Other posters seem to have raised some doubts about the accuracy of your facts, but assuming what you say is true, you're still mixing up patent and copyright.
but, and here's the thing, Sequent developed it's tech independent of Unix. RCU and that stuff would work on any modern OS's kernel. They published their papers and filed their patents before they implemented it in their own version of Unix.
Not having read the document myself, I can't say this with absolute certainty, but AT&T's license clause saying they get the rights to any changes you make to Unix sounds like it's talking about copyright rights. If that's the case, then SCO would own the copyright on the lines of code belonging to Sequent's Unix RCU implementation, not the patent rights to the RCU technology itself. Therefore, SCO cannot claim that the Sequent programmer doesn't have the right to re-implement the technology in Linux; what they can claim is that he doesn't have the right to take the implementation he wrote for Unix and copy that code into Linux.
So the question is, is the Linux RCU implementation an independent rewrite, or a copy of the original implementation? Unfortunately, we won't know unless SCO shows us their implementation. But in any case the fact that the technology was developed and patented before it was implemented in Unix is irrelevant.
You can take GPL software and sell it without permission from the author, sure -- look at Red Hat, for example -- but I think what was meant was the possibility of negotiating a different license for a particular company.
Consider the distribution model used by MySQL: You can download and modify MySQL for free under the GPL, but that requires you to release the source code to your changes. If you don't want to release the source code to your changes, you can contact MySQL AB, the company behind the software, and buy the right to use MySQL under a different license, one that allows you to keep your changes to yourself.
That's interesting, because I currently use Mutt, and am considering switching to Evolution.:-)
My reasons are, support for scheduling, and the fact that it looks nicer and will make a good impression on friends who aren't Linux users but are interested in Linux. That said, though, I'd like to retain "compatibility" with Mutt if at all possible, so that I can use Mutt to read new or old mail without interfering with the operation of Evolution.
btw, I think Evolution would be a bit more "popular" versus Outlook if there was a Windows version -- I have a friend who'd switch to Evolution in an instant if he could, but he's not ready to move to the Linux/UNIX platform yet.
"The reason Lexmark is pissed is because it sells its printers as a loss leader, and then makes money on the ink cartridges."
That's not an excuse, nobody is forcing Lexmark or anybody else to sell things at loss.
I see a very important distinction to be made here:
Lexmark has the right to use whatever business model they want. Aside from criminal acts, they can run their business any way they like. If they want to sell printers at loss, they can. If they don't want to sell printers at loss, they don't have to.
There is no guarantee made to Lexmark that their chosen business model will be successful. Lexmark sells printes at loss in the hope that it will generate more sales of printers and ink. Whether that actually happens is another matter entirely; it's not the responsibility of the rest of the world to change our buying habits to accomodate Lexmark.
It's fine for Lexmark to focus on sales of ink and toner as a major revenue source, but they have no right to challenge Static Control for taking away part of that revenue in normal, honest economic competition. I'm sure the people at Static Control would love for all the printer manufacturers to start making printers that don't authenticate their consumables at all, but they'd have no more right to sue Lexmark for making their lives difficult than Lexmark has to sue Static Control for making their lives difficult.
The fact that the DMCA is being used here shows how overly-broad that law is, but the core problem here is not the DMCA - if it didn't exist, they'd find something else to sue over. The problem is that people are lazy and don't want to expend more effort than necessary, and in this country's legal environment it's often easier to sue what you want out of someone else than to take the time to develop it constructively on your own. If Lexmark wants to sell ink and toner for their printers, they should do it by offering better ink and toner than anyone else, so that consumers will willingly choose to buy it - not by establishing themselves as the only ones able to provide ink and toner, so that consumers are forced to buy it.
The article doesn't explain very well, but I get the impression that this is basically about storing a hash of the image into the image itself. It gives you all the same benefits of a cryptographic hash or signature, (depending on whether the data is in fact signed), but the hash/signature data is stored indelibly within the image. This is better than storing the data in a separate file, or appending it to the end of the image file, because there's zero possibility of it getting "lost" as the image is transferred from place to place.
My university allows one gigabyte of transfer within a 12-hour sliding window, and if you go over that limit, you get severely rate-limited. I used to run LimeWire with 20 connections, just to get my search horizon as big as possible, and I found that simply being connected for about an hour (no downloads, nobody downloading from me) would put me over that gigabyte limit.
I got into the habit of getting some connections up, doing a search, and disconnecting as soon as my results were in. (Unfortunately, this meant I couldn't download from people who were behind firewalls, since doing a "push" reqest requires both parties to be connected to the network.)
Gnutella overhead most definitely takes up a considerable share of bandwidth.
You're thinking of keys for symmetric ciphers - the kind where the same key does both the encryption and decryption. For public-key algorithms, more key bits are needed to achieve the same level of security.
According to Bruce Schneier in Applied Cryptography, Second Edition, a 56-bit symmetric key is roughly as secure as a 384-bit asymmetric key, and a 128-bit symmetric key is roughly as secure as a 2304-bit asymmetric key. (Table 7.9 on page 166; there's a copy of the same table on the page you linked to.)
Even with a symmetric algorithm, though, breaking a 32-bit key is not "practically impossible by human standards". 56 bits, the key size used by DES, is considered to be insecure since it can be broken in a few days on a PC. I'm not sure where you got your information on that page you referred to, since in the last paragraph the author says "For today's secrets, a 1024-bit is probably safe and a 2048-bit key definitely is." And "today" in this case is January 26, 1997, when the page was last modified.
I'd recommend at least 4096 bits for new keypairs. It may or may not be overkill, but modern computers are fast enough that the time it takes to cipher with a longer key is still insignificant in the course of normal usage.
The reason it reminds you of Quake 2 is that a lot of the textures he used in his sample levels actually are borrowed Quake 2 textures.
Quake 3's big "cool new feature" is the powerful shader engine, which allows dynamic textures composed of multiple images which move or fade or whatever. They give the map a feeling of "liveliness" - water ripples, health spheres shimmer, jump pads pulse, and so on. Coming up with textures to draw is independent of actually drawing geometry, so a similar system could be added to the Cube engine.
The adjustable LOD is an idea that's used in the Unreal engine, and it's what allows Unreal to render huge open spaces like canyons that the Quake engine couldn't even hope to attempt. In Unreal, actors (monsters, pickups, etc.) seen at a distance are drawn with fewer polygons, making them render faster. AFAIK the map geometry itself isn't affected, but in Cube it sounds like it is. The author did say, after all, that it's a "landscape-style engine" that just "pretends to be an indoor first person shooter engine".
Personally, I think this is really cool and we'll be seeing more of it in the future.
That's true, but the "stable" branch is mostly useful on things like servers, and who puts a top-of-the-line 3D accelerator in a server? "Unstable" really isn't very unstable at all; yes, individual programs break from time to time, but don't think you'll have things break down on you on a regular basis.
I run unstable most of the time, and I boot Windows about once every week or two to play games. Between those reboots, I'm running XFree86 4.1 at 1600x1200 on nvidia's drivers, running xmms, Gaim, Galeon, xchat, LimeWire, VMware, and myriad useful panel applets, for days straight. In the background I have Apache, SSH, CUPS, scanlogd, OpenAFS, fetchmail, samba, and a few others. Occasionally I'll fire up Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament. Last night my panel crashed randomly and then restarted with everything in its place, and honestly, that's the only crash I can remember experiencing all summer.
Debian only backports security fixes you fucking liar.
No, Debian only backports security fixes as a matter of policy. Other bugfixes do get backported by the maintainers of their respective packages; read the changelogs. They just don't have a special team dedicated to the task like the security fixes do.
Second, now instead of having a fully tested stable release of the software directly from the developers you have some hacked together debian version with all sorts of sketchy patches that *might* break some functionality on the server.
You mean similar to the hacked-together patched-up broken "GCC 2.96" that's been part of RedHat for the past four releases?
If you're going to issue an update to fix a bug, it's better to issue a backport that incorporates only the bugfix (released from upstream, remember, so not exactly "sketchy") than to issue a whole new version that includes changes totally unrelated to the bug.
Debian is not trying to push you to switch from KDE to GNOME. Remember that each Debian package is maintained by a volunteer who builds new packages on his or her own time. Maybe there are more people working on the GNOME packages, or maybe they just work harder or something.
If you're not happy with the release schedule of the KDE packages, don't blame the volunteers who are doing the best they can within the constraints of other things going on in their lives - become a Debian developer and help them out.
Alright... I know about this testing stuff and how long has woody been on but KDE 2.2 ? I mean come on, Redhat 7.3 was released before this one and it came with KDE 3.
KDE 3 is out now, but it wasn't when Woody went under freeze. The point of Debian's "stable" release is to be stable, not to be flashy; the idea is "tried and true", not "latest and greatest".
RedHat 7.3 shipped with KDE 3. It also shipped with an unofficial, experimental version of GCC that they called 2.96, which causes compilation issues with many major packages. Would you want this running as part of, say, a compile farm? I wouldn't put my trust in a release that can't even compile Apache correctly.
Not all of us use Linux for servers only, but those who do want a system that's solid. If you want more bleeding-edge software in exchange for a bit of risk that things might not work on occasion, you should try Debian's unstable branch. I've been running it on my own machine for the past several years and I find it to be quite nice. And you can always install "stable" and then upgrade individual packages using newer versions from "unstable".
Right now I'm listening to 128kbps MP3 streamed over ordinary cable broadband, thanks to Icecast, and I have never yet heard it skip at all. Do the math: 128 kilobits per second equals 16 kilobytes per second. That's really not all that much, to anyone who isn't on dialup. I don't know what your listeners were doing wrong, but I've played several of these at the same time with no ill effect.
I have a few friends who use Dvorak, and I'm currently training myself to type on it too. Typing speed aside, pretty much everyone seems to agree that it's more comfortable to type on. That in itself makes the switch worthwhile, I'd say.
I won't look at a product from "joe59qa1314@hotmail.com," but I may look at an ad from "ibm-mailer@ibm.com," since its from a real corporate email.
Doesn't this imply that only large corporations have anything worth buying? What if the offer came from securityservices@microsoft.com? The Slashdot community spends a good deal of time bashing large corporations for exploiting consumers with deceptive practices, especially in the technology sector. It's usually the smaller, non-bureaucratic, more "in-touch" organizations we tend to trust.
I think the "spamminess" of an email message is not determined at all by its origin. Yes, there's an observed relationship - spam mail comes from "cheap"-looking addresses more often than legitimate mail does - but as anyone who's studied statistics knows, correlation does not imply causality. Joe Vendor isn't guilty of spamming just because he doesn't have deep pockets with which to buy a professional-sounding domain name.
I think the best identifying characteristic I've seen posed so far is Micah's insight that advertisers who subsidize useful things are legitimate, and those who don't are spammers. Basically, if you give something back to the public (like funding for websites and TV shows) in return for gaining something from the community (ad impressions), you're playing well with others and that's OK. If you just want to take, take, take from the general public (ad impressions via telemarketing and mass-mailing) without returning anything constructive (and maybe even being destructive, i.e. wasted time, bandwidth, etc.) then you're spamming and ought to be made to stop.
Spammers justify their behavior by imagining that they really are providing a useful and appreciated service by sending "special offers" to people, and ignoring or trivializing all the evidence to the contrary. I'd be interested in what a psychologist might have to say about this sort of delusion - any takers?
Calling 911 and hanging up is generally not a good idea. Some kid did that once at a group event my family was at, and they traced the call and sent police, fire, and ambulance to the scene. See, they have to assume the worst - that something really serious was happening and the caller was too weak or injured or something to explain the situation. Cellular calls aren't as easy to trace, but it's still not a good idea.
If you're going to call 911 just to see if you can, at least take a moment to tell the operator "I'm just testing this; there's no emergency". And then do hang up, to leave the lines open for people who do have emergencies.
Or better yet, don't call 911 at all if you don't have an emergency. And don't yell "wolf" when there's no wolf. It's really not worth the few cents you save by getting a free phone call.
This is (presumably) why IE6 has a "lock the toolbars" option, enabled by default, which turns off the drag handles on all the toolbars. This way, you can't accientally move one out of place, but if you want to move one, you can still do it pretty easily (and then re-lock them again afterward).
Furthermore, if a curious user unchecks the option and suddenly sees drag handles appear on the toolbars, they'll experiment with them (having in mind the fact that they've just "unlocked" the toolbars) and probably figure out pretty quickly how toolbars can be rearranged.
I think this is a great feature. Provided that the default toolbars are OK for most people, having them start out locked prevents accidental reconfiguration, without sacrificing configurability for people who do want to change them.
All that remains, I guess, is the question of whether the default toolbars really are OK for most people. Personally, I see no need for buttons like Favorites, History, and Print; Favorites already has a menu, and the others are used infrequently enough that their menu commands are enough; I don't need toolbar buttons taking up screen space. So my IE toolbar consists of the back, forward, stop,and reload buttons, and then the address bar collapsed onto the same line. I would consider this a "sensible default", but I imagine others might think the browser is lacking in features or something when they don't see a Print button. So this area, the default settings, is really where the decision comes in as to whether the UI caters to "experienced" or "inexperienced" users.
If I steal something, the police may obtain a warrant and enter my house and sieze it. The person I stole from does not have the right to break down my door and steal it back.
The fact that we're considering the online equivalent of this right seems to say that Congress (or at least this particular congressman) has given up on the constitutional guarantee of "due process of law" because they don't want to deal with a controversial problem.
Many people run P2P clients like Gnutella and WinMX, and those programs do upload things.
Furthermore, if I'm using all my upload bandwidth (15kB/sec) for, say, sending a file to someone, my downloads are reduced to a crawl because my TCP acknowledgement packets are slow getting out, and the other end won't send too many packets without receiving acknowledgement that I've received the ones it's already transmitted. It literally takes me from cable-modem download speed to sub-56K download speed. I've had my brother complain that his browser timed out while loading Google's front page, and that's pretty spartan.
It's very irritating because it means if I want to send someone a large file, I have to wait and do it overnight, or my family gets annoyed when they can't effectively do anything online. It reminds me of when I was on a modem, and I'd have to stay dialed-in overnight when I wanted to transfer something big.
Keep in mind that if you're playing on a PS2, you're seeing graphics in 720x480 resolution (NTSC) at a measly 30 effective frames per second, or 720x645 at 25 frames per second (PAL). On a PC with a good 3D accelerator, you can play in any resolution your monitor supports - say, 1280x1024 at up to 75 frames per second. Naturally the hardware is more expensive, but it's worth it.
Maybe it's just where I surf, but it's quite rare nowadays that I come across a website that doesn't look right in Galeon. I remember reading one article about a month back that had an inset ad which overlapped the text instead of the text wrapping below it, but that's all that comes to mind right now.
I use Galeon (which is based on Mozilla) on a daily basis and it works great. My main complaints are lack of anti-aliased fonts (because I haven't bothered setting them up; they'll work better with GNOME 2.0) and slightly-choppy Flash (since the Linux version is Java). Now that the Netscape/IE "old" browser war is over and the novelty of things like <marquee> have worn off, most sites seem to use acceptably-standard HTML these days.
If I remember correctly, those patents (or some of them) were on technologies in the TUX webserver. Apache is competition with TUX; therefore Redhat doesn't want to give up an opportunity to fight Apache.
Slashdot Mirror
Other posters seem to have raised some doubts about the accuracy of your facts, but assuming what you say is true, you're still mixing up patent and copyright.
Not having read the document myself, I can't say this with absolute certainty, but AT&T's license clause saying they get the rights to any changes you make to Unix sounds like it's talking about copyright rights. If that's the case, then SCO would own the copyright on the lines of code belonging to Sequent's Unix RCU implementation, not the patent rights to the RCU technology itself. Therefore, SCO cannot claim that the Sequent programmer doesn't have the right to re-implement the technology in Linux; what they can claim is that he doesn't have the right to take the implementation he wrote for Unix and copy that code into Linux.
So the question is, is the Linux RCU implementation an independent rewrite, or a copy of the original implementation? Unfortunately, we won't know unless SCO shows us their implementation. But in any case the fact that the technology was developed and patented before it was implemented in Unix is irrelevant.
You can take GPL software and sell it without permission from the author, sure -- look at Red Hat, for example -- but I think what was meant was the possibility of negotiating a different license for a particular company.
Consider the distribution model used by MySQL: You can download and modify MySQL for free under the GPL, but that requires you to release the source code to your changes. If you don't want to release the source code to your changes, you can contact MySQL AB, the company behind the software, and buy the right to use MySQL under a different license, one that allows you to keep your changes to yourself.
That's interesting, because I currently use Mutt, and am considering switching to Evolution. :-)
My reasons are, support for scheduling, and the fact that it looks nicer and will make a good impression on friends who aren't Linux users but are interested in Linux. That said, though, I'd like to retain "compatibility" with Mutt if at all possible, so that I can use Mutt to read new or old mail without interfering with the operation of Evolution.
btw, I think Evolution would be a bit more "popular" versus Outlook if there was a Windows version -- I have a friend who'd switch to Evolution in an instant if he could, but he's not ready to move to the Linux/UNIX platform yet.
I see a very important distinction to be made here:
It's fine for Lexmark to focus on sales of ink and toner as a major revenue source, but they have no right to challenge Static Control for taking away part of that revenue in normal, honest economic competition. I'm sure the people at Static Control would love for all the printer manufacturers to start making printers that don't authenticate their consumables at all, but they'd have no more right to sue Lexmark for making their lives difficult than Lexmark has to sue Static Control for making their lives difficult.
The fact that the DMCA is being used here shows how overly-broad that law is, but the core problem here is not the DMCA - if it didn't exist, they'd find something else to sue over. The problem is that people are lazy and don't want to expend more effort than necessary, and in this country's legal environment it's often easier to sue what you want out of someone else than to take the time to develop it constructively on your own. If Lexmark wants to sell ink and toner for their printers, they should do it by offering better ink and toner than anyone else, so that consumers will willingly choose to buy it - not by establishing themselves as the only ones able to provide ink and toner, so that consumers are forced to buy it.
The article doesn't explain very well, but I get the impression that this is basically about storing a hash of the image into the image itself. It gives you all the same benefits of a cryptographic hash or signature, (depending on whether the data is in fact signed), but the hash/signature data is stored indelibly within the image. This is better than storing the data in a separate file, or appending it to the end of the image file, because there's zero possibility of it getting "lost" as the image is transferred from place to place.
1-2 gigabytes overnight? Bah.
My university allows one gigabyte of transfer within a 12-hour sliding window, and if you go over that limit, you get severely rate-limited. I used to run LimeWire with 20 connections, just to get my search horizon as big as possible, and I found that simply being connected for about an hour (no downloads, nobody downloading from me) would put me over that gigabyte limit.
I got into the habit of getting some connections up, doing a search, and disconnecting as soon as my results were in. (Unfortunately, this meant I couldn't download from people who were behind firewalls, since doing a "push" reqest requires both parties to be connected to the network.)
Gnutella overhead most definitely takes up a considerable share of bandwidth.
You're thinking of keys for symmetric ciphers - the kind where the same key does both the encryption and decryption. For public-key algorithms, more key bits are needed to achieve the same level of security.
According to Bruce Schneier in Applied Cryptography, Second Edition, a 56-bit symmetric key is roughly as secure as a 384-bit asymmetric key, and a 128-bit symmetric key is roughly as secure as a 2304-bit asymmetric key. (Table 7.9 on page 166; there's a copy of the same table on the page you linked to.)
Even with a symmetric algorithm, though, breaking a 32-bit key is not "practically impossible by human standards". 56 bits, the key size used by DES, is considered to be insecure since it can be broken in a few days on a PC. I'm not sure where you got your information on that page you referred to, since in the last paragraph the author says "For today's secrets, a 1024-bit is probably safe and a 2048-bit key definitely is." And "today" in this case is January 26, 1997, when the page was last modified.
I'd recommend at least 4096 bits for new keypairs. It may or may not be overkill, but modern computers are fast enough that the time it takes to cipher with a longer key is still insignificant in the course of normal usage.
Try Deus Ex. Meaningful plot development.
The reason it reminds you of Quake 2 is that a lot of the textures he used in his sample levels actually are borrowed Quake 2 textures.
Quake 3's big "cool new feature" is the powerful shader engine, which allows dynamic textures composed of multiple images which move or fade or whatever. They give the map a feeling of "liveliness" - water ripples, health spheres shimmer, jump pads pulse, and so on. Coming up with textures to draw is independent of actually drawing geometry, so a similar system could be added to the Cube engine.
The adjustable LOD is an idea that's used in the Unreal engine, and it's what allows Unreal to render huge open spaces like canyons that the Quake engine couldn't even hope to attempt. In Unreal, actors (monsters, pickups, etc.) seen at a distance are drawn with fewer polygons, making them render faster. AFAIK the map geometry itself isn't affected, but in Cube it sounds like it is. The author did say, after all, that it's a "landscape-style engine" that just "pretends to be an indoor first person shooter engine".
Personally, I think this is really cool and we'll be seeing more of it in the future.
That's true, but the "stable" branch is mostly useful on things like servers, and who puts a top-of-the-line 3D accelerator in a server? "Unstable" really isn't very unstable at all; yes, individual programs break from time to time, but don't think you'll have things break down on you on a regular basis.
I run unstable most of the time, and I boot Windows about once every week or two to play games. Between those reboots, I'm running XFree86 4.1 at 1600x1200 on nvidia's drivers, running xmms, Gaim, Galeon, xchat, LimeWire, VMware, and myriad useful panel applets, for days straight. In the background I have Apache, SSH, CUPS, scanlogd, OpenAFS, fetchmail, samba, and a few others. Occasionally I'll fire up Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament. Last night my panel crashed randomly and then restarted with everything in its place, and honestly, that's the only crash I can remember experiencing all summer.
No, Debian only backports security fixes as a matter of policy. Other bugfixes do get backported by the maintainers of their respective packages; read the changelogs. They just don't have a special team dedicated to the task like the security fixes do.
You mean similar to the hacked-together patched-up broken "GCC 2.96" that's been part of RedHat for the past four releases?
If you're going to issue an update to fix a bug, it's better to issue a backport that incorporates only the bugfix (released from upstream, remember, so not exactly "sketchy") than to issue a whole new version that includes changes totally unrelated to the bug.
Debian is not trying to push you to switch from KDE to GNOME. Remember that each Debian package is maintained by a volunteer who builds new packages on his or her own time. Maybe there are more people working on the GNOME packages, or maybe they just work harder or something.
If you're not happy with the release schedule of the KDE packages, don't blame the volunteers who are doing the best they can within the constraints of other things going on in their lives - become a Debian developer and help them out.
KDE 3 is out now, but it wasn't when Woody went under freeze. The point of Debian's "stable" release is to be stable, not to be flashy; the idea is "tried and true", not "latest and greatest".
RedHat 7.3 shipped with KDE 3. It also shipped with an unofficial, experimental version of GCC that they called 2.96, which causes compilation issues with many major packages. Would you want this running as part of, say, a compile farm? I wouldn't put my trust in a release that can't even compile Apache correctly.
Not all of us use Linux for servers only, but those who do want a system that's solid. If you want more bleeding-edge software in exchange for a bit of risk that things might not work on occasion, you should try Debian's unstable branch. I've been running it on my own machine for the past several years and I find it to be quite nice. And you can always install "stable" and then upgrade individual packages using newer versions from "unstable".
Right now I'm listening to 128kbps MP3 streamed over ordinary cable broadband, thanks to Icecast, and I have never yet heard it skip at all. Do the math: 128 kilobits per second equals 16 kilobytes per second. That's really not all that much, to anyone who isn't on dialup. I don't know what your listeners were doing wrong, but I've played several of these at the same time with no ill effect.
I have a few friends who use Dvorak, and I'm currently training myself to type on it too. Typing speed aside, pretty much everyone seems to agree that it's more comfortable to type on. That in itself makes the switch worthwhile, I'd say.
Actually, the first thing that came to my mind was a new Maxis game...
Doesn't this imply that only large corporations have anything worth buying? What if the offer came from securityservices@microsoft.com? The Slashdot community spends a good deal of time bashing large corporations for exploiting consumers with deceptive practices, especially in the technology sector. It's usually the smaller, non-bureaucratic, more "in-touch" organizations we tend to trust.
I think the "spamminess" of an email message is not determined at all by its origin. Yes, there's an observed relationship - spam mail comes from "cheap"-looking addresses more often than legitimate mail does - but as anyone who's studied statistics knows, correlation does not imply causality. Joe Vendor isn't guilty of spamming just because he doesn't have deep pockets with which to buy a professional-sounding domain name.
I think the best identifying characteristic I've seen posed so far is Micah's insight that advertisers who subsidize useful things are legitimate, and those who don't are spammers. Basically, if you give something back to the public (like funding for websites and TV shows) in return for gaining something from the community (ad impressions), you're playing well with others and that's OK. If you just want to take, take, take from the general public (ad impressions via telemarketing and mass-mailing) without returning anything constructive (and maybe even being destructive, i.e. wasted time, bandwidth, etc.) then you're spamming and ought to be made to stop.
Spammers justify their behavior by imagining that they really are providing a useful and appreciated service by sending "special offers" to people, and ignoring or trivializing all the evidence to the contrary. I'd be interested in what a psychologist might have to say about this sort of delusion - any takers?
Calling 911 and hanging up is generally not a good idea. Some kid did that once at a group event my family was at, and they traced the call and sent police, fire, and ambulance to the scene. See, they have to assume the worst - that something really serious was happening and the caller was too weak or injured or something to explain the situation. Cellular calls aren't as easy to trace, but it's still not a good idea.
If you're going to call 911 just to see if you can, at least take a moment to tell the operator "I'm just testing this; there's no emergency". And then do hang up, to leave the lines open for people who do have emergencies.
Or better yet, don't call 911 at all if you don't have an emergency. And don't yell "wolf" when there's no wolf. It's really not worth the few cents you save by getting a free phone call.
This is (presumably) why IE6 has a "lock the toolbars" option, enabled by default, which turns off the drag handles on all the toolbars. This way, you can't accientally move one out of place, but if you want to move one, you can still do it pretty easily (and then re-lock them again afterward).
Furthermore, if a curious user unchecks the option and suddenly sees drag handles appear on the toolbars, they'll experiment with them (having in mind the fact that they've just "unlocked" the toolbars) and probably figure out pretty quickly how toolbars can be rearranged.
I think this is a great feature. Provided that the default toolbars are OK for most people, having them start out locked prevents accidental reconfiguration, without sacrificing configurability for people who do want to change them.
All that remains, I guess, is the question of whether the default toolbars really are OK for most people. Personally, I see no need for buttons like Favorites, History, and Print; Favorites already has a menu, and the others are used infrequently enough that their menu commands are enough; I don't need toolbar buttons taking up screen space. So my IE toolbar consists of the back, forward, stop,and reload buttons, and then the address bar collapsed onto the same line. I would consider this a "sensible default", but I imagine others might think the browser is lacking in features or something when they don't see a Print button. So this area, the default settings, is really where the decision comes in as to whether the UI caters to "experienced" or "inexperienced" users.
This isn't exactly a bug, but it's one of those things that makes you wonder how anyone could let it slip by...
If I steal something, the police may obtain a warrant and enter my house and sieze it. The person I stole from does not have the right to break down my door and steal it back.
The fact that we're considering the online equivalent of this right seems to say that Congress (or at least this particular congressman) has given up on the constitutional guarantee of "due process of law" because they don't want to deal with a controversial problem.
Many people run P2P clients like Gnutella and WinMX, and those programs do upload things.
Furthermore, if I'm using all my upload bandwidth (15kB/sec) for, say, sending a file to someone, my downloads are reduced to a crawl because my TCP acknowledgement packets are slow getting out, and the other end won't send too many packets without receiving acknowledgement that I've received the ones it's already transmitted. It literally takes me from cable-modem download speed to sub-56K download speed. I've had my brother complain that his browser timed out while loading Google's front page, and that's pretty spartan.It's very irritating because it means if I want to send someone a large file, I have to wait and do it overnight, or my family gets annoyed when they can't effectively do anything online. It reminds me of when I was on a modem, and I'd have to stay dialed-in overnight when I wanted to transfer something big.
Keep in mind that if you're playing on a PS2, you're seeing graphics in 720x480 resolution (NTSC) at a measly 30 effective frames per second, or 720x645 at 25 frames per second (PAL). On a PC with a good 3D accelerator, you can play in any resolution your monitor supports - say, 1280x1024 at up to 75 frames per second. Naturally the hardware is more expensive, but it's worth it.
Maybe it's just where I surf, but it's quite rare nowadays that I come across a website that doesn't look right in Galeon. I remember reading one article about a month back that had an inset ad which overlapped the text instead of the text wrapping below it, but that's all that comes to mind right now.
I use Galeon (which is based on Mozilla) on a daily basis and it works great. My main complaints are lack of anti-aliased fonts (because I haven't bothered setting them up; they'll work better with GNOME 2.0) and slightly-choppy Flash (since the Linux version is Java). Now that the Netscape/IE "old" browser war is over and the novelty of things like <marquee> have worn off, most sites seem to use acceptably-standard HTML these days.
If I remember correctly, those patents (or some of them) were on technologies in the TUX webserver. Apache is competition with TUX; therefore Redhat doesn't want to give up an opportunity to fight Apache.