Now that's Funny. When you get to the "404" you'll notice that you can only search articles after 1985. All records from 1984 back have been expunged! George Orwell indeed!
Having followed your link and clicking on the first result (The Globe and Mail) I find that there is zero evidence to support your assertion that their is a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. To pick some quotes (with my own emphasis):
At one point, we had up to about 20
suspected al-Qaeda members, but as we have continued to refine and interrogate, we have not been able to establish definitively that they were al-Qaeda members
U.S. officials have said at least some of the attacks
may have been orchestrated by Mr. Hussein's former deputy Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who may have forged an alliance with the Kurdish religious extremist group Ansar al-Islam.
Ansar al-Islam is
believed to have ties to al-Qaeda. It was unclear whether Gen. Sanchez was referring to Ansar fighters when he said the Americans were holding about 20 al-Qaeda suspects.
This could mean that 20 al-Qaede terrorists have been captured, but could just as easily mean that the Americans captured 20 people (who may or may not have been aggressors against them) and labelled them "Al Qaeda" in an attempt to make connections to satisfy people that the attack on Iraq was connected to 911. I would read the above as pointing to Hussein's deputy simply getting anyone he can to help attack the occupying forces, and even if now connections are being made to Al-Qaede by the Iraqis, it in no way implies that the connections were previously in existence but simply that Iraq is the most obvious military target for all American enemies.
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but you can get surround sound from a divx, in fact a divx can contain the original audio stream from the dvd including multiple languages and commentaries. Of course having multiple 5.1 audio channels does mean that the resulting divx will be substantially bigger! Also you could distribute the full original dvd content simply recoded to divx in a compressed archive, leaving all the menus and original extra content intact. It seems to indicate the "market" interest in all these features that all of this does not happen and shared divx files are just the movie with a stereo soundtrack.
This is about the third comment I have started typing a reply to, and I'll post this one because I just can't let another one slide.
By what criteria (and where did you derive them from) are you judging the US Vs Syria? What do you say to Guantanamo bay? What would you say if you were incarcerated without any judicial proceeding for an indeterminate time without any access to the outside world, and subjected to torture? Would you say your captors showed great respect for human rights? What would you say if your country (palestine) was being bombed and locked down at will by an invading/collonising force (israel) going against the will of the world (read UN) where all the funds to support the oppressors is funded by another country (guess who) entirely? Would you say either the oppressors or their funders showed respect for human rights? What would you say of a country which places more black 20-30s in prison then college or saves the death penaly for black on white murders? Human rights? What about Florida in the Bush Gore election where Jed ensured he could deliver the states votes by first excluding 22,000 voters (95%+ incorrectly) and then controlling the count of the votes? Need I point out that the UN should be sent into the US to monitor your elections from now on (as they are all over the world) if you wish to vote in the UN anymore. What about a country that first massacred their indigenous people (oh look, Australia gets a look in aswell) and then proceeds to also import other "lesser" people to do their work (including producing children they can sell) and when they finally have to "give up on slaves" they simply imprison people instead and make them work for 23c/hour. You don't seem to be taking responsibility for the corrupt regime which runs your own country which you also put in place.
The point of the UN is that by allowing all countries to have a vote, the wild rantings of one nation (however powerful) cannot carry the opinion of "the world". Heaven forbid that W and his lap dog Tony could actually carry the UN vote alone on the basis that they have spent the most of weapons for the past 50 years!
When the US has it right you can all come back and start preaching to the rest of us how we've got it all wrong, in the meantime either close your borders and leave us alone, or respect our humanity, talk to us and stop telling us about your morals.
All men are created equal, though some are more equal than others?
The gist of my argument is that the current situation is a absurd as possible. The path towards sanity lies in figuring out what we are banning and why? I would personally ban anyone from distributing any psychoactive substance unless they have a licence (same for bungee and base jumping), would decriminalise the possession and production of small quantities but would enfore legislation which came down heavily on anyone who didn't addequately try to prevent substances coming into childrens hands.
No, just because something can kill people is not enough. If it was we would criminalise fire (how many people are burnt to death annually), electricity (fried), cars (run over) and pencils (falling asleep and taking one up the nose). Oh yeah, how about firearms?
As for violence, well need I say more then alcohol?
As for learning, well need I say more then alcohol?
Now as for how societies should deal with things which are not safe, I don't know the answer (I know my answer but not societies) but I wish people who thought they did could at least come up with a consitent answer. For example, I can bungee but not base jump. I can drink 1 litre (well I've never gone past 0.75) of vodka and smoke 200 cigarettes (80) but I can't take a drag of a joint even if I don't inhale.
For me the drugs issue comes down to two major factors. Firstly if society rejects recreational drugs then they should criminalise Alcohol and Tobacco and start a real "War on Drugs". Secondly doctors should not be restricted from researching alternative therapies and employing them (i.e. if we criminalise alcohol but a doctor feels that a glass of wine a day is required for a heart patient he should be allowed prescribe it).
most autos are sold at a loss, money made up in finance, ext. warranties, etc.
What? So if you go to someone selling "autos" and they say "I'll give you this 10k auto for 300/month over 5 years with the 5 year extended warranty" you can't say "hell no, I'll give you the 10k cash thank you" and go on down your bank and get a 10k loan for 300/month over 3 years instead and hence stop them getting the extra 4.5k?
Now if you really want to look at "autos" you can say that Ford have no right to produce a vehicle and insist that you can only refill it with Ford Fuel, or that the fuel tank will only open to a pump fitted with a ford radio unlocker. You know if they tried this that mechanics would either learn how make a key to open the tank or replace the tank opening.
Linus and the FSF say that they will have to release the source to the kernel itself to anyone they distribute it to and that they have to give them all the same rights, so any soldier would have to be allowed to upload the source to the kernel (and any other GPL licensed software). Just being the OS of choice for the American Army would probably be enough of an excuse for them to bomb any country which harbours terrorists who discuss the security of the base system (let alone their own). The DMCA just got it's army!
that's what anyone who wants to view the American Army's source code for Linux will become. If you think SCO is a threat to the uninforceability of the GPL, can you imagine the FSF going to the US army and telling them to release the source!
It's not a concept to have a "we sued slashdot" hall of fame, if you look at the hall of fame and the most visited stories you will note that numbers 1 and 8 are the Microsoft and the scientoligists requests to remove content (with 377844 and 265178 views respectively)! Just goes to show that sueing to remove content is not the best way to have the content go away!
Does anyone else see a new hall of fame story in the making, "Diebold orders/. to remove posts"? Sure is fun to watch however (even when slashdot caves in to the $cientoligi$t$).
My only question is will the ROTK be an extended edition in its initial state or will we have to wait another year before I can finally sit down in a cinema and watch the entire extended trilogy in one sitting? As it is, I had been waiting for the opportunity to see the entire trilogy in a cinema (and wondered when and if any cinema would do it) in a day. I had never really hoped that I would get to see the extended editions in the cinema so this is excellent news, I just hope that they get the ROTK out in an extended edition for the cinemas also. I'm sure that every (reasonably large) city going would have a cinema which would take on showing the full series daily in extended form for a few weeks (and it wouldn't matter whether they did it on ROTK release or a month or two after so those prints can travel). This could be one of those "cultural" experiences which shapes the future of cinematography! I remember going to see SW:ESB and SW:ROTJ for the first times in the cinema back to back with my dad and that was one of the greatest days of my childhood (I was about 9)! Pity he didn't feel up to doing the full 3 movie trilogy!
SCO has been making a major business out of intellectual property enforcement, which happens to be the company's fastest-growing revenue generator
Who bought a licence? Who calls 699 a major business? Any income for SCO in any category would make that category the fastest-growing revenue generator for the company which has no credible products in the market?
No I don't believe that shrinkwrapped boxes will contain a huge multitude of CDs, I believe that commercial software will become more and more specialised as time moves on. Now if someone is creating a game (you mention games and it's an easy example) they will look to the market and decide what platforms are worth targetting. Then they will see what technologies/methods can be applied across those platforms. Then they will examine how many of the non-targetted platforms they can get to without having to do any major extra work. Finally they will write the game so that the program is a recompile away from each targetted and achievable platform. Taking my example figures, you would probably find that games developers (assuming market usage of the OSs is spread evenly across the spectrum) would target Linux (and probably a specific set of major library versions which can be found across the main derivatives), Windows XP and Mac OS X and as a by product they would probably try to have a BSD version aswell. End result the box would have 4 installers and binaries (the game data being shared across all platforms). As they are trying to work within the system (and not to circumvent any security) the differences between the various Linux distros would not leave them needing to write seperate versions for each distro. Finally, the smart ones would actually construct the game so that the main core logic of the game is binary only, the game data (graphics, levels, whatever) in binary only and the rest (graphics sub-systems, input system) would be binary and source (or at least be exposed so that someone could port the game onto any platform that can run the core logic).
So Linux with a 45% share (or bsd with a 5% share) is just fine by you but a 15% apple share makes me an Apple zealot? No, I'm just trying to outline any sort of a diverse set of OS conditions. I could have put in the Amiga OS, QNX, BeIA, OpenBeos, AIX, Solaris and anything else you could think of to make the list even longer but for the sake of not scrolling down to far on the screen I stuck to a small but (hopefully) big enough list to get the idea I wanted to express (diversity) across.
The point is not what OS would be the target if Linux held 90% of the desktops, it is what would be the target if the OS market looked like:
Windows 9x: 10%
Windows XP: 20%
Mac OS 9: 5%
Mac OS X: 10%
Red Hat: 15%
SuSE: 15%
Debian: 5%
Mandrake: 10%
*BSD: 5%
Others: 5%
What would people target? Probably IOS until it suffered the same fate and saw it's dominance split. Then anyone wanting to wreak havoc would have to accept the fact that they can't or do some amazing things to find cross platform targets (i.e. common flaws in java runtimes or multi-platform binaries). You wouldn't even really be able to target the Linux 45% I have above very well as each system would have it's own software versions and policies which would make finding common exploits very difficult. Diversity is key here!
California appears to have the highest concentration of techinically literate people in the USA. How would you view the proposition of retooling California to only use Free Software in all (feasible, would need to be phased in) areas where the state has control (as opposed to private companies)? I would view this as having the advantage of reducing funds leaving the state and also developing a California based expertise which could be exported worldwide in helping other states (be they US style or actual countries) in converting to using Free Software. Each region which converts to free software is breeding an workforce for the future, both for its own needs and as an exportable commodity, would you like to take colifornia into the lead here by leveraging its already substantial technoligical know-how?
We'll in the worst case, if they did excessively copy from the LGPL wine code then they would still not have to release the source of their system, they would simply have to release the "modified" code from the voting system. If they had "de-libraried" the MMIO functions then they could provide a test case for the GPL but I imagine they would simply re-library it with the blessings of the wine projects and release the source to this library LGPL. The LGPL allows you to hide YOUR code while diclosing what you do with IT'S code.
Just because you can only boot from the HDD doesn't mean you cannot install anything you want! You just have to work around the problem. For example you could use VMWare to boot your distro and then install to the real hard disk. Alternatively you could simply use rawrite to overwrite the mbr (tricky to construct your mbr... but possible). Now if your OS that you can boot from won't let you access the mbr and the raw disk, then you'll just have to whip out the hard disk to do your installing and then return it.
Bottom line is that yes, every desktop in a large install should be secured both physically and through software to prevent the users from modifying anything non-trivial.
As for personal experiences, I have owned "stealth" linux installs and a good friend of mine who works for one of the largest ISPs in Ireland has one, as he has told me do many others throughout the company.
Although SuSE'slast bid arguably altered the course for good, the victorious Social Democrats stand firm in the position that the decision in favor of Linux and a yet to be chosen Open Source office software is of fundamental nature and
does not imply contracts with SuSE or IBM.
Emphasis mine! Munich has decided to go with Linux and Open Source software, not SuSE and IBM on the basis of the freedom from a single company. This is a great decision but it will be a good few years before the PHBs will be able to look at the results as they will take their time implementing the solution when they finally issue contracts.
Another VERY good reason why home users will use Linux rather than Windows is that DRM realted technologies will be abhorent to Linux so when they buy their CD and it won't play on their PC they'll just bring it back and tell the store to go to hell and download the tracks from XXX. Likewise when they pick up a few DVDs over in the US (or Europe) and come back home they will be able to just play them and not discover that they have locked themselves out from playing the rest of their collection. Now I know that Windows does not preclude them doing these things, but you have to venture into a seedier underworld of crackers where on Linux the hacking will be done out of the box (or else they will just have to get any DVD to play and then be able to play any other DVD without fear).
Debian have a tendency to backport security fixes rather than updating a system. The security team released this update to the kernel this month. So with Debian there's no need to update the kernel version for security fixes, instead you can just get the same kernel with the security fix(s).
Well firstly Jackson is doing LotR in about 10 hours (or so) and in doing that he has cut quite a lot of stuff out to simplify things to fit into the film. LotR is also a shorter "book" then the RGB Mars and LotR also has a considerable amount of descriptive/emotive text where the adage of "a picture's worth a thousand words" makes it wasier for Jackson. Finally RGB Mars develops the evolution of an entire planet and culture, LotR uses the remaining works of Tolkien to do that so the films really deal with just the surface story with some hints to the bigger picture. Perhaps I'm talking arse, but I truly do wonder just how easy it will be to preserve the depth of RGB Mars, even in 18 hours! BTW I've never read Dune or seen the SciFi channels version.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that's Funny. When you get to the "404" you'll notice that you can only search articles after 1985. All records from 1984 back have been expunged! George Orwell indeed!
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but you can get surround sound from a divx, in fact a divx can contain the original audio stream from the dvd including multiple languages and commentaries. Of course having multiple 5.1 audio channels does mean that the resulting divx will be substantially bigger! Also you could distribute the full original dvd content simply recoded to divx in a compressed archive, leaving all the menus and original extra content intact. It seems to indicate the "market" interest in all these features that all of this does not happen and shared divx files are just the movie with a stereo soundtrack.
This is about the third comment I have started typing a reply to, and I'll post this one because I just can't let another one slide.
By what criteria (and where did you derive them from) are you judging the US Vs Syria? What do you say to Guantanamo bay? What would you say if you were incarcerated without any judicial proceeding for an indeterminate time without any access to the outside world, and subjected to torture? Would you say your captors showed great respect for human rights? What would you say if your country (palestine) was being bombed and locked down at will by an invading/collonising force (israel) going against the will of the world (read UN) where all the funds to support the oppressors is funded by another country (guess who) entirely? Would you say either the oppressors or their funders showed respect for human rights? What would you say of a country which places more black 20-30s in prison then college or saves the death penaly for black on white murders? Human rights? What about Florida in the Bush Gore election where Jed ensured he could deliver the states votes by first excluding 22,000 voters (95%+ incorrectly) and then controlling the count of the votes? Need I point out that the UN should be sent into the US to monitor your elections from now on (as they are all over the world) if you wish to vote in the UN anymore. What about a country that first massacred their indigenous people (oh look, Australia gets a look in aswell) and then proceeds to also import other "lesser" people to do their work (including producing children they can sell) and when they finally have to "give up on slaves" they simply imprison people instead and make them work for 23c/hour. You don't seem to be taking responsibility for the corrupt regime which runs your own country which you also put in place.
The point of the UN is that by allowing all countries to have a vote, the wild rantings of one nation (however powerful) cannot carry the opinion of "the world". Heaven forbid that W and his lap dog Tony could actually carry the UN vote alone on the basis that they have spent the most of weapons for the past 50 years!
When the US has it right you can all come back and start preaching to the rest of us how we've got it all wrong, in the meantime either close your borders and leave us alone, or respect our humanity, talk to us and stop telling us about your morals.
All men are created equal, though some are more equal than others?
The gist of my argument is that the current situation is a absurd as possible. The path towards sanity lies in figuring out what we are banning and why? I would personally ban anyone from distributing any psychoactive substance unless they have a licence (same for bungee and base jumping), would decriminalise the possession and production of small quantities but would enfore legislation which came down heavily on anyone who didn't addequately try to prevent substances coming into childrens hands.
No, just because something can kill people is not enough. If it was we would criminalise fire (how many people are burnt to death annually), electricity (fried), cars (run over) and pencils (falling asleep and taking one up the nose). Oh yeah, how about firearms?
As for violence, well need I say more then alcohol?
As for learning, well need I say more then alcohol?
Now as for how societies should deal with things which are not safe, I don't know the answer (I know my answer but not societies) but I wish people who thought they did could at least come up with a consitent answer. For example, I can bungee but not base jump. I can drink 1 litre (well I've never gone past 0.75) of vodka and smoke 200 cigarettes (80) but I can't take a drag of a joint even if I don't inhale.
For me the drugs issue comes down to two major factors. Firstly if society rejects recreational drugs then they should criminalise Alcohol and Tobacco and start a real "War on Drugs". Secondly doctors should not be restricted from researching alternative therapies and employing them (i.e. if we criminalise alcohol but a doctor feels that a glass of wine a day is required for a heart patient he should be allowed prescribe it).
What? So if you go to someone selling "autos" and they say "I'll give you this 10k auto for 300/month over 5 years with the 5 year extended warranty" you can't say "hell no, I'll give you the 10k cash thank you" and go on down your bank and get a 10k loan for 300/month over 3 years instead and hence stop them getting the extra 4.5k?
Now if you really want to look at "autos" you can say that Ford have no right to produce a vehicle and insist that you can only refill it with Ford Fuel, or that the fuel tank will only open to a pump fitted with a ford radio unlocker. You know if they tried this that mechanics would either learn how make a key to open the tank or replace the tank opening.
Linus and the FSF say that they will have to release the source to the kernel itself to anyone they distribute it to and that they have to give them all the same rights, so any soldier would have to be allowed to upload the source to the kernel (and any other GPL licensed software). Just being the OS of choice for the American Army would probably be enough of an excuse for them to bomb any country which harbours terrorists who discuss the security of the base system (let alone their own). The DMCA just got it's army!
that's what anyone who wants to view the American Army's source code for Linux will become. If you think SCO is a threat to the uninforceability of the GPL, can you imagine the FSF going to the US army and telling them to release the source!
It's not a concept to have a "we sued slashdot" hall of fame, if you look at the hall of fame and the most visited stories you will note that numbers 1 and 8 are the Microsoft and the scientoligists requests to remove content (with 377844 and 265178 views respectively)! Just goes to show that sueing to remove content is not the best way to have the content go away!
Does anyone else see a new hall of fame story in the making, "Diebold orders /. to remove posts"? Sure is fun to watch however (even when slashdot caves in to the $cientoligi$t$).
My only question is will the ROTK be an extended edition in its initial state or will we have to wait another year before I can finally sit down in a cinema and watch the entire extended trilogy in one sitting? As it is, I had been waiting for the opportunity to see the entire trilogy in a cinema (and wondered when and if any cinema would do it) in a day. I had never really hoped that I would get to see the extended editions in the cinema so this is excellent news, I just hope that they get the ROTK out in an extended edition for the cinemas also. I'm sure that every (reasonably large) city going would have a cinema which would take on showing the full series daily in extended form for a few weeks (and it wouldn't matter whether they did it on ROTK release or a month or two after so those prints can travel). This could be one of those "cultural" experiences which shapes the future of cinematography! I remember going to see SW:ESB and SW:ROTJ for the first times in the cinema back to back with my dad and that was one of the greatest days of my childhood (I was about 9)! Pity he didn't feel up to doing the full 3 movie trilogy!
No I don't believe that shrinkwrapped boxes will contain a huge multitude of CDs, I believe that commercial software will become more and more specialised as time moves on. Now if someone is creating a game (you mention games and it's an easy example) they will look to the market and decide what platforms are worth targetting. Then they will see what technologies/methods can be applied across those platforms. Then they will examine how many of the non-targetted platforms they can get to without having to do any major extra work. Finally they will write the game so that the program is a recompile away from each targetted and achievable platform. Taking my example figures, you would probably find that games developers (assuming market usage of the OSs is spread evenly across the spectrum) would target Linux (and probably a specific set of major library versions which can be found across the main derivatives), Windows XP and Mac OS X and as a by product they would probably try to have a BSD version aswell. End result the box would have 4 installers and binaries (the game data being shared across all platforms). As they are trying to work within the system (and not to circumvent any security) the differences between the various Linux distros would not leave them needing to write seperate versions for each distro. Finally, the smart ones would actually construct the game so that the main core logic of the game is binary only, the game data (graphics, levels, whatever) in binary only and the rest (graphics sub-systems, input system) would be binary and source (or at least be exposed so that someone could port the game onto any platform that can run the core logic).
So Linux with a 45% share (or bsd with a 5% share) is just fine by you but a 15% apple share makes me an Apple zealot? No, I'm just trying to outline any sort of a diverse set of OS conditions. I could have put in the Amiga OS, QNX, BeIA, OpenBeos, AIX, Solaris and anything else you could think of to make the list even longer but for the sake of not scrolling down to far on the screen I stuck to a small but (hopefully) big enough list to get the idea I wanted to express (diversity) across.
- Windows 9x: 10%
- Windows XP: 20%
- Mac OS 9: 5%
- Mac OS X: 10%
- Red Hat: 15%
- SuSE: 15%
- Debian: 5%
- Mandrake: 10%
- *BSD: 5%
- Others: 5%
What would people target? Probably IOS until it suffered the same fate and saw it's dominance split. Then anyone wanting to wreak havoc would have to accept the fact that they can't or do some amazing things to find cross platform targets (i.e. common flaws in java runtimes or multi-platform binaries). You wouldn't even really be able to target the Linux 45% I have above very well as each system would have it's own software versions and policies which would make finding common exploits very difficult. Diversity is key here!California appears to have the highest concentration of techinically literate people in the USA. How would you view the proposition of retooling California to only use Free Software in all (feasible, would need to be phased in) areas where the state has control (as opposed to private companies)? I would view this as having the advantage of reducing funds leaving the state and also developing a California based expertise which could be exported worldwide in helping other states (be they US style or actual countries) in converting to using Free Software. Each region which converts to free software is breeding an workforce for the future, both for its own needs and as an exportable commodity, would you like to take colifornia into the lead here by leveraging its already substantial technoligical know-how?
We'll in the worst case, if they did excessively copy from the LGPL wine code then they would still not have to release the source of their system, they would simply have to release the "modified" code from the voting system. If they had "de-libraried" the MMIO functions then they could provide a test case for the GPL but I imagine they would simply re-library it with the blessings of the wine projects and release the source to this library LGPL. The LGPL allows you to hide YOUR code while diclosing what you do with IT'S code.
Just because you can only boot from the HDD doesn't mean you cannot install anything you want! You just have to work around the problem. For example you could use VMWare to boot your distro and then install to the real hard disk. Alternatively you could simply use rawrite to overwrite the mbr (tricky to construct your mbr ... but possible). Now if your OS that you can boot from won't let you access the mbr and the raw disk, then you'll just have to whip out the hard disk to do your installing and then return it.
Bottom line is that yes, every desktop in a large install should be secured both physically and through software to prevent the users from modifying anything non-trivial.
As for personal experiences, I have owned "stealth" linux installs and a good friend of mine who works for one of the largest ISPs in Ireland has one, as he has told me do many others throughout the company.
Another VERY good reason why home users will use Linux rather than Windows is that DRM realted technologies will be abhorent to Linux so when they buy their CD and it won't play on their PC they'll just bring it back and tell the store to go to hell and download the tracks from XXX. Likewise when they pick up a few DVDs over in the US (or Europe) and come back home they will be able to just play them and not discover that they have locked themselves out from playing the rest of their collection. Now I know that Windows does not preclude them doing these things, but you have to venture into a seedier underworld of crackers where on Linux the hacking will be done out of the box (or else they will just have to get any DVD to play and then be able to play any other DVD without fear).
Just play games on your phone instead!
Debian have a tendency to backport security fixes rather than updating a system. The security team released this update to the kernel this month. So with Debian there's no need to update the kernel version for security fixes, instead you can just get the same kernel with the security fix(s).
Well firstly Jackson is doing LotR in about 10 hours (or so) and in doing that he has cut quite a lot of stuff out to simplify things to fit into the film. LotR is also a shorter "book" then the RGB Mars and LotR also has a considerable amount of descriptive/emotive text where the adage of "a picture's worth a thousand words" makes it wasier for Jackson. Finally RGB Mars develops the evolution of an entire planet and culture, LotR uses the remaining works of Tolkien to do that so the films really deal with just the surface story with some hints to the bigger picture. Perhaps I'm talking arse, but I truly do wonder just how easy it will be to preserve the depth of RGB Mars, even in 18 hours! BTW I've never read Dune or seen the SciFi channels version.