Don't think that we all face the same issues you do. The government of your country managed to make a fortune at your expense. Hopefully by the time the licenses are due for renewal (how long were they for) the rest of the world won't have moved too far ahead of you.
While you say you just want a phone, does that mean you want them to strip out everything (including the screen) so you have numbers 0-9 + on/off-hook? No phone book or clock or text messaging or control over your ringer or modem facilities (unless you can get a mic and speaker onto the phone rigged to some other sort of modem)? Once you add texting, data service, phone book and ring-tone adjustment you now have a device with more potential.
I want phone which is built by a company designing for end users, not one designed for network operators. I want the facility for multiple sims, automatic least cost routing (with manual overrides) via any available networks it can roam onto (home bluetooth perhaps) and the option of the pad form model (palm/tablet) or handset style, the pad adding some form of general purpose programming environment with a full open api for the system.
Not too long ago I walked into a little computer training "shop" in a supermarket near me (in Dublin, admittedly the shop is probably 2-3 miles from MS main Dublin headquarters) and there in amongst all their brochures extolling the wonders of their courses was a small cd display stand with Windows XP2 update cds.
If the world was sane, the payback to MS customers (including the indirect ones getting Windows pre-installed) for "Product Activation" should be simple access to new installation CDs! So if your computer dies, you should be able to contact MS and get a new CD sent out for your new install which will have service packs (and preferably all critical and security updates) applied, so you can actually install it without having to disconnect your network (I would imagine 95%+ of all windows users are not aware of the dangers to a new windows installation). It's no good doing a new install and going straight to windows updates, but how many Windows users are going to think differently if/when they need to re-install?
Next time someone tells you installing Linux is hard, ask them how they deal with the security issues of installing XP, and if they don't know what you mean, provide a little explanation!
If you have a suitable machine you can grab kanotix64 and try out a full 64 bit OS from a cd, and install it if you want to! Unlimited support incidents come from the simple link to the Kanotix irc channel from the desktop or a quick trip to the forum. Donations go by Paypal to "donate the_@_here kanotix.com" so know you know what to do with your $12!
Ubuntu is forked from sid/unstable and Knoppix is a testing/unstable cross (or was, right now I'm not sure exactly what the mix is). Virtually by definition both will be uneffected by a debian sarge release as they will immediately move straight back on to testing/unstable. If Debian development had stopped for the last few years waiting for sarge then debians problems would be huge, but distributions from Ubuntu to Knoppix, Progeny to Kanotix are all happily sucking from (and blowing at) the central repository that is debian.
The introduction of the testing tree has allowed development of debian to do a far better job of continuing around releases. For now it may have actually delayed a release (by making development of things which don't target the upcomgin release easier), but when sarge is released I hope, and suspect, that etch will take shape before anyone has realised it and the core debian packages (and their major updates) will no longer be stumbling blocks in a debian release. Wilder development will take place in sid, while testing will take shape in the couple of months after each release, being shaken out into a full release every year or so.
The testing infrastucture is still not complete, once sarge is released though the system will be in place to help debian turn a fully chaotic development model (experimental, sid, frozen or stable) into something with an inherent (and rule based) structure (experimental, sid, testing, stable). What's been killing debian was the the complete start from scratch at each release and the long time it's taken the infrastructure to catch up with the new methods.
Once the testing infrastructure is finished the only thing that will hold up future debian releases is if teams are allowed to demand their packages which should be in experimental to be pushed up to unstable/testing and hence hold up the whole release process. If they simply let their packages go as they should (and the threat of being dropped from the next release should do for all but base packages) I think debian development can be rejuvinated as it is a great system to develop software and has the depth of interest (thanks also to the derivatives) to actually test software reasonably before it hits stable.
For their next exercise (or your own) please write up these findings and put them online. Make sure you include some way it can be verified and a date!
No, attorneys should only be able to successfully sue if you've broken the law but they can sue you whenever they/their clients want to.
Or to extend it a bit further towards the problem with software patents, is it illegal to distribute a piece of software which uses ideas covered by granted patents? To me the answer is that it is only illegal if the patent is not "obviously" flawed (perhaps you have prior art). The problem is only the rich can afford to play this game, a normal person can't afford the time and money it would take to fight even an obviously flawed patent (bar perhaps sending letters to interested parties to try and get the Patent Office to discard it before it ever sees a court).
Until the report is released this is a non-story, just fuel for the FUD machine. Unfortunately we will have to wait for a month to actually discuss what this means so I don't even no why I am bothering to post to this!
I wonder why you say "The parent is talking about a Knoppix base debian" when in fact they simply state that they want a livecd without X based on Debian.
dfs does have an installation program, it may not be what you want, but knoppix-installer isn't what many people want either. dfs lets you install stable/testing or sid (and the i386 version even lets you install amd64).
To say dfs has not had an update in 6 months is a lie, last 1386 was released 28th October which is less then 4 months ago. Also, and more importantly, dfs is not just a livecd, it is also a debian package for producing itself and/or modified versions of it so depending how you think of it (and the original poster was trying remastering Knoppix as a solution) it is updated as often as Debian.
Finally, dfs (or dfsbuild if you prefer to call it that) is an official debian package so it is in fact produced by an enormous group of volunteers. Perhaps everything has been done by one-man and will continue to be, but it is Free and would be put up for adoption by another debian developer should the current developer orphan it.
So I say... Troll... but an anonymous one so you'll most probably never read this.
Kanotix already includes this since it's BHX release and is essentially a debian-sid liveCD with some residual vague semblence to Knoppix. All you have to do is either put the iso image under KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX.ISO on any partition or drive and use the cheatcode fromiso, or you can use fromiso=somedir/K*FIX2.iso or even fromhd=/dev/hda1 fromiso=somedir/K*.iso and of course Knoppix uses grub to boot from cd anyway so it is much easier to construct your own grub menu for it.
When you get a not so new piece of hardware (let's say 5 years old) which OS would you rather try and install it in? And while you are at it, go to a Mac/Sun shop and buy some hardware without doing any research (don't read any boxes to look for a Windows logo or ask anyone if it'll work) and see how you get on with it in your Windows box, that's the comparison to make to buying $random_windows_supported_hardware with no research to use on Linux. I guess you've never seen people trying to hunt down Windows drivers for Win-Modems or some funky printers, especially XP drivers for 9x hardware. The advantage with Linux is ususally that if it was ever supported with Free code it will be supported for a long time unlike windows where a manufacturer can often only ever release drivers for one OS especially with more useful/less common products (say video capture devices where one prime example I know of used to take the national distributer about a day to setup the software for a 2500 card on a fresh install of the only supported and working Windows OS version).
Really for a Gentoo user to extrapolate on the state of Linux is laughable, it's like someone building their own TVR Kit car saying that it's too hard to fit parts and that TVRs just aren't for everyone/are lots of hassle. You comments may be applicable to the 0.0001% of computer users who have a real need for Gentoo but it is hardly indicative of the general situation. I think you know this though hence you know you are in Troll territory even if you really don't mean to Troll!
And to get back on Topic, this is IBM we are talking about, how hard is it for them to setup a distributed internal apt mirror network for the approved company packages? Or for them to implement a standard remote desktop paradigm to support them? They have resources! And if some particular applications are stumbling points, setup NX servers (or something similar) to let people run those apps on the OS they need to run them on, but all on their Linux desktop.
It's simply the "administration" shutting down the flow of information in advance of an attack. They don't want any pesky students posting photos for all to see of abuses to Iranians or leaking sensitive tactical information, or perhaps they have simply declared this site as a host for terrorists. Time to watch for other Iranian sites going dark to see if this is the precursor to the next round in "The War on Terror".
I wonder which war will take longer to admit defeat in, Terror or Drugs.
There is nearly nothing in klik which can be downloaded like that. Klik builds the packages on your machine. I'm not denying there are some things which could/can be downloaded/browsed from windows (the openoffice.org cmg can probably be grabbed). Klik isn't just a normal site, it's a web software installer which depends on a klik client running on the target host for the program.
I was just trying to get across how dependencies are handled by klik. If you are on a supported distro they should not be a problem, if you are not on a supported distro then you may not have required libraries. As one of the major complaints in the previous slashdot story on bundled applications was about how many copies of libc or other common libraries may be around I wanted to get across that there is a slight solution to this in klik.
Nope, you are quite wrong. When installing the dependencies are calculated against a base set of assummed packages (from the supported distros) and no install scripts are run. Config files can be copied to/etc if you so wish and snap with files destined for/var (you are prompted to copy either if they are present). Besides, klik is run as a user, and needs no root privileges (except for the presence of suitable mount points in fstab).
One existing user of bundled applications on GNU/Linux is klik which was originally designed for installing additional programs on Knoppix by simply installing the klik client and clicking on links on the klik site. Klik has evolved since it's inception so that now it builds compressed images as bundles, supports 4 distributions (Knoppix 3.7, Kanotix BHZ, Simply MEPIS 2004.04 and Linspire 5.0), can work with dialog|Xdialog aswell as kdialog and firefox|elinks aswell as konqueror and finally offers the entire debian sid archive by klik (and many other changes). This is "next generation" klik, and while it is still evolving it is a very useful tool especially for debian based systems and livecds in particular.
A lot of the posts in this thread seem to repeat the same arguments against bundles (the duplication and security issues of having shared libraries in bundles) but nobody mentions the prime advantage I see in them. They can be summarised with this present from probono, a cmg of OpenOffice.org 1.9.65 which can run on many distributions (it uses a Linux transparent compressed iso for it's image rather then the normal cramfs to extend compatibility). So you can try out a preview release of ooo2 without having to upgrade any of your system, no need to have a test setup to try it out or wonder what risks you are taking that you might break something trying out experimental software.
Another aspect which klik deals with in it's own way that hasn't been discussed much here is that klik assumes a base system, the set of all packages installed in all it's supported systems with the minimum expected version being the lowest version in any of the supported distributions. This means that everything in the base system of your distribution is still handled everywhere by it (so updating your base system updates the common packages), everything outside of this will be bundled in any applications which need it.
Just remember to look at the klik docs and the klik forum if you have any problems.
Or they come from a part of the world where these alleged patents have no validity (and they don't do any business in any such part of the world). So who thinks they can make one in the EU and who doesn't:-)
Perhaps another possible explanation of this is IBM has some technoligies it wishes to put into Open Source projects and it can't see them being accepted unless they do something like this? Also nice to note that at the parents url it says this is not a one off event.
There's no mention in this of klik which allows you to simply download and run other software with knoppix (and other systems). Klik even gave everyone a christmas present of a 100M download of openoffice2 (well 1.9.65 or something similar) which allows you to try it simply and without installing, no need to upgrade your system and risk impacting anything else.
A second quick point is that it doesn't seem to provide useful information on encrypted DVDs. It is quite easy to download and extract libdvdcss2 and run xine so it can find the extracted libraries (LD_LIBRARY_PATH) so with a 27k download you can watch any DVDs you like with the existing xine.
Glad you posted that url as it shows just how much traffic the Knoppix torrents shift. The latest release has been up for 11 days and has averaged putting out nearly 8 megabytes/second since which would certainly cost significant amounts of money. Kanotix also uses bittorrent for distribution along with a small list of mirrors, life would be very painful for anyone trying to download a new Kanotix release otherwise but instead everyone interested gets to contribute towards getting the new release out quickly!
Well if your mad enough, you could (probably I haven't tried it) use Knoppix/Kanotix or a similar livecd (stock so the presence of the tools suggests nothing) and store your key and sensitive information on a encrypted loopback fs. You could even put extra encryption/stenographic software inside the loopback fs using something like klik. The only problem is that somewhere unecrypted has to be your code to "destroy the loopback fs if the wrong password is entered" and I can't see that becoming too common so it'll probably always be your own hack and as long as they can find that they have something to "accuse" you with. If a livecd or similar existed that did this (and it's raison d'etre was something else so just using it wasn't enough to point the finger) they'd probably have lots of complaints from people who typed in the wrong password by mistake! As for simply fitting PGP on a floppy, pick a system that comes with the tools by default then their presence won't do anything to implicate you not matter how suspicious the investigator.
Complete total and utter bullshit! How many stories have been on slashdot speculating on what a company might be doing because they have registered another slew of domain names? Plenty! What insight would the world at large have received if Apple had registered 20 domains of the form iWord.com, including iTunes.com? Nothing meaningful except for Apple's penchant for the letter i. How do Apple get to claim that they have an inalienable right to a random domain name on the basis of internal discussions? They don't! If the site was for a piano tuner then I cannot imagine Apple would have even a sniff of a case (based on the apparent fact that they had no claim to the trademark prior to his registration), even still their case will be based upon his acts, Apple doesn't automatically win this one simply because he is using their name (as Apple the computer company themselves survived (for now) against Apple the record company). If you RTFA you will see that the only hope for Apple is that Nominet can strip a domain if it is misleading people into believing the domain is registered, operated, authorised or otherwise connected to Apple.
Re:you aint gonna CGI citizen cane real soon now
on
Best Tools for Machinima?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think it's a totally different thing to attempt to add Gollum to Jackson's LOTR then to make a gollum which would fit into a totally cgi environment. Also I think Jackson milked Gollum for all he was worth. If you couldn't do him quite as well, you'ld just have to keep the camera moving more and generally further back, not 6 inches from his face, everything still for a few seconds! I think machinima will be an artform with limited success, and the people who do have success will probably go on to become very highly regarded in a more mainstream field (directors, script writers, animators, game designers). If you can create a good script to fit what you can do though I can't see any reason why machinima can't potentialy be every bit as good as cartoon.
Slashdot Mirror
Not too long ago I walked into a little computer training "shop" in a supermarket near me (in Dublin, admittedly the shop is probably 2-3 miles from MS main Dublin headquarters) and there in amongst all their brochures extolling the wonders of their courses was a small cd display stand with Windows XP2 update cds.
If the world was sane, the payback to MS customers (including the indirect ones getting Windows pre-installed) for "Product Activation" should be simple access to new installation CDs! So if your computer dies, you should be able to contact MS and get a new CD sent out for your new install which will have service packs (and preferably all critical and security updates) applied, so you can actually install it without having to disconnect your network (I would imagine 95%+ of all windows users are not aware of the dangers to a new windows installation). It's no good doing a new install and going straight to windows updates, but how many Windows users are going to think differently if/when they need to re-install?
Next time someone tells you installing Linux is hard, ask them how they deal with the security issues of installing XP, and if they don't know what you mean, provide a little explanation!
in 5 parts
Of course it has 42 acts.
If you have a suitable machine you can grab kanotix 64 and try out a full 64 bit OS from a cd, and install it if you want to! Unlimited support incidents come from the simple link to the Kanotix irc channel from the desktop or a quick trip to the forum. Donations go by Paypal to "donate the_@_here kanotix.com" so know you know what to do with your $12!
Ubuntu is forked from sid/unstable and Knoppix is a testing/unstable cross (or was, right now I'm not sure exactly what the mix is). Virtually by definition both will be uneffected by a debian sarge release as they will immediately move straight back on to testing/unstable. If Debian development had stopped for the last few years waiting for sarge then debians problems would be huge, but distributions from Ubuntu to Knoppix, Progeny to Kanotix are all happily sucking from (and blowing at) the central repository that is debian.
The introduction of the testing tree has allowed development of debian to do a far better job of continuing around releases. For now it may have actually delayed a release (by making development of things which don't target the upcomgin release easier), but when sarge is released I hope, and suspect, that etch will take shape before anyone has realised it and the core debian packages (and their major updates) will no longer be stumbling blocks in a debian release. Wilder development will take place in sid, while testing will take shape in the couple of months after each release, being shaken out into a full release every year or so.
The testing infrastucture is still not complete, once sarge is released though the system will be in place to help debian turn a fully chaotic development model (experimental, sid, frozen or stable) into something with an inherent (and rule based) structure (experimental, sid, testing, stable). What's been killing debian was the the complete start from scratch at each release and the long time it's taken the infrastructure to catch up with the new methods.
Once the testing infrastructure is finished the only thing that will hold up future debian releases is if teams are allowed to demand their packages which should be in experimental to be pushed up to unstable/testing and hence hold up the whole release process. If they simply let their packages go as they should (and the threat of being dropped from the next release should do for all but base packages) I think debian development can be rejuvinated as it is a great system to develop software and has the depth of interest (thanks also to the derivatives) to actually test software reasonably before it hits stable.
For their next exercise (or your own) please write up these findings and put them online. Make sure you include some way it can be verified and a date!
No, attorneys should only be able to successfully sue if you've broken the law but they can sue you whenever they/their clients want to.
Or to extend it a bit further towards the problem with software patents, is it illegal to distribute a piece of software which uses ideas covered by granted patents? To me the answer is that it is only illegal if the patent is not "obviously" flawed (perhaps you have prior art). The problem is only the rich can afford to play this game, a normal person can't afford the time and money it would take to fight even an obviously flawed patent (bar perhaps sending letters to interested parties to try and get the Patent Office to discard it before it ever sees a court).
Until the report is released this is a non-story, just fuel for the FUD machine. Unfortunately we will have to wait for a month to actually discuss what this means so I don't even no why I am bothering to post to this!
No I have never actually tried dfs.
I wonder why you say "The parent is talking about a Knoppix base debian" when in fact they simply state that they want a livecd without X based on Debian.
dfs does have an installation program, it may not be what you want, but knoppix-installer isn't what many people want either. dfs lets you install stable/testing or sid (and the i386 version even lets you install amd64).
To say dfs has not had an update in 6 months is a lie, last 1386 was released 28th October which is less then 4 months ago. Also, and more importantly, dfs is not just a livecd, it is also a debian package for producing itself and/or modified versions of it so depending how you think of it (and the original poster was trying remastering Knoppix as a solution) it is updated as often as Debian.
Finally, dfs (or dfsbuild if you prefer to call it that) is an official debian package so it is in fact produced by an enormous group of volunteers. Perhaps everything has been done by one-man and will continue to be, but it is Free and would be put up for adoption by another debian developer should the current developer orphan it.
So I say ... Troll ... but an anonymous one so you'll most probably never read this.
Perhaps Debian From Scratch is what you are looking for?
Kanotix already includes this since it's BHX release and is essentially a debian-sid liveCD with some residual vague semblence to Knoppix. All you have to do is either put the iso image under KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX.ISO on any partition or drive and use the cheatcode fromiso, or you can use fromiso=somedir/K*FIX2.iso or even fromhd=/dev/hda1 fromiso=somedir/K*.iso and of course Knoppix uses grub to boot from cd anyway so it is much easier to construct your own grub menu for it.
When you get a not so new piece of hardware (let's say 5 years old) which OS would you rather try and install it in? And while you are at it, go to a Mac/Sun shop and buy some hardware without doing any research (don't read any boxes to look for a Windows logo or ask anyone if it'll work) and see how you get on with it in your Windows box, that's the comparison to make to buying $random_windows_supported_hardware with no research to use on Linux. I guess you've never seen people trying to hunt down Windows drivers for Win-Modems or some funky printers, especially XP drivers for 9x hardware. The advantage with Linux is ususally that if it was ever supported with Free code it will be supported for a long time unlike windows where a manufacturer can often only ever release drivers for one OS especially with more useful/less common products (say video capture devices where one prime example I know of used to take the national distributer about a day to setup the software for a 2500 card on a fresh install of the only supported and working Windows OS version).
Really for a Gentoo user to extrapolate on the state of Linux is laughable, it's like someone building their own TVR Kit car saying that it's too hard to fit parts and that TVRs just aren't for everyone/are lots of hassle. You comments may be applicable to the 0.0001% of computer users who have a real need for Gentoo but it is hardly indicative of the general situation. I think you know this though hence you know you are in Troll territory even if you really don't mean to Troll!
And to get back on Topic, this is IBM we are talking about, how hard is it for them to setup a distributed internal apt mirror network for the approved company packages? Or for them to implement a standard remote desktop paradigm to support them? They have resources! And if some particular applications are stumbling points, setup NX servers (or something similar) to let people run those apps on the OS they need to run them on, but all on their Linux desktop.
It's simply the "administration" shutting down the flow of information in advance of an attack. They don't want any pesky students posting photos for all to see of abuses to Iranians or leaking sensitive tactical information, or perhaps they have simply declared this site as a host for terrorists. Time to watch for other Iranian sites going dark to see if this is the precursor to the next round in "The War on Terror".
I wonder which war will take longer to admit defeat in, Terror or Drugs.
p.s. please read the subject of this post :-)
There is nearly nothing in klik which can be downloaded like that. Klik builds the packages on your machine. I'm not denying there are some things which could/can be downloaded/browsed from windows (the openoffice.org cmg can probably be grabbed). Klik isn't just a normal site, it's a web software installer which depends on a klik client running on the target host for the program.
I was just trying to get across how dependencies are handled by klik. If you are on a supported distro they should not be a problem, if you are not on a supported distro then you may not have required libraries. As one of the major complaints in the previous slashdot story on bundled applications was about how many copies of libc or other common libraries may be around I wanted to get across that there is a slight solution to this in klik.
Nope, you are quite wrong. When installing the dependencies are calculated against a base set of assummed packages (from the supported distros) and no install scripts are run. Config files can be copied to /etc if you so wish and snap with files destined for /var (you are prompted to copy either if they are present). Besides, klik is run as a user, and needs no root privileges (except for the presence of suitable mount points in fstab).
One existing user of bundled applications on GNU/Linux is klik which was originally designed for installing additional programs on Knoppix by simply installing the klik client and clicking on links on the klik site. Klik has evolved since it's inception so that now it builds compressed images as bundles, supports 4 distributions (Knoppix 3.7, Kanotix BHZ, Simply MEPIS 2004.04 and Linspire 5.0), can work with dialog|Xdialog aswell as kdialog and firefox|elinks aswell as konqueror and finally offers the entire debian sid archive by klik (and many other changes). This is "next generation" klik, and while it is still evolving it is a very useful tool especially for debian based systems and livecds in particular.
A lot of the posts in this thread seem to repeat the same arguments against bundles (the duplication and security issues of having shared libraries in bundles) but nobody mentions the prime advantage I see in them. They can be summarised with this present from probono, a cmg of OpenOffice.org 1.9.65 which can run on many distributions (it uses a Linux transparent compressed iso for it's image rather then the normal cramfs to extend compatibility). So you can try out a preview release of ooo2 without having to upgrade any of your system, no need to have a test setup to try it out or wonder what risks you are taking that you might break something trying out experimental software.
Another aspect which klik deals with in it's own way that hasn't been discussed much here is that klik assumes a base system, the set of all packages installed in all it's supported systems with the minimum expected version being the lowest version in any of the supported distributions. This means that everything in the base system of your distribution is still handled everywhere by it (so updating your base system updates the common packages), everything outside of this will be bundled in any applications which need it.
Just remember to look at the klik docs and the klik forum if you have any problems.
Or they come from a part of the world where these alleged patents have no validity (and they don't do any business in any such part of the world). So who thinks they can make one in the EU and who doesn't :-)
The list of patents is included in this document (pdf).
Perhaps another possible explanation of this is IBM has some technoligies it wishes to put into Open Source projects and it can't see them being accepted unless they do something like this? Also nice to note that at the parents url it says this is not a one off event.
There's no mention in this of klik which allows you to simply download and run other software with knoppix (and other systems). Klik even gave everyone a christmas present of a 100M download of openoffice2 (well 1.9.65 or something similar) which allows you to try it simply and without installing, no need to upgrade your system and risk impacting anything else.
A second quick point is that it doesn't seem to provide useful information on encrypted DVDs. It is quite easy to download and extract libdvdcss2 and run xine so it can find the extracted libraries (LD_LIBRARY_PATH) so with a 27k download you can watch any DVDs you like with the existing xine.
Glad you posted that url as it shows just how much traffic the Knoppix torrents shift. The latest release has been up for 11 days and has averaged putting out nearly 8 megabytes/second since which would certainly cost significant amounts of money. Kanotix also uses bittorrent for distribution along with a small list of mirrors, life would be very painful for anyone trying to download a new Kanotix release otherwise but instead everyone interested gets to contribute towards getting the new release out quickly!
What's wrong with vlc? It was initially designed for just what you describe! What am I missing?
Well if your mad enough, you could (probably I haven't tried it) use Knoppix/Kanotix or a similar livecd (stock so the presence of the tools suggests nothing) and store your key and sensitive information on a encrypted loopback fs. You could even put extra encryption/stenographic software inside the loopback fs using something like klik. The only problem is that somewhere unecrypted has to be your code to "destroy the loopback fs if the wrong password is entered" and I can't see that becoming too common so it'll probably always be your own hack and as long as they can find that they have something to "accuse" you with. If a livecd or similar existed that did this (and it's raison d'etre was something else so just using it wasn't enough to point the finger) they'd probably have lots of complaints from people who typed in the wrong password by mistake! As for simply fitting PGP on a floppy, pick a system that comes with the tools by default then their presence won't do anything to implicate you not matter how suspicious the investigator.
Complete total and utter bullshit! How many stories have been on slashdot speculating on what a company might be doing because they have registered another slew of domain names? Plenty! What insight would the world at large have received if Apple had registered 20 domains of the form iWord.com, including iTunes.com? Nothing meaningful except for Apple's penchant for the letter i. How do Apple get to claim that they have an inalienable right to a random domain name on the basis of internal discussions? They don't! If the site was for a piano tuner then I cannot imagine Apple would have even a sniff of a case (based on the apparent fact that they had no claim to the trademark prior to his registration), even still their case will be based upon his acts, Apple doesn't automatically win this one simply because he is using their name (as Apple the computer company themselves survived (for now) against Apple the record company). If you RTFA you will see that the only hope for Apple is that Nominet can strip a domain if it is misleading people into believing the domain is registered, operated, authorised or otherwise connected to Apple.
I think it's a totally different thing to attempt to add Gollum to Jackson's LOTR then to make a gollum which would fit into a totally cgi environment. Also I think Jackson milked Gollum for all he was worth. If you couldn't do him quite as well, you'ld just have to keep the camera moving more and generally further back, not 6 inches from his face, everything still for a few seconds! I think machinima will be an artform with limited success, and the people who do have success will probably go on to become very highly regarded in a more mainstream field (directors, script writers, animators, game designers). If you can create a good script to fit what you can do though I can't see any reason why machinima can't potentialy be every bit as good as cartoon.