...the US secret service has a documented history of using its snooping on its allies, mostly for the benefit of US businesses.
Can you name a major country that doesn't? Seriously, the Germans do it, the French have been caught a few times recently, the Japanese have been caught a few times. The list goes on.
You are probably new to the net, but I have seen virtual communities die because of spam. It is not a pretty sight. Had you expeirenced that first hand, you would not be so soft on spammers.
New to the net? Let's see. I've been using computers since 1977, getting paid to do so since 1986.
I started my first BBS in 1981. I have been using the Internet in one form or another since 1989.
I designed and built my home town's first ISP, and administrated it until it reached over 1,500 customers, including occasionally spending an afternoon sending out cancels for my own user's Usenet spam violations.
I was my Fidonet net's NC, and served as NEC since nobody else wanted to pony up the bucks to transport the echoes. I had to, since I was the co-moderator of one.
Currently I get paid to administrate Unix systems and TCP/IP networks for Fortune 100 companies. I'm currently responsible for several hundred such systems in three data centers in as many time zones, and we're discussing taking over support for some systems in Brussels and Singapore.
I suspect I have at least as much 'net experience as you do, son.
Right except the spammers _haven't_ passed, and they have been their so long that most people have forgotten the sidewalk even existed.
A lot of fat people can walk down a given sidewalk on a given day. It still doesn't mean you're deprived of the use of the sidewalk. I get quite a bit of spam every day, and I still manage to keep up with a dozen mailing lists, several of which I moderate, and all my business-related email, as well as communicating via email with my large extended family, many of whom also work in the computer industry. Oh, and I'm about to take over as moderator of a popular web discussion site devoted to Airsoft. No, it's not AirsoftZone.
Well, then *remove* the laws that prevent us from implementing the technical solutions.
Sorry, I kind of like the First Amendment. You'll get no help from me there.
They agreed to host our local Linux user's group meetings, and right after that our founder declared the LUG dissolved and went away.
Between the confusion on that and the change of location (they're way off the beaten path here and a lot of people couldn't find the place), we had two meetings with light attendance. This is after years of 30 to 50 people coming, and was during the summer when many of our college-student users weren't around anyway.
Based on these two small meetings, SGI told us they weren't interested in hosting our meetings anymore, because we weren't bringing enough people for them to advertise to.
That's right, their concern wasn't helping the group, it was getting people into a room where they could make sales pitches.
So if they decide next week that they can make more money on Irix than Linux, Linux is gone.
If you're going to deal with SGI, take a page from Ronald Reagan:
Don't compare it with violent crime, compare it with counterfeit money. Spam has the same effect on electronic communication as coutnerfeit money has on the economy.
Ridiculous. Counterfeit money allows someone to steal merchandise from merchants, without the merchant getting paid for it.
Spam's effect on electronic communication is more like a fat person's affect on your sidewalk. While he's there, you can't use the sidewalk, but once he passes, it's usable again.
If he happens to be so heavy he cracks the sidewalk, you make him pay to fix it, probably in small claims court unless he's a good person and just says "sorry, send me the bill, real sorry about that".
If a spammer breaks your box, he should have to pay to fix it. If he crashes it causing it to reboot, you should be able to collect for whatever business you lost in the time it took to reboot.
Other than that, it's an annoyance, not a crime.
Spam needs technical solutions, not legislators passing a bunch of stupid laws. We have too damn many laws in this country now, it's caused a climate in which nobody respects the law anymore because it's not possible to get through the day without violating a few.
If you complain that sales tax is wrong on internet transactions, then it should be equally wrong on brick-and-mortar transactions.
I completely agree; sales tax is wrong on brick-and-mortar transactions, as well.
Anytime you tax something, you discourage it. Perhaps only a little, but you do, if for no other reason than the fact that person's $100 won't buy $100 worth of merchandise, but only $94 or so, which means he's only contributed $94 back into the economy, not $100.
Since the purpose of taxes is to pay for government programs, let the government charge for the use of it's services, and stop tying that to other things to disguise it.
Let me keep 100% of my money, spend it as I like, and then tell me how much I have to spend if I want government services. I'll pick the ones I want, and pay for them.
I'll donate some of the remaining money to charity, to help those who are less fortunate than myself pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
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Re:American Television - Killed by commerce
on
15 Minutes
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· Score: 2
I see xenophobia is alive and kicking in land of Uncle Sam...
Thinking British people pay stupid taxes for lousy service isn't xenophobic. It's taxophobic, perhaps, but not xenophobic.
To be xenophobic, I'd have to hate and/or fear British people. I don't have any opinions about British people as a whole.
What I do hate and fear is people who think we should institute things in this country just because they've been tried in the UK and not been proven to actually kill anybody.
British TV may be highly regarded in many countries with even worse TV, but in the US, it's regarded as just one more bit of proof that government doesn't do anything well, and should be relied upon to do only those things that can't be done by anything else but a government.
The thought pattern that says "if the government can do something, and pay for it by taking my money away at gunpoint, they should do it" is exactly why we threw them out. That's a fact, regardless of some idiot thinking it was a troll.
I've seen quite a lot of British TV. I even like some shows, such as Monty Python, Benny Hill, Dr. Who, Blake's Seven, AbFab, etc. But I would not consider it a positive change in my life if my 50-some-odd channels of cable disappeared and were replaced by 15 channels of the sort of drek the Queen's subjects are exposed to on a daily basis, and charged for whether they like it or not.
I'd far rather watch a few commercials in return for Star Trek, Stargate SG-1, Andromeda, Saturday Night Live, Letterman, Dexter's Lab, etc.
Hell, if we only had 15 channels like this presumptuous Brit wishes to hand us from on high, would we have a CNN? A CSPAN? A Sci-Fi Channel? Cartoon Network? The fricken' Food Channel?
No thanks, Lizzy; keep your government monopoly, we'll pull the half a dozen good shows out of the morass and run 'em on PBS from time to time.
Also, many people seem to forget that you have NO rights until you become a voting citizen in the republic, ie you turn eighteen.
The primary reason they forget that is that it isn't true. The 14th amendment guarantees that, too.
If that weren't true, the 26th amendment wouldn't make any sense; why make it clear that a right only extends to citizens who are 18 years of age or older, if there are no citizens less than that age?
Don't feel bad, I got smacked down in Constitutional Law class in college for thinking the same thing, and I'm American.
What backs it up, when the number of vehicles on the system won't be enough to congest it for some time?
You can't have it both ways; either you are wrong in your argument that everybody will use it right away (thus eliminating the need for continuing to expand the Interstates in parallel, thus necessitating tax increases) or you are wrong in your argument that they WON'T use it right away (thus eliminating the need for expanding the entrance system).
Which is it?
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Re:What assumptions? They're listed in the article
on
Fiddler on the RUF
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· Score: 2
Why would they be so big? They're one lane in each direction, so two lanes wide. At worst they'd need to be like a short section of elevated freeway.
Yeah, that's another thing; you think you can turn the existing multi-lane 70mph entrances into one lane of 18mph, and this will IMPROVE things?
It'll be backed up for several miles behind each entrance, and *THAT* will require lots of new road capacity for several miles behind each entrance.
And at the exits, same deal; you'll be stacking them up at 18mph. The traffic heading for those exits can't go 70mph, it'll have to slow down to 18.
Gridlock, only now it's in one lane and can't be bypassed.
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Re:What property? It goes in *highway medians*.
on
Fiddler on the RUF
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· Score: 2
Because the rails can go up in the air above existing highway medians (and perhaps also above major surface roads), the land-acquisition costs for this system would be nil.
You're making some bad assumptions:
First, that the medians are available. Here in Orlando, they're already spoken for, there won't be medians soon.
Second, you're forgetting that the interchanges to get the RUFs on and off this thing will be HUGE in the US.
Third, you're assuming that while this is being built, we won't have to keep expanding the roads. The fact is we'll be expanding the roads the entire time this is built, *AND* for quite a while afterwards, until it's adopted by a large portion of the population, which is very unlikely.
In Denmark, where the whole country only has 5 million people, this makes sense. In the US, where we've got individual cities larger than that, and lots of cities of comparable population (like Orlando, which is 1/3 the population of Denmark), it's just bewilderingly orders of magnitude harder to integrate.
I think it's completely infeasible. Nobody is going to want to buy another car *AND* pay an extra $10,000 a year in taxes, just so they can sit in a dinky little weird-ass car with a wall in the middle and a pussy engine.
If you don't charge an arm and a leg in increased taxes, then it'll take 40 years to build the damn thing.
Let me see this work in London, and I'll believe it. Until then, keep it on that side of the pond, thanks.
First of all, you're wrong about costs rising. Generally speaking, business costs decline over time. It's called technology.
Your information is about 30 years out of date, and only applies to small manufacturing firms nowadays.
We're talking about huge corporations here, that aren't involved chiefly in manufacturing.
Their people's salaries go up. The costs of their replacement machinery go up. The costs of their replacement computers stays static, but they have continuing upgrade costs for software if they use Microsoft products.
Two questions - 1) if this "problem" has been around since the mid-80's why has it never been exploited?
Because it's been fixed for quite a while in most OSes. There are still some exceptionally stupid OSes that are vulnerable to it, but nobody who knows beans about security uses them.
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Re:This is no different than an interstate
on
Fiddler on the RUF
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· Score: 2
If there's an emergency, you can deal with it without slowing down -- you're not driving the RUF while it's on the rail. It would be a whole lot easier to deal with a choking baby (or a driver that has a heart attack, as happened near here recently) in a RUF than in a car doing 70MPH in the fast lane of a crowded freeway.
Ok, now I'm in the back seat taking care of baby, and suddenly, we reach my interchange and I'm dumped into the road back on manual drive. But I'm in the back seat...
I *HAVE* dealt with this emergency on an Interstate in the fast lane at 70 MPH. I slowed and pulled into the breakdown lane, got out, and saved my son's life. No problem.
This system isn't just for the U.S. -- it's starting in Denmark where the inventor lives
And I'm saying that in 20 years, it still won't be in the US in any meaningful way. If Denmark likes it, more power to 'em.
* The interstate system hasn't always existed, either. It took quite a while to build
Yes, but it's ALREADY HERE. The money has been spent. We don't need to spend it again on this Danish whim.
* Perhaps most significantly, this isn't intended to replace the entire interstate system. It's meant for sprawling urban areas, where interstates have already proven they're not up to the task at hand.
All those objections I made based on the situation where I live were in that context; I live in a sprawling urban area, Orlando, about 1/3 the population of Denmark.
What works in Denmark doesn't necessarily apply to the US. We have states larger than Denmark, and we have "sprawling urban areas" with higher population than their entire country.
And we have a robust Interstate highway system going to all of it.
If I were going to Tampa or Jacksonville, I'd be interested in this (if they made the damn cars big enough to transport my stuff), but not so much so that I'd be willing to pay the massive tax increases necessary to build this parallel system, and not so much so that I'd be willing to be a party to the massive invasion of other people's property rights to build it.
...especially since the brilliance of The Cryptonomicon is the degree to which it blended clearly historical facts with clearly fictional events. I found myself wondering time and again where the line was drawn between what was made up and what was not.
You should also read the Illuminatus Trilogy. Some key bizarre events in it are factual, but it's pure fiction.
Alright, first, ICMP is a necessity. It is the Internet Control Messaging Protocol, and is used to troubleshoot network issues.
It's used for a lot more than that. It is a required protocol, all IP stacks must support it. If they don't, they aren't IP stacks, they some proprietary thing that is similar to IP.
If you wrote something with the latest version of Word Perfect, you can't open it in Word Perfect 4.2, nor can you open it in emacs or possibly in Star Office (not sure about that but you get my point).
Yes, but if you wrote something in Word Perfect 4.2, you CAN open it in the latest Word Perfect.
If you wrote something in emacs 3.5, you CAN open it in the latest emacs.
If you wrote something in Star Office 5.0, you CAN open it in the latest Star Office.
The same is not necessarily true of Microsoft Word. You often have to keep the old version around so you can use your old documents, which can mean needing two computers if the new version can't coexist with the old one.
If you have data, you can always get the md5 checksum of that data, but with the checksum only there is no way to determine what the data that produced it was, short of trying every possible input.
And as you know, even that isn't sure; there are an infinite number of inputs that will produce the same checksum, and some of those aren't going to be garbage.
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Re:American Television - Killed by commerce
on
15 Minutes
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· Score: 1
If I were a dictator charged with improving American television, I would cut down the number of channels to 15 or so, start up an organisation similar to the BBC informed by the Reithian ethos and funded by licenses paid by the end consumer, and give it perhaps 6 of these channels.
In other words, instead of funding the stations through voluntarily selling a useful product (visual impressions) to lawful consumers (the sponsors), you'd confiscate money from the viewers at the point of a gun and give it to the TV studios.
Thinking like that is why we threw you people out in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
...the US secret service has a documented history of using its snooping on its allies, mostly for the benefit of US businesses.
Can you name a major country that doesn't? Seriously, the Germans do it, the French have been caught a few times recently, the Japanese have been caught a few times. The list goes on.
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You can brag to people that you have meetings at some SGI place while they're at their local library for meetings.
The libraries here won't let you bring in computers.
Kind of makes it hard to hold an installfest.
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You are probably new to the net, but I have seen virtual communities die because of spam. It is not a pretty sight. Had you expeirenced that first hand, you would not be so soft on spammers.
New to the net? Let's see. I've been using computers since 1977, getting paid to do so since 1986.
I started my first BBS in 1981. I have been using the Internet in one form or another since 1989.
I designed and built my home town's first ISP, and administrated it until it reached over 1,500 customers, including occasionally spending an afternoon sending out cancels for my own user's Usenet spam violations.
I was my Fidonet net's NC, and served as NEC since nobody else wanted to pony up the bucks to transport the echoes. I had to, since I was the co-moderator of one.
Currently I get paid to administrate Unix systems and TCP/IP networks for Fortune 100 companies. I'm currently responsible for several hundred such systems in three data centers in as many time zones, and we're discussing taking over support for some systems in Brussels and Singapore.
I suspect I have at least as much 'net experience as you do, son.
Right except the spammers _haven't_ passed, and they have been their so long that most people have forgotten the sidewalk even existed.
A lot of fat people can walk down a given sidewalk on a given day. It still doesn't mean you're deprived of the use of the sidewalk. I get quite a bit of spam every day, and I still manage to keep up with a dozen mailing lists, several of which I moderate, and all my business-related email, as well as communicating via email with my large extended family, many of whom also work in the computer industry. Oh, and I'm about to take over as moderator of a popular web discussion site devoted to Airsoft. No, it's not AirsoftZone.
Well, then *remove* the laws that prevent us from implementing the technical solutions.
Sorry, I kind of like the First Amendment. You'll get no help from me there.
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* Alta Vista (I see that a mountain is back in the logo)
Yes, but that mountain is their debt.
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I question SGI's overall commitment to Linux.
They agreed to host our local Linux user's group meetings, and right after that our founder declared the LUG dissolved and went away.
Between the confusion on that and the change of location (they're way off the beaten path here and a lot of people couldn't find the place), we had two meetings with light attendance. This is after years of 30 to 50 people coming, and was during the summer when many of our college-student users weren't around anyway.
Based on these two small meetings, SGI told us they weren't interested in hosting our meetings anymore, because we weren't bringing enough people for them to advertise to.
That's right, their concern wasn't helping the group, it was getting people into a room where they could make sales pitches.
So if they decide next week that they can make more money on Irix than Linux, Linux is gone.
If you're going to deal with SGI, take a page from Ronald Reagan:
Trust, but verify.
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VIC-20? 3-speed? Those are for pussies.
I had to carry my abacus in my teeth while crawling on broken glass. Uphill.
But you tell that to the kids today, and they won't believe you.
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Don't compare it with violent crime, compare it with counterfeit money. Spam has the same effect on electronic communication as coutnerfeit money has on the economy.
Ridiculous. Counterfeit money allows someone to steal merchandise from merchants, without the merchant getting paid for it.
Spam's effect on electronic communication is more like a fat person's affect on your sidewalk. While he's there, you can't use the sidewalk, but once he passes, it's usable again.
If he happens to be so heavy he cracks the sidewalk, you make him pay to fix it, probably in small claims court unless he's a good person and just says "sorry, send me the bill, real sorry about that".
If a spammer breaks your box, he should have to pay to fix it. If he crashes it causing it to reboot, you should be able to collect for whatever business you lost in the time it took to reboot.
Other than that, it's an annoyance, not a crime.
Spam needs technical solutions, not legislators passing a bunch of stupid laws. We have too damn many laws in this country now, it's caused a climate in which nobody respects the law anymore because it's not possible to get through the day without violating a few.
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If you complain that sales tax is wrong on internet transactions, then it should be equally wrong on brick-and-mortar transactions.
I completely agree; sales tax is wrong on brick-and-mortar transactions, as well.
Anytime you tax something, you discourage it. Perhaps only a little, but you do, if for no other reason than the fact that person's $100 won't buy $100 worth of merchandise, but only $94 or so, which means he's only contributed $94 back into the economy, not $100.
Since the purpose of taxes is to pay for government programs, let the government charge for the use of it's services, and stop tying that to other things to disguise it.
Let me keep 100% of my money, spend it as I like, and then tell me how much I have to spend if I want government services. I'll pick the ones I want, and pay for them.
I'll donate some of the remaining money to charity, to help those who are less fortunate than myself pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
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I see xenophobia is alive and kicking in land of Uncle Sam...
Thinking British people pay stupid taxes for lousy service isn't xenophobic. It's taxophobic, perhaps, but not xenophobic.
To be xenophobic, I'd have to hate and/or fear British people. I don't have any opinions about British people as a whole.
What I do hate and fear is people who think we should institute things in this country just because they've been tried in the UK and not been proven to actually kill anybody.
British TV may be highly regarded in many countries with even worse TV, but in the US, it's regarded as just one more bit of proof that government doesn't do anything well, and should be relied upon to do only those things that can't be done by anything else but a government.
The thought pattern that says "if the government can do something, and pay for it by taking my money away at gunpoint, they should do it" is exactly why we threw them out. That's a fact, regardless of some idiot thinking it was a troll.
I've seen quite a lot of British TV. I even like some shows, such as Monty Python, Benny Hill, Dr. Who, Blake's Seven, AbFab, etc. But I would not consider it a positive change in my life if my 50-some-odd channels of cable disappeared and were replaced by 15 channels of the sort of drek the Queen's subjects are exposed to on a daily basis, and charged for whether they like it or not.
I'd far rather watch a few commercials in return for Star Trek, Stargate SG-1, Andromeda, Saturday Night Live, Letterman, Dexter's Lab, etc.
Hell, if we only had 15 channels like this presumptuous Brit wishes to hand us from on high, would we have a CNN? A CSPAN? A Sci-Fi Channel? Cartoon Network? The fricken' Food Channel?
No thanks, Lizzy; keep your government monopoly, we'll pull the half a dozen good shows out of the morass and run 'em on PBS from time to time.
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which amendment is it that says the United States Constitution applies to the states?
The 14th.
Also, many people seem to forget that you have NO rights until you become a voting citizen in the republic, ie you turn eighteen.
The primary reason they forget that is that it isn't true. The 14th amendment guarantees that, too.
If that weren't true, the 26th amendment wouldn't make any sense; why make it clear that a right only extends to citizens who are 18 years of age or older, if there are no citizens less than that age?
Don't feel bad, I got smacked down in Constitutional Law class in college for thinking the same thing, and I'm American.
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In other words, the Anna Kournikova virus could come along and wipe out Critter B.
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And so, we have to expand both, and taxes skyrocket.
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What backs it up, when the number of vehicles on the system won't be enough to congest it for some time?
You can't have it both ways; either you are wrong in your argument that everybody will use it right away (thus eliminating the need for continuing to expand the Interstates in parallel, thus necessitating tax increases) or you are wrong in your argument that they WON'T use it right away (thus eliminating the need for expanding the entrance system).
Which is it?
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Why would they be so big? They're one lane in each direction, so two lanes wide. At worst they'd need to be like a short section of elevated freeway.
Yeah, that's another thing; you think you can turn the existing multi-lane 70mph entrances into one lane of 18mph, and this will IMPROVE things?
It'll be backed up for several miles behind each entrance, and *THAT* will require lots of new road capacity for several miles behind each entrance.
And at the exits, same deal; you'll be stacking them up at 18mph. The traffic heading for those exits can't go 70mph, it'll have to slow down to 18.
Gridlock, only now it's in one lane and can't be bypassed.
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Because the rails can go up in the air above existing highway medians (and perhaps also above major surface roads), the land-acquisition costs for this system would be nil.
You're making some bad assumptions:
First, that the medians are available. Here in Orlando, they're already spoken for, there won't be medians soon.
Second, you're forgetting that the interchanges to get the RUFs on and off this thing will be HUGE in the US.
Third, you're assuming that while this is being built, we won't have to keep expanding the roads. The fact is we'll be expanding the roads the entire time this is built, *AND* for quite a while afterwards, until it's adopted by a large portion of the population, which is very unlikely.
In Denmark, where the whole country only has 5 million people, this makes sense. In the US, where we've got individual cities larger than that, and lots of cities of comparable population (like Orlando, which is 1/3 the population of Denmark), it's just bewilderingly orders of magnitude harder to integrate.
I think it's completely infeasible. Nobody is going to want to buy another car *AND* pay an extra $10,000 a year in taxes, just so they can sit in a dinky little weird-ass car with a wall in the middle and a pussy engine.
If you don't charge an arm and a leg in increased taxes, then it'll take 40 years to build the damn thing.
Let me see this work in London, and I'll believe it. Until then, keep it on that side of the pond, thanks.
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First of all, you're wrong about costs rising. Generally speaking, business costs decline over time. It's called technology.
Your information is about 30 years out of date, and only applies to small manufacturing firms nowadays.
We're talking about huge corporations here, that aren't involved chiefly in manufacturing.
Their people's salaries go up. The costs of their replacement machinery go up. The costs of their replacement computers stays static, but they have continuing upgrade costs for software if they use Microsoft products.
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Two questions - 1) if this "problem" has been around since the mid-80's why has it never been exploited?
Because it's been fixed for quite a while in most OSes. There are still some exceptionally stupid OSes that are vulnerable to it, but nobody who knows beans about security uses them.
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If there's an emergency, you can deal with it without slowing down -- you're not driving the RUF while it's on the rail. It would be a whole lot easier to deal with a choking baby (or a driver that has a heart attack, as happened near here recently) in a RUF than in a car doing 70MPH in the fast lane of a crowded freeway.
Ok, now I'm in the back seat taking care of baby, and suddenly, we reach my interchange and I'm dumped into the road back on manual drive. But I'm in the back seat...
I *HAVE* dealt with this emergency on an Interstate in the fast lane at 70 MPH. I slowed and pulled into the breakdown lane, got out, and saved my son's life. No problem.
This system isn't just for the U.S. -- it's starting in Denmark where the inventor lives
And I'm saying that in 20 years, it still won't be in the US in any meaningful way. If Denmark likes it, more power to 'em.
* The interstate system hasn't always existed, either. It took quite a while to build
Yes, but it's ALREADY HERE. The money has been spent. We don't need to spend it again on this Danish whim.
* Perhaps most significantly, this isn't intended to replace the entire interstate system. It's meant for sprawling urban areas, where interstates have already proven they're not up to the task at hand.
All those objections I made based on the situation where I live were in that context; I live in a sprawling urban area, Orlando, about 1/3 the population of Denmark.
What works in Denmark doesn't necessarily apply to the US. We have states larger than Denmark, and we have "sprawling urban areas" with higher population than their entire country.
And we have a robust Interstate highway system going to all of it.
If I were going to Tampa or Jacksonville, I'd be interested in this (if they made the damn cars big enough to transport my stuff), but not so much so that I'd be willing to pay the massive tax increases necessary to build this parallel system, and not so much so that I'd be willing to be a party to the massive invasion of other people's property rights to build it.
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Forget this old stuff, we need a Linux port of Half-life and Counter-Strike!
And Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, but that's not Sierra.
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No, Red Hat has had only one profitable quarter ever. Check out the reports on edgar.sec.gov if you have any doubts about this.
c le /0,,4661_133741,00.html
They weren't required to file reports with the SEC prior to 1999.
Here's a link for you:
http://www.internetstockreport.com/tracker/arti
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...especially since the brilliance of The Cryptonomicon is the degree to which it blended clearly historical facts with clearly fictional events. I found myself wondering time and again where the line was drawn between what was made up and what was not.
:-)
You should also read the Illuminatus Trilogy. Some key bizarre events in it are factual, but it's pure fiction.
Or so They want you to think.fnord
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Alright, first, ICMP is a necessity. It is the Internet Control Messaging Protocol, and is used to troubleshoot network issues.
It's used for a lot more than that. It is a required protocol, all IP stacks must support it. If they don't, they aren't IP stacks, they some proprietary thing that is similar to IP.
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If you wrote something with the latest version of Word Perfect, you can't open it in Word Perfect 4.2, nor can you open it in emacs or possibly in Star Office (not sure about that but you get my point).
Yes, but if you wrote something in Word Perfect 4.2, you CAN open it in the latest Word Perfect.
If you wrote something in emacs 3.5, you CAN open it in the latest emacs.
If you wrote something in Star Office 5.0, you CAN open it in the latest Star Office.
The same is not necessarily true of Microsoft Word. You often have to keep the old version around so you can use your old documents, which can mean needing two computers if the new version can't coexist with the old one.
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If you have data, you can always get the md5 checksum of that data, but with the checksum only there is no way to determine what the data that produced it was, short of trying every possible input.
And as you know, even that isn't sure; there are an infinite number of inputs that will produce the same checksum, and some of those aren't going to be garbage.
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If I were a dictator charged with improving American television, I would cut down the number of channels to 15 or so, start up an organisation similar to the BBC informed by the Reithian ethos and funded by licenses paid by the end consumer, and give it perhaps 6 of these channels.
In other words, instead of funding the stations through voluntarily selling a useful product (visual impressions) to lawful consumers (the sponsors), you'd confiscate money from the viewers at the point of a gun and give it to the TV studios.
Thinking like that is why we threw you people out in the first place.
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