the sited article is dated Sunday October 06, @20:37... October 6 of what year? This could make the difference between a random reference and verified prior art. (I'm not kidding here... Slashdot posts might classify as prior art in some patent fights).
In this case, it looks like this one was 2002 (the other option is an unlikely 1996), which is 2 years after MS filed their patent.
I'm lazy.. I hate having to use cal(1) to figure this out.
Just about every flavour of Unix and Linux has some form of the 'units' command. It can convert just about any unit to just about any other unit.... EG:
Read the opinion. There is no requirement of probable cause in the demand for one's name.
I call Bullshit!
From the decision:
Section 171.123 provides in relevant part:
1.
Any peace officer may detain any person whom
the officer encounters under circumstances which reasonably indicate that
the person has committed, is committing or is about to commit a crime.
. . . . .
3.
The officer may detain the person pursuant to this section only to ascertain his identity and the suspicious circumstances surriounding his presence abroad. Any person so detained shall identify himself, but may not be compelled to answer any other inquiry of the peace officer.
(page 2)
A few states model their statues on the Uniform Arrest Act, a model code tha permits an officer to
stop a person reasonably suspected of committing a crime and "demand of him his name, address,
business abroad and whither he is going."
(Page 4)
In Brown V. Texas [....] The Court ruled that the initial stop was not based on specific, objective
facts astablishing reasonale suspicion to believe that the subspect was involved in criminal activity.
(Page 5)
This is, perhaps a RTFA moment.
The request for ID was done in the context of what the courts call "A Terry Stop". A Terry Stop requires some
sort of cause. The decision also requires only the provision of a name. From the
wording of the decision, I get the feeling that simply a verbal provision of name might
have been enough.
Last time I upgraded, I got myself a 'real' modem with a proper UART. I don't use it much for actual dialup (only when ADSL dies, which happens about once a year), but it works real nice as a FAX modem and a computerized call-display unit.
Now I can ssh to my home box and check to see who called me today.
If you just do a linux filesystem format, this can still leave gobs of residue data on the drive. If it's a 20Gig drive, and the Linux install uses 5, then you've still got 15GB (minus inode info) of possibly interesting information floating around.
From the linux command line, 'dd if=/dev/urand of=/dev/hd{abcd]' should make life hard on most casual browsers, and the 'shred' command should thwart anybody who isn't seaching at 'secret' clearance or above.
Once you've done that, THEN you can do a Linux install.
(( FYI: for the RedHat/Fedora install disks ctrl-alt-F2 takes you to
a commandline ))
For the purposes of most people who aren't expecting the NSA to go recovering quantum residues off of your disk:
for N in 1 2 3 4 5 6 ; do
echo pass $N.. `date`
dd if=/dev/urand of=/dev/hdc
done
(/dev/hdc presumes that the soon-to-be disposed of drive is the primary drive on the secondary IDE controller. Adjust as appropriate -- eg:/dev/hda to sanitize the dos C: drive).
For those of you who don't have Linux, a copy of Knoppix will do fine,
as will using the first install disk of most distributions, and going 'Linux Rescue"
(i've tried this on RedHat.. I'll presume that others have something similar).
Many distributions now also have the 'shred' command which does a (much) more organized version of the same thing.
Oh, and did I mention "Backup any data you want to keep before trying this"?
I think that Ken Brown has been pretty much proven to be some combination of an idio, a shill, deluded and/or a psychopath. I'd think that nothing that anybody says is going to change his mind, and anybody who looks at the currently existing rebuttal's is likely to take him seriously.
Time now to go on to something that'll actually make a difference in this world... like getting the Free/Open Source comminity active in the many elections comming up this year.
"Unix System Resources" is a joke backronym to try to hide this, the initial Unix design used "/" for this purpose.
Honest to god... I'v been using UNIX for 20 years, and I've never heard 'Unix System Resourses" applied to/usr before today. (at least -- not that I remember!).
You know what they're really for?
*/bin is for binaries that you need to use the system in single user mode (i.e. no 'user' involved).
*/usr/bin is for binaries that a user might want to use, like those of your average set of applications.br>
*/usr/local/bin is for binaries that are local to the machine.
That's how they're used now, but it's not quite how it was originally used. Like I said, it's evolved over time. On Solaris, for example,/bin is symlinked to/usr/bin
I live in Canada.. (OK: I live in Vancouver, where this doesn't apply as much, but I used to live in Edmonton where it really applies.). In most of the country it can get pretty cold in th winter.
Now, if you think that I'm gonna take off my gloves at -40C just so that the RIAA can prevent me from lending my player to my Girlfriend, I've got an ice plant in the arctic to sell you.
My last 4/5 roommates have all been definite non techno-weenies (a mildly technophobic photographer, a bartender, a hairdresser, an ex sound technician and a security guard, respectively.). I've tossed them all into the malestrom that is Linux, and they've all come out happy. (My photographer roommate became a rabid Linux booster).
The biggest problem they've had with Linux has been missing functionality (e.g. my sound-tech roomate was missing the sound editing functions) that has been mostly provided with the most recent Linux software.
In my experience, Linux is ready for the prime=time desktop... The next problem is convincing the prime=time desktop user to try Linux. All of my roommates were a bit iffy about trying Linux, but they were happy once they took the plunge.
Won't these costs just be forced down onto the customers? Sure, it funds Spamhaus, but why is this a good thing for a user who doesn't have to deal with spam? I get maybe one spam e-mail a day.
Part of the reason why you get so little spam is organizations like spamhaus.
Compare the top-end $14,500 cost of spamhaus to the $400,000 price tag for one of the highest-end routers. If Spamhaus saves MSN from buying 2 more intel servers, then they'll recover their costs.
For the largest ISP's (we're talking the likes of MSN, Yahoo, etc.) this comes to about 1/4 of a full person's salary (or about 1/10th if you include secondary costs). I have a friend who pays about that for some of his servers... (we won't even start looking at what some people pay for SUNs).
Even for the medium-sized ISPs who will be asked to pay $190.. they'll probably spend almost that much processing the bill. We're talking less than the price of an XP-Professional license.
For the smallest ISPs and single users (like me) they're promising to remain free -- in fact that's why they're doing this.
I knew that I was going to get FPd on the pad!=password thing, but The two aren't completely separate. There's a bit of an equivalence in that you have a one-use set of information that is used to authenticate a transaction. -- makes life that much harder on an interloper.
(( I agree that, mathematically, they're not related ))
If the transaction is actually encrypted with the one time password before it's tranmitted, then it might even provide an additional barrier against breaching SSL.
Yes, there are a few who will hack their camera, but most of them are likely to be people who wouldn't have bought the higher price camera to begin with.
Professionals aren't likely to want to trust their bread and butter to a hack. They might buy a Rebel as a second body (which they might have anyways), and try the hack on that (as a second body). On the other hand, the few lost sales are likely to be offset by the increased sales that this article on Slashdot is likely to generate.
Case in point: Back when the APEX AD-600A Region hack was referenced on Slashdot, I (and about a half-dozen of my workmates) was one of the many people who went out to buy one specifically for this reason. To give you an idea as to just how likely I was to buy one otherwise: When I got home, I realized that I'd have to get my TV working again (it had died about 2 years previously, and I hadn't been bothered to fix it).
This isn't as big a loss as you might think. VC companies essentially play the odds, and I think that they knew that SCO was a long shot. Think about it: If there was a 10% chance that SCO would win, but at 20-1 payoff if they did, then (on average), you're looking at a 2-1 ratio. As long as you get your odds and payoffs calculated somewhere near right, then you get the win over time.
It's like being a bookie... You don't guarantee a win on any given move, but you play them off against each other until you have a win either way. You need to have a lot of bets in the air for these kinds of things to pay off in the long run -- so you can imagine what kind of money some of these people have.
That having beeen said, I'm definitely glad that they're loosing their shirt, shorts and toupé on this one.
As has been said one million times...
"The X Consortium requests that the following names be used
when referring to this software:"....
Different question...
The fact that the X consortium wants it to be called something is completely separate from the question of when people started using the (admittedly bastardized) name.
One of the errors that I see is Linux doesn't handle the read-once case very well.
Once in a while I'll do something like 'grep -r "oops"/big/filetree'. The fact of the matter is that I'm probably only reading any of that data ONCE, and it's not going to all fit in memory anyways, so I don't even gain anything if I run the grep a second time.
In a situation like that, I'd like to have some sort of 'nocache' directive that says 'Don't waste the cache with this'.
Something else that might help would be to have some sort of 'minprog' directive which would tell the swapper that a certain amount of space is reserved for 'program' data (i.e. code (including shared libs) and data), -- and that that memory shouldn't be swapped out in favour of something otherwise being read from disk. I think that this might avoid the situation that I sometimes run into of a large program (mozilla/gimp) being unresponsive after I do some other disk-intensive task (like the aformentioned recursive grep).
Things like the OS enforcing things like the RSS rlimit hints would also help. (I hadn't previously realized that it didn't).
There is far better to do than just write a stinkin' letter.
Spend a couple of hours (or a few dollars) supporting a politician who isn't (or won't be) voting for these stinking bills. Make sure that they know why you're donating your money and time. Make it an election issue when they have callins and/or town hall meetings.
If you live in/near Hatch, then make sure to spend some time supportint his rival. If you don't feel free to send money.
Look for innovative ways to support an anti-RIAA politician.
It won't just affect the RIIA. It's a really good way to generate good contacts for other issues -- It's also a good way to meet people (including of the romantic persuasion --
I've actualy ended up going out with a couple of people I'v met thru my political work, and I consider myself pretty clueless at that game.)
If everybody on slashdot spent 3 hours (or $100) on this, it would make the Rifle Association look like chicken scratch.
It's a little bit of time and/or resources that could make a big difference in the next few years -- especially given that these people are still looking at passing this legislation.
If it is, it may not be for long... Remember that IBM has moved to get SCO's copyright infringement claims thrown out. If that works, it pretty much vindicates the old method... That having been said, the changes are simply designed to make it easier to track where any new pieces of code come from without seriously impacting the speed of development
Slashdot Mirror
In this case, it looks like this one was 2002 (the other option is an unlikely 1996), which is 2 years after MS filed their patent.
I'm lazy.. I hate having to use cal(1) to figure this out.
- $ units 20thousand-furlongs light-microseconds
- * 13420.511
(the second number is the inverse of the first)/ 7.451281e-05
or:
/ 0.00029307107
"Hi! I'm from ID(tm); I understand you're looking for a weapons design consultant...".
I call Bullshit! From the decision:
This is, perhaps a RTFA moment.The request for ID was done in the context of what the courts call "A Terry Stop". A Terry Stop requires some sort of cause. The decision also requires only the provision of a name. From the wording of the decision, I get the feeling that simply a verbal provision of name might have been enough.
Now I can ssh to my home box and check to see who called me today.
For long-term mobile computing, I'd like to be able to just carry around a 1C packet of methanol to refill my computer at will.
I can just see someone cycling up to a petro-can Station pulling out a steaming laptop and yelling 'Filler up fast! I'm being slashdotted!'
From the linux command line, 'dd if=/dev/urand of=/dev/hd{abcd]' should make life hard on most casual browsers, and the 'shred' command should thwart anybody who isn't seaching at 'secret' clearance or above.
Once you've done that, THEN you can do a Linux install.
(( FYI: for the RedHat/Fedora install disks ctrl-alt-F2 takes you to a commandline ))
- for N in 1 2 3 4 5 6 ; do
(- echo pass $N
.. `date`
donedd if=/dev/urand of=/dev/hdc
For those of you who don't have Linux, a copy of Knoppix will do fine, as will using the first install disk of most distributions, and going 'Linux Rescue"
(i've tried this on RedHat.. I'll presume that others have something similar).
Many distributions now also have the 'shred' command which does a (much) more organized version of the same thing.
Oh, and did I mention "Backup any data you want to keep before trying this"?
Time now to go on to something that'll actually make a difference in this world... like getting the Free/Open Source comminity active in the many elections comming up this year.
Honest to god... I'v been using UNIX for 20 years, and I've never heard 'Unix System Resourses" applied to /usr before today. (at least -- not that I remember!).
*
*
That's how they're used now, but it's not quite how it was originally used. Like I said, it's evolved over time. On Solaris, for example, /bin is symlinked to /usr/bin
Now, if you think that I'm gonna take off my gloves at -40C just so that the RIAA can prevent me from lending my player to my Girlfriend, I've got an ice plant in the arctic to sell you.
The biggest problem they've had with Linux has been missing functionality (e.g. my sound-tech roomate was missing the sound editing functions) that has been mostly provided with the most recent Linux software.
In my experience, Linux is ready for the prime=time desktop... The next problem is convincing the prime=time desktop user to try Linux. All of my roommates were a bit iffy about trying Linux, but they were happy once they took the plunge.
Mirrors anyone??? The site's already getting slashdotted.
Well, they've been F'ing over the public and their competition for long enough that they might just get it.
Part of the reason why you get so little spam is organizations like spamhaus.
Compare the top-end $14,500 cost of spamhaus to the $400,000 price tag for one of the highest-end routers. If Spamhaus saves MSN from buying 2 more intel servers, then they'll recover their costs.
For the largest ISP's (we're talking the likes of MSN, Yahoo, etc.) this comes to about 1/4 of a full person's salary (or about 1/10th if you include secondary costs). I have a friend who pays about that for some of his servers... (we won't even start looking at what some people pay for SUNs).
Even for the medium-sized ISPs who will be asked to pay $190.. they'll probably spend almost that much processing the bill. We're talking less than the price of an XP-Professional license.
For the smallest ISPs and single users (like me) they're promising to remain free -- in fact that's why they're doing this.
I knew that I was going to get FPd on the pad!=password thing, but The two aren't completely separate. There's a bit of an equivalence in that you have a one-use set of information that is used to authenticate a transaction. -- makes life that much harder on an interloper. (( I agree that, mathematically, they're not related ))
If the transaction is actually encrypted with the one time password before it's tranmitted, then it might even provide an additional barrier against breaching SSL.
Professionals aren't likely to want to trust their bread and butter to a hack. They might buy a Rebel as a second body (which they might have anyways), and try the hack on that (as a second body). On the other hand, the few lost sales are likely to be offset by the increased sales that this article on Slashdot is likely to generate.
Case in point: Back when the APEX AD-600A Region hack was referenced on Slashdot, I (and about a half-dozen of my workmates) was one of the many people who went out to buy one specifically for this reason. To give you an idea as to just how likely I was to buy one otherwise: When I got home, I realized that I'd have to get my TV working again (it had died about 2 years previously, and I hadn't been bothered to fix it).
It's like being a bookie... You don't guarantee a win on any given move, but you play them off against each other until you have a win either way. You need to have a lot of bets in the air for these kinds of things to pay off in the long run -- so you can imagine what kind of money some of these people have.
That having beeen said, I'm definitely glad that they're loosing their shirt, shorts and toupé on this one.
Get sued by Linus for not acknowledging his trademark on Linux(tm).
The fact that the X consortium wants it to be called something is completely separate from the question of when people started using the (admittedly bastardized) name.
Once in a while I'll do something like 'grep -r "oops" /big/filetree'. The fact of the matter is that I'm probably only reading any of that data ONCE, and it's not going to all fit in memory anyways, so I don't even gain anything if I run the grep a second time.
In a situation like that, I'd like to have some sort of 'nocache' directive that says 'Don't waste the cache with this'.
Something else that might help would be to have some sort of 'minprog' directive which would tell the swapper that a certain amount of space is reserved for 'program' data (i.e. code (including shared libs) and data), -- and that that memory shouldn't be swapped out in favour of something otherwise being read from disk. I think that this might avoid the situation that I sometimes run into of a large program (mozilla/gimp) being unresponsive after I do some other disk-intensive task (like the aformentioned recursive grep).
Things like the OS enforcing things like the RSS rlimit hints would also help. (I hadn't previously realized that it didn't).
Spend a couple of hours (or a few dollars) supporting a politician who isn't (or won't be) voting for these stinking bills. Make sure that they know why you're donating your money and time. Make it an election issue when they have callins and/or town hall meetings.
If you live in/near Hatch, then make sure to spend some time supportint his rival. If you don't feel free to send money.
Look for innovative ways to support an anti-RIAA politician.
It won't just affect the RIIA. It's a really good way to generate good contacts for other issues -- It's also a good way to meet people (including of the romantic persuasion -- I've actualy ended up going out with a couple of people I'v met thru my political work, and I consider myself pretty clueless at that game.)
If everybody on slashdot spent 3 hours (or $100) on this, it would make the Rifle Association look like chicken scratch.
It's a little bit of time and/or resources that could make a big difference in the next few years -- especially given that these people are still looking at passing this legislation.
If it is, it may not be for long... Remember that IBM has moved to get SCO's copyright infringement claims thrown out. If that works, it pretty much vindicates the old method... That having been said, the changes are simply designed to make it easier to track where any new pieces of code come from without seriously impacting the speed of development