Library changes don't effect running programs that have already loaded the libraries. The file on disk is updated; the program won't be linked against new libraries until it is restarted.
Sure, but what about other critical (non-library) files? Firefox always seems to fail badly when the package gets updated underneath it. It would be good if it just said "Firefox got updated and needs to restart" but no, instead the renderer just fails with odd messages about missing layout files etc.
Also what about security fixes in libraries? The old running process will still be linked to the insecure library until it gets restarted, which does not necessarily happen when a dependency is updated.
Perhaps the amount of testing that is required to make sure all packages can be properly and securely updated while a process is running outweighs the advantage of being able to do that in the first place? Maybe there is a way of automatically testing for this? But this problem with Firefox (and others) failing when an update happens has been an issue now for years, and it has not been fixed. It is hardly surprising that people are now considering more reliable solutions to finally fix this issue.
Hardware doesn't always come back up when you issue 'reboot'
It would be nice if, for non-kernel updates, the updater could switch runlevel, install the updates, then start everything back up again without actually terminating the kernel. And for kernel updates, it would be nice if the running kernel could just kexec the new one. That is not what is planned initially, but maybe it will happen somewhere down the road.
sometimes you have a component such as a RAID card that hates warm boots, and will fail to come up properly after a reset until you cold boot.
The solution in that case is to replace the flaky hardware. It is not financially effective to run systems on hardware that is known to fail on reboot.
So too big to fail? Sounds like these big manufacturing companies need to be broken up.
There is a big difference between a) a company declining over time, and b) what would happen if the government prevented a large consumer electronics company from selling its wares, thus forcing it into rapid failure, probably to the point of bankruptcy within days as the stock crashes.
Having said that, politically speaking these companies probably are "too big to fail"; can you imagine politicians standing idly by if some foreign competitor ever got a complete sales ban on iPhones? I bet patent law would be reformed within weeks to "protect American jobs".
I think that this may well be illegal, because even if you consent, the server at the other side of the connection hasn't consented. That means that at least one party to the communication is having their encrypted data intercepted and decrypted by a third party without their knowledge or consent. Wiretap laws apply to both communicating parties. Not aware of any case law, someone needs to actually Sue cisco bluecoat or one of the other ssl intercepting proxy makers to establish legality.
Would the alleged crime be illegal in the UK? Yes.
Please cite the law in question and show how it applies to Assange's specific behavior of not wearing a condom after promising he would.
It does not matter - UK law allows extradition for an alleged offence even if it is not recognised under UK law:
"The Extradition Act 2003, in implementing the European Arrest Warrant scheme, effectively abolishes dual criminality for extradition requests within the EU in respect of 32 categories of offences listed in the European Framework. This means that for these offences a person sought by an EU country can be extradited even if the alleged offence is not one recognised in the UK." http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/human-rights/justice/extradition/index.php
Yes, Nokia was failing in the smart phone market as Symbian was dying, but the answer was clearly not to move to an unproven system platform that had low market share and wouldn't be ready for another year. They could've licensed Android and had some (>10%?) of the smart phone market by now, they could've chosen a dual-Android-Windows strategy as other mobile manufacturers have done; instead, Elop chose to move exclusively to Windows Phone, a completely unproven platform with single-digit market share. It was an incredibly risky move, one that would only pay off for Nokia if Microsoft managed to capture some significant percentage of the market - and even then, they would still be competing against other hardware manufacturers - just as they would've had to if they had chosen to support Android. I don't really see what Nokia gains for this partnership with Microsoft, it's like being stuck in a one-sided open relationship.
How is China capitalist? It is certainly more capitalist than it was 10 years ago
It depends on how you define capitalism. 10 years ago I watched ARM Chairman Robin Saxby give a keynote speech where he said, "China is wonderful - it's the most capitalist country on Earth." What he meant was that, regardless of the central planning, China was actually a very good environment for doing business. Chinese suppliers were very competitive, and producing low price goods and materials. There were very limited regulations on employment, wages, manufacturing etc. and no need for employers to pay employee taxes, provide health care etc. China didn't even have free education for all children until 2006. That "central planning" that some people despise has led to China having a modern and efficient infrastructure, which in turn makes business more efficient.
In China, you can hire a person for $200/month, work them 100 hours a week, and fire them on the spot. That is a level of "capitalism" unmatched in Europe or the U.S.
The good thing about this will be that eventually all socialism will end, which is great
Rising unemployment will lead to more socialism, not less. The more people are unemployed and destitute, the more people will vote for a government that promises to look after them (socialism) rather than throwing them to the wolves. The only way you can have your dream of "no socialism" is either to make every person employed and wealthy, and thus have no desire or need for government support, or get rid of democracy and instead turn to fascism.
U.S. Congress 1784: "standing armies in time of peace are inconsistent with the principles of republican government, dangerous to the liberties of a free people, and generally converted into destructive engines for establishing despotism."
This particular move may be clever marketing, but they also have a recent history of ambition and innovation beyond what you'd expect from a medium sized Australian consumer electronics retailer.
Those companies would make the same request where ever the app was hosted, wether it Google Play or any other app store.
A request to honor a U.S. patent has no legal force outside of the U.S., so foreign app stores would be fine. Obviously Google operates in the U.S. and so might choose to comply, but then again, maybe not - they have refused similar requests to remove content from their search engine unless there is a court order.
According to the MPAA, U.S. government, etc. these digital files are the same as physical property, and under the Fifth Amendment "No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Note the wording - it doesn't state that the government must actually have seized the property in question (which the government argues they did not do) - it must merely have caused a person to be deprived of their property. By their own logic, through the actions of the government, Mr. Goodwin has been deprived of his property, and without his right to a jury trial.
But the government argues that they aren't liable because they only copied certain servers, and a forensic expert could retrieve the original files with access to the servers and hard disks. This is like arguing that the government can seize your car from the garage and dismantle it into thousands of parts, but that they haven't deprived you of your property, because you are free to hire a mechanic (at great cost) to put it all back together again.
On the other hand, suppose you leave some property in the safe of your lawyer, who is subsequently arrested for committing some serious crime. You have now been deprived of your property, but it still exists in the safe. In this case, the government would not have a liability to release a criminal in order to let him open his safe and retrieve your belongings. I think that the government might win this one - if they are willing to let Mr. Goodwin have access to the servers, which they say they are. The Fifth Amendment does not require that the government ensure that you have access to your property that you have left in the care of another person, it only requires them to not be the ones depriving you of it.
The other big issue from the article is that the U.S. government plans to extradite Kim Dotcom and the employees of Megaupload (including web developers etc.) so that they can be charged with criminal copyright infringement in the U.S. Can you imagine what the outcry would be like if any other nation tried to extradite Americans working for a U.S. based file hosting company? What if British prosecutors decide to extradite the developers of {Dropbox,Google Drive,etc.} because some users were sharing episodes of Doctor Who? Most people support extraditions for serious offences like murder, but when it starts to be used for frivolous things like copyright infringement, that support is going to disappear.
Non resident shareholders and trusts are not liable to pay income tax, so under your scheme there would be no tax at all on companies wholly owned by non residents (like google, Facebook etc in the UK, as these are Irish resident). Also, as someone else also pointed out, there is the issue of capital gains on share trading (not all companies pay dividends, or even salaries)
I'd rather just go off actual sales if Samsung actually released any.
It's not just Samsung - Apple also does not release its monthly sales figures for the UK and other regions. That's why all of the media cited figures are just estimates; the uSwitch mobile tracker is based on actual sales from one of the most popular price comparison sites in the UK, so perhaps it has more validity than quoting some random analyst company.
No one should dismiss the likelihood of rogus developers submitting changes to key components of popular distros like Ubuntu to exploit. Combined with a MITM attack, your Ubuntu system is owned. This is one reason I no longer use Ubuntu.
Do you have any evidence that this was the action of a rogue developer? By your logic, you must no longer use a computer, as the "rogue" developer issue is one that potentially affects all software.
Apple claimed that the new phone, which is yet to go on sale in the US but went on sale in Australia last week, could cause it "irreparable harm," citing press reports that mobile companies had already sold more than nine million units in pre-orders.
Microsoft currently doesn't make money on anything but Windows and Office -- everything else is either runs at loss, or has so much money sunk in it while it was being developed or ran at loss, it will take significant amount of time to turn profit.
Citation? Exchange - for example - would appear to be a very profitable product, XBox has been hugely profitable for the last 5 years
Microsoft almost always supports other platforms if it has enough marketshare and if they think they can make money off it.
Microsoft will not support other platforms if they pose a real threat to their core product of Windows+Office, but they will support other platforms if it helps to maintain the appearance of competition and hence keep antitrust regulators at bay. Having an Apple desktop taking 5% of the global market is acceptable if it means that Microsoft gets the other 95%, and when accused of having a monopoly, they can point to Apple as evidence of a competitive alternative. A duopoly with a single-digit market share competitor is better than being subject to antitrust regulators.
I don't mean "was bought out", "was merged", or "had its intellectual property sold off". I mean, straight-up died.
A bankruptcy without asset selling isn't likely to happen... Any company that is large will, by definition, have some assets (employees, customers, buildings, land) that are worth scooping up - so as it goes bankrupt, someone else will buy it out for those assets. But selling a corpse does not make a dead company live again. See Silicon Graphics, SCO Group etc.
Funnily enough, I used to have legitimate access to a private key that could be used to load firmware onto a certain brand of credit card payment terminals. So did hundreds of other developers over the years - the key was required to do any form of development, but once you had it, you could reprogram any device in the field to grab card details, pin numbers, modify transactions etc. It was only the goodwill and honesty of the developers that prevented the key from being leaked. I'm sure there are some companies that work hard to protect their private keys and hold those with access accountable, but there are also those who handout private keys to internal staff and contractors alike.
grub will no longer be able to load anything. grub has to be signed, and it will also only load a kernel that is signed, and require device drivers that are signed.
I was just wondering about that: does Red Hat have a plan for signing external drivers? Like those from NVidia, ATI, etc.? This might encourage companies to incorporate their drivers into the upstream Linux sources.
In order to understand climate change as a scientific subject, you need differential equations, statistics, thermodynamics, and computational modeling.
It seems like you have serious gaps in your science education. Heliocentrism has been been around for more than 2000 years.
But it wasn't widely accepted, and there was no mathematical model, which is the standard that you set for it being "scientific". Wikipedia:
The notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun had been proposed as early as the 3rd century BC by Aristarchus of Samos,[2] but had received no support from most other ancient astronomers.
It was not until the 16th century that a fully predictive mathematical model of a heliocentric system was presented, by the Renaissance mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic cleric Nicolaus Copernicus of Poland, leading to the Copernican Revolution. In the following century, Johannes Kepler elaborated upon and expanded this model to include elliptical orbits, and supporting observations made using a telescope were presented by Galileo Galilei.
In the 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus De revolutionibus presented a full discussion of a heliocentric model of the universe in much the same way as Ptolemy's Almagest had presented his geocentric model in the 2nd century. Copernicus discussed the philosophical implications of his proposed system, elaborated it in full geometrical detail, used selected astronomical observations to derive the parameters of his model, and wrote astronomical tables which enabled one to compute the past and future positions of the stars and planets. In doing so, Copernicus moved heliocentrism from philosophical speculation to predictive geometrical astronomy
Details of the claims and counterclaims involve lengthy and arcane statistical arguments, so let's skip straight to the 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science (pdf). The academy was asked by Congress to assess the validity of temperature reconstructions, including the hockey stick.
The report states: "The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world".
Most researchers would agree that while the original hockey stick can - and has - been improved in a number of ways, it was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading up to the 20th century than the hockey stick, but none suggest that it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of the 20th century.
It is true that there are big uncertainties about the accuracy of all past temperature reconstructions, and that these uncertainties have sometimes been ignored or glossed over by those who have presented the hockey stick as evidence for global warming.
Climate scientists, however, are only too aware of the problems (see Climate myths: It was warmer during the Medieval period), and the uncertainties were both highlighted by Mann's original paper and by others at the time it was published.
Update: as suggested by the academy in its 2006 report, Michael Mann and his colleagues have reconstructed northern hemisphere temperatures for the past 2000 years using a broader set of proxies than was available for the original study and updated measurements from the recent past.
The new reconstruction has been generated using two statistical methods, both different to that used in the original study. Like other temperature reconstructions done since 2001 (see graph), it shows greater variability than the original hockey stick. Yet again, though, the key conclusion is the same: it's hotter now than it has been for at least 1000 years.
In fact, independent evidence, from ice cores and sea sediments for instance, suggest the last time the planet approached this degree of warmth was during the interglacial period preceding the last ice age over 100,000 years ago. It might even be hotter now than it has been for at least a million years.
Further back in the past, though, it certainly has been hotter - and the world has been a very different place. The crucial point is that our modern civilisation has been built on the basis of the prevailing climate and sea levels. As these change, it will cause major problems.
My question is where did the money for the C&C servers come from?
My question is: is the U.S. government liable for the costs incurred by Microsoft and JMicron and Realtek for having to replace their stolen signing certificates? What about the cleanup costs for companies infected by Stuxnet etc.?
And what if someone can modify Flame to deliver a more devastating payload? The components of Flame are now signed with a Microsoft certificate, if there is any vulnerability that allows it to be co-opted to spread other malware, is the U.S. government going to be liable? I'm pretty sure that if any normal citizen stole a certificate, and wrote malware and distributed malware based on that, then it would be considered a criminal offence.
The cause of the war has nothing to do with the conditions of surrender. It is entirely possible for both claims to be true: that both the start of the war was legitimate, and the conditions of surrender many years later were unacceptable.
There would be no conditions for surrender if the war had not started. It is that simple.
Analogy time: I make a cheese sandwich. I offer to sell it to you for the price of $1 million. You refuse, because those terms of sale are unacceptable to you. Now, it is true that I couldn't have offered to sell you the cheese sandwich if I had never made it in the first place. However, this has nothing to do with the terms of sale. I could have offered to sell it for $1, or some other terms that would have been acceptable. The creation of the cheese sandwich and the terms of sale are independent, even though one must causally predate the other. It is possible for both to be true at the same time: that my creation of the cheese sandwich was legitimate, and that the sale price of $1 million was unacceptable to you.
First a designer is free to reuse pieces and parts of past designs in new ones.
Most of these viral copies have been completely deactivated over time via various mutations (not necessarily within the copy of virus DNA, but also in the regions around it), which is why we no longer suffer from effects of those viruses. In the chimp case, every copy of PtERV1 has been deactivated. So this is not a case of reuse, we are talking about extinct viruses that are present in both chimp and human DNA.
there has obviously been interactions between virus and other species that has occurred in the past.
So you are willing to accept that viruses can insert genes into DNA, and extract genes from DNA, and thus gene transfer occurs between species? And that genes become mutated over generations? Sounds a lot like evolution. But anyway, this still does not explain why chimps and humans have the same inactive viruses in the same places in their DNA...
Third, finding small sequences of DNA that match when you only have 4 building blocks is not so hard to imagine given that they are not claiming a full copy of the virus, only small fragments.
Actually, some of the copies are complete enough that the researchers have extracted the virus and resurrected the extinct virus. We are not talking about a few base pairs that happen to correspond between human and chimp DNA, we are talking about hundreds of copies of endogenous retroviruses (each ~500 base pairs long) occurring in the same place in human and chimp DNA. 40 out of the 42 viruses found in chimp DNA are also found in humans. The probability of that occurring by chance is infinitesimally small. The answer is either common descent, or that your designer deliberately put deactivated copies of the same viruses in the same places in both chimp and human DNA. Which brings me back to the question, if that is what you believe, then why would he do that? Why would an omnipotent creator put hundreds of the same copies of deactivated viruses into both chimp and human DNA?
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Library changes don't effect running programs that have already loaded the libraries. The file on disk is updated; the program won't be linked against new libraries until it is restarted.
Sure, but what about other critical (non-library) files? Firefox always seems to fail badly when the package gets updated underneath it. It would be good if it just said "Firefox got updated and needs to restart" but no, instead the renderer just fails with odd messages about missing layout files etc.
Also what about security fixes in libraries? The old running process will still be linked to the insecure library until it gets restarted, which does not necessarily happen when a dependency is updated.
Perhaps the amount of testing that is required to make sure all packages can be properly and securely updated while a process is running outweighs the advantage of being able to do that in the first place? Maybe there is a way of automatically testing for this? But this problem with Firefox (and others) failing when an update happens has been an issue now for years, and it has not been fixed. It is hardly surprising that people are now considering more reliable solutions to finally fix this issue.
Hardware doesn't always come back up when you issue 'reboot'
It would be nice if, for non-kernel updates, the updater could switch runlevel, install the updates, then start everything back up again without actually terminating the kernel. And for kernel updates, it would be nice if the running kernel could just kexec the new one. That is not what is planned initially, but maybe it will happen somewhere down the road.
sometimes you have a component such as a RAID card that hates warm boots, and will fail to come up properly after a reset until you cold boot.
The solution in that case is to replace the flaky hardware. It is not financially effective to run systems on hardware that is known to fail on reboot.
So too big to fail? Sounds like these big manufacturing companies need to be broken up.
There is a big difference between a) a company declining over time, and b) what would happen if the government prevented a large consumer electronics company from selling its wares, thus forcing it into rapid failure, probably to the point of bankruptcy within days as the stock crashes.
Having said that, politically speaking these companies probably are "too big to fail"; can you imagine politicians standing idly by if some foreign competitor ever got a complete sales ban on iPhones? I bet patent law would be reformed within weeks to "protect American jobs".
I think that this may well be illegal, because even if you consent, the server at the other side of the connection hasn't consented. That means that at least one party to the communication is having their encrypted data intercepted and decrypted by a third party without their knowledge or consent. Wiretap laws apply to both communicating parties. Not aware of any case law, someone needs to actually Sue cisco bluecoat or one of the other ssl intercepting proxy makers to establish legality.
Would the alleged crime be illegal in the UK? Yes.
Please cite the law in question and show how it applies to Assange's specific behavior of not wearing a condom after promising he would.
It does not matter - UK law allows extradition for an alleged offence even if it is not recognised under UK law:
"The Extradition Act 2003, in implementing the European Arrest Warrant scheme, effectively abolishes dual criminality for extradition requests within the EU in respect of 32 categories of offences listed in the European Framework. This means that for these offences a person sought by an EU country can be extradited even if the alleged offence is not one recognised in the UK." http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/human-rights/justice/extradition/index.php
Nokia threw themselves off the cliff.
Yes, Nokia was failing in the smart phone market as Symbian was dying, but the answer was clearly not to move to an unproven system platform that had low market share and wouldn't be ready for another year. They could've licensed Android and had some (>10%?) of the smart phone market by now, they could've chosen a dual-Android-Windows strategy as other mobile manufacturers have done; instead, Elop chose to move exclusively to Windows Phone, a completely unproven platform with single-digit market share. It was an incredibly risky move, one that would only pay off for Nokia if Microsoft managed to capture some significant percentage of the market - and even then, they would still be competing against other hardware manufacturers - just as they would've had to if they had chosen to support Android. I don't really see what Nokia gains for this partnership with Microsoft, it's like being stuck in a one-sided open relationship.
How is China capitalist? It is certainly more capitalist than it was 10 years ago
It depends on how you define capitalism. 10 years ago I watched ARM Chairman Robin Saxby give a keynote speech where he said, "China is wonderful - it's the most capitalist country on Earth." What he meant was that, regardless of the central planning, China was actually a very good environment for doing business. Chinese suppliers were very competitive, and producing low price goods and materials. There were very limited regulations on employment, wages, manufacturing etc. and no need for employers to pay employee taxes, provide health care etc. China didn't even have free education for all children until 2006. That "central planning" that some people despise has led to China having a modern and efficient infrastructure, which in turn makes business more efficient.
In China, you can hire a person for $200/month, work them 100 hours a week, and fire them on the spot. That is a level of "capitalism" unmatched in Europe or the U.S.
TIME: Why China Does Capitalism Better than the U.S.
The good thing about this will be that eventually all socialism will end, which is great
Rising unemployment will lead to more socialism, not less. The more people are unemployed and destitute, the more people will vote for a government that promises to look after them (socialism) rather than throwing them to the wolves. The only way you can have your dream of "no socialism" is either to make every person employed and wealthy, and thus have no desire or need for government support, or get rid of democracy and instead turn to fascism.
That said, the example you are probably looking for is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_American_Regiment
U.S. Congress 1784: "standing armies in time of peace are inconsistent with the principles of republican government, dangerous to the liberties of a free people, and generally converted into destructive engines for establishing despotism."
U.S. Congress 2012: authorizes indefinite military detention, authorizes war with Iran (a nation that poses no threat to the U.S. and hasn't attacked another in over 200 years), and legalizes domestic use of military propaganda.
How times change.
Kogan is reasonably well known: founded in 2006, they are one of the fastest growing Australian companies. They aimed to release the world's first Android phone back in 2008/2009, were the first with a ChromeBook, and they produce their own Agora line of Android devices.
This particular move may be clever marketing, but they also have a recent history of ambition and innovation beyond what you'd expect from a medium sized Australian consumer electronics retailer.
Those companies would make the same request where ever the app was hosted, wether it Google Play or any other app store.
A request to honor a U.S. patent has no legal force outside of the U.S., so foreign app stores would be fine. Obviously Google operates in the U.S. and so might choose to comply, but then again, maybe not - they have refused similar requests to remove content from their search engine unless there is a court order.
According to the MPAA, U.S. government, etc. these digital files are the same as physical property, and under the Fifth Amendment "No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law". Note the wording - it doesn't state that the government must actually have seized the property in question (which the government argues they did not do) - it must merely have caused a person to be deprived of their property. By their own logic, through the actions of the government, Mr. Goodwin has been deprived of his property, and without his right to a jury trial.
But the government argues that they aren't liable because they only copied certain servers, and a forensic expert could retrieve the original files with access to the servers and hard disks. This is like arguing that the government can seize your car from the garage and dismantle it into thousands of parts, but that they haven't deprived you of your property, because you are free to hire a mechanic (at great cost) to put it all back together again.
On the other hand, suppose you leave some property in the safe of your lawyer, who is subsequently arrested for committing some serious crime. You have now been deprived of your property, but it still exists in the safe. In this case, the government would not have a liability to release a criminal in order to let him open his safe and retrieve your belongings. I think that the government might win this one - if they are willing to let Mr. Goodwin have access to the servers, which they say they are. The Fifth Amendment does not require that the government ensure that you have access to your property that you have left in the care of another person, it only requires them to not be the ones depriving you of it.
The other big issue from the article is that the U.S. government plans to extradite Kim Dotcom and the employees of Megaupload (including web developers etc.) so that they can be charged with criminal copyright infringement in the U.S. Can you imagine what the outcry would be like if any other nation tried to extradite Americans working for a U.S. based file hosting company? What if British prosecutors decide to extradite the developers of {Dropbox,Google Drive,etc.} because some users were sharing episodes of Doctor Who? Most people support extraditions for serious offences like murder, but when it starts to be used for frivolous things like copyright infringement, that support is going to disappear.
Non resident shareholders and trusts are not liable to pay income tax, so under your scheme there would be no tax at all on companies wholly owned by non residents (like google, Facebook etc in the UK, as these are Irish resident). Also, as someone else also pointed out, there is the issue of capital gains on share trading (not all companies pay dividends, or even salaries)
I'd rather just go off actual sales if Samsung actually released any.
It's not just Samsung - Apple also does not release its monthly sales figures for the UK and other regions. That's why all of the media cited figures are just estimates; the uSwitch mobile tracker is based on actual sales from one of the most popular price comparison sites in the UK, so perhaps it has more validity than quoting some random analyst company.
Except when stuff like this comes out: http://freecode.com/articles/ubuntu-new-apt-packages-fix-security-vulnerabilities-3 [freecode.com]
Ubuntu bug: Bug reported 22nd September and closed the same day.
Microsoft bug: attacks on MD5 widely known and carried out since 2005, but Microsoft still carry on using it in Windows Update until 2012.
No one should dismiss the likelihood of rogus developers submitting changes to key components of popular distros like Ubuntu to exploit. Combined with a MITM attack, your Ubuntu system is owned. This is one reason I no longer use Ubuntu.
Do you have any evidence that this was the action of a rogue developer? By your logic, you must no longer use a computer, as the "rogue" developer issue is one that potentially affects all software.
Apple claimed that the new phone, which is yet to go on sale in the US but went on sale in Australia last week, could cause it "irreparable harm," citing press reports that mobile companies had already sold more than nine million units in pre-orders.
Hardly surprising that Apple is worried, according to the Telegraph the Samsung Galaxy S3 has now overtaken the iPhone 4S as the UK's most popular phone.
Microsoft currently doesn't make money on anything but Windows and Office -- everything else is either runs at loss, or has so much money sunk in it while it was being developed or ran at loss, it will take significant amount of time to turn profit.
Citation? Exchange - for example - would appear to be a very profitable product, XBox has been hugely profitable for the last 5 years
MSFT operating profit by division. Xbox comes under "Entertainment and Devices", a division that has historically been a loss leader. The vast bulk of the profit is from Windows + Office + Windows Server. Basically Microsoft's profits as a whole are largely dependent on sales of Windows and Office: profits jump 31% on strong Office sales, profits stagnate as Windows sales fall.
Microsoft almost always supports other platforms if it has enough marketshare and if they think they can make money off it.
Microsoft will not support other platforms if they pose a real threat to their core product of Windows+Office, but they will support other platforms if it helps to maintain the appearance of competition and hence keep antitrust regulators at bay. Having an Apple desktop taking 5% of the global market is acceptable if it means that Microsoft gets the other 95%, and when accused of having a monopoly, they can point to Apple as evidence of a competitive alternative. A duopoly with a single-digit market share competitor is better than being subject to antitrust regulators.
I don't mean "was bought out", "was merged", or "had its intellectual property sold off". I mean, straight-up died.
A bankruptcy without asset selling isn't likely to happen... Any company that is large will, by definition, have some assets (employees, customers, buildings, land) that are worth scooping up - so as it goes bankrupt, someone else will buy it out for those assets. But selling a corpse does not make a dead company live again. See Silicon Graphics, SCO Group etc.
What private keys of note have been hacked?... Dell, Microsoft, the big players, they all work very hard to make sure their private keys are secure.
That I can remember right now:
* ASUS secure boot key
* JMicron and Realtek Windows driver keys
* RSA's SecurID seeds
* Yahoo's private key for signing plugins
* Motorola's bootloader key
* HTC various engineering bootloaders (not an actual key, but signed bootloaders that allowed chainloading of non-signed code, which is just as good as a key in this case)
Funnily enough, I used to have legitimate access to a private key that could be used to load firmware onto a certain brand of credit card payment terminals. So did hundreds of other developers over the years - the key was required to do any form of development, but once you had it, you could reprogram any device in the field to grab card details, pin numbers, modify transactions etc. It was only the goodwill and honesty of the developers that prevented the key from being leaked. I'm sure there are some companies that work hard to protect their private keys and hold those with access accountable, but there are also those who handout private keys to internal staff and contractors alike.
grub will no longer be able to load anything. grub has to be signed, and it will also only load a kernel that is signed, and require device drivers that are signed.
I was just wondering about that: does Red Hat have a plan for signing external drivers? Like those from NVidia, ATI, etc.? This might encourage companies to incorporate their drivers into the upstream Linux sources.
In order to understand climate change as a scientific subject, you need differential equations, statistics, thermodynamics, and computational modeling.
It seems like you have serious gaps in your science education. Heliocentrism has been been around for more than 2000 years.
But it wasn't widely accepted, and there was no mathematical model, which is the standard that you set for it being "scientific". Wikipedia:
The notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun had been proposed as early as the 3rd century BC by Aristarchus of Samos,[2] but had received no support from most other ancient astronomers. It was not until the 16th century that a fully predictive mathematical model of a heliocentric system was presented, by the Renaissance mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic cleric Nicolaus Copernicus of Poland, leading to the Copernican Revolution. In the following century, Johannes Kepler elaborated upon and expanded this model to include elliptical orbits, and supporting observations made using a telescope were presented by Galileo Galilei.
In the 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus De revolutionibus presented a full discussion of a heliocentric model of the universe in much the same way as Ptolemy's Almagest had presented his geocentric model in the 2nd century. Copernicus discussed the philosophical implications of his proposed system, elaborated it in full geometrical detail, used selected astronomical observations to derive the parameters of his model, and wrote astronomical tables which enabled one to compute the past and future positions of the stars and planets. In doing so, Copernicus moved heliocentrism from philosophical speculation to predictive geometrical astronomy
Indeed - the US National Academy of Science was asked by Congress to investigate the "hockey stick" and found that it was valid back in 2006.
Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong:
Details of the claims and counterclaims involve lengthy and arcane statistical arguments, so let's skip straight to the 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science (pdf). The academy was asked by Congress to assess the validity of temperature reconstructions, including the hockey stick.
The report states: "The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world".
Most researchers would agree that while the original hockey stick can - and has - been improved in a number of ways, it was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading up to the 20th century than the hockey stick, but none suggest that it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of the 20th century.
It is true that there are big uncertainties about the accuracy of all past temperature reconstructions, and that these uncertainties have sometimes been ignored or glossed over by those who have presented the hockey stick as evidence for global warming.
Climate scientists, however, are only too aware of the problems (see Climate myths: It was warmer during the Medieval period), and the uncertainties were both highlighted by Mann's original paper and by others at the time it was published.
Update: as suggested by the academy in its 2006 report, Michael Mann and his colleagues have reconstructed northern hemisphere temperatures for the past 2000 years using a broader set of proxies than was available for the original study and updated measurements from the recent past.
The new reconstruction has been generated using two statistical methods, both different to that used in the original study. Like other temperature reconstructions done since 2001 (see graph), it shows greater variability than the original hockey stick. Yet again, though, the key conclusion is the same: it's hotter now than it has been for at least 1000 years.
In fact, independent evidence, from ice cores and sea sediments for instance, suggest the last time the planet approached this degree of warmth was during the interglacial period preceding the last ice age over 100,000 years ago. It might even be hotter now than it has been for at least a million years.
Further back in the past, though, it certainly has been hotter - and the world has been a very different place. The crucial point is that our modern civilisation has been built on the basis of the prevailing climate and sea levels. As these change, it will cause major problems.
My question is where did the money for the C&C servers come from?
My question is: is the U.S. government liable for the costs incurred by Microsoft and JMicron and Realtek for having to replace their stolen signing certificates? What about the cleanup costs for companies infected by Stuxnet etc.?
And what if someone can modify Flame to deliver a more devastating payload? The components of Flame are now signed with a Microsoft certificate, if there is any vulnerability that allows it to be co-opted to spread other malware, is the U.S. government going to be liable? I'm pretty sure that if any normal citizen stole a certificate, and wrote malware and distributed malware based on that, then it would be considered a criminal offence.
The cause of the war has nothing to do with the conditions of surrender. It is entirely possible for both claims to be true: that both the start of the war was legitimate, and the conditions of surrender many years later were unacceptable.
There would be no conditions for surrender if the war had not started. It is that simple.
Analogy time: I make a cheese sandwich. I offer to sell it to you for the price of $1 million. You refuse, because those terms of sale are unacceptable to you. Now, it is true that I couldn't have offered to sell you the cheese sandwich if I had never made it in the first place. However, this has nothing to do with the terms of sale. I could have offered to sell it for $1, or some other terms that would have been acceptable. The creation of the cheese sandwich and the terms of sale are independent, even though one must causally predate the other. It is possible for both to be true at the same time: that my creation of the cheese sandwich was legitimate, and that the sale price of $1 million was unacceptable to you.
First a designer is free to reuse pieces and parts of past designs in new ones.
Most of these viral copies have been completely deactivated over time via various mutations (not necessarily within the copy of virus DNA, but also in the regions around it), which is why we no longer suffer from effects of those viruses. In the chimp case, every copy of PtERV1 has been deactivated. So this is not a case of reuse, we are talking about extinct viruses that are present in both chimp and human DNA.
there has obviously been interactions between virus and other species that has occurred in the past.
So you are willing to accept that viruses can insert genes into DNA, and extract genes from DNA, and thus gene transfer occurs between species? And that genes become mutated over generations? Sounds a lot like evolution. But anyway, this still does not explain why chimps and humans have the same inactive viruses in the same places in their DNA...
Third, finding small sequences of DNA that match when you only have 4 building blocks is not so hard to imagine given that they are not claiming a full copy of the virus, only small fragments.
Actually, some of the copies are complete enough that the researchers have extracted the virus and resurrected the extinct virus. We are not talking about a few base pairs that happen to correspond between human and chimp DNA, we are talking about hundreds of copies of endogenous retroviruses (each ~500 base pairs long) occurring in the same place in human and chimp DNA. 40 out of the 42 viruses found in chimp DNA are also found in humans. The probability of that occurring by chance is infinitesimally small. The answer is either common descent, or that your designer deliberately put deactivated copies of the same viruses in the same places in both chimp and human DNA. Which brings me back to the question, if that is what you believe, then why would he do that? Why would an omnipotent creator put hundreds of the same copies of deactivated viruses into both chimp and human DNA?