnest.
I don't actually know what was going on in English parliament at the time, who were traditionally the ones to stand up for the rights of citizens, but I assume this was ignored because, as was pointed out a few times during the revolution, Americans didn't actually have any representation there.
1) Whether or not these were worse than the rules that people in England were living under is a side issue. They were new and different rules. It's easy to make people keep paying X, it's hard to make them start paying X.
The American revolution was because Englishmen, who had traditionally had various rights under the government, were being subjected to random laws by Parliament and, yes, the King. The King had seriously started to micromanage internal American affairs by that time. Parliament could have stopped him, but didn't care, because, hey, they didn't represent those people.
American history gets this completely wrong by failing to point out this was not the norm. English citizens had a huge list of rights by that time. English citizens living in the American colonies merely found those right infringed, and, what's more, infringed without their even being able to comment on it.
The exact same thing has happened with all other English colonies that consider themselves 'English'. They start demanding the rights that Englishmen have, like their own Parliment.
And there are three places the rights in the US Constitution come from. The evolved English ones (Freedom of speech, trial by jury, habeus corpus, seach and seizure restrictions), the fairly new principles of Locke, (which were evolved from the English ones, just not actual English traditions yet) like freedom of religion, and uniquely American objection to English practices like quartering soldiers in houses, the least mentioned, and probably leat important, Bill of Rights.
The Senate version of the bill restricted something to 13 months.
The House version, apparently mistakenly, restricted it to 36 months.
The version the president signed said 13.
They've just decided that the House 'really meant' 13.
This is how you turn a tiny procedural error into a fucking constitional crisis.
The President has committed a felony, barring some miraculous 11th hour magical interpetation of authorization to use military force that neither I, nor, I believe, you, believe is plausible.(1)
Because he is president, he cannot be charged with this felony without an impeachment by Congress. That does not mean he has not committed it. He could, for example, be charged after January, 2009, as he cannot possibly be president at that time.
However, nothing stops anyone else who participated from being arrested. There is an interesting question whether the Vice President can be outright arrested, or must also be impeached, but certainly anyone else can be arrested.(2) Like the agents actually doing the wiretaps.
1) He also has some absurd concept about 'Commander in Chief', but that's because he's an idiot who can't read. He's the Commander in Chief of the military. This does not give him any authority, or ability to infringe the rights of, any people not in the military. He's not my commander in chief, anymore than J. Random General is my general. He's not even the 'United State's Commander in Chief', as some people will mistakenly say. He's the United State's military's Commander in Chief. Or, most specifically, the Army and Navy's, which is why the Air Force and Marines are still officially part of one of those, I forget which. (This isn't entirely moot. We could end up with control of random troups under US control and the President would not be their Commander in Chief. So far, though, we've always had control of them them via our military, so it's the same thing, but if, absurdly, NASA, a civilian agency, ever started sending NATO troups somewhere, the president would not be their Commander in Chief. OTOH, he controls NASA anyway, so maybe it is moot.)
2) OTOH, there is an interesting fact that anyone in the executive branch can be impeached and removed from their position, or even barred from ever holding public office again. That just doesn't have to happen for them to be arrested, unlike the president.
And, more to the point, it's only an erosion back to before FDR.
Okay, I don't know much English history, but even I know that's happened several times before. You've done it for certain monarchs, you've done it against certain monarchs, you've done it because you wanted a war, you've done it because you didn't want that war anymore, you've done it because you wanted higher pay, you've done it because you apparently hadn't invented TV yet and were bored.
English history can probably be best explained by people getting so annoyed at the current government they've started shoving in the queue and ended up with someone else in charge. Often getting immediately pissed at that guy and installing the former guy back in place within the decade.
Hell, it would have happened in the American revolution if anyone here could have figured out how to get a few hundred thousand people from here over there to march on the government. Sadly, the logicistics of that failed, so we just had to start our own country.
At least in America, we have the excuse of not revolting because we only tried that once and it failed. You guys seem to do it every hundred years, and you manage to do it and keep the 'same' government.
Jeez, some people can't read English. It worked for us, until it stopped working.