Ockham's razor recommends that this straightforward explanation is preferable to positing some "unknown third factor" which has no predictive or explanatory power.
You are describing a common misconception of this concept, which is wrong nine times out of ten: being black makes you a criminal (because that's preferable to complex unknown social causes), light propagates through the ether (because that's preferable to complex ineffable quantum physics), being muslim makes you a terrorist (you get the idea).
Correctly applied, Ockham's razor cannot be used to discard any options which would give a different outcome. Instead, these options must be empirically tested and eliminated one by one, by setting up the necessary conditions and observing which predicted outcomes do not occur.
Also, your notion that there is no rational reason to think CO2 is the cause rather than effect of Pleistocene climate change is a bit strange.
There are plenty of rational reasons. That makes it *possible*. If there were no rational reasons, it would be *disproven*. The existence of a possibility does not prove that the possibility is true. We can demonstrate that this *could* happen. We have not yet been able to prove whether or not it *did* happen. This distinction is vital to comprehending scientific research.
Moreover, you oversimplify when you posit a simple cause-effect relationship between greenhouse gases and temperature.
I simplified nothing. I classified all possible end results into categories, providing complete coverage. This is not a simplification at all, because it's just rearranging the options (the point being that you *can't* simplify it by discarding some of these options). The observed data *must* be explained by one of those three cases. This is a standard observation in all fields of science: when variables A and B are correlated, then one of these three statements is true:
A causes B
B causes A
C causes A and B
The first two are the "simple cause-effect relationships" that you refer to, and the third one is everything else (including "coincidence", which just means "C is not interesting"). Curious that you first decried the possibility of the third statement (in your first paragraph), and then went on to claim it was the correct one here.
Actually there are well-known feedback relationships whereby increasing temperature tends to increase the concentration of greenhouse gases
That's the second possibility of the three, yes: increasing the temperature of the planet causes CO2 levels to rise, instead of the other way around. You will note that this possibility is directly opposed to the notion that human CO2 emissions cause global warming. We do not yet know whether this actually occurs, but we're damn sure that it's *possible*.
which in turn raise the temperature, which then raises GHG levels further and so on.
Pure nonsense. There are no runaway feedback loops in the planetary ecology. If there were, there wouldn't be any life on the planet, it would be an uninhabitable ball of searing hot gases.
All significant feedback loops in nature are stable - they tend to cause the system to return to an earlier state. Unstable systems are rapidly eliminated, because they destroy themselves. Our planet it still here after many climate cycles, so it's a stable one (and if it's not, there isn't anything we can do about it).
Rather like arguing that maybe HIV doesn't cause AIDS, but some mysterious third-cause is responsible for both.
I know I sound very offtopic bringing this up, but many PC gamers also play console games. They will want to compare console graphics to PC graphics.
Have you ever played PC games and console games? Console graphics have always SUCKED DONKEY compared to PC graphics. The PS2 had the most advanced graphics processor around when it was released... but the output resolution was 320x200 (because that's about what a TV uses), so it really didn't matter a damn.
Nobody sane has ever expected decent graphics from a console. Consoles are not intended to give decent graphics, except when compared to other consoles. Consoles are intended to be used with TV sets, which is an incredibly limiting constraint.
The current round of consoles has made a lot of noise about HDTV but none of them currently have any intention of implementing it (they'll give HDMI output but the quality of the output is not greatly improved over a regular TV). Console games continue to run at painfully low resolutions, compared to equivalent PC games. Gamers who really care about graphics quality will continue to use PCs, like they have done for the past several years.
Maybe it was a good fake, and I'd have to watch the paper rolls getting moved.
While I know nothing about the system where you are, if it has been designed properly (like in many civilised countries) then you and any other voter can sign up to do precisely that: stand and observe the poll workers (without interfering with them in any way) as they do their jobs, to make sure they aren't doing anything wrong. In places with such systems, it's traditional for the party of each major candidate to send a couple of people to every polling site to do precisely this - they ask for volunteers from their members. There's usually no shortage of middle-aged people with nothing better to do and a powerful desire to poke their noses in.
With IPv6, there are (effectively) an unlimited number of IP addresses available for spammers.
Nonsense. You cannot just make up an IP address to use on the internet, if you expect it to work. You have to use the addresses allocated to you by your provider. No provider is going to assign you an effectively unlimited number of addresses to work with. Most of the IPv6 addresses are going to remain unallocated for a long time.
There will be approximately as many (same order of magnitude) allocated IPv6 addresses prefixes as there are IPv4 addresses, when the conversion is complete, because the number of users of both with be about the same. Ignoring for a moment the stupidity of maintaining a database of IP addresses used by spammers, such a scheme would be precisely as practical with IPv6 as it is with IPv4, because the mechanism by which they are allocated will be unchanged. The only appreciable difference with IPv6 is that you get allocated a block containing many addresses with a common prefix, instead of a single address. It is trivial to match based on the prefix instead of the entire address.
NTP is a classic example of a patent troll. They purchase patents from other companies and then sue people for violations of those patents, and try to get people to pay them protection money ("license fees") to leave them alone. At no point do they produce or use anything, so they are completely exempt from "defensive" patents - nobody can countersue NTP for patent violations because NTP do nothing that could violate any patents. Similarly, license clauses that attempt to block people from suing for patent violations are ineffective against them.
Companies like this are a good example of why both "defensive" patents and those license clauses are a total waste of time, accomplishing nothing other than to create new problems.
It isn't as if they're going to make an animal which is a cross between a humand and a rabbit, the DNA codes for a human being, that's what you'd get.
DNA isn't everything. If you don't grow the DNA in the intended host environment (a chicken needs to grow in a chicken egg, a human needs to grow in a human female), then all you're likely to get is a mass of nonviable cells (that is, a blob which isn't capable of sustaining its own existence). While it is not yet understood exactly which parts come from the DNA and which parts come from the host, it is known that the host is an essential part of the process for complex lifeforms. You cannot grow a viable human in a petri dish; the process isn't that simple. While it may be possible to construct an artificial environment in which you can grow a viable human, we don't know how to do it yet.
They are not going to make any animals. We can't do that and we're nowhere close to being able to do it. The only way we know to grow a functional animal is boring old in vitro fertilisation. This is entirely different.
What you can do is grow some components of a lifeform - like new blood, bone marrow, etc. Maybe even new organs - if we can get this working, it would be a far better solution to the organ transplant problem than our current system. We don't know how to do that yet, but we can probably figure it out in the next 20 years or so. You can also watch the cells developing and investigate how they work (because we really don't know at present). That's what stem cell research is all about.
With that kind of attitude, you'll never be a decent salesman!
I really, deeply hope that I never become the sort of person who would be a decent salesman. I would rather do something more wholesome, like politics or genocide.
It's a process that's inherently neither good nor bad.
And yet in the real world it creates no shortage of bad, but never any real good. That's the flaw in your theory right there: it fails to predict the observed evidence.
Every time I've seen or heard of somebody buying something that was good for them, it was a result of their own research. Every time I've seen or heard of somebody buying something that a salesman pushed to them, it was bad for them.
... can somebody "debunk" the results from the EPICA ice cores? You know, the ones that record CO2 levels for at least the past 650 kYears, and conclude that current CO2 levels are nearly 2 times higher than they have ever been over the last 8 ice ages?
And then there was another set of results that showed how CO2 levels and global temperature are very closely related.
Before I'm willing to believe that global warming is bunk, somebody is going to have to convincingly refute the above evidence to the contrary.
Stop thinking about "debunking" this. That's political schtick that has no place in a rational discussion.
Scientists are convinced that CO2 levels are rising and that global temperatures are rising (your first reference). That is all they are convinced about - these numbers are definitely increasing for some reason.
Scientists have observed that there is a correlation between these two things (your second reference). However, evidence of correlation is not evidence of causation. It could be that rising CO2 levels cause global warming, or that global warming causes CO2 levels to rise, or that both of them are caused by some unknown third factor (and in the history of science, these things almost always turn out to be some unknown third factor; it's very rare for the first thing discovered to be the true cause of anything). What is going on could be *any* of these three, and we just don't know which yet. There's nothing to "debunk" - it's just an unknown. Lots of research is going on to try and figure it out, but it's very very hard to do meaningful research on a planetary ecology, since you can't set up repeatable experiments.
The political "pro-global-warming" idea is based on the assumption that the first case is true - CO2 levels are causing global warming. The political "anti-global-warming" idea is based on the assumption that nothing is happening. Neither of these two ideas are particularly rational, and no politicians seem to be seriously considering the other possibilities. Both of them are using it as a political tool (and the article is discussing a few of the ways in which this is happening from the pro-global-warming side); they aren't really interested in controlling the climate of the planet.
So in brief: global warming has never been proven nor debunked. We don't know whether it's true. The article discusses ways in which politicians are abusing this confusion for their own ends.
Remember that the management team for this company has likely spoken to their lawyers
Only large companies have lawyers on staff to handle this sort of advice. This sounds like a small company, who will be billed by the minute for all legal advice. They will not speak to their lawyers unless they have no choice. They will not ask them for advice on such matters. Small companies never do.
Plants aren't simple oxygen machines; they give and take in ways that I simply cannot recall
Right. They generate oxygen during the day (photosynthesis) and consume it at night (respiration just like every other creature). The net effect on the planet's oxygen is quite small.
The carbon-dioxide/oxygen ratio in the atmosphere is not determined by plants at all. It is regulated by blue-green algae in the oceans in a rather cool negative-feedback loop - if the carbon dioxide level rises, the algae increase their consumption of it, emitting oxygen. That's the primary source of the oxygen that we breathe. Land plants have significant roles to play in the ecosystem (such as the nitrogen cycle), but oxygen generation is not one of them.
You missed the point. That's just electronic vote counting - that's easy. This is voter-verifiable vote counting - you can verify after the fact that your vote was counted the way you voted it. Doing this, without revealing to anybody else how you voted, is tricky - but it's possible.
I've always been surprised that Linksys or one of the other network-box companies hasn't put together an easy to use "web accellerator" caching proxy.
If there's one thing that people should have learned from the last 10 years of end-user non-entertainment consumer computer products, it's this:
No significant numbers of people will buy your product unless it will save them money or they think they cannot live without it.
People will pay through the nose for entertainment stuff (games, etc), but for anything else, they will buy only what you can convince them is non-optional. The firewall and anti-virus companies have put a lot of effort into convincing people that they cannot live without these products. Microsoft work hard to make Windows and Office mandatory purchases.
Any "accelerator" of any kind is, by definition, optional - and consumers do not pay for the amount of bandwidth they use, so they do not benefit from improved caching. Such products are not successful in the marketplace; most consumers will just ignore them. A few manage to break-even and survive, but most die, and none turn a significant profit. Companies like Linksys are doubtless aware of this and don't waste their time on producing such things.
Note that this is specific to consumers - business users are entirely different. But business users rarely have a compelling need for caching web browsing unless they are very large - and so they won't be interested in turnkey solutions like this.
Only in theory. They figured out a way to work around that pesky law a long time ago - a private contractor is given the task of 'producing' the work, with assistance supplied by the government. "Assistance" here means that the government supplies all the people who do the actual work on it. The contractor then sells the copyright to the government. This little legal fiction results in a work that was produced entirely by government employees and using government funds, that is copyrighted and owned by the government. It's now standard practice in any case where the government thinks they might want to have copyright on something.
One of the most important skills you can learn is how to sell.
However, you have to make the choice between being a seller (which means lying to customers - no salesman ever tells the truth), and being a person who does something productive. The two things are not compatible; sales is a zero-sum activity.
So Linux is good, and it's *all* thanks to RedHat? No one else deserves credit.
Well, when you're only considering Redhat and Novell/SuSE, only Redhat deserves any credit. All SuSE ever did was create proprietary applications and package other people's work - this isn't a *bad* thing to be doing, but they certainly don't deserve any credit for it. They've become a little less irrelevant in recent years, but haven't done anything special in that time.
It's also true that Redhat does a lot of good work on developing essential free software (linux itself, glibc, gcc, etc) - depending on how you count, they're probably responsible for something on the order of 10% to 50% of the work on the "core" components of the system. That's far more than any other single player. It's not a *majority* of the work done (individual developers, with no particular corporate affiliation, as a group do more work than Redhat), but no other entity can claim to have done any more work than they have - which appears to be the point they're making here.
Other posters have pointed out that building a bomb that works without killing yourself is actually really hard, I'm just going to pick up on this bit:
The hard part is getting the enriched Uranium or Plutonium.
Enriching them is hard. Getting enriched uranium is fairly easy - the US alone produces tons of the stuff every year and loses a significant amount of it. It wouldn't be difficult for somebody to steal some, and it would go completely unnoticed (as it would just be a small increase in the amount that can no longer be located).
It hurts that 1/1 millionth of the population that might care, but it provides a CONSISTENT user experience that can be built on for the rest of us.
Oh man, you haven't ever used Windows, have you? Of all my experiences with Windows, "consistent" would not be a word I would use to describe any of them. Terms like "arbitrary", "random", and "ill-defined" come to mind. Also "no two systems ever quite work the same way".
Municipally owned and operated ISPs are a bad idea.
Indeed. Government-operated services are the worst possible way to run a service. You cannot get any worse......except for having no service at all. Which is the case here; it's not a choice between "government service" and "private industry", it's a choice between "government service" and "nothing". The private industry is attempting to ensure that the choice made is for "nothing".
Missing the point. This is not and never has been about stopping virus attacks - it won't accomplish that and Microsoft knows it; every Windows kernel is full of exploitable bugs and most viruses exploit them.
This is about stopping the user from modifying the kernel's behaviour, so that Microsoft can lock down your computer and control what you do with it.
the kernel is supposed to be the only software which accesses these low level things and abstracts out interfaces for the rest of the software to utilize
Not in the Windows world. There, the kernel is the software which Microsoft does not want altered - stuff like parts of the user interface, IE, etc. (I'm not kidding, IE *does* have components which run in ring 0).
The "music business" is probably dead as well, killed off by greedy younglings that want to collect all the songs they can for free.
I have no interest in collecting all the songs I can... but if it will kill off the music business, I'm all for it. The world would be a much better place without those vultures in it. They squeeze everybody they can reach for as much money as they can get, and pass draconian laws that cause no end of problems for people who have nothing to do with the music business. And what do we get in exchange? A fraction of a percentage point shaved off the unemployment rate? We're better off without them. If unemployment is the price of getting rid of them, it's worth every penny.
But can someone more legally inclined tell me why his response shouldn't be "because I'm innocent until proven guilty"?
While "innocent until proven guilty" is a fundamental component of any sane legal system, it's not the only such component. Another closely related one is called "prima facie" evidence. This is evidence that by itself proves guilt if no proper rebuttal is forthcoming from the other party. Once prima facie evidence has been supplied by the plaintiff, the defendant *has* been proven guilty if they cannot rebut it.
While I can't find a copy of this petition to read, it seems likely that it is of the form: "Thompson did these things: [quote from the court record]. This is prima facie evidence of contempt". At this point, it is indeed Thompson's task to show he did no wrong - if he cannot rebut such evidence, then he's guilty. There's no need for a trial to establish whether or not part of the court record is true (the court presumes that it knows what happened in its own courtroom). The judge will review the petition, and if he agrees that it is prima facie evidence, then the only bit left is for Thompson to defend himself.
It is a safe bet to assume that anything you read on grc.com is nonsense. Gibson is one of the single worst things to happen to people's understanding of network security, ever.
All that you should take away from this page is: "anybody that is connected on this side of the nearest security barrier (typically your firewall; in large networks it may be the nearest router) is and must be completely trusted". This is something that anybody should understand before being allowed to handle a network: there is no security in a network except that which you deliberately and explicitly put in place.
Using a VPN absolutely eliminates the danger of sniffing, even if the "VPN" is merely SSL webmail.
If AND ONLY IF you have verified the server certificate. If you did not verify the certificate at all, it accomplishes nothing. If you trusted the Verisign root certificates to do it for you (such as in the case of SSL webmail), it accomplishes nothing (because they have many times been caught handing out certificates to attackers).
If you do not know what a server certificate is, using SSL or any kind of VPN accomplishes nothing for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Occam's razor states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, by eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions
You are describing a common misconception of this concept, which is wrong nine times out of ten: being black makes you a criminal (because that's preferable to complex unknown social causes), light propagates through the ether (because that's preferable to complex ineffable quantum physics), being muslim makes you a terrorist (you get the idea).
Correctly applied, Ockham's razor cannot be used to discard any options which would give a different outcome. Instead, these options must be empirically tested and eliminated one by one, by setting up the necessary conditions and observing which predicted outcomes do not occur.
There are plenty of rational reasons. That makes it *possible*. If there were no rational reasons, it would be *disproven*. The existence of a possibility does not prove that the possibility is true. We can demonstrate that this *could* happen. We have not yet been able to prove whether or not it *did* happen. This distinction is vital to comprehending scientific research.
I simplified nothing. I classified all possible end results into categories, providing complete coverage. This is not a simplification at all, because it's just rearranging the options (the point being that you *can't* simplify it by discarding some of these options). The observed data *must* be explained by one of those three cases. This is a standard observation in all fields of science: when variables A and B are correlated, then one of these three statements is true:
The first two are the "simple cause-effect relationships" that you refer to, and the third one is everything else (including "coincidence", which just means "C is not interesting"). Curious that you first decried the possibility of the third statement (in your first paragraph), and then went on to claim it was the correct one here.
That's the second possibility of the three, yes: increasing the temperature of the planet causes CO2 levels to rise, instead of the other way around. You will note that this possibility is directly opposed to the notion that human CO2 emissions cause global warming. We do not yet know whether this actually occurs, but we're damn sure that it's *possible*.
Pure nonsense. There are no runaway feedback loops in the planetary ecology. If there were, there wouldn't be any life on the planet, it would be an uninhabitable ball of searing hot gases.
All significant feedback loops in nature are stable - they tend to cause the system to return to an earlier state. Unstable systems are rapidly eliminated, because they destroy themselves. Our planet it still here after many climate cycles, so it's a stable one (and if it's not, there isn't anything we can do about it).
Refusin
Have you ever played PC games and console games? Console graphics have always SUCKED DONKEY compared to PC graphics. The PS2 had the most advanced graphics processor around when it was released... but the output resolution was 320x200 (because that's about what a TV uses), so it really didn't matter a damn.
Nobody sane has ever expected decent graphics from a console. Consoles are not intended to give decent graphics, except when compared to other consoles. Consoles are intended to be used with TV sets, which is an incredibly limiting constraint.
The current round of consoles has made a lot of noise about HDTV but none of them currently have any intention of implementing it (they'll give HDMI output but the quality of the output is not greatly improved over a regular TV). Console games continue to run at painfully low resolutions, compared to equivalent PC games. Gamers who really care about graphics quality will continue to use PCs, like they have done for the past several years.
While I know nothing about the system where you are, if it has been designed properly (like in many civilised countries) then you and any other voter can sign up to do precisely that: stand and observe the poll workers (without interfering with them in any way) as they do their jobs, to make sure they aren't doing anything wrong. In places with such systems, it's traditional for the party of each major candidate to send a couple of people to every polling site to do precisely this - they ask for volunteers from their members. There's usually no shortage of middle-aged people with nothing better to do and a powerful desire to poke their noses in.
Nonsense. You cannot just make up an IP address to use on the internet, if you expect it to work. You have to use the addresses allocated to you by your provider. No provider is going to assign you an effectively unlimited number of addresses to work with. Most of the IPv6 addresses are going to remain unallocated for a long time.
There will be approximately as many (same order of magnitude) allocated IPv6 addresses prefixes as there are IPv4 addresses, when the conversion is complete, because the number of users of both with be about the same. Ignoring for a moment the stupidity of maintaining a database of IP addresses used by spammers, such a scheme would be precisely as practical with IPv6 as it is with IPv4, because the mechanism by which they are allocated will be unchanged. The only appreciable difference with IPv6 is that you get allocated a block containing many addresses with a common prefix, instead of a single address. It is trivial to match based on the prefix instead of the entire address.
To expand on what others have already said:
NTP is a classic example of a patent troll. They purchase patents from other companies and then sue people for violations of those patents, and try to get people to pay them protection money ("license fees") to leave them alone. At no point do they produce or use anything, so they are completely exempt from "defensive" patents - nobody can countersue NTP for patent violations because NTP do nothing that could violate any patents. Similarly, license clauses that attempt to block people from suing for patent violations are ineffective against them.
Companies like this are a good example of why both "defensive" patents and those license clauses are a total waste of time, accomplishing nothing other than to create new problems.
DNA isn't everything. If you don't grow the DNA in the intended host environment (a chicken needs to grow in a chicken egg, a human needs to grow in a human female), then all you're likely to get is a mass of nonviable cells (that is, a blob which isn't capable of sustaining its own existence). While it is not yet understood exactly which parts come from the DNA and which parts come from the host, it is known that the host is an essential part of the process for complex lifeforms. You cannot grow a viable human in a petri dish; the process isn't that simple. While it may be possible to construct an artificial environment in which you can grow a viable human, we don't know how to do it yet.
They are not going to make any animals. We can't do that and we're nowhere close to being able to do it. The only way we know to grow a functional animal is boring old in vitro fertilisation. This is entirely different.
What you can do is grow some components of a lifeform - like new blood, bone marrow, etc. Maybe even new organs - if we can get this working, it would be a far better solution to the organ transplant problem than our current system. We don't know how to do that yet, but we can probably figure it out in the next 20 years or so. You can also watch the cells developing and investigate how they work (because we really don't know at present). That's what stem cell research is all about.
I really, deeply hope that I never become the sort of person who would be a decent salesman. I would rather do something more wholesome, like politics or genocide.
And yet in the real world it creates no shortage of bad, but never any real good. That's the flaw in your theory right there: it fails to predict the observed evidence.
Every time I've seen or heard of somebody buying something that was good for them, it was a result of their own research. Every time I've seen or heard of somebody buying something that a salesman pushed to them, it was bad for them.
Stop thinking about "debunking" this. That's political schtick that has no place in a rational discussion.
Scientists are convinced that CO2 levels are rising and that global temperatures are rising (your first reference). That is all they are convinced about - these numbers are definitely increasing for some reason.
Scientists have observed that there is a correlation between these two things (your second reference). However, evidence of correlation is not evidence of causation. It could be that rising CO2 levels cause global warming, or that global warming causes CO2 levels to rise, or that both of them are caused by some unknown third factor (and in the history of science, these things almost always turn out to be some unknown third factor; it's very rare for the first thing discovered to be the true cause of anything). What is going on could be *any* of these three, and we just don't know which yet. There's nothing to "debunk" - it's just an unknown. Lots of research is going on to try and figure it out, but it's very very hard to do meaningful research on a planetary ecology, since you can't set up repeatable experiments.
The political "pro-global-warming" idea is based on the assumption that the first case is true - CO2 levels are causing global warming. The political "anti-global-warming" idea is based on the assumption that nothing is happening. Neither of these two ideas are particularly rational, and no politicians seem to be seriously considering the other possibilities. Both of them are using it as a political tool (and the article is discussing a few of the ways in which this is happening from the pro-global-warming side); they aren't really interested in controlling the climate of the planet.
So in brief: global warming has never been proven nor debunked. We don't know whether it's true. The article discusses ways in which politicians are abusing this confusion for their own ends.
Only large companies have lawyers on staff to handle this sort of advice. This sounds like a small company, who will be billed by the minute for all legal advice. They will not speak to their lawyers unless they have no choice. They will not ask them for advice on such matters. Small companies never do.
Right. They generate oxygen during the day (photosynthesis) and consume it at night (respiration just like every other creature). The net effect on the planet's oxygen is quite small.
The carbon-dioxide/oxygen ratio in the atmosphere is not determined by plants at all. It is regulated by blue-green algae in the oceans in a rather cool negative-feedback loop - if the carbon dioxide level rises, the algae increase their consumption of it, emitting oxygen. That's the primary source of the oxygen that we breathe. Land plants have significant roles to play in the ecosystem (such as the nitrogen cycle), but oxygen generation is not one of them.
You missed the point. That's just electronic vote counting - that's easy. This is voter-verifiable vote counting - you can verify after the fact that your vote was counted the way you voted it. Doing this, without revealing to anybody else how you voted, is tricky - but it's possible.
If there's one thing that people should have learned from the last 10 years of end-user non-entertainment consumer computer products, it's this:
No significant numbers of people will buy your product unless it will save them money or they think they cannot live without it.
People will pay through the nose for entertainment stuff (games, etc), but for anything else, they will buy only what you can convince them is non-optional. The firewall and anti-virus companies have put a lot of effort into convincing people that they cannot live without these products. Microsoft work hard to make Windows and Office mandatory purchases.
Any "accelerator" of any kind is, by definition, optional - and consumers do not pay for the amount of bandwidth they use, so they do not benefit from improved caching. Such products are not successful in the marketplace; most consumers will just ignore them. A few manage to break-even and survive, but most die, and none turn a significant profit. Companies like Linksys are doubtless aware of this and don't waste their time on producing such things.
Note that this is specific to consumers - business users are entirely different. But business users rarely have a compelling need for caching web browsing unless they are very large - and so they won't be interested in turnkey solutions like this.
Only in theory. They figured out a way to work around that pesky law a long time ago - a private contractor is given the task of 'producing' the work, with assistance supplied by the government. "Assistance" here means that the government supplies all the people who do the actual work on it. The contractor then sells the copyright to the government. This little legal fiction results in a work that was produced entirely by government employees and using government funds, that is copyrighted and owned by the government. It's now standard practice in any case where the government thinks they might want to have copyright on something.
However, you have to make the choice between being a seller (which means lying to customers - no salesman ever tells the truth), and being a person who does something productive. The two things are not compatible; sales is a zero-sum activity.
Well, when you're only considering Redhat and Novell/SuSE, only Redhat deserves any credit. All SuSE ever did was create proprietary applications and package other people's work - this isn't a *bad* thing to be doing, but they certainly don't deserve any credit for it. They've become a little less irrelevant in recent years, but haven't done anything special in that time.
It's also true that Redhat does a lot of good work on developing essential free software (linux itself, glibc, gcc, etc) - depending on how you count, they're probably responsible for something on the order of 10% to 50% of the work on the "core" components of the system. That's far more than any other single player. It's not a *majority* of the work done (individual developers, with no particular corporate affiliation, as a group do more work than Redhat), but no other entity can claim to have done any more work than they have - which appears to be the point they're making here.
Enriching them is hard. Getting enriched uranium is fairly easy - the US alone produces tons of the stuff every year and loses a significant amount of it. It wouldn't be difficult for somebody to steal some, and it would go completely unnoticed (as it would just be a small increase in the amount that can no longer be located).
Oh man, you haven't ever used Windows, have you? Of all my experiences with Windows, "consistent" would not be a word I would use to describe any of them. Terms like "arbitrary", "random", and "ill-defined" come to mind. Also "no two systems ever quite work the same way".
Whether or not people like a decision has got nothing to do with whether or not it is ethical.
Indeed. Government-operated services are the worst possible way to run a service. You cannot get any worse...
This is about stopping the user from modifying the kernel's behaviour, so that Microsoft can lock down your computer and control what you do with it.
Not in the Windows world. There, the kernel is the software which Microsoft does not want altered - stuff like parts of the user interface, IE, etc. (I'm not kidding, IE *does* have components which run in ring 0).
I have no interest in collecting all the songs I can... but if it will kill off the music business, I'm all for it. The world would be a much better place without those vultures in it. They squeeze everybody they can reach for as much money as they can get, and pass draconian laws that cause no end of problems for people who have nothing to do with the music business. And what do we get in exchange? A fraction of a percentage point shaved off the unemployment rate? We're better off without them. If unemployment is the price of getting rid of them, it's worth every penny.
The majority of Windows users out there are on 95 or 98. It may be true that the majority of the ones who actively use the web are on XP, though.
While "innocent until proven guilty" is a fundamental component of any sane legal system, it's not the only such component. Another closely related one is called "prima facie" evidence. This is evidence that by itself proves guilt if no proper rebuttal is forthcoming from the other party. Once prima facie evidence has been supplied by the plaintiff, the defendant *has* been proven guilty if they cannot rebut it.
While I can't find a copy of this petition to read, it seems likely that it is of the form: "Thompson did these things: [quote from the court record]. This is prima facie evidence of contempt". At this point, it is indeed Thompson's task to show he did no wrong - if he cannot rebut such evidence, then he's guilty. There's no need for a trial to establish whether or not part of the court record is true (the court presumes that it knows what happened in its own courtroom). The judge will review the petition, and if he agrees that it is prima facie evidence, then the only bit left is for Thompson to defend himself.
It is a safe bet to assume that anything you read on grc.com is nonsense. Gibson is one of the single worst things to happen to people's understanding of network security, ever.
All that you should take away from this page is: "anybody that is connected on this side of the nearest security barrier (typically your firewall; in large networks it may be the nearest router) is and must be completely trusted". This is something that anybody should understand before being allowed to handle a network: there is no security in a network except that which you deliberately and explicitly put in place.
If AND ONLY IF you have verified the server certificate. If you did not verify the certificate at all, it accomplishes nothing. If you trusted the Verisign root certificates to do it for you (such as in the case of SSL webmail), it accomplishes nothing (because they have many times been caught handing out certificates to attackers).
If you do not know what a server certificate is, using SSL or any kind of VPN accomplishes nothing for you.