Ubuntu is the only distribution that actually tries to Just Work
You, sir, are an Ubuntu marketer. Most other distributions try to do that; to the best of my knowledge, the first Linux platform to routinely use the term "Just Work", with the capitalisation like that, was Debian (probably because it was one of the first Linux platforms to exist, and the term was being used in contrast to slackware, which was more a case of "work, damn you! work! argh!").
I'm sure this headline will send RMS into a tizzy, but it also resurfaces the question of where open-source is headed if it is to survive and flourish against staunchly proprietary competitors.
In the opposite direction. You do not defeat oppression by oppressing other people.
If you want to keep you system "pure", then you aren't going to be watching any Quicktime or Windows Media files or DVDs.
Quicktime is MPEG-4. Windows Media is VC-1. DVDs are MPEG-2. All of these are published, open specifications that anybody outside the US may implement. You probably already have free implementations of them installed.
The problem is not codecs. The problem is DRM. If you have a WMV that won't play, it's encrypted.
They've been writing 3D drivers for almost a decade at this point. They have entire teams of guys writing the drivers. How can anyone compete with that? And why would they try?
Both the ATI and the nVidia proprietary video drivers are extremely unstable and I have seen them often crash the entire kernel, hard. The nVidia driver in particular also has fundamental security issues (anybody with access to the video device has effective root); the same thing's probably true of the ATI driver, but I haven't heard of anybody figuring out how yet. These drivers are almost as bad as their Windows equivalents, needing patching every time somebody tries to run a new piece of code.
Microsoft have been writing operating systems for over a decade at this point, and they still suck at it. ATI and nVidia have been writing drivers for almost as long, and they still suck at it. The problem is not experience, it's objectives. "Providing a stable, secure operating environment" is not on their list of objectives, because that is not what sells video cards. Games, noisy fans, and cards that take up huge amounts of space (and therefore look more impressive) are what sells video cards. All that time and effort has not been put into making drivers more reliable, it has been put into making new visual effects that only work on the new models of cards, so that people have to keep buying new cards.
Yes, anyone can compete with that if they had the necessary information. There is plenty of scope for competition here. The reasons why they would try should be obvious.
Meanwhile, those of us not stuck in dreamland have to deal with reality. Proprietary codecs and software are part of reality
What reality are you living in? Pretty much everything but the older versions of WMV and newer versions of realvideo has free codecs and published specs nowadays (Microsoft published the current WMV codec a while ago, it's SMTPE 421M, and quicktime is just MPEG-4 these days). There may be onerous patents that screw US users, but you can take that up with your government - it's nothing to do with the software and doesn't apply to the rest of the world.
The problem is not codecs, and has not been for some time. The problem is DRM-crippled streams. We have the video codecs for everything of significance except the current realvideo. What we don't have is the DRM protocols - and you're never going to see a DRMed stream that is intended for use on Linux-based platforms, no matter how many corporations you bend over for. All those WMVs you find that won't play on Linux? That's DRM, not the codec.
Bird flu currently seems much deadlier, as more than half of the humans infected have died.
Careful. The following statement is also true:
"More than half of the humans crushed to a pulp by falling whales have died."
The important question is: what is the actual rate of infection among a population?
Right now it's approximately 0% because it's not really transmissible between humans; the fears are that this number may increase in an unknown manner, but the chances of it becoming large are quite remote; it would have to simultaneously develop a long incubation period during which no obvious symptoms are apparent, but when it is still readily transmissible, in order to evade all the things we do to arrest the spread of a pandemic in its early stages. "Dangerous" is not the same thing as "likely".
At the very least this warrents some share of the IP, say, gratis licences to manufacture the drugs so researched.
I just wish that some country would have the balls to realise that they're a sovereign nation, say "screw you" to the pharma companies, and declare open season on production of drugs that are important to their national health.
Maybe once a few governments kick the habit of paying the danegeld, the danes will go home. Paying them never, ever gets rid of the dane.
Bit torrent gets throttled because it is a bandwidth hog
Smart ISPs do not throttle bittorrent. They just throttle everything.
Attempting to distinguish between protocols for this sort of thing, when you're in an ISP role, is ineffective, wasteful, and dumb. Users will always evade your hostile attempts to classify their traffic. Traffic classification only works with the cooperation of at least one of the participants, which ISPs do not have in this instance.
If the problem is bandwidth usage, set realistic bandwidth limits and don't sell bandwidth that you don't have. Selling bandwidth that you don't have is fraud. Advertising bandwidth rates and then setting lower limits for certain protocols is fraud. People get prosecuted for this kind of nonsense all the time.
The point: people who talk about a protocol being abused are more or less always wrong. It is not about the protocols. (Yes, that makes these university networks admins wrong, and also dumb)
It may be true for high functioning autistic children, but it's cruel to put guilt trips on parents who have autistic kids who can't speak or be potty-trained for wishing their beloved children were not stricken with such a horrible disorder. It's a 'way of being' as much as Down Syndrome is.
The point which you are failing to make is that "autism" doesn't exist, and is just a lumping-together of many, many different traits that look similar to the educated observed who hasn't carefully studied them. Some of those traits are viable (in that the result is a person which can function, if not in the same manner as other people) and some are not viable (in that the result needs permanent low-level life support, because they can't survive on their own, for whatever reason).
Trying to lump all of these things together into the category of "autism" is probably counter-productive.
MECP2 as "the cause" of autism is overblown-- scientists have isolated several genetic areas that are somewhat probable contributors toward developing autism, but 1. Autism is definitely caused by the contributions of many genes; 2. There are various ways autism presents itself- presumably due to varying genetic contributions. Rett Syndrome is (in my understanding) an atypically (genetically) simple form of autism.
And they still haven't come up with any actual proof that such a thing as autism even exists.
The problem with the whole autism spectrum disorder thing is that it's a completely arbitrary category of a bunch of symptoms which human observers think look similar. So far there's no particular evidence that "autism" exists anywhere but in the imaginations of people. It could be a collection of many unrelated traits - and probably is, at least to some extent.
Saying that autism has a cause is likely to turn out to be like saying that being French has a cause - it kinda does ("having French parents"), but you're not going to find a "French gene". You will find a whole bunch of genetic traits that go along with being French, but turning them off won't turn a Frenchman into a normal person. Correlation does not imply causation, and it definitely does not imply that modifying one of the correlated variables will alter the other.
By the way - to those who worry about it infringing on your freedom - unless you're a convicted pedophile, molester, etc, it hardly seems to apply to you.
Ever get drunk and do something stupid in public that involved a state of undress? You're a sex offender.
Ever look at a porn site which did not have full and correctly formed declarations of the ages of all the people involved? You're a sex offender.
Ever receive a spam mail that included underage porn? You're a sex offender just by receiving that mail.
This applies to you. "Sex offender" does not mean a mass-murderer, it means pretty much anybody that a prosecutor decides to chase. It's one of those "selective enforcement" laws.
I haven't seen anyone discredit this panel or this document yet.
That's because, behind all the lengthly wording and figures, this document doesn't actually say all that much. If you read it closely, what it says amounts to:
These are the trends that have been observed in the past 300 years. If these trends continue, this is what we can expect to happen.
We don't know why this is happening, although we have some theories which seem plausible. We think that human activities are probably responsible for some of it, but we don't know how much. We offer no suggestions about how these trends might be altered.
There isn't really anything in that statement that anybody can seriously disagree with. It's the scientific version of spreading your hands and shrugging. I strongly suspect that this document has been written so that all the US political parties can read it as supporting their position.
The big problem with all this climatology? Nobody has any serious evidence to back up any suggestions about what we should do about it. People make a lot of noise about carbon emissions... but we don't know how to significantly reduce carbon emissions (or at least, not without abandoning our lifestyle and killing a lot of people in the process, due to loss of modern farming and medical industries, which is generally not considered an acceptable solution), and even if we did, we don't know if that would actually help. Even if you assume that carbon emissions created the problem, it does not automatically follow that reducing carbon emissions now will improve matters - climates are just not that simple. The same problem applies to all the other issues that people come up with: we don't have any solutions, even if we were sure that the problem was even real (which we aren't, in most cases).
Or you could use bittorrent. I'm not entirely sure of the legality of downloading things that you already pay a license for such as TV shows, but that's never stopped anyone before.
And this is precisely the argument I made in my submission to the consultation. The people who are likely to want to use this service are probably already downloading the programmes via bittorrent. In order for this service to be used, it must be competitive with the thing that people are currently doing. Opinions on the legitimacy of bittorrent are not relevant - people will use whatever is most convenient. A system that is DRM-locked and can only be played on Windows computers, instead of being burned to DVD and watched on your regular TV set, is not going to take a large bite out of the market.
The proposal is for an experiment with unproven DRM systems. The BBC should not be wasting money on such experiments. If they aren't going to use the proven systems that everybody is already using, then they should avoid the whole thing and spend money on something that we know will be worthwhile (like making decent TV programmes).
I encourage any UK license payers reading this to make the same argument.
Here in the UK, it is almost always a crime to permit the BSA to do one of these "audits" without a warrant. This is because their idea of an audit involves you giving them access to all of your data, and giving them access to any data about your customers (like your accounting package) is a breach of the Data Protection Act.
So if you don't let them in, they try to sue you in a civil court, and if you do let them in, you get prosecuted in a criminal court and then your customers sue you (the DPA allows civil redress as well as criminal charges).
The problem is that most small businesses don't understand this.
Right, and that's an essential part of the problem (I should have gone into it, but the post was long enough already). Each "official" motherboard gets a different key.
The thing which is stolen from the production plant is the set of 50,000 keys for the current batch of motherboards (even if it's not supposed to be retained, the production software/equipment will be quietly modified so that it does get retained).
You have to realise: there is absolutely no reason why every bootleg device needs to have a different key. So in fact, all the ones on the street have the *same* key, and the bootleggers make one new key available for download every day. The manufacturer is now faced with a problem: kill one key a day and have no effect, kill them all and face a product recall, or forget the whole thing.
The hardware manufacturers have no incentive to play nice with the Trusted Computing scheme. This is just a repeat of DVD Region Coding. The manufacturers just started producing players that ignore the region code, because they outsold the locked players. Of course the first few on the market were "accidents", "mistakes", and "test designs".
It's a little more subtle than that.
In the first round, all the "major" manufacturers produce compliant devices (modulo bugs), which are locked down.
Then the Asian bootleggers get in on the business. Their friends in the Asian device production plants that make all these motherboards slip them copies of the current keys. Mod-chips and entire motherboards start appearing on the grey market, on the streets of Hong Kong and Seoul. Not to be outdone, Japanese importers start grabbing up these devices and they appear in the back-street stores in Akihabara.
Slow to catch on, the TCPA consortium revokes the offending keys, and the major motherboard producers are forced, at great expense, to recall all the previously sold boards and offer free replacements to anybody who wants their copy of Vista to keep working (it's impossible to securely issue a software update for this problem - the update would be equally applicable to the bootlegged devices, since there's no way to authenticate the 'genuine' ones when they're all using the same keys).
The morning after the keys are revoked, the keys for the new devices are available on the internet (because those production plants are still run by the same people, who really don't give a damn about the demands of the American corporations). This pattern continues for a couple of months, while the corporations shuffle their staff in the production facilities - and discover that there isn't anybody they can hire in those countries who is going to run the operation securely enough to matter. Frantic board meetings are held.
Meanwhile, alerted by media reports of the product recalls, western importers start getting hold of the bootleg devices. They begin to appear for sale in the US and Europe, via ebay and dedicated sites. The TCPA consortium flails about a bit, a bunch of stuff on ebay gets delisted, but there are too many importers and not enough time to sue them all.
The board meetings of most of the major motherboard manufacturers come to this conclusion: "TCPA is costing us money from having to change the keys all the time, there's no way that us *and all our competitors* are going to be able to secure all our production facilities any time soon - and worst of all, we're losing sales to this bootlegged hardware, because our customers want to download videos from thepiratebay. Screw this. We're going to start selling a product that people want to buy."
The second round of motherboards are rather less secure. Much like DVD region coding, the boards look like they do what they're supposed to at first glance, but actually there are ways to persuade the chips to give up their keys, or just sign anything you hand them. These are initially blamed on "test designs", etc. Not every manufacturer will do it at first - but those that don't will take a heavy hit in the market. Do not underestimate the desire of Americans for free porn and free violent movies.
TCPA is now dead.
This is basically what happened to DVD region coding - the major western production houses, faced with decss/dvdcss on the one hand and eastern import hardware eating into their sales on the other hand, quickly realised that siding with the DVD consortium was ultimately going to lose them a lot of money. The only way that TCPA could avoid this is if somehow every single approved motherboard manufacturer could manage to make their security watertight - and that just is not going to happen.
Of course, non-Vista platforms will be buried in a legal quagmire for years, as we have been with libdvdcss - it's not strictly legal, maybe, but it's the only way we'll ever have. This is perhaps the objective of the entire TCPA concept.
On a Linux or MacOS system, all characters except '/' and '\0' are valid in filenames, so we have nothing to spare. No, you can't steal the ':'.
On a Linux system, the character used to denote the start of a 'stream' name is '/'. Every stream must have a name and you can create as many as you like, and even put streams inside streams. The standard 'mv' and 'cp -a' utilities operate on all streams. The only difference between Linux and Windows with regards to stream support is that Linux has no concept of a "null stream name". All backup and file access utilities support streams just fine.
Yes, these are exactly the same thing as files and directories. That's the point. The concept of 'streams' is just a limited kind of directory structure, which is already supported just fine by Linux.
If you want an implementation of the "null stream name", I can do it in about ten minutes by creating an LD_PRELOAD-suitable library that wraps the open() function, appending "/.data" to every filename passed that does not include O_DIRECTORY. Yes, that really does work. We don't normally do it because frankly, it's kinda silly.
Microsoft doesn't "get" directories. This has always been a great source of amusement for me.
Hierarchies are a horrible way to manage data, because no one "category" is always a subset of another. Pick the more general term here:...
You can't. Or else it depends on a number of things.
Congratulations, you managed to contort your way into missing the point. Part of the design of any good system for filing is to define which categories are 'more general'. In cases where it doesn't matter, you simply make an arbitrary choice, and part of the filing system is the documentation of that choice so that everybody knows what the answer is. So once again: when you have a filing system, directory structures are an excellent way to model that system. When you do not have a filing system, you just have a mess that you can't find anything in. Ask any secretary.
If this inanity continues long enough, the next+1 version of Outlook will include a feature where you can force the recipient's client to misfile the mail you send them into categories specified in one of the headers. It will be marketed as a way for bosses to force their workers to follow "the system", so all PHBs will have the group policies set to prevent you from turning this feature off.
Within six weeks of its release, the amount of spam will have increased by over an order of magnitude, because you now get one version of each spam delivered into each folder.
Hardware is the easy part. The hard part is looking at a pile of a million things and trying to figure out what the tags are on that document you were writing last month.
It's a stupid idea. Filing is not about searching blindly in the style of google. Filing is about having a SYSTEM for categorising things, so that you can figure out what categories any given thing belongs in. Once you have such a system, the easiest way to implement that in software? Directories.
Sloppy labels only look good to people who have never had anything resembling a filing system, and instead just lose their documents.
On general ethical principle: if the US was at war with Iraq at the time, their soldiers should be subject to US military law, and if they were not, their soldiers should be subject to Iraqi law.
If you're not fighting these people, and you're in their country, you damn well obey their rules. If you don't like that, get out of their country.
"Our" side? They are rich American politicians. You are posting on slashdot. They are not on your side.
It is a mistake to think of "us vs them" as "democrats vs republicans", whichever way around you think of it. Everybody in congress is on the same side, and it's not your one.
i personally put a lot of faith in my immune system. i reckon i've already encountered this alleged terrifying flu, and many of its relatives.
It can only be contracted from handling the guts of dead infected birds. There are no other known infection vectors to date (and an infected human cannot transmit it).
Yeah, the media don't usually mention that part. There is no current bird flu threat, only a bunch of fuss about the possibility of one in the future.
I'm having trouble conceiving of this enzyme as being dangerous when it is from inside the guts of a common (albeit in this case from an uncommon region) fish (remember, cats and seagulls aren't particularly fussy about which parts of a fish they eat).
Wild cats are fussy about what they eat, like many other large wild animals. Many domesticated ones never had a reason to learn not to eat intestines, because they've been fed from a tin all their life. Don't use their behaviour as a guideline.
Seagulls just don't care. If you're looking at a seagull, it probably has several diseases which are going to kill it. They just don't live that long in the first place, so it's not all that important. So long as they manage to breed before they die from all the crap they eat, it doesn't matter that it's tearing them up inside and will shorten their lifespan. This is a common trait with short-lived, fast-breeding creatures - if it doesn't kill them *right away*, the species survival is often improved by eating something rather than not eating it. A meal that kills it in six months is one that gives it enough time to breed again, which is a net win.
Yes you do. You want to take the risk that you're right. Although apparently you want to avoid admitting that it's a risk.
It goes like this: your current lifestyle, and the current population of the planet, can only be supported at our current technology level by large-scale power production. That produces carbon dioxide and we don't have the technology to prevent that while achieving the current power production levels. If you want to scale it back in the manner required to have a severe impact on global warming, if the theories you support are correct, then you are going to HAVE to do both of the following:
Give up your current lifestyle, and live more like the people in India and China. No ipods, no pop music, no home computers, and definitely no sitting on your oversized butt and posting on slashdot. Those things can only be supported by the kind of industrial production that you're planning to end.
Accept that millions are going to die around the world as a result of your actions, as knock-on effects from economic damage that interrupts health, sanitation, and food industries (and goodness knows what else - when you kick a global economy in the crotch like that, all sorts of bad things are likely to happen)
You want to take the risk that this is better than the alternative.
If you're wrong, you earn a place in the history books, and it's not a good one.
Maybe in 20 years we could pull it off without this - but realistically, we would need some major breakthroughs, and those can never be predicted. Incremental improvement is always outpaced by demand (primarily due to population growth).
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You, sir, are an Ubuntu marketer. Most other distributions try to do that; to the best of my knowledge, the first Linux platform to routinely use the term "Just Work", with the capitalisation like that, was Debian (probably because it was one of the first Linux platforms to exist, and the term was being used in contrast to slackware, which was more a case of "work, damn you! work! argh!").
In the opposite direction. You do not defeat oppression by oppressing other people.
Quicktime is MPEG-4. Windows Media is VC-1. DVDs are MPEG-2. All of these are published, open specifications that anybody outside the US may implement. You probably already have free implementations of them installed.
The problem is not codecs. The problem is DRM. If you have a WMV that won't play, it's encrypted.
Both the ATI and the nVidia proprietary video drivers are extremely unstable and I have seen them often crash the entire kernel, hard. The nVidia driver in particular also has fundamental security issues (anybody with access to the video device has effective root); the same thing's probably true of the ATI driver, but I haven't heard of anybody figuring out how yet. These drivers are almost as bad as their Windows equivalents, needing patching every time somebody tries to run a new piece of code.
Microsoft have been writing operating systems for over a decade at this point, and they still suck at it. ATI and nVidia have been writing drivers for almost as long, and they still suck at it. The problem is not experience, it's objectives. "Providing a stable, secure operating environment" is not on their list of objectives, because that is not what sells video cards. Games, noisy fans, and cards that take up huge amounts of space (and therefore look more impressive) are what sells video cards. All that time and effort has not been put into making drivers more reliable, it has been put into making new visual effects that only work on the new models of cards, so that people have to keep buying new cards.
Yes, anyone can compete with that if they had the necessary information. There is plenty of scope for competition here. The reasons why they would try should be obvious.
What reality are you living in? Pretty much everything but the older versions of WMV and newer versions of realvideo has free codecs and published specs nowadays (Microsoft published the current WMV codec a while ago, it's SMTPE 421M, and quicktime is just MPEG-4 these days). There may be onerous patents that screw US users, but you can take that up with your government - it's nothing to do with the software and doesn't apply to the rest of the world.
The problem is not codecs, and has not been for some time. The problem is DRM-crippled streams. We have the video codecs for everything of significance except the current realvideo. What we don't have is the DRM protocols - and you're never going to see a DRMed stream that is intended for use on Linux-based platforms, no matter how many corporations you bend over for. All those WMVs you find that won't play on Linux? That's DRM, not the codec.
Careful. The following statement is also true:
"More than half of the humans crushed to a pulp by falling whales have died."
The important question is: what is the actual rate of infection among a population?
Right now it's approximately 0% because it's not really transmissible between humans; the fears are that this number may increase in an unknown manner, but the chances of it becoming large are quite remote; it would have to simultaneously develop a long incubation period during which no obvious symptoms are apparent, but when it is still readily transmissible, in order to evade all the things we do to arrest the spread of a pandemic in its early stages. "Dangerous" is not the same thing as "likely".
I just wish that some country would have the balls to realise that they're a sovereign nation, say "screw you" to the pharma companies, and declare open season on production of drugs that are important to their national health.
Maybe once a few governments kick the habit of paying the danegeld, the danes will go home. Paying them never, ever gets rid of the dane.
Smart ISPs do not throttle bittorrent. They just throttle everything.
Attempting to distinguish between protocols for this sort of thing, when you're in an ISP role, is ineffective, wasteful, and dumb. Users will always evade your hostile attempts to classify their traffic. Traffic classification only works with the cooperation of at least one of the participants, which ISPs do not have in this instance.
If the problem is bandwidth usage, set realistic bandwidth limits and don't sell bandwidth that you don't have. Selling bandwidth that you don't have is fraud. Advertising bandwidth rates and then setting lower limits for certain protocols is fraud. People get prosecuted for this kind of nonsense all the time.
The point: people who talk about a protocol being abused are more or less always wrong. It is not about the protocols. (Yes, that makes these university networks admins wrong, and also dumb)
The point which you are failing to make is that "autism" doesn't exist, and is just a lumping-together of many, many different traits that look similar to the educated observed who hasn't carefully studied them. Some of those traits are viable (in that the result is a person which can function, if not in the same manner as other people) and some are not viable (in that the result needs permanent low-level life support, because they can't survive on their own, for whatever reason).
Trying to lump all of these things together into the category of "autism" is probably counter-productive.
And they still haven't come up with any actual proof that such a thing as autism even exists.
The problem with the whole autism spectrum disorder thing is that it's a completely arbitrary category of a bunch of symptoms which human observers think look similar. So far there's no particular evidence that "autism" exists anywhere but in the imaginations of people. It could be a collection of many unrelated traits - and probably is, at least to some extent.
Saying that autism has a cause is likely to turn out to be like saying that being French has a cause - it kinda does ("having French parents"), but you're not going to find a "French gene". You will find a whole bunch of genetic traits that go along with being French, but turning them off won't turn a Frenchman into a normal person. Correlation does not imply causation, and it definitely does not imply that modifying one of the correlated variables will alter the other.
Ever look at a porn site which did not have full and correctly formed declarations of the ages of all the people involved? You're a sex offender.
Ever receive a spam mail that included underage porn? You're a sex offender just by receiving that mail.
This applies to you. "Sex offender" does not mean a mass-murderer, it means pretty much anybody that a prosecutor decides to chase. It's one of those "selective enforcement" laws.
These are the trends that have been observed in the past 300 years. If these trends continue, this is what we can expect to happen.
We don't know why this is happening, although we have some theories which seem plausible. We think that human activities are probably responsible for some of it, but we don't know how much. We offer no suggestions about how these trends might be altered.
There isn't really anything in that statement that anybody can seriously disagree with. It's the scientific version of spreading your hands and shrugging. I strongly suspect that this document has been written so that all the US political parties can read it as supporting their position.
The big problem with all this climatology? Nobody has any serious evidence to back up any suggestions about what we should do about it. People make a lot of noise about carbon emissions... but we don't know how to significantly reduce carbon emissions (or at least, not without abandoning our lifestyle and killing a lot of people in the process, due to loss of modern farming and medical industries, which is generally not considered an acceptable solution), and even if we did, we don't know if that would actually help. Even if you assume that carbon emissions created the problem, it does not automatically follow that reducing carbon emissions now will improve matters - climates are just not that simple. The same problem applies to all the other issues that people come up with: we don't have any solutions, even if we were sure that the problem was even real (which we aren't, in most cases).
The proposal is for an experiment with unproven DRM systems. The BBC should not be wasting money on such experiments. If they aren't going to use the proven systems that everybody is already using, then they should avoid the whole thing and spend money on something that we know will be worthwhile (like making decent TV programmes).
I encourage any UK license payers reading this to make the same argument.
Here in the UK, it is almost always a crime to permit the BSA to do one of these "audits" without a warrant. This is because their idea of an audit involves you giving them access to all of your data, and giving them access to any data about your customers (like your accounting package) is a breach of the Data Protection Act.
So if you don't let them in, they try to sue you in a civil court, and if you do let them in, you get prosecuted in a criminal court and then your customers sue you (the DPA allows civil redress as well as criminal charges).
The problem is that most small businesses don't understand this.
Right, and that's an essential part of the problem (I should have gone into it, but the post was long enough already). Each "official" motherboard gets a different key.
The thing which is stolen from the production plant is the set of 50,000 keys for the current batch of motherboards (even if it's not supposed to be retained, the production software/equipment will be quietly modified so that it does get retained).
You have to realise: there is absolutely no reason why every bootleg device needs to have a different key. So in fact, all the ones on the street have the *same* key, and the bootleggers make one new key available for download every day. The manufacturer is now faced with a problem: kill one key a day and have no effect, kill them all and face a product recall, or forget the whole thing.
In the first round, all the "major" manufacturers produce compliant devices (modulo bugs), which are locked down.
Then the Asian bootleggers get in on the business. Their friends in the Asian device production plants that make all these motherboards slip them copies of the current keys. Mod-chips and entire motherboards start appearing on the grey market, on the streets of Hong Kong and Seoul. Not to be outdone, Japanese importers start grabbing up these devices and they appear in the back-street stores in Akihabara.
Slow to catch on, the TCPA consortium revokes the offending keys, and the major motherboard producers are forced, at great expense, to recall all the previously sold boards and offer free replacements to anybody who wants their copy of Vista to keep working (it's impossible to securely issue a software update for this problem - the update would be equally applicable to the bootlegged devices, since there's no way to authenticate the 'genuine' ones when they're all using the same keys).
The morning after the keys are revoked, the keys for the new devices are available on the internet (because those production plants are still run by the same people, who really don't give a damn about the demands of the American corporations). This pattern continues for a couple of months, while the corporations shuffle their staff in the production facilities - and discover that there isn't anybody they can hire in those countries who is going to run the operation securely enough to matter. Frantic board meetings are held.
Meanwhile, alerted by media reports of the product recalls, western importers start getting hold of the bootleg devices. They begin to appear for sale in the US and Europe, via ebay and dedicated sites. The TCPA consortium flails about a bit, a bunch of stuff on ebay gets delisted, but there are too many importers and not enough time to sue them all.
The board meetings of most of the major motherboard manufacturers come to this conclusion: "TCPA is costing us money from having to change the keys all the time, there's no way that us *and all our competitors* are going to be able to secure all our production facilities any time soon - and worst of all, we're losing sales to this bootlegged hardware, because our customers want to download videos from thepiratebay. Screw this. We're going to start selling a product that people want to buy."
The second round of motherboards are rather less secure. Much like DVD region coding, the boards look like they do what they're supposed to at first glance, but actually there are ways to persuade the chips to give up their keys, or just sign anything you hand them. These are initially blamed on "test designs", etc. Not every manufacturer will do it at first - but those that don't will take a heavy hit in the market. Do not underestimate the desire of Americans for free porn and free violent movies.
TCPA is now dead.
This is basically what happened to DVD region coding - the major western production houses, faced with decss/dvdcss on the one hand and eastern import hardware eating into their sales on the other hand, quickly realised that siding with the DVD consortium was ultimately going to lose them a lot of money. The only way that TCPA could avoid this is if somehow every single approved motherboard manufacturer could manage to make their security watertight - and that just is not going to happen.
Of course, non-Vista platforms will be buried in a legal quagmire for years, as we have been with libdvdcss - it's not strictly legal, maybe, but it's the only way we'll ever have. This is perhaps the objective of the entire TCPA concept.
On a Linux system, the character used to denote the start of a 'stream' name is '/'. Every stream must have a name and you can create as many as you like, and even put streams inside streams. The standard 'mv' and 'cp -a' utilities operate on all streams. The only difference between Linux and Windows with regards to stream support is that Linux has no concept of a "null stream name". All backup and file access utilities support streams just fine.
Yes, these are exactly the same thing as files and directories. That's the point. The concept of 'streams' is just a limited kind of directory structure, which is already supported just fine by Linux.
If you want an implementation of the "null stream name", I can do it in about ten minutes by creating an LD_PRELOAD-suitable library that wraps the open() function, appending "/.data" to every filename passed that does not include O_DIRECTORY. Yes, that really does work. We don't normally do it because frankly, it's kinda silly.
Microsoft doesn't "get" directories. This has always been a great source of amusement for me.
Congratulations, you managed to contort your way into missing the point. Part of the design of any good system for filing is to define which categories are 'more general'. In cases where it doesn't matter, you simply make an arbitrary choice, and part of the filing system is the documentation of that choice so that everybody knows what the answer is. So once again: when you have a filing system, directory structures are an excellent way to model that system. When you do not have a filing system, you just have a mess that you can't find anything in. Ask any secretary.
If this inanity continues long enough, the next+1 version of Outlook will include a feature where you can force the recipient's client to misfile the mail you send them into categories specified in one of the headers. It will be marketed as a way for bosses to force their workers to follow "the system", so all PHBs will have the group policies set to prevent you from turning this feature off.
Within six weeks of its release, the amount of spam will have increased by over an order of magnitude, because you now get one version of each spam delivered into each folder.
Hardware is the easy part. The hard part is looking at a pile of a million things and trying to figure out what the tags are on that document you were writing last month.
It's a stupid idea. Filing is not about searching blindly in the style of google. Filing is about having a SYSTEM for categorising things, so that you can figure out what categories any given thing belongs in. Once you have such a system, the easiest way to implement that in software? Directories.
Sloppy labels only look good to people who have never had anything resembling a filing system, and instead just lose their documents.
On general ethical principle: if the US was at war with Iraq at the time, their soldiers should be subject to US military law, and if they were not, their soldiers should be subject to Iraqi law.
If you're not fighting these people, and you're in their country, you damn well obey their rules. If you don't like that, get out of their country.
"Our" side? They are rich American politicians. You are posting on slashdot. They are not on your side.
It is a mistake to think of "us vs them" as "democrats vs republicans", whichever way around you think of it. Everybody in congress is on the same side, and it's not your one.
It can only be contracted from handling the guts of dead infected birds. There are no other known infection vectors to date (and an infected human cannot transmit it).
Yeah, the media don't usually mention that part. There is no current bird flu threat, only a bunch of fuss about the possibility of one in the future.
Wild cats are fussy about what they eat, like many other large wild animals. Many domesticated ones never had a reason to learn not to eat intestines, because they've been fed from a tin all their life. Don't use their behaviour as a guideline.
Seagulls just don't care. If you're looking at a seagull, it probably has several diseases which are going to kill it. They just don't live that long in the first place, so it's not all that important. So long as they manage to breed before they die from all the crap they eat, it doesn't matter that it's tearing them up inside and will shorten their lifespan. This is a common trait with short-lived, fast-breeding creatures - if it doesn't kill them *right away*, the species survival is often improved by eating something rather than not eating it. A meal that kills it in six months is one that gives it enough time to breed again, which is a net win.
Yes you do. You want to take the risk that you're right. Although apparently you want to avoid admitting that it's a risk.
It goes like this: your current lifestyle, and the current population of the planet, can only be supported at our current technology level by large-scale power production. That produces carbon dioxide and we don't have the technology to prevent that while achieving the current power production levels. If you want to scale it back in the manner required to have a severe impact on global warming, if the theories you support are correct, then you are going to HAVE to do both of the following:
You want to take the risk that this is better than the alternative.
If you're wrong, you earn a place in the history books, and it's not a good one.
Maybe in 20 years we could pull it off without this - but realistically, we would need some major breakthroughs, and those can never be predicted. Incremental improvement is always outpaced by demand (primarily due to population growth).