So LongHorn will have HD-DVD out of the box, and Linux will have support for all of the DVD formats available out of the box long before Longhorn is available in a box. My point still stands, that the Linux universe is much less constrained by some megalomaniac's business model.
Contingency plans are for something that is reasonably possible, with the probability of disaster being amortized over the cost of not being prepared.
Last year, the Linux community was looking at contingency plans. Last week SCO and Baystar were
fighting over who was going to to be stuck with most of SCO's rotting carcas after this is all said and done.
Even SCO is implicitly acknowledging that the end is near. Over the last year, they've gone from claiming full ownership of Unix, with partial rights to Linux and the known world (er, sorry about that last bit of hyperbole) to acknowledging that "UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group." in a press release that doesn't otherwise mention Unix or Linux.
All things said and done, I honestly do believe that the Apocalypse is more likely, in the next 5 years, than SCO winning anything material in their lawsuits -- but I'm not buying papal pardons, either.
No inside info or anything, but there has been no successful attempt on IBM or Novell's part for a summary judgement in their favor.
Novel's initial move for summary judgment was successful, but the judge gave SCO a second kick at the can.
IBM's motion for summary judgement is currently pending, and expected to be heard little while. If it succeeds, it will mean that SCO isn't just wrong, but that they're blatently wrong (I understand that it's rather rare for summary motions this early in the trial process to succeed).
Summary motion success would mean that even if you accepted SCO's versions of all the facts, they'd still be in the wrong. That's a pretty hefty burden of proof to get over.
Daimler Chrysler succeded on everything but the question of whether or not two months was too long to lay on the floor laughing.
AutoZone and RedHat are currently awaiting the (expected) thrashing at the hands of Novell and IBM, but Red Hat is chomping at the bit for a chance to take a good byte out of Darl & co.
Chances are that, by the time Longhorn comes out, Linux will have support for all of those DVD standards. I'ts pretty likely that somebody will write drivers for them for Linux (even if it's the manufacturers).
The result is that consumers and manufacturers have a real choice with Linux, whereas Windows users and OEMs are completely at the mercy of Microsoft's business plan.
If large pieces of the shuttle can survive a reentry after the shuttle has been ripped to pieces, why can't the plotonium be safely encased in something to protect it?
That's random large pieces. designing specific pieces to survive breakup and re-entry is a bit more work. It's also likely to increase the weight, and thus the cost of disposal of the waste.
investment in security will continue until the cost of the security exceeds the cost of a breach -- or until someone insists on getting some useful work done.
If I had the points I would have modded the parent insightful not funny. How we name things does taint the way that we think of them. It's a really bad idea to link patriotism with ratting out your neighbour, ignoring civil rights and secretly jailing people.
The third is that controllers to handle an increased amount of drives are orders of magnitude more expensive and you can only have 15 devices on a scsi chain. With 146gb drives that gives you a max of 2.1TB on a chain, with 250gb drives that becomes 3.7TB on a chain, yeah it's only a terabyte, a terabyte is nothing right?
If you're only worried about how much data you can put on a chain, SCSI has a two-level addressing scheme. Each 'target' (usually a drive), an have up to 8 or 15 Drives on it... It's not used very often, but I've seen some SUN enclosures that used that addressing method. In any case, that's pushing you up into the 16 and 32 terabyte range for a single chain.
As you pointed out, however, the bottleneck that you run into at that point is performance. When you're looking at performance, smaller drives have two advantages:
* More spindles means lower average latency
* more IO drives means faster overall transfer.
Simple fact of the matter is that it can take way too damn long to dump the contents of a 300GB drive -- and during that time, the drive is tied up. Far better to split that data among 4 80GB drives where only one is tied up at a time and/or you get a higher overall transfer rate if you have them properly distrubuted among controllers, etc.
At 30megabytes/second, a 300gigabyte drive is going to take almost 3 hours to dump/fill. If you're running a raid-5 system with data worth millions of dollars, thats a long time to be exposed to the possibility of a second drive failure. (I once suffered a 2-drive raid failure -- trust me, it's not pretty.).
From a manufacturer's point of view, 300GB RAID isn't a good bet. For the consumer market you can get away with a 1 year warranty... Few enough pay attention to the small print that you could probably get away with a 90 day warranty for a lot of them.
On the other hand, the kinds of businesses that like buying SCSI drives pay attention to their warranties. They'll want a 5 year term, and they'll put your feet to the fire if the drives fail in that 5 year span.
Given the lower volume, the lower profit margin and the lower reliability, it's just not worth building a 300GB drive with a 5 year warranty on a SCSI controller. It's just asking to et your foot blown off.
That's the whole point... Get those non-voting youth whipped up into a frenzy, and make sure that they get themselves registered to vote. A sudden rush of young people signing up to vote would probably be enough to get this bill killed.
Until that man himself wants out of the Senate, my guess is that he will continue to be re-elected by the blind masses here in LDS-land that follow the political directives of their church.
How much was he voted in by, and what's his competition like? What would it take to get somebody in who would be acceptable to the church, but not as anti-citizen as Hatch is?
Even if it fails, It might still be worth making an attack on this guy. The people of Utah may be blindly following their religious leaders, but they may start to be shaken if their ability to do their own stuff is seen to be at risk.
OK: According to The Federal Election Comittee, Hatch won in Utah by 66% - 32%. Getting him out would require both pulling out the interested non-voters and getting current Utah voters to change their mind about him.
This isn't impossible, but it would take a lot of work. Nontheless, it may be worthwhile taking on -- Even if a campaign makes a significant dent in his majority, it could gain the notice of the rest of the senate.
I think, however, that It'd be best for a national campaign to go after a few of his less entrenched RIIA teammates, with UTah people still trying to make a noticable dent in Hatch's electoral bunker.
Beat him over the head with a VOTING BOOTH.
on
Hatch Pushes INDUCE Act
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Among other things, it's legal.
This might be an excuse to start getting out the youth vote. I suggest the following add be placed by 'interested citizens' in his riding:
Would you like to be thrown in jail for making an MP3?
Do you want CD writers to be illegal?
Would you like your computer destroyed for sharing your own music?
Would you like VCRs to be illegal?
If Orrin Hatch has his way, all of these things may come to pass.
NOW is the time to stop him.
Get active.
Get voting
These ads should start going out as soon as possible.. Similar adds in the constituencies of other senators who are supporting this bill.
People should start putting notices on their websites about senators and congresscrittors trying to outlaw these things.
If anything will get out the youth vote, I think that this will.
If a work can stand alone WITHOUT modification to the source, then that work is NEVER a derivative of the thing it can stand seperate from.
In the literary world, you can, for example, have a collective copyright on a collection of short stories -- This would be despite the fact that each short story wourld be (clearly) copyright it's own author (and still is). The collective copyright would be as a derivative of it's consituant parts.
Although the GPL explicitly excuses the case of a loose collective (where the GPL code is simply distributed together with other semi-random works), I expect that you could apply it to the collective case where the OS is distributed as a unified working unit, even though the various modules could have been distributed as standalone (but not truly functional by themselves) pieces.
Although I would agree that it classifies as a somewhat grey area, it's definitely not light-grey enough for me to consider betting my business model on. If someone asked me, I'd tell them: "If you don't think you could survive distributing the source code to the module, then don't base your work on GPL code."
This is very distinguishable from somebody distributing a piece of hardware with absolutely no embeded OS code, and supplying a binary-only Linux module. I'd still prefer to see the source to the module, but I'd have serious doubts about being able to force the release.
1. What constitutes derived work off the source code
This still doesn't get around the fact that, if what you're distributing classifies as 'derived work', then you're caught by the GPL.
Note that the GPL can, in some cases, call on you to distribute the source code to something that -- standing by itself -- would not constitute derived code. An example might be embeded device manufacturers. Even though a Linux module, distributed on it's own, might not classify as a derivative work triggering the GPL, the entire OS, distributed as part of the device and including the seme modules could concievably classify as a derivative work, and thus require the release of the entire source (including the otherwise standalone module) to classify as GPL compliant.
As fir wgat classifies as a reasonable charge for distributing the source code, It's not going to be a big deal until the difference between what you consider unreasonable and what I consider unreasonable is less than what it would cost me to file suit and get an injunction against you (even if I do it self-represented).
If you're that far off of what most people would consider a reasonable price, chances are you're going to know.
If I thought you were way too high, but still less expensive than hiring a lawyer, chances are that I'd just get some friends to pool together the cost of a single copy and then put it up on my website and advertise it. Bandwidth is usually a cheaper revenge than legal fees.
An anarchy is without a formal leadership (or it could be said: It is formally without a leadership structure). That doesn't mean that transitory leaders will arise -- example: people to speak for the group on a certain issue / at a specific meeting, or members of a group tasked with solving a specific problem, etc.
These people might be seen (from the outside) as leaders because of what they are doing. On the inside of the group, however, they would just happen to be the people that took on that job, and were accepted in that role by the group. The fact that this specific role might be highly visible does not carry much weight within a (true) anarchy.
Nor would the fact that a similar group of people like being in (and are liked being in) some of these high-visibility roles.
Truth of the matter is that the monkey that cleans the sewers is just as important as the monkey that designed them. If either one didn't do a good job, the other's work would be all but useless.
A well-flowing anarchy will often degrade into sn effective meritocracy -- simply as a side effect of human nature.. The difference is that the 'leaders' in an anarchy have no formal leadership position or priveledge.
an ill-flowing anarchy can degrade into a nasty situation.. At that point it becomes necessary for the people in the anarchy to 'put down' such nastiness.
In general, I'd suggest that rule by power developing out of an anarchy is the creation of a heirarchy which is (once again) very different than an anarchy.
If the people want a true anarchy, it must be defended as vigorously as any other *-archy regime.
-archy refers to ruling/ordering... In this concept the ordering of leadership.
Oligarchy is the leadership of the few Hierarchy Leadership by level (height) anarchy the 'an' prefix means 'without' or 'not needing' as in anerobic bacteria (don't need air). or anachronism (outside it's time).
Anarchy is not the same as disorder. It's a situation where there are not static leaders. People might (and often do) show up to take things on, and gain respect for what they do. Other people can (and sometimes do) come in and duplicate and/or replace those other active and respecte members.
In an anarchy, one does not get respect by being a leader. One becomes an effective leader as a function of gained respect.
The early years of The Internet were especially like this. Anybody who wanted to could easily put their two bits into any discussion. Standards really became standards by use, and the years (sometimes) of discussions leading up to the creation of 'official' net standards occured because people realized that getting a consensus meant two things:
1: If everybody agreed, it would get wide implementation and acceptance very quickly.
2: If everybody agreed, there was likely not to be any big, unexpected, 'show-stoppers'.
( A side-effect was that internet protocols tended to allow a lot of freedom, such that things like the world wide web and P2P could be become centerpieces of the 'net more than a decade after the underlying protocols were designed).
I'm serious.
It worked with mortage spammers, and I'm convinced that it would work equally with 419 spammers. It attacks them via the same statistical model that they use.
Spamming is based on two sem-related statistics:
If you send your request for business/money to enough people, even an abysmally small response rate will allow you to make money.
anybody who knows about spammers knows not to respond.
What we're currently suffering under is #2: That was the initial response to spammers -- don't respond, and hope that they go away. Unfortunately, that's overwhelmed by #1. We just got it a bit wrong.
It's not that we shouldn't respond to them -- it's that we should not give them our business.
If everybody who was annoyed by spam (i.e. everybody reading this) spent 1 minute a day doing something intended to annoy the spamming community, we'd make their life hell. Remember: there's thousands of times as many of us as there are of them. 1 minute a day times the billion or so internet users out there would come to millions of man-hours would come to about 50,000 man-years per month. Even if our one-minute of work cost them an average of one second to respond to it, that would come to ovef 10,000 man=years/to deal with our counter-spamming over the next year -- and that's 24hour day years, not 8-hour shift-days.
Considering that there's only supposed to be about 100 or so hard-core spammers out there, that means that we're looking at about 100 person-years which means that (at 3 shifts/day), that each spammer would have to hire about 300 people just to shift thru our responses to find legitimate 'marks'.
And there are other things we can do to them too...
Engage them in useless conversations.
find out which credit cards they accept, and write/phone those companies asking them to dump them. (enough requests will cause them to do a profit-loss analysis)
do anything you can think of that would cause them to lose time/money/energy.
Don't let the above list limit you. Come up with your own ideas. Remember -- You don't have to spend a large ammount of time on this. More to the point, you shouldn't spend a large ammount of time on this. The strength is in the numbers.
It's a bit late now, but I'm guessing that it wouldn't have been that difficult to find someone in Washington who could print up the application and hand-deliver it.
And that turns out to be the Homeland Defence Office. they're the ones who suggested that people (read: the government) start moving away from IE. The fact that it'll cut down on the most onerous of the support hogs is only a bonus.
(honest!)
Even better yet, you could point out that all of these support calls are an example of why Motherland Defence is suggesting a move away from IE. These nasty spyware progs might just as easily be snooping government passwords, etc., but there's no time to check them all for that.
Sommerville might be able to get this case tossed on the basis of the 'unclean hands' principle... You can't go to court to protect illegal action.
If odeon's site is against the disabillity act, then it's illegal. If Sommerville's site is intended to correct, among other things, the illegality of the Odeon site, then Odeon doesn't have standing in court to attack him.
Any British legal types willing to comment (or, better yet, take on the fight?)
In the meantiome:
BOYCOT ODEON
If these guys are going to be so pig-headed and careless about their customers, write them a letter about how and why you're going to encourage your friends to use another movie site.
As they said, most of these impacts are dust particles the size of cigarette smoke.
% units 'milligram-(45000mph)^2' grams-tnt * 0.087744895 / 11.396674
In other words, for 1 milligras dust particles, each impact would have about the kinetic force of a large cap gun cap (or a very small firecracker).
On the other hand, a 1-ounce pebble would have the kinetic force of about 5 pounds of TNT compressed into an impact point less than 1cm across..... Think hole straight tru the orbiter with lots of dead instruments.
I'm guessing that the probe designers calculated the probability of a large-particle impact, and then just made the antenna as sturdy as they could afford to.
Re:Sound in Space?
on
Saturn Hailstorm
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My first reaction was "They put a friggin microphone on a spacecraft (with my second being 'and it worked??!!").
Then I read the article and found out that they were recording the em pulses resulting from the space dust being turned to plasma by the force of the impact.
As for the high gain antenna being that tough --- yeah. they seem to have designed it that way... Remember that they turned the bus (er, spacecraft) to use the antenna as a shield as they went thru the gap.It makes sense to put an extra 1/4" of armor on the antenna, since it's the biggest target on the craft and it has a really low ratio of fragile parts to block of metal (the only fragile parts I can think of would be the radio pickup and the cables... These probably got extra armor.
It's the same kind of design they put into APCs and tanks -- put the extra armor where you're most likely to get hit, then try and take any hits there. (if you're ever unfortunte enough to have to take out an APC, don't bother shooting at the front, where they have a couple extra inches of armor. Aim at the sides.)
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft plans new aggravator..
Made perfect sense to me at the time... I was just surprised that they'd put that in a press release.
So LongHorn will have HD-DVD out of the box, and Linux will have support for all of the DVD formats available out of the box long before Longhorn is available in a box. My point still stands, that the Linux universe is much less constrained by some megalomaniac's business model.
Contingency plans are for something that is reasonably possible, with the probability of disaster being amortized over the cost of not being prepared.
Last year, the Linux community was looking at contingency plans. Last week SCO and Baystar were fighting over who was going to to be stuck with most of SCO's rotting carcas after this is all said and done.
Even SCO is implicitly acknowledging that the end is near. Over the last year, they've gone from claiming full ownership of Unix, with partial rights to Linux and the known world (er, sorry about that last bit of hyperbole) to acknowledging that "UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group." in a press release that doesn't otherwise mention Unix or Linux.
All things said and done, I honestly do believe that the Apocalypse is more likely, in the next 5 years, than SCO winning anything material in their lawsuits -- but I'm not buying papal pardons, either.
Novel's initial move for summary judgment was successful, but the judge gave SCO a second kick at the can.
IBM's motion for summary judgement is currently pending, and expected to be heard little while. If it succeeds, it will mean that SCO isn't just wrong, but that they're blatently wrong (I understand that it's rather rare for summary motions this early in the trial process to succeed).
Summary motion success would mean that even if you accepted SCO's versions of all the facts, they'd still be in the wrong. That's a pretty hefty burden of proof to get over.
Daimler Chrysler succeded on everything but the question of whether or not two months was too long to lay on the floor laughing.
AutoZone and RedHat are currently awaiting the (expected) thrashing at the hands of Novell and IBM, but Red Hat is chomping at the bit for a chance to take a good byte out of Darl & co.
The result is that consumers and manufacturers have a real choice with Linux, whereas Windows users and OEMs are completely at the mercy of Microsoft's business plan.
Your move.
That's random large pieces. designing specific pieces to survive breakup and re-entry is a bit more work. It's also likely to increase the weight, and thus the cost of disposal of the waste.
investment in security will continue until the cost of the security exceeds the cost of a breach -- or until someone insists on getting some useful work done.
Oh, great -- so then he changes his company's name to Uzi Solutions, and finds Israel Military Industries gunning for him!
If I had the points I would have modded the parent insightful not funny. How we name things does taint the way that we think of them.
It's a really bad idea to link patriotism with ratting out your neighbour, ignoring civil rights and secretly jailing people.
If you're only worried about how much data you can put on a chain, SCSI has a two-level addressing scheme. Each 'target' (usually a drive), an have up to 8 or 15 Drives on it... It's not used very often, but I've seen some SUN enclosures that used that addressing method. In any case, that's pushing you up into the 16 and 32 terabyte range for a single chain.
As you pointed out, however, the bottleneck that you run into at that point is performance. When you're looking at performance, smaller drives have two advantages:
* More spindles means lower average latency
* more IO drives means faster overall transfer.
Simple fact of the matter is that it can take way too damn long to dump the contents of a 300GB drive -- and during that time, the drive is tied up. Far better to split that data among 4 80GB drives where only one is tied up at a time and/or you get a higher overall transfer rate if you have them properly distrubuted among controllers, etc.
At 30megabytes/second, a 300gigabyte drive is going to take almost 3 hours to dump/fill. If you're running a raid-5 system with data worth millions of dollars, thats a long time to be exposed to the possibility of a second drive failure. (I once suffered a 2-drive raid failure -- trust me, it's not pretty.).
From a manufacturer's point of view, 300GB RAID isn't a good bet. For the consumer market you can get away with a 1 year warranty... Few enough pay attention to the small print that you could probably get away with a 90 day warranty for a lot of them.
On the other hand, the kinds of businesses that like buying SCSI drives pay attention to their warranties. They'll want a 5 year term, and they'll put your feet to the fire if the drives fail in that 5 year span.
Given the lower volume, the lower profit margin and the lower reliability, it's just not worth building a 300GB drive with a 5 year warranty on a SCSI controller. It's just asking to et your foot blown off.
That's the whole point... Get those non-voting youth whipped up into a frenzy, and make sure that they get themselves registered to vote. A sudden rush of young people signing up to vote would probably be enough to get this bill killed.
How much was he voted in by, and what's his competition like? What would it take to get somebody in who would be acceptable to the church, but not as anti-citizen as Hatch is?
Even if it fails, It might still be worth making an attack on this guy. The people of Utah may be blindly following their religious leaders, but they may start to be shaken if their ability to do their own stuff is seen to be at risk.
OK: According to The Federal Election Comittee, Hatch won in Utah by 66% - 32%. Getting him out would require both pulling out the interested non-voters and getting current Utah voters to change their mind about him.
This isn't impossible, but it would take a lot of work. Nontheless, it may be worthwhile taking on -- Even if a campaign makes a significant dent in his majority, it could gain the notice of the rest of the senate.
I think, however, that It'd be best for a national campaign to go after a few of his less entrenched RIIA teammates, with UTah people still trying to make a noticable dent in Hatch's electoral bunker.
This might be an excuse to start getting out the youth vote. I suggest the following add be placed by 'interested citizens' in his riding:
These ads should start going out as soon as possible.. Similar adds in the constituencies of other senators who are supporting this bill.People should start putting notices on their websites about senators and congresscrittors trying to outlaw these things.
If anything will get out the youth vote, I think that this will.
In the literary world, you can, for example, have a collective copyright on a collection of short stories -- This would be despite the fact that each short story wourld be (clearly) copyright it's own author (and still is). The collective copyright would be as a derivative of it's consituant parts.
Although the GPL explicitly excuses the case of a loose collective (where the GPL code is simply distributed together with other semi-random works), I expect that you could apply it to the collective case where the OS is distributed as a unified working unit, even though the various modules could have been distributed as standalone (but not truly functional by themselves) pieces.
Although I would agree that it classifies as a somewhat grey area, it's definitely not light-grey enough for me to consider betting my business model on. If someone asked me, I'd tell them: "If you don't think you could survive distributing the source code to the module, then don't base your work on GPL code."
This is very distinguishable from somebody distributing a piece of hardware with absolutely no embeded OS code, and supplying a binary-only Linux module. I'd still prefer to see the source to the module, but I'd have serious doubts about being able to force the release.
This still doesn't get around the fact that, if what you're distributing classifies as 'derived work', then you're caught by the GPL.
Note that the GPL can, in some cases, call on you to distribute the source code to something that -- standing by itself -- would not constitute derived code. An example might be embeded device manufacturers. Even though a Linux module, distributed on it's own, might not classify as a derivative work triggering the GPL, the entire OS, distributed as part of the device and including the seme modules could concievably classify as a derivative work, and thus require the release of the entire source (including the otherwise standalone module) to classify as GPL compliant.
As fir wgat classifies as a reasonable charge for distributing the source code, It's not going to be a big deal until the difference between what you consider unreasonable and what I consider unreasonable is less than what it would cost me to file suit and get an injunction against you (even if I do it self-represented).
If you're that far off of what most people would consider a reasonable price, chances are you're going to know.
If I thought you were way too high, but still less expensive than hiring a lawyer, chances are that I'd just get some friends to pool together the cost of a single copy and then put it up on my website and advertise it. Bandwidth is usually a cheaper revenge than legal fees.
These people might be seen (from the outside) as leaders because of what they are doing. On the inside of the group, however, they would just happen to be the people that took on that job, and were accepted in that role by the group. The fact that this specific role might be highly visible does not carry much weight within a (true) anarchy.
Nor would the fact that a similar group of people like being in (and are liked being in) some of these high-visibility roles.
Truth of the matter is that the monkey that cleans the sewers is just as important as the monkey that designed them. If either one didn't do a good job, the other's work would be all but useless.
Yeah, well, that's what you get for dealing with a bunch of brain-damaged monkeys.
an ill-flowing anarchy can degrade into a nasty situation.. At that point it becomes necessary for the people in the anarchy to 'put down' such nastiness.
In general, I'd suggest that rule by power developing out of an anarchy is the creation of a heirarchy which is (once again) very different than an anarchy.
If the people want a true anarchy, it must be defended as vigorously as any other *-archy regime.
Oligarchy is the leadership of the few
Hierarchy Leadership by level (height)
anarchy the 'an' prefix means 'without' or 'not needing' as in anerobic bacteria (don't need air). or anachronism (outside it's time).
Anarchy is not the same as disorder. It's a situation where there are not static leaders. People might (and often do) show up to take things on, and gain respect for what they do. Other people can (and sometimes do) come in and duplicate and/or replace those other active and respecte members.
In an anarchy, one does not get respect by being a leader. One becomes an effective leader as a function of gained respect.
The early years of The Internet were especially like this. Anybody who wanted to could easily put their two bits into any discussion. Standards really became standards by use, and the years (sometimes) of discussions leading up to the creation of 'official' net standards occured because people realized that getting a consensus meant two things:
1: If everybody agreed, it would get wide implementation and acceptance very quickly.
2: If everybody agreed, there was likely not to be any big, unexpected, 'show-stoppers'.
( A side-effect was that internet protocols tended to allow a lot of freedom, such that things like the world wide web and P2P could be become centerpieces of the 'net more than a decade after the underlying protocols were designed).
It worked with mortage spammers, and I'm convinced that it would work equally with 419 spammers. It attacks them via the same statistical model that they use.
Spamming is based on two sem-related statistics:
What we're currently suffering under is #2: That was the initial response to spammers -- don't respond, and hope that they go away. Unfortunately, that's overwhelmed by #1. We just got it a bit wrong.
It's not that we shouldn't respond to them -- it's that we should not give them our business.
If everybody who was annoyed by spam (i.e. everybody reading this) spent 1 minute a day doing something intended to annoy the spamming community, we'd make their life hell. Remember: there's thousands of times as many of us as there are of them. 1 minute a day times the billion or so internet users out there would come to millions of man-hours would come to about 50,000 man-years per month. Even if our one-minute of work cost them an average of one second to respond to it, that would come to ovef 10,000 man=years/to deal with our counter-spamming over the next year -- and that's 24hour day years, not 8-hour shift-days.
Considering that there's only supposed to be about 100 or so hard-core spammers out there, that means that we're looking at about 100 person-years which means that (at 3 shifts/day), that each spammer would have to hire about 300 people just to shift thru our responses to find legitimate 'marks'.
And there are other things we can do to them too...
- Engage them in useless conversations.
- find out which credit cards they accept, and write/phone those companies asking them to dump them. (enough requests will cause them to do a profit-loss analysis)
- do anything you can think of that would cause them to lose time/money/energy.
Don't let the above list limit you. Come up with your own ideas. Remember -- You don't have to spend a large ammount of time on this. More to the point, you shouldn't spend a large ammount of time on this. The strength is in the numbers.It's a bit late now, but I'm guessing that it wouldn't have been that difficult to find someone in Washington who could print up the application and hand-deliver it.
And that turns out to be the Homeland Defence Office.
they're the ones who suggested that people (read: the government) start moving away from IE. The fact that it'll cut down on the most onerous of the support hogs is only a bonus.
(honest!)
Even better yet, you could point out that all of these support calls are an example of why Motherland Defence is suggesting a move away from IE. These nasty spyware progs might just as easily be snooping government passwords, etc., but there's no time to check them all for that.
Those who understand the parent would probably rate it +1funny. The rest would probably want to rate it -1 silly.
If odeon's site is against the disabillity act, then it's illegal. If Sommerville's site is intended to correct, among other things, the illegality of the Odeon site, then Odeon doesn't have standing in court to attack him.
Any British legal types willing to comment (or, better yet, take on the fight?)
In the meantiome:
BOYCOT ODEON
If these guys are going to be so pig-headed and careless about their customers, write them a letter about how and why you're going to encourage your friends to use another movie site.
On the other hand, a 1-ounce pebble would have the kinetic force of about 5 pounds of TNT compressed into an impact point less than 1cm across..... Think hole straight tru the orbiter with lots of dead instruments.
I'm guessing that the probe designers calculated the probability of a large-particle impact, and then just made the antenna as sturdy as they could afford to.
Then I read the article and found out that they were recording the em pulses resulting from the space dust being turned to plasma by the force of the impact.
As for the high gain antenna being that tough --- yeah. they seem to have designed it that way... Remember that they turned the bus (er, spacecraft) to use the antenna as a shield as they went thru the gap.It makes sense to put an extra 1/4" of armor on the antenna, since it's the biggest target on the craft and it has a really low ratio of fragile parts to block of metal (the only fragile parts I can think of would be the radio pickup and the cables... These probably got extra armor.
It's the same kind of design they put into APCs and tanks -- put the extra armor where you're most likely to get hit, then try and take any hits there. (if you're ever unfortunte enough to have to take out an APC, don't bother shooting at the front, where they have a couple extra inches of armor. Aim at the sides.)