Texas has a three-strikes misdemeanor law under which a third-offense Class B misdemeanor can be "enhanced" to a Class A. Similarly, a third-offense Class A misdemeanor can be enhanced to a third degree felony (2-10 years), so theoretical, a fifth-offense Class A felony could get you a life sentance.
Now, Class A misdemeanors are, as a general rule, fairly serious offenses, seeing as how they are punishable by up to a year in jail and/or a fine of up to $4,000. Texas's Class A misdemeanors include Aggravated Assault, Negligent Homicide, and such friendly acts as Unlawful Restraint (a 'minor' form of kidnapping) and various theft/fraud offenses involving property having $500-$1500 in value.
If someone is facing trial for a fifth offense for crimes of this nature maybe they SHOULD face a life sentence. Speaking in the abstract I really can't say.
I don't know about anybody else's state, but here in Texas:
§ 33.02. BREACH OF COMPUTER SECURITY. (a) A person commits an offense if the person knowingly accesses a computer, computer network, or computer system without the effective consent of the owner.
(b) An offense under this section is a Class B misdemeanor unless in committing the offense the actor knowingly obtains a benefit, defrauds or harms another, or alters, damages, or deletes property,...
... then the statute goes on to describe the conditions that make the offense a misdemeanor, state jail felony and various degrees of felony.
Now, let's see... Overpeer gets paid for distributing their crapware... sounds like they "obtain a benefit to me"... they know they will get paid because that's why they distribute it... sounds like "knowingly obtaining a benefit"... they know what it will do... sounds like "know2ing access"... and the adverse effects of installing adware/spyware are well-documented, so it sounds like "knowingly harming another."
Of course, getting our Republican Attorney General, who is a corporate "tool" if ever one existed, to act on such a complaint is... well survivable snowballs in hell are a better investment.
Could it be that 10 year-olds are "softer targets" than multi-billion dollar corporations?
Could it be because Ashcroft is an ultra-right-wing Republican who believes, with all his heart, in the mantra "corporation good/consumer evil?"
Could it be that sometime in his political past Ashcroft received a brib^H^H^H^Hcampaign contribution from the content oligarchy that was large enough to put him in their pocket for all eternity?
No... the correct answer is all three of the above.
I don't understand how people can complain that Windows is easier - every time someone has a problem in Windows and asks me for help I'm left wondering how I fix it whereas in Linux the tools you need are just there. I.e. if I've got a networking problem, after checking the obvious I break out tcpdump and see what traffic is actually going where, that's something I can't do in Windows so I'm left without any clue what the problem is or how to fix it.
Or recovering a trashed root filesystem after a badly-timed power flicker (this really happened to me... lights flashed during a journal commit on ext3). Took all of 2 hours or so to fix after booting up with a Debian CD1 and breaking out to a shell... with ZERO data lost. Try that with NTFS!
Grandma will still get emails like "Funnyshit.rpm" and the browser will ask if you want to install "super-search.xpi." These apps will hide themselves anywhere they can, just like they do in windows.
... which will be limited to Grandma's $HOME... not a hard thing to search and clean.
You seem not to understand the difference in security models between *n?x and Windows applications, and the security implications of Microsoft's obsession with backward compatibility. Over the years lazy coders in Windows development shops have built up such a bank of apps that REQUIRE Admin privileges that Grandma must run as Administrator, or at least be a member of the Admin group, to do what she wants to do.
*n?x apps, OTOH, are designed to function properly under the "least privilege" model. They do not require Admin privileges because they will only store stuff in the use's $HOME and they don't require privileged access to the hardware. They don't require direct access to the kernel. In short, they are "secure by design." The few apps that DO require such access have their permissions set so that normal users can't run them.
I'd be tickled to death if OS X would topple Windows, but don't hold you breath. The price point just isn't right since one company controls both the hardware and the software. Additionally, I doubt that Apple has the marketing clout that IBM and Novell have in the corporate market. The home market is peanuts compared to the Enterprise, just ask Microsoft, they've been trying to get into the data center for YEARS.
My wife Was using Win98 and IE6.1 SP whatever up until six months ago. Her IE installation got so corrupted with spyware that it wouldn't even launch, so I installed Firefox and Thunderbird with my favorite extensions (AdBlock, TTLO, User Agent Switcher, etc.) and it took her all of 3 days to fall in love with it.
I then picked up a cut-price generic Athlon box, that was some 12 times as fast as her old machine at Fry's for about $200.00, installed Fedora Core 2 on it and gave it to her. To make her feel like she had a safety belt, I also got her "Linux for Non-Geeks" which she has barely opened. Her first question when the box booted up after the install was "where's Firefox?"
She now snipes at Windows almost as much as the most zealous penguinista at your local Junior High. She will occasionally run into content on the 'net that won't load, but when she asks me about it, it's usually something designed to exploit Windows' poor security model (like ActiveX controls and browser hijacks).
She's happy with her newer, faster machine and is learning to love the penguin, but I would NEVER have done it if she wasn't: 1) willing to learn, and 2) pre-conditioned by a few months' favorable experience with Firefox and Thunderbird.
I disagree... some homeopathic treatments are effective... only they're damned few and far between...
The idea that there is a broad spectrum of effective homeopathic remedies, and that they are capable of treating AIDS is either fraudulent, delusion or intentionally and genocidally criminal (see earlier post about murder).
I don't know... my wife loves Firefox-1.0... said the popup blocker makes being on the 'net fun again... yeah, yeah, yeah, I know Opera blocka popups too, but at a cost.
Security policies at the U where I work are set by the Office of the Provost. IT is a part of Division of Academic Affairs and my boss works directly for the Dean of the College of Engineering. Enforcing the University's security policies is easy when they come from that high up.
His (my boss's) attitude is "we do not support student or faculty administered machines, other than to shut them down when they get compromised. If you want Administrator or root access to your machines, professor, you get to keep both halves when it breaks."
Of course, our favorite trick to discourage use of telnet and XDMCP is showing the prof his username and password in a sniffer log from one of his compromised machines.
... and as for system software support, I had a professor order SunPCI2 cards for his two Ultra80 workstations. I had the pleasure of installing them, except that his workstations had DVD-ROMs instead of CD-ROMs. At the time of this misadventure, the drivers for the SunPCI2 did not support installation from DVD-ROM.
After literally DAYS on the phone with one particular support engineer, I finally managed to get Win2K installed on ONE of them using an external SCSI CD-ROM, but you don't EVEN want to know what THAT took.
Anyhow, when all else failed, at his suggestion, I zipped up the disk image file from the machine that WAS working, copied it over to the other using sftp, booted up the card, changed the hostname and IP address and they were both up.
You also don't want to know what my cellphone bill was that month. All told, he stayed on the phone with me for about 48 clock hours and never once tried to dump me.
He, of course, was immediately attacked (rather childishly) by a few of the rightists in the class. All kind of fun to watch (beats the heck out of TV).
So true. One of the most entertaining classes I took in law school was "Seminar in Religion, Ethics and Law." At the start of the semester the class was made up of myself and a compatriot from the school's Civil Liberties Society, however, he wussed out and left me alone to face a dozen of the right-wing type you would expect to be attracted to a class with a name like that.
Baiting and debating the fundies all semester was SO entertaining. What made it even more fun was that the professor was a miniscule jewish lady who had been born and raised in Israel, and who delighted in pointing out all the mistranslations of the Old Testament that form such a large part of fundamentalist NewSpeak these days.
BTW, I got an "A" in the course because I was the only student in the class who used religous authority other than the Christian canon when I wrote my paper.
I seriously doubt that you can build a 2.6 kernel in a RedHat 5.[0-2] environment unless you have updated and re-architected the system to the point that it is no longer Redhat 5.[0-2]. egcs doesn't support many of the commandline options and CFLAGS used in the 2.6 source tree. Symbols have been redefined within glibc and the binutils versioning isn't even close. Add to that the changes in the module system, VM virtual machine, SMP, etc. ad nauseum and you get a picture of a system that will die in a smoking ruin when you try to boot the kernel, IF you can get it to build.
... could have fooled my wife, who seems to prefer KDE over Windows once she got oriented to the differing menu structure... and, no, she's not an IT professional...
(2) you want to plug in a new device, to your plug-and-play USB hub? ok, great, now go spend all day tracking down the driver and recompiling your kernel
... never happened to me and I hotplug webcams, digital cameras, memory card readers, etc., all the time...
(3).. insert more here
Now, I'll grant you that my wife, cited above, had the benefit of my help in making the transition from Win98 to Fedora Core 2 (I'm more the Sid Dabster type than the stereotypical "20 year-old socially retarded geek"), and she doesn't have root access to her machine, but that's the way she wanted it from the get-go. Now that she has been using Linux, exclusively, for about two months I feel confident in saying that, with minimal training, non-techies rather quickly become happy with Linux because it just seems to work (the way they want it to).
I think the key to easing the transition was when I replaced IE and Outlook Express with Firefox and Thunderbird. Once she found out about popup blockers that WORK, AdBlock, and NO browser hijacks she was a very happy camper... said it made being on the 'net fun again.
Breathe in slowly, breathe out slowly... now repeat after me... It is not patent infringement to own and use an infringing device, program or business method. It is only infringement to produce the infringing device, program or business method.
The business about end user indemnification is a non-existent tempest in a teapot. Granted, one might fall in the category of "infringer" by downloading the source and compiling the infringing software for themselves, but that argument is tenuous at best.
Second, if a dangerous patent is not already in their arsenal, it soon will be because MS possesses what amounts (for all pratical purposes) to unlimited money, so they can buy-out any number of obscure patents.
This is also a threat, but it is also an indication why software patents are a Really Bad Thing. If Microsoft spent a few hundred million buying up ALL the "potentially infringed" patents and tried to litigate them, how many would be invalidated in court? How many of them would already be cross-licensed by the "big players" in the Linux game? How many of those "big players" would step up to the plate to defend their FOSS revenue stream? I'd be willing to bet IBM would be there, given that I've recently seen reports that their Linux-based revenue stream has exceeded the revenue they derive from their OWN patent portfolio. How many Microsoft cross-licensing deals would be invalidated by filing suit (a standard poison pill included in cross-licensing contracts)?
I, along with two cohorts, admin pretty close to 100 boxes running a mixture of Linux, Solaris, Tru64 and Irix in a university environment. We host dozens of departmental and student organization websites from our servers. None of the webmasters have, nor do they need, root access.
In short, the answer to your question about overcoming the admin's "power politics play" is... you don't. My boss reports directly for the Assistant Dean of the College of Engineering. Think you can beat that kind of clout?
Our stock answer when a Professor or a student organization insists on adminning their own machine is "Fine... you break it, you get to keep both the pieces. You will get ZERO support from us." When they ask about shared root access or using sudo, the answer is "No... end of discussion."
Administration of machines connected to the public network by fat pipes belongs in the hands of professional admins, not webmasters or programmers. Besides that, if your admin is any good, he/she will already have everything set up so that you don't NEED root access, so quitcherbitchin' and get back to coding.
... and you think a best-selling sci-fi author is hurting for fundage?
Consider this, All the Honor Harrington books after about "A Short Victorious War" were released in hardcover (may have been Baen's first hardcover books, although I'm not sure about that) a year before they came out in paperback and they have still consistently made the bestseller lists. Weber may actually have MORE money than Ms. Jolie.
The inverse square law only holds for point source spherical radiators.
Errrrmmmmm.... no.
If you measure the signal strength at, say, 10 km from your nominal "big fsking dish... ", (don't want to be any closer, those things have BOATloads of gain), then again at 20 km, you will find that the signal strength is precisely (10/20)^2, or 1/4, as strong.
Beam shaping by directional radiators has nothing to do with the inverse square law. The law is an expression of the energy density of a wavefront. Double the area of the wavefront, divide the energy density by 4.
Perhaps you will understand my objection to the distribution of the Bush tax cuts when you consider this analysis of the CBO report on the Bush tax cuts.
The part that I particularly object to is this:
Taxpayers whose incomes range from $51,500 to about $75,600 saw their share of federal tax payments increase...
This is exactly the portion of the population that is most deserving of tax cuts because these are the people producing the wealth of the nation.
You said:
Making everybody equally rich is not possible.
and I agree. This is not about redistribution of wealth, it is about controlling the degree to which wealth is being concentrated in a VERY few hands. You also said:
But by trying, you have a good chance of making everyone equially poor.
This is an unproven assertion. I could just as glibly assert, with better historical backup, that running record deficits AND cutting taxes during a time of international conflict (the US is not legally in a state of war at this time, but it is effectively so) will lead to runaway inflation and economic stagnation. This is especially true where the tax cuts effectively take money OUT of an economy that is not really growing in the first place.
The current administration's economic policies are irresponsible to the point of being reckless.
Slashdot Mirror
It's geeky to the max ... but cool too
Texas has a three-strikes misdemeanor law under which a third-offense Class B misdemeanor can be "enhanced" to a Class A. Similarly, a third-offense Class A misdemeanor can be enhanced to a third degree felony (2-10 years), so theoretical, a fifth-offense Class A felony could get you a life sentance.
Now, Class A misdemeanors are, as a general rule, fairly serious offenses, seeing as how they are punishable by up to a year in jail and/or a fine of up to $4,000. Texas's Class A misdemeanors include Aggravated Assault, Negligent Homicide, and such friendly acts as Unlawful Restraint (a 'minor' form of kidnapping) and various theft/fraud offenses involving property having $500-$1500 in value.
If someone is facing trial for a fifth offense for crimes of this nature maybe they SHOULD face a life sentence. Speaking in the abstract I really can't say.
Now, let's see
Of course, getting our Republican Attorney General, who is a corporate "tool" if ever one existed, to act on such a complaint is
I don't know ... hmmmmmmm ...
... the correct answer is all three of the above.
Could it be that 10 year-olds are "softer targets" than multi-billion dollar corporations?
Could it be because Ashcroft is an ultra-right-wing Republican who believes, with all his heart, in the mantra "corporation good/consumer evil?"
Could it be that sometime in his political past Ashcroft received a brib^H^H^H^Hcampaign contribution from the content oligarchy that was large enough to put him in their pocket for all eternity?
No
Or recovering a trashed root filesystem after a badly-timed power flicker (this really happened to me
You seem not to understand the difference in security models between *n?x and Windows applications, and the security implications of Microsoft's obsession with backward compatibility. Over the years lazy coders in Windows development shops have built up such a bank of apps that REQUIRE Admin privileges that Grandma must run as Administrator, or at least be a member of the Admin group, to do what she wants to do.
*n?x apps, OTOH, are designed to function properly under the "least privilege" model. They do not require Admin privileges because they will only store stuff in the use's $HOME and they don't require privileged access to the hardware. They don't require direct access to the kernel. In short, they are "secure by design." The few apps that DO require such access have their permissions set so that normal users can't run them.
I'd be tickled to death if OS X would topple Windows, but don't hold you breath. The price point just isn't right since one company controls both the hardware and the software. Additionally, I doubt that Apple has the marketing clout that IBM and Novell have in the corporate market. The home market is peanuts compared to the Enterprise, just ask Microsoft, they've been trying to get into the data center for YEARS.
I agree with the parent poster.
My wife Was using Win98 and IE6.1 SP whatever up until six months ago. Her IE installation got so corrupted with spyware that it wouldn't even launch, so I installed Firefox and Thunderbird with my favorite extensions (AdBlock, TTLO, User Agent Switcher, etc.) and it took her all of 3 days to fall in love with it.
I then picked up a cut-price generic Athlon box, that was some 12 times as fast as her old machine at Fry's for about $200.00, installed Fedora Core 2 on it and gave it to her. To make her feel like she had a safety belt, I also got her "Linux for Non-Geeks" which she has barely opened. Her first question when the box booted up after the install was "where's Firefox?"
She now snipes at Windows almost as much as the most zealous penguinista at your local Junior High. She will occasionally run into content on the 'net that won't load, but when she asks me about it, it's usually something designed to exploit Windows' poor security model (like ActiveX controls and browser hijacks).
She's happy with her newer, faster machine and is learning to love the penguin, but I would NEVER have done it if she wasn't: 1) willing to learn, and 2) pre-conditioned by a few months' favorable experience with Firefox and Thunderbird.
I disagree ... some homeopathic treatments are effective ... only they're damned few and far between ...
The idea that there is a broad spectrum of effective homeopathic remedies, and that they are capable of treating AIDS is either fraudulent, delusion or intentionally and genocidally criminal (see earlier post about murder).
I don't know ... my wife loves Firefox-1.0 ... said the popup blocker makes being on the 'net fun again ... yeah, yeah, yeah, I know Opera blocka popups too, but at a cost.
"No occurences of 'Gates' were found in the document."
I guess Melinda doesn't like Firefox either.
Security policies at the U where I work are set by the Office of the Provost. IT is a part of Division of Academic Affairs and my boss works directly for the Dean of the College of Engineering. Enforcing the University's security policies is easy when they come from that high up.
His (my boss's) attitude is "we do not support student or faculty administered machines, other than to shut them down when they get compromised. If you want Administrator or root access to your machines, professor, you get to keep both halves when it breaks."
Of course, our favorite trick to discourage use of telnet and XDMCP is showing the prof his username and password in a sniffer log from one of his compromised machines.
I might add that this was warranty support, NOT paid-up contract support, so Sun made NO extra money from it, so don't try to tell me "Sun sucks."
After literally DAYS on the phone with one particular support engineer, I finally managed to get Win2K installed on ONE of them using an external SCSI CD-ROM, but you don't EVEN want to know what THAT took.
Anyhow, when all else failed, at his suggestion, I zipped up the disk image file from the machine that WAS working, copied it over to the other using sftp, booted up the card, changed the hostname and IP address and they were both up.
You also don't want to know what my cellphone bill was that month. All told, he stayed on the phone with me for about 48 clock hours and never once tried to dump me.
Quoth the poster:
So true. One of the most entertaining classes I took in law school was "Seminar in Religion, Ethics and Law." At the start of the semester the class was made up of myself and a compatriot from the school's Civil Liberties Society, however, he wussed out and left me alone to face a dozen of the right-wing type you would expect to be attracted to a class with a name like that.
Baiting and debating the fundies all semester was SO entertaining. What made it even more fun was that the professor was a miniscule jewish lady who had been born and raised in Israel, and who delighted in pointing out all the mistranslations of the Old Testament that form such a large part of fundamentalist NewSpeak these days.
BTW, I got an "A" in the course because I was the only student in the class who used religous authority other than the Christian canon when I wrote my paper.
Rely on library calls rather than system calls to access the kernel services, then link statically. Netscape did this for years.
I seriously doubt that you can build a 2.6 kernel in a RedHat 5.[0-2] environment unless you have updated and re-architected the system to the point that it is no longer Redhat 5.[0-2]. egcs doesn't support many of the commandline options and CFLAGS used in the 2.6 source tree. Symbols have been redefined within glibc and the binutils versioning isn't even close. Add to that the changes in the module system, VM virtual machine, SMP, etc. ad nauseum and you get a picture of a system that will die in a smoking ruin when you try to boot the kernel, IF you can get it to build.
Now, I'll grant you that my wife, cited above, had the benefit of my help in making the transition from Win98 to Fedora Core 2 (I'm more the Sid Dabster type than the stereotypical "20 year-old socially retarded geek"), and she doesn't have root access to her machine, but that's the way she wanted it from the get-go. Now that she has been using Linux, exclusively, for about two months I feel confident in saying that, with minimal training, non-techies rather quickly become happy with Linux because it just seems to work (the way they want it to).
I think the key to easing the transition was when I replaced IE and Outlook Express with Firefox and Thunderbird. Once she found out about popup blockers that WORK, AdBlock, and NO browser hijacks she was a very happy camper
Breathe in slowly, breathe out slowly ... now repeat after me ... It is not patent infringement to own and use an infringing device, program or business method. It is only infringement to produce the infringing device, program or business method.
The business about end user indemnification is a non-existent tempest in a teapot. Granted, one might fall in the category of "infringer" by downloading the source and compiling the infringing software for themselves, but that argument is tenuous at best.
Not really.
This is also a threat, but it is also an indication why software patents are a Really Bad Thing. If Microsoft spent a few hundred million buying up ALL the "potentially infringed" patents and tried to litigate them, how many would be invalidated in court? How many of them would already be cross-licensed by the "big players" in the Linux game? How many of those "big players" would step up to the plate to defend their FOSS revenue stream? I'd be willing to bet IBM would be there, given that I've recently seen reports that their Linux-based revenue stream has exceeded the revenue they derive from their OWN patent portfolio. How many Microsoft cross-licensing deals would be invalidated by filing suit (a standard poison pill included in cross-licensing contracts)?
Sounds like too big a gamble to me.
I, along with two cohorts, admin pretty close to 100 boxes running a mixture of Linux, Solaris, Tru64 and Irix in a university environment. We host dozens of departmental and student organization websites from our servers. None of the webmasters have, nor do they need, root access.
... you don't. My boss reports directly for the Assistant Dean of the College of Engineering. Think you can beat that kind of clout?
... you break it, you get to keep both the pieces. You will get ZERO support from us." When they ask about shared root access or using sudo, the answer is "No ... end of discussion."
In short, the answer to your question about overcoming the admin's "power politics play" is
Our stock answer when a Professor or a student organization insists on adminning their own machine is "Fine
Administration of machines connected to the public network by fat pipes belongs in the hands of professional admins, not webmasters or programmers. Besides that, if your admin is any good, he/she will already have everything set up so that you don't NEED root access, so quitcherbitchin' and get back to coding.
Hell, I'd vote for Bush after all if my doing so will get him to ride that missile all the way to impact!
Vote for a Free America on 11-2-2004!
Mod me flamebait if you want
Consider this, All the Honor Harrington books after about "A Short Victorious War" were released in hardcover (may have been Baen's first hardcover books, although I'm not sure about that) a year before they came out in paperback and they have still consistently made the bestseller lists. Weber may actually have MORE money than Ms. Jolie.
How about flooding the P2P networks with files that it is LEGAL to redistribute?
...
THEN we can make the President's "Abu Ghraib" argument (disregard all these memos about torture, it's just a few bad apples)
Errrrmmmmm
If you measure the signal strength at, say, 10 km from your nominal "big fsking dish
Beam shaping by directional radiators has nothing to do with the inverse square law. The law is an expression of the energy density of a wavefront. Double the area of the wavefront, divide the energy density by 4.
The part that I particularly object to is this:
This is exactly the portion of the population that is most deserving of tax cuts because these are the people producing the wealth of the nation.
You said:
and I agree. This is not about redistribution of wealth, it is about controlling the degree to which wealth is being concentrated in a VERY few hands. You also said:
This is an unproven assertion. I could just as glibly assert, with better historical backup, that running record deficits AND cutting taxes during a time of international conflict (the US is not legally in a state of war at this time, but it is effectively so) will lead to runaway inflation and economic stagnation. This is especially true where the tax cuts effectively take money OUT of an economy that is not really growing in the first place.
The current administration's economic policies are irresponsible to the point of being reckless.