Nah, Firefox 3.0.2 will introduce a new popup warning for unencrypted, unauthenticated (http:) sites:
"INVALID CERTIFICATE: certificate is not signed by a trusted authority because it uses no certificate at all (sec_error_no_certificate)."
People who are too dumb to understand how important proper security is will be allowed to click four times to allow the uncertified site to load if they really want, though.
StartSSL supposedly offers free-as-in-free-beer SSL certificate-signing services, but even that's not really the issue in my opinion.
Why are we being told that we must get permission from a "trusted" authority in order to "legitimately" use encryption?
I wouldn't have even blinked if a commercial, proprietary browser started doing this...but "open source" Mozilla? Campaigning against do-it-yourself encryption? Just to "scare consumers" away from things that might possibly maybe be bad? That just seems completely wrong. The use-case mentioned above of the wifi router which can't necessarily get a "trusted authority" to verify due to lack of a FQDN is a good example of why this shouldn't just be of interest to do-it-yourself hobbyist nerds.
I still fail to see how being driven away from anti-eavesdropping (but unauthenticated) communications to completely unencrypted AND unauthenticated communications makes people "safer" and am a bit baffled that Mozilla is now treating unauthenticated certificates exactly like fraudelently authenticated certificates.
The usual retort here assumes that the only alternative is that self-signed certificates be treated the same as authenticated certificates and therefore people will somehow think they're "safe" even though there's a chance the site at the other end might possibly be involved with a "Man-in-the-middle" attack. There's also a disturbing assumption that only corporate "e-commerce" and government sites have any interest in "legitimate" encryption (the "they'll just go out of business if they don't 'buy' a certificate" arguments...). Of course, we do have to worry about the teeming masses of evildoers who break into people's houses to replace their wifi routers in order to steal their slashdot.org login password...
Why they don't want to consider having a third "encrypted but not 'secure'" state for correct but unauthenticated (self-signed) certificates or certificates that have gone past the arbitrary expiration date encoded in it I also don't know. Does Mozilla corporation have some kind of "partnership" with some of the big "Trusted Authorities" or something?
It's worth remembering that technology is a huge factor in the US economy, jobs, defence, (privacy/spying, civil rights, scientific progress...) etc. - so the topic is quite important.
I should note that I agree completely with this, by the way - the KDE team obviously knew that they wouldn't get many people to jump in and test "Tech Preview 3.99", so they decided to label it 4.0 in hopes of getting distributions to include it and people to try it out.
Despite the fact that they were pretty clear in interviews and such that this was an incomplete tech preview that they just wanted lots of people to test, they didn't seem too worried about the fact that a majority of people who ended up trying out "KDE 4.0" weren't reading interviews with the KDE team and just got it because their distribution included it. Those people all expected something at least mostly finished and were understandably disappointed. (Heck, I KNEW it was a "tech preview" and I was still disappointed at the lack of functionality.)
The point of my previous post still stands, though: the 4.1 release so far appears to be making very good progress towards re-implementing the missing functionality. The 4.1.0 release looks like it will still lack a few features, but should still be pretty much what many people seem to have expected 4.0 to be and perhaps more. Or so I am currently predicting.
Oddly (apparently), I found KDE 4.0.x to be quite stable. For me, its problem was that there wasn't anything implemented other than some "shiny bubble icon" eye-candy. It's not really "polish" that KDE4 needs - it's had THAT from the start. It's actual functionality that it has really been needing.
I've been using the current SVN builds for the 4.1 series, and it's looking much better in terms of actual functionality than the 4.0 series was. There are still a few irritating missing bits (like metadata display [duration/bitrate/etc. for mp3 and ogg-vorbis files, for example] and a fully working version of K3B for KDE4, etc.) but from my perspective they've done a very credible job of addressing many of the major shortcomings from the original KDE4(.0) releases.
I think the whole "plasmoids" thing that they've been frantically laying the groundwork for will probably make dealing with the remaining missing functionality pretty quick.
Everyone seems to be going on about authentication as though that were the most important function provided by SSL/TLS.
Personally, I've always felt the encryption was much more important and useful. I'm usually far less worried that the site I'm connecting to is an imposter than I am about people using the same public wireless access point "sniffing" my traffic.
I keep wondering whether it'd be possible to use PGP encryption instead. Obviously there'd need to be some browser-side support for this, but for situations where authentication is less worrisome than encryption, it would at least get us away from the "pay Verisign for permission to encrypt your website for a year" model that we seem to be headed towards. (I'm sure government agencies around the world love this idea - then there are only a few central "certificate" companies they need to flash a badge at to get a fake certificate for your domain name. Hey, if you're not into child pornography or terrorism you have no reason to object to this, right?...)
Failing that, at least allowing a much simpler "accept self-signed certificates" configuration option, with the "lock" icon indicating "your communication is safely encrypted, even though we cannot guarantee the identity of the website you're communicating with" rather than the Big Scary Pop-Up Window interface they're using now.
"So there needs to be an interoperable standard for avatars, and a standard protocol for your "browser" to interact with any 3d server."
I heard somewhere there was this new standard called VRML for that...
Didn't you see the story about it on the news? It was mentioned between the report about Lorena Bobbit being acquitted and report about President Bill Clinton's first "State of the Union" address...
"have stated there will be Mac and Linux versions"
Link? All I was able to find was the page where they say "we hope to support other platforms someday". There is a canned button on the suggestions page to request "Mac support" but not Linux.
I'm TRYING to comment in their Google Groups "Lively -- suggestions and feedback" page. First I had to sign in. THEN I had to "subscribe". Then I had to find which group's posts would allow me to reply. Now I've hit "send" for my comment. The "send" button has now greyed out to indicate that I've pressed it, but there's no indication that anything's being sent...
I think they just don't want to hear it.
They seem to have lost interest in cross-platform. If they hadn't, they'd be developing with broad cross-platform support in mind from the beginning, rather than promoting the Microsoft Windows platform right from the start, with the idea that "someday" they might get around to trying to figure out how to make their Microsoft Windows software limp along on "other platforms". I point to the example of their Flickr-alike (whose name I keep forgetting). It now has a "Linux" version after a long wait. It evidently requires WINE so as to pretend to be on "Microsoft Windows". Not a good indication of interest in cross-platform support, in my opinion.
It's gotten so bad that I'm finding myself ever-so-slightly surprised when I see they even took the trouble to make it work outside of Microsoft Internet Explorer.
(With the exception of Android, I wonder if "Google Earth 4" - which I am grateful for and make frequent use of - may be the last time they bother with native code for us mere Linux users. I'm paranoid they may abandon us if/when they get around to developing the "Google Earth 5" series.)
I've compiled it with support for the compositing features (the "xcomposite" flag - I'm using the Gentoo overlay), but I haven't done any configuration to "use" them. I figure I'll look at the pretty eye-candy features once I've got basic functionality.
Quick update - the bleeding edge SVN version solved the Magical Crashing Panel problem, but replaced it with a tendency to explode with about 30-40 instances of a "unable to find multimedia backend!" error message upon opening or changing settings in KDE programs. I can click all of them closed and continue, but it's REALLY annoying, especially since if I'm actively using it, this happens every minute or so. I'm wondering if that has anything to do with me being currently unable to get the SVN version of phonon-xine to compile. I expect they'll have that glitch fixed pretty quickly (definitely by the 8th, I expect, when they're due to tag the rc1 release) and the 4.1 system will be usable for me, finally. I hope.
I'm a little shocked at the instability at the moment - I remember running "KDE 3" for several MONTHS (compiled regularly from CVS) before they started releasing the betas, and finding them quite stable and usable back then. Hopefully in the next couple of days everything will be shaken out and back to normal.
That's not really true (plus, the article's title is suggesting that 4.1 IS gaining more improvements than detriments at the moment). What little I've been able to see of 4.1 so far suggests that they ARE addressing a lot of the shortcomings that were in 4.0. If I can keep the dang thing from crashing for more than 3-5 minutes it looks like I'll be pretty pleased with it, personally.
"Gee, complaining about glitches in a beta. That's brilliant. Hmmm the beta has some glitches!"
To be fair, I finally got beta2 to compile yesterday, and for me the panel was unusably crashy (the panel was crashing KDE to death literally - after about the third time the panel crashed and restarted itself, it would crash and take all the rest of KDE with it, leaving me with a blank black screen. Every other click or mouseover type event seemed to precipitate a crash, so this was a matter of 3-5 minutes of use...) - far less stable than I'm used to seeing with a "beta" (especially a "beta 2") on a Linux-based system...
Working on getting the up-to-the-moment source from subversion to build. Between crashes, I could see that at least SOME of the major irritants that I had with 4.0 seemed to have been dealt with. Once 4.1 is stabilized I think it'll be quite usable.
<voice mode="Creaky old man sitting in rocking chair on front porch of retirement home">I remember a time when for years, motherboards included USB ports, but they were always unused because there really weren't any USB peripherals. We still had two serial ports so why the heck would we pay extra for some newfangled USB mouse? I think there were a few USB sound devices floating around too, which always struck me as kind of odd given that the built-in SB16 card seemed like it'd have better responsiveness - plus there were actual drivers available for it. Of course, now if you want an old-school serial port, you have to buy a USB adapter that provides one...
Now you kids get off of my lawn!</voice>
I predict it'll continue to be a slow startup, but I think in the next few years the painfully slow growth in number of people who care and number of providers who can handle IPv6 will finally creep up to a point where usage can take off. Just like USB did.
I can't imagine TSC sufferers are a big market. Then again, narcoleptics aren't a big market either, but Modafinil ("Provigil®") seems to be doing pretty well in the market. The side-effects of rapamycin seem pretty serious, but it's possible a related compound could be developed that better targets the desired brain improvements and has lesser side-effects.
So the question is: what kind of effect might a drug in this class have on normal "healthy" individuals? Could it be used as a performance-enhancing drug, much as modafinil and adderall sometimes are?
That would expand its market greatly and bring down the cost for TSC sufferers...
So that's where all the [philosophy|mathematics|English Literature|Journalism|Liberal Arts|Insert-your-favorite-supposedly-useless-degree-here] majors go for entertainment...
There's a "penultimate" evil font now, too. I can never remember the name of it, but it's getting used as gratuitously now as "MS Comic Sans" was half a decade ago.
What IS the name of that elongated crinkly-edged font that everybody insists on using now?...
On the other hand, you lose the ability to read when your batteries die or the power goes out. You also are required to buy an expensive device (a computer or "e-book reader") in order to view the material at all. And if you want a dead-tree edition as many of us do, you have to do your own printing and binding.
To me, at least, this is all okay, but does not justify paying the same price as getting an already-assembled real book. 10% might be a bit low (at least until the market takes off and prices come down further) but I definitely can't justify spending full price on a copy of the book data rather than an actual book. This is especially true for O'Reilly books - unlike cheap fiction paperbacks, most of the O'Reilly books I buy (and I've bought quite a few) have been in the $40-60 range. $40-$60 for the same book in "do it yourself/supply-your-own-paper-and-ink" format? This might be reasonable at the $5 price-point for cheap fiction, but expensive technical books?
Look at it this way - what if O'Reilly were to offer, in bookstores, a bundle containing both the real book AND a CD containing the.pdf of the same book. I would generally be quite willing to pay extra for that, but how many people really think this bundle should cost the same as buying two copies of the book? To me, pricing the digital-only copy about the same as the extra one would charge over the price of a physical book for a physical+digital bundle is more in line with what is reasonable.
(We're not arguing that the value of having the book's "source code", so to speak, is negligible - only that for most uses the value doesn't really approach that of the finished material product that is made from it.)
There are only a handful of things that really bug me on KDE4 (4.0), but this is one of them. akregator from 3.5x seems to work okay under KDE4 (other than the "launcher" complaining that it can't find akregator...after it successfully starts it), but kmail's IMAP support appears to be broken when run on kde4.
Give me kmail and akregator (hopefully with enclosure support now), real metadata in dolphin, ability to revert to KDE3's "sort by date" algorithm, and LET ME PROPERLY RESIZE AND POSITION THE FRIGGIN' "Panel" and Widget font sizes, and I'll be pretty happy.
...because all I can think of now is the fact that this would probably mean there will be people working very hard to port WINE to run on Windows (7)...
I hadn't thought about it before, but considering what the RIA/MPA/BSA and such are costing us in court time and enforcement, perhaps it's time to crank up the royalty tax rates to offset the costs (and I would assume that payments for permission to use patents should also count as "royalties", yes?).
Certainly a substantial increase in the royalty tax rate should perhaps be a part of any "intellectual property" "reform" bill as proposed by those who profit from it (and perhaps this would encourage people to go back to actually SELLING things and slow the stampede towards the "bribe someone for permission to use under restricted conditions" model...)
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, Firefox 3.0.2 will introduce a new popup warning for unencrypted, unauthenticated (http:) sites:
People who are too dumb to understand how important proper security is will be allowed to click four times to allow the uncertified site to load if they really want, though.
StartSSL supposedly offers free-as-in-free-beer SSL certificate-signing services, but even that's not really the issue in my opinion.
Why are we being told that we must get permission from a "trusted" authority in order to "legitimately" use encryption?
I wouldn't have even blinked if a commercial, proprietary browser started doing this...but "open source" Mozilla? Campaigning against do-it-yourself encryption? Just to "scare consumers" away from things that might possibly maybe be bad? That just seems completely wrong. The use-case mentioned above of the wifi router which can't necessarily get a "trusted authority" to verify due to lack of a FQDN is a good example of why this shouldn't just be of interest to do-it-yourself hobbyist nerds.
I still fail to see how being driven away from anti-eavesdropping (but unauthenticated) communications to completely unencrypted AND unauthenticated communications makes people "safer" and am a bit baffled that Mozilla is now treating unauthenticated certificates exactly like fraudelently authenticated certificates.
The usual retort here assumes that the only alternative is that self-signed certificates be treated the same as authenticated certificates and therefore people will somehow think they're "safe" even though there's a chance the site at the other end might possibly be involved with a "Man-in-the-middle" attack. There's also a disturbing assumption that only corporate "e-commerce" and government sites have any interest in "legitimate" encryption (the "they'll just go out of business if they don't 'buy' a certificate" arguments...). Of course, we do have to worry about the teeming masses of evildoers who break into people's houses to replace their wifi routers in order to steal their slashdot.org login password...
Why they don't want to consider having a third "encrypted but not 'secure'" state for correct but unauthenticated (self-signed) certificates or certificates that have gone past the arbitrary expiration date encoded in it I also don't know. Does Mozilla corporation have some kind of "partnership" with some of the big "Trusted Authorities" or something?
That is just not true!
"secret" is the opposite of "blatant".
It's worth remembering that technology is a huge factor in the US economy, jobs, defence, (privacy/spying, civil rights, scientific progress...) etc. - so the topic is quite important.
I should note that I agree completely with this, by the way - the KDE team obviously knew that they wouldn't get many people to jump in and test "Tech Preview 3.99", so they decided to label it 4.0 in hopes of getting distributions to include it and people to try it out.
Despite the fact that they were pretty clear in interviews and such that this was an incomplete tech preview that they just wanted lots of people to test, they didn't seem too worried about the fact that a majority of people who ended up trying out "KDE 4.0" weren't reading interviews with the KDE team and just got it because their distribution included it. Those people all expected something at least mostly finished and were understandably disappointed. (Heck, I KNEW it was a "tech preview" and I was still disappointed at the lack of functionality.)
The point of my previous post still stands, though: the 4.1 release so far appears to be making very good progress towards re-implementing the missing functionality. The 4.1.0 release looks like it will still lack a few features, but should still be pretty much what many people seem to have expected 4.0 to be and perhaps more. Or so I am currently predicting.
Oddly (apparently), I found KDE 4.0.x to be quite stable. For me, its problem was that there wasn't anything implemented other than some "shiny bubble icon" eye-candy. It's not really "polish" that KDE4 needs - it's had THAT from the start. It's actual functionality that it has really been needing.
I've been using the current SVN builds for the 4.1 series, and it's looking much better in terms of actual functionality than the 4.0 series was. There are still a few irritating missing bits (like metadata display [duration/bitrate/etc. for mp3 and ogg-vorbis files, for example] and a fully working version of K3B for KDE4, etc.) but from my perspective they've done a very credible job of addressing many of the major shortcomings from the original KDE4(.0) releases.
I think the whole "plasmoids" thing that they've been frantically laying the groundwork for will probably make dealing with the remaining missing functionality pretty quick.
Everyone seems to be going on about authentication as though that were the most important function provided by SSL/TLS.
Personally, I've always felt the encryption was much more important and useful. I'm usually far less worried that the site I'm connecting to is an imposter than I am about people using the same public wireless access point "sniffing" my traffic.
I keep wondering whether it'd be possible to use PGP encryption instead. Obviously there'd need to be some browser-side support for this, but for situations where authentication is less worrisome than encryption, it would at least get us away from the "pay Verisign for permission to encrypt your website for a year" model that we seem to be headed towards. (I'm sure government agencies around the world love this idea - then there are only a few central "certificate" companies they need to flash a badge at to get a fake certificate for your domain name. Hey, if you're not into child pornography or terrorism you have no reason to object to this, right?...)
Failing that, at least allowing a much simpler "accept self-signed certificates" configuration option, with the "lock" icon indicating "your communication is safely encrypted, even though we cannot guarantee the identity of the website you're communicating with" rather than the Big Scary Pop-Up Window interface they're using now.
No, that's for authentication. Fingerprints and retina scans are too easy to fake, but nobody's come up with a good way to fake a tongueprint yet.
I heard somewhere there was this new standard called VRML for that...
Didn't you see the story about it on the news? It was mentioned between the report about Lorena Bobbit being acquitted and report about President Bill Clinton's first "State of the Union" address...
(You kids get offa my lawn!)
Link? All I was able to find was the page where they say "we hope to support other platforms someday". There is a canned button on the suggestions page to request "Mac support" but not Linux.
I'm TRYING to comment in their Google Groups "Lively -- suggestions and feedback" page. First I had to sign in. THEN I had to "subscribe". Then I had to find which group's posts would allow me to reply. Now I've hit "send" for my comment. The "send" button has now greyed out to indicate that I've pressed it, but there's no indication that anything's being sent...
I think they just don't want to hear it.
They seem to have lost interest in cross-platform. If they hadn't, they'd be developing with broad cross-platform support in mind from the beginning, rather than promoting the Microsoft Windows platform right from the start, with the idea that "someday" they might get around to trying to figure out how to make their Microsoft Windows software limp along on "other platforms". I point to the example of their Flickr-alike (whose name I keep forgetting). It now has a "Linux" version after a long wait. It evidently requires WINE so as to pretend to be on "Microsoft Windows". Not a good indication of interest in cross-platform support, in my opinion.
It's gotten so bad that I'm finding myself ever-so-slightly surprised when I see they even took the trouble to make it work outside of Microsoft Internet Explorer.
(With the exception of Android, I wonder if "Google Earth 4" - which I am grateful for and make frequent use of - may be the last time they bother with native code for us mere Linux users. I'm paranoid they may abandon us if/when they get around to developing the "Google Earth 5" series.)
I've compiled it with support for the compositing features (the "xcomposite" flag - I'm using the Gentoo overlay), but I haven't done any configuration to "use" them. I figure I'll look at the pretty eye-candy features once I've got basic functionality.
Quick update - the bleeding edge SVN version solved the Magical Crashing Panel problem, but replaced it with a tendency to explode with about 30-40 instances of a "unable to find multimedia backend!" error message upon opening or changing settings in KDE programs. I can click all of them closed and continue, but it's REALLY annoying, especially since if I'm actively using it, this happens every minute or so. I'm wondering if that has anything to do with me being currently unable to get the SVN version of phonon-xine to compile. I expect they'll have that glitch fixed pretty quickly (definitely by the 8th, I expect, when they're due to tag the rc1 release) and the 4.1 system will be usable for me, finally. I hope.
I'm a little shocked at the instability at the moment - I remember running "KDE 3" for several MONTHS (compiled regularly from CVS) before they started releasing the betas, and finding them quite stable and usable back then. Hopefully in the next couple of days everything will be shaken out and back to normal.
That's not really true (plus, the article's title is suggesting that 4.1 IS gaining more improvements than detriments at the moment). What little I've been able to see of 4.1 so far suggests that they ARE addressing a lot of the shortcomings that were in 4.0. If I can keep the dang thing from crashing for more than 3-5 minutes it looks like I'll be pretty pleased with it, personally.
To be fair, I finally got beta2 to compile yesterday, and for me the panel was unusably crashy (the panel was crashing KDE to death literally - after about the third time the panel crashed and restarted itself, it would crash and take all the rest of KDE with it, leaving me with a blank black screen. Every other click or mouseover type event seemed to precipitate a crash, so this was a matter of 3-5 minutes of use...) - far less stable than I'm used to seeing with a "beta" (especially a "beta 2") on a Linux-based system...
Working on getting the up-to-the-moment source from subversion to build. Between crashes, I could see that at least SOME of the major irritants that I had with 4.0 seemed to have been dealt with. Once 4.1 is stabilized I think it'll be quite usable.
Oddly enough, this sounds a lot like USB...
<voice mode="Creaky old man sitting in rocking chair on front porch of retirement home">I remember a time when for years, motherboards included USB ports, but they were always unused because there really weren't any USB peripherals. We still had two serial ports so why the heck would we pay extra for some newfangled USB mouse? I think there were a few USB sound devices floating around too, which always struck me as kind of odd given that the built-in SB16 card seemed like it'd have better responsiveness - plus there were actual drivers available for it. Of course, now if you want an old-school serial port, you have to buy a USB adapter that provides one...
Now you kids get off of my lawn!</voice>
I predict it'll continue to be a slow startup, but I think in the next few years the painfully slow growth in number of people who care and number of providers who can handle IPv6 will finally creep up to a point where usage can take off. Just like USB did.
Sheer poetry. I love it. You win the internet for the next millisecond.
I've been meaning to dredge up some comprehensible documentation on setting up an IPv6 network - guess now's a good time to get to work on it.
Ah, yes, that's the one. And I think your assessment is exactly correct...
I can't imagine TSC sufferers are a big market. Then again, narcoleptics aren't a big market either, but Modafinil ("Provigil®") seems to be doing pretty well in the market. The side-effects of rapamycin seem pretty serious, but it's possible a related compound could be developed that better targets the desired brain improvements and has lesser side-effects. So the question is: what kind of effect might a drug in this class have on normal "healthy" individuals? Could it be used as a performance-enhancing drug, much as modafinil and adderall sometimes are? That would expand its market greatly and bring down the cost for TSC sufferers...
And I, for one, am grateful. It'd creep me out if every other person I ran into looked like they'd been hit in the face with a latex pie...
So that's where all the [philosophy|mathematics|English Literature|Journalism|Liberal Arts|Insert-your-favorite-supposedly-useless-degree-here] majors go for entertainment...
There's a "penultimate" evil font now, too. I can never remember the name of it, but it's getting used as gratuitously now as "MS Comic Sans" was half a decade ago. What IS the name of that elongated crinkly-edged font that everybody insists on using now?...
On the other hand, you lose the ability to read when your batteries die or the power goes out. You also are required to buy an expensive device (a computer or "e-book reader") in order to view the material at all. And if you want a dead-tree edition as many of us do, you have to do your own printing and binding.
To me, at least, this is all okay, but does not justify paying the same price as getting an already-assembled real book. 10% might be a bit low (at least until the market takes off and prices come down further) but I definitely can't justify spending full price on a copy of the book data rather than an actual book. This is especially true for O'Reilly books - unlike cheap fiction paperbacks, most of the O'Reilly books I buy (and I've bought quite a few) have been in the $40-60 range. $40-$60 for the same book in "do it yourself/supply-your-own-paper-and-ink" format? This might be reasonable at the $5 price-point for cheap fiction, but expensive technical books?
Look at it this way - what if O'Reilly were to offer, in bookstores, a bundle containing both the real book AND a CD containing the .pdf of the same book. I would generally be quite willing to pay extra for that, but how many people really think this bundle should cost the same as buying two copies of the book? To me, pricing the digital-only copy about the same as the extra one would charge over the price of a physical book for a physical+digital bundle is more in line with what is reasonable.
(We're not arguing that the value of having the book's "source code", so to speak, is negligible - only that for most uses the value doesn't really approach that of the finished material product that is made from it.)
There are only a handful of things that really bug me on KDE4 (4.0), but this is one of them. akregator from 3.5x seems to work okay under KDE4 (other than the "launcher" complaining that it can't find akregator...after it successfully starts it), but kmail's IMAP support appears to be broken when run on kde4. Give me kmail and akregator (hopefully with enclosure support now), real metadata in dolphin, ability to revert to KDE3's "sort by date" algorithm, and LET ME PROPERLY RESIZE AND POSITION THE FRIGGIN' "Panel" and Widget font sizes, and I'll be pretty happy.
...because all I can think of now is the fact that this would probably mean there will be people working very hard to port WINE to run on Windows (7)...
I hadn't thought about it before, but considering what the RIA/MPA/BSA and such are costing us in court time and enforcement, perhaps it's time to crank up the royalty tax rates to offset the costs (and I would assume that payments for permission to use patents should also count as "royalties", yes?).
Certainly a substantial increase in the royalty tax rate should perhaps be a part of any "intellectual property" "reform" bill as proposed by those who profit from it (and perhaps this would encourage people to go back to actually SELLING things and slow the stampede towards the "bribe someone for permission to use under restricted conditions" model...)
My problem is that every time I try to cut down I get dangerously high levels of blood in my caffeinestream and I have to abort the attempt.