If your employer went into bankruptcy, then all their debts, including the one that they owed you, were cancelled. You can get into line with the company's other unsecured creditors, but, to be honest, your odds of getting much in compensation are low.
As to going after the CEO's assets, there are essentially no cases in which you'd have any legal standing to do so, since the corporate veil was created precisely to prevent that. If you held stock in the corporation, then you might have a case against the management of the company if you could show that they mismanaged the company into the ground. Again, however, your odds of winning are very poor, and, frankly, probably not worth the expense.
The thing to understand is this: when employees are canned without severance, it sucks. It's sleazy, and disreputable, and the people who do it are the scum of the earth. However, beyond that, Michael's wrong -- what your employer did isn't illegal; we as a nation protect those whose businesses fail, even if they should never have hired employees in the first place.
That protection isn't one-sided, though. You weren't fired for cause, so you can collect unemployment insurance. You may well be eligible for other transitional programs, too -- exploit them. We all pay taxes to protect people like you, so don't waste the money we payed.
But that's exactly the point of the white paper. If the operator of a P2P service -- which could well be something as small as a single Freenet node -- either knew or should reasonably have known that his or her service was being used for infringing purposes, then he or she could be liable for indirect infringement. Since any node operator can be reasonably sure that their Freenet node is being used for infringing purposes, operating a Freenet node probably leaves you personally liable for contributory infringement.
In fact, the operation of a Freenet node is probably direct infringement: you've made an infringing copy on the disk inside the node. That's direct infringement.
Well, if you were british, you would know that it should be, "I wish I were british." It's subjunctive. As in
abutebaris modo subjunctivo.
The subjunctive mood? Fooey -- that's fancy Frenchification of the language by the lexicographers. You only talk that way because you Brits don't speak real English, any more than us Americans understand irony.
This is a stupid idea -- not because there's anything wrong with using a SSTO device as a very high-speed bomber, but because there's absolutely no reason to use a manned platform for it. We can do everything that this can do with a semi-autonomous (or even fully autonomous) system. If there's no reason to use a manned platform for it, then there's no reason to build a reusable vehicle; the weight of the reentry equipment would be better used for payload. If there's no reason for that...then why not use ballistic missles for the same thing? They're cheap, easy to build, easy to conceal, and well understood.
And don't tell me about technology spin off. If that's what we want to do, then NASA needs to make that case itself, instead of hiding behind DOD's "national security" excuse. Military production is inefficient at the best of times, but undirected research without public review is a recipe for pure and unmitigated waste. The X-33 is still in a very pure research stage. The military won't do any better with it than NASA did, and will probably do much worse.
NASA knows that X-33 failed to meet any of its basic goals and they know that it won't meet any of them in the near term. Being good bureaucrats, they're trying to save the program. Instead of trying to justify the project to Congress any more, NASA's found some guy with scrambled eggs on his head and scrambled brains in his head who wants to get the military to underwrite the rest of his career. Typical conspiracy of crooks. What a crock.
Hmm. Actually, Jefferson probably would have sanctioned exactly that. In several letters to Madison during the time when Madison was drafting the Constitution, Jefferson opposed the provision of any kind of protection for intellectual property.
I'm always amazed by the adulation the Jefferson gets among educated people. TJ wasn't a very nice man -- he supported and encouraged the atrocities of the French Revolution, supported laws requiring that freed slaves be required to move out of Virginia within a year of their manumission, etc. Hell, he didn't even write the Declaration of Independence -- he was merely the lead draftsman among the committee of five.
I've read your report, and I didn't find any description of the mechanism by which you came up with your estimate of the average number of times that a given purchased copy of Linux is installed. That's probably my own error, but since you're answering questions, would you be willing to enlighten me?
You use the number "15". Frankly, I'm surprised that it is so big. Upon what data did you base that estimate? Who did you interview to get it? I realize that any such estimate would have to account both for the very large number of installs at large colocation and/or service provider shops, as well as the number of untrackable network installs that take place. But it would also need to account for the number of times where a machine had Linux installed upon it, was used as an experimental development platform, and then was wiped, not to mention the number of cases where somebody bought a distribution, and then never installed it at all.
Sorry, but this is simply not true. Sort order is not handled by embedded encodings; the ONLY way to handle it is to go to Unicode. (And that, in fact, is why CJK compatibility is so important. If I embed Japanese text into a Chinese document, and then search the Chinese document, the Japanese text should be ordered according to the Chinese context, not the Japanese content.)
Suppose, for the nonce, that I chose to protest this law by attempting to notify my neighbors that it does not appear to have a loophole for anonymous political speech. Suppose, further, that I attempted to reach as many of the relevant people as possible by sending out bulk electronic mail. And finally suppose that I decided not to use my own private account, which is easily associated with my employer, say because I work for a large Redmond, Washington-based company which would probably not wish to be associated with my activities. In fact, in order to protect my job, let's just say that I hid behind a pseudonym. (Not, of course, that any of the above could possibly apply to me in my real person; this is a purely hypothetical example.)
Guess what? I'd be in violation of the state anti-spam law. Given the hypothetical base of my employer, I'd almost certainly be a Washington resident, with a legitimate reason to not use my own name, engaging in overtly protected political speech. There is extensive precedent concerning the absolute protection accorded to anonymous political pamphleting in the US, whether on the street or through the mails. The law would expose me to financial risk on the basis of the mode I'd used to publicize my views.
That's censorship, pure and simple, and it is censorship of the worst kind: a direct attack on political speech. Obviously, that isn't the intent of the law, but as written, I'd say it was wildly overbroad.
Well, actually, the FUD here is in the claim that the BSD stack is in Windows any more. Despite the the lies that have come out of the OSS world, we got rid of the Berkeley stack as quickly as we could. The Berkeley stack is a first rate piece of software engineering, but (a) it's essentially Unix-like, so it's rather slow under Windows, (b) it isn't SMP-friendly (can you say "great big kernel lock"?), and (c) it had to be completely rewritten to support asyncronous operation. Seeing as how the Windows has supported (b) and (c) for six years now, I think that you'd have long since laid this particular lie to rest.
(And, if you wonder why nmap used to confuse W2K with FreeBSD, it's because of backwards compatibility issues. One of the consequences of our need to be backwards compatible with clients is that we are constrained by their limitations.)
In fact, the only reason we ever had a copy of the Berkeley stack in the OS is because we bought a company in order to provide some level of support for TCP/IP in NT 3.1, a decade ago. At the time, that company's implementation was "derived" from BSD's, and so we were infected by that code. What can I say? We were being driven by the market's needs, and we needed something out there. We knew that we could do better the next time out, but it important to get something out there then.
Actually, no, I'd hear through two means: word of mouth (getting an e-mail saying "Hey, did you see..."), or by the author sending me an unsolicited reprint. More often than not, I'd have been one of the author's referrees anyway. Like I said, there's a standard means for self-promotion; it's not like that's a new problem in the scientific community!
Science is a REALLY small world. You need to realize is that there were perhaps ten people in the world whose papers I "needed" to read as a specialist, and perhaps five other papers a year I needed to read to maintain general knowledge of my field. That's not a terribly unusual number.
Surprisingly, the bottom line isn't all that good. I was closely associated with one of the Pergamon Press majors (one of the Math Psych journals) a few years ago. The page costs covered the cost of typesetting and figure pressing. The journal made its money off the subscription fee libraries payed for it, pure and simple.
You're missing the key point in his argument. The services provided by the recording industry are wider and more important to recording artists than the services provided by the scientific publication industry are to scientists.
In the scientific community, journals provide a number of services. They provide editorial support, referreeing support, and a level of public distribution. Those are all important, to a degree, but that degree is quite limited. Assistant editors (the scientists that refer papers out to referrees) aren't payed for their time, so they don't care about the journal's redistribution policy. Referrees aren't payed for their time, so they don't care about the journal's redistribution policy. The consuming public would rather have the paper sooner and freely distributable to their classes, so they don't care about the journal's redistribution policy.
The recording industry provides another important service, and that service has no parallel in the scientific publication industry: publicity. I knew almost all of the names of the people who published in my field, and more than that, they knew mine. There's a standard method by which a newbie became established. I might miss a paper or two from a new star, but I could be confident that I'd know about them "soon enough". I don't know about all the bands I'd be likely to be interested in. That's a facility that the recording industry provides.
Actually, Agent wasn't an MSR project. The Agent team was a small, independent (and INCREDIBLY LOUD) product team -- two devs, one PM, a handful of testers. They were down the hall from us.
The Agent guys did good work, though -- wonder what they're working on now...
If its fair use, then its a legitimate noninfringing use
Actually, no. If it's fair use, then it's a sanctioned infringing use. That's a significant distinction.
A legitimate non-infringing use requires that the copyright holder's monopoly is not violated. "Time-shifting" is non-infringing, because only one copy of the original material is retained in the viewer's possession. The viewer has merely chosen to view the program at a different time, not to make multiple copies of the program and redistribute them. Since the material was broadcast, it was obviously intended to be viewed; the viewer has merely exerted a degree of control over the terms under which he or she viewed the broadcast.
A fair-use defense starts with the presupposition that a copy has been made of a copyrighted work; that is, it starts from the presumption that copyright has been violated. The burden of proof then lies upon the violator to show that this prima facie violation is, in fact, so small and so minor that no real damage was done; the text was propelry attributed, etc. But don't lie to yourself: fair use is infringement, merely tolerated infringement.
Well, actually, the question was about how hard it is to do the remote install -- go look at the original parent to which I responded.
However, the truth is that it's pretty easy to create a remote installer. MS provides a tool for scripting remote installs of workstations called the "Remote Installation Service" (stunningly obvious name, eh?) They even have a KB entry on using RIS to install servers. Setting up the disk is largely wizard driven, either way. It's certainly a great deal easier than, say, maintaining a custom FreeBSD kernel on my dev machine, which is what I do at home.
And the best thing is that I can copy half the contents of/etc and have a similar server up and running in half the time again. Try doing that with NT/2K.
I did this in my office with a test machine just about a week ago. Wiped the disk. Took the W2K remote install disk that my employer generates, slid it into the floppy drive, booted the machine, clicked "standard Web server, support SSL", hit return.
Went and got myself a coffee.
Came back 30 minutes later to a working box running 2K, IIS, with a server cert generated and installed, with the most recent set of hot fixes and security patches already installed.
Oh, and this machine does not have a standard config. I needed to test some software I was writing, so I scrounged together a junk machine that could sit in my office and provide me with a working web server. You example of "copying/etc and going from there" just simply doesn't work if the machine's config isn't known in advance.
So what was that about W2K being difficult to install?
Re:this is clearly a hoax...
on
Silicon LED
·
· Score: 2
So what? So there's the podunk place called "eng-bland" or some such -- all the electronics work worth doing is done right here in America: all microchip research is done by Intel, all operating systems are made by Microsoft, and all boxes are designed by Dell.
As the great American Song says: "This land is your land, this land is my land..." It's yours, it's mine, it's ours. There is ownership.
You know, Arlo Guthrie tells a great story about coming home from school one day, and singing that song to his father. Woodie responded, "Did you know that I wrote that? Do you know the rest of the song?" Arlo didn't -- but he still sings the whole thing whenever he performs it in concert these days.
You might want to go look up the original lyrics. In gross violation of Judge Kaplan (but in tribute to what Guthrie himself would have wanted...) here's a link.
How do you know that capitalism isn't actually either ascendent or in ascent everywhere? How are you measuring it's status among the evolving economies outside the developed world?
One of the consequences of Da Soto's analysis is that "capitalism" is undermeasured in those economies. The shadow economy is rabidly competitive and fiercely price driven -- a very classical capitalistic system. If, as Da Soto argues, the shadow economy is not counted in your market analysis, you'd see only the failure of the grand projects, but miss the success of the petite (in this case, tres petite) bourgeoisie.
In fact, the Celera assembly is proof positive of the value of the HGP. When HGP started a decade ago, a dedicated scientist with years and years of training might be able to sequence a few tens of base pairs in a day, if he or she did nothing else. Five years later, after the public funded a huge improvement in the basic technology of sequencing, a barely competent technician can be expected to sequence thousands of bases a day without breaking a sweat.
Two years after that, private industry realized that it could make money exploiting that technology. All hail to Celera for doing a good job -- but if they had seen further, it would only be because they stood on the shoulders of public money.
The Unix shell CLI is predicated upon the notion that every piece of code has essentially two input streams: a set of bits that flows in and a set of bits that flows out. That's a fairly powerful metaphor, and, if you have the cycles to throw at it, even universal. Look at XMLTerm if you want: although it's incredibly clumsy and unbelievably slow, it really does allow the user to go back and forth between CLI and GUI.
But there's a problem with the control structure of that model. The computer is in control; it reads from stdin when it wants to do so, and it writes to stdout when it wants to do so, and the user is the slave of the processor. For CLI-like tasks, and particularly those where the computer can itself generate a data stream, process it serially, and then spit out the result, it's exceptionally efficient.
The GUI has an essentially user-centric control model. There is not just one stream of data: the mouse and the keybooard are independent of one another. Components can be embedded in one another in non-linear fashions: the user can enter data into any of several slots, and, when a certain conjunct of data presence is available, a new set of slots or actions can become available to him. In order to build an abstract data model for such a machine, you need to step from the clean and comprehensible linear machine-based Unix CLI into a Petri-machine based system.
Can it be done? Of course. But expressing a Petri machine in text is very hard, and so it's quite unnatural to use a CLI to describe GUI-like processing. Imagine trying to express the idea that "When data are available at each of these two streams simultaneously, do x and send the result to component seven" for a system with twenty or thirty components. Then understand that my screen has approximately one hundred different active elements on it right now. How do you describe that as a pipe-stream?
So, let me get this straight...there's an exploit based on an element of the RFC (read and return receipts) and an element of the display code (DOM/CSS support). From this, you immediately conclude that the DOM/CSS/HTML support is the problem. I suggest that you're showing the typical NIH attitude of unix-geeks: if we didn't create it, it's wrong. I'd like to advance the notion that the novel idea might be fine, and that the original RFC is clearly wrong.
Why do you, the sender, need to know that I read your e-mail, much less be able to insert an arbitrary message body into that read receipt? You don't! It's not HTML/DOM/CSS support that's a problem here, it's the original designers that put a clear invasion of privacy into their mail protocol. E-mail was designed to mimic memoranda, and the parallel is pretty good -- but it isn't perfect. For my part, I'd rather that e-mail clients didn't ever send rr's; that would have been better design. If I want you to know that I read your mail, I'll respond, thank you very much.
HTML e-mail is pervasive because the bulk of users find it useful. Just because you and I don't doesn't make it less useful to them.
Slashdot Mirror
If your employer went into bankruptcy, then all their debts, including the one that they owed you, were cancelled. You can get into line with the company's other unsecured creditors, but, to be honest, your odds of getting much in compensation are low.
As to going after the CEO's assets, there are essentially no cases in which you'd have any legal standing to do so, since the corporate veil was created precisely to prevent that. If you held stock in the corporation, then you might have a case against the management of the company if you could show that they mismanaged the company into the ground. Again, however, your odds of winning are very poor, and, frankly, probably not worth the expense.
The thing to understand is this: when employees are canned without severance, it sucks. It's sleazy, and disreputable, and the people who do it are the scum of the earth. However, beyond that, Michael's wrong -- what your employer did isn't illegal; we as a nation protect those whose businesses fail, even if they should never have hired employees in the first place.
That protection isn't one-sided, though. You weren't fired for cause, so you can collect unemployment insurance. You may well be eligible for other transitional programs, too -- exploit them. We all pay taxes to protect people like you, so don't waste the money we payed.
But that's exactly the point of the white paper. If the operator of a P2P service -- which could well be something as small as a single Freenet node -- either knew or should reasonably have known that his or her service was being used for infringing purposes, then he or she could be liable for indirect infringement. Since any node operator can be reasonably sure that their Freenet node is being used for infringing purposes, operating a Freenet node probably leaves you personally liable for contributory infringement.
In fact, the operation of a Freenet node is probably direct infringement: you've made an infringing copy on the disk inside the node. That's direct infringement.
This is a stupid idea -- not because there's anything wrong with using a SSTO device as a very high-speed bomber, but because there's absolutely no reason to use a manned platform for it. We can do everything that this can do with a semi-autonomous (or even fully autonomous) system. If there's no reason to use a manned platform for it, then there's no reason to build a reusable vehicle; the weight of the reentry equipment would be better used for payload. If there's no reason for that...then why not use ballistic missles for the same thing? They're cheap, easy to build, easy to conceal, and well understood.
And don't tell me about technology spin off. If that's what we want to do, then NASA needs to make that case itself, instead of hiding behind DOD's "national security" excuse. Military production is inefficient at the best of times, but undirected research without public review is a recipe for pure and unmitigated waste. The X-33 is still in a very pure research stage. The military won't do any better with it than NASA did, and will probably do much worse.
NASA knows that X-33 failed to meet any of its basic goals and they know that it won't meet any of them in the near term. Being good bureaucrats, they're trying to save the program. Instead of trying to justify the project to Congress any more, NASA's found some guy with scrambled eggs on his head and scrambled brains in his head who wants to get the military to underwrite the rest of his career. Typical conspiracy of crooks. What a crock.
Hmm. Actually, Jefferson probably would have sanctioned exactly that. In several letters to Madison during the time when Madison was drafting the Constitution, Jefferson opposed the provision of any kind of protection for intellectual property.
I'm always amazed by the adulation the Jefferson gets among educated people. TJ wasn't a very nice man -- he supported and encouraged the atrocities of the French Revolution, supported laws requiring that freed slaves be required to move out of Virginia within a year of their manumission, etc. Hell, he didn't even write the Declaration of Independence -- he was merely the lead draftsman among the committee of five.
I've read your report, and I didn't find any description of the mechanism by which you came up with your estimate of the average number of times that a given purchased copy of Linux is installed. That's probably my own error, but since you're answering questions, would you be willing to enlighten me?
You use the number "15". Frankly, I'm surprised that it is so big. Upon what data did you base that estimate? Who did you interview to get it? I realize that any such estimate would have to account both for the very large number of installs at large colocation and/or service provider shops, as well as the number of untrackable network installs that take place. But it would also need to account for the number of times where a machine had Linux installed upon it, was used as an experimental development platform, and then was wiped, not to mention the number of cases where somebody bought a distribution, and then never installed it at all.
Oh, boy! No more writing crib notes on my wrists...I can just erase my cuffs when the prof walk by!
Sorry, but this is simply not true. Sort order is not handled by embedded encodings; the ONLY way to handle it is to go to Unicode. (And that, in fact, is why CJK compatibility is so important. If I embed Japanese text into a Chinese document, and then search the Chinese document, the Japanese text should be ordered according to the Chinese context, not the Japanese content.)
Suppose, for the nonce, that I chose to protest this law by attempting to notify my neighbors that it does not appear to have a loophole for anonymous political speech. Suppose, further, that I attempted to reach as many of the relevant people as possible by sending out bulk electronic mail. And finally suppose that I decided not to use my own private account, which is easily associated with my employer, say because I work for a large Redmond, Washington-based company which would probably not wish to be associated with my activities. In fact, in order to protect my job, let's just say that I hid behind a pseudonym. (Not, of course, that any of the above could possibly apply to me in my real person; this is a purely hypothetical example.)
Guess what? I'd be in violation of the state anti-spam law. Given the hypothetical base of my employer, I'd almost certainly be a Washington resident, with a legitimate reason to not use my own name, engaging in overtly protected political speech. There is extensive precedent concerning the absolute protection accorded to anonymous political pamphleting in the US, whether on the street or through the mails. The law would expose me to financial risk on the basis of the mode I'd used to publicize my views.
That's censorship, pure and simple, and it is censorship of the worst kind: a direct attack on political speech. Obviously, that isn't the intent of the law, but as written, I'd say it was wildly overbroad.
Well, actually, the FUD here is in the claim that the BSD stack is in Windows any more. Despite the the lies that have come out of the OSS world, we got rid of the Berkeley stack as quickly as we could. The Berkeley stack is a first rate piece of software engineering, but (a) it's essentially Unix-like, so it's rather slow under Windows, (b) it isn't SMP-friendly (can you say "great big kernel lock"?), and (c) it had to be completely rewritten to support asyncronous operation. Seeing as how the Windows has supported (b) and (c) for six years now, I think that you'd have long since laid this particular lie to rest.
(And, if you wonder why nmap used to confuse W2K with FreeBSD, it's because of backwards compatibility issues. One of the consequences of our need to be backwards compatible with clients is that we are constrained by their limitations.)
In fact, the only reason we ever had a copy of the Berkeley stack in the OS is because we bought a company in order to provide some level of support for TCP/IP in NT 3.1, a decade ago. At the time, that company's implementation was "derived" from BSD's, and so we were infected by that code. What can I say? We were being driven by the market's needs, and we needed something out there. We knew that we could do better the next time out, but it important to get something out there then.
Actually, no, I'd hear through two means: word of mouth (getting an e-mail saying "Hey, did you see ..."), or by the author sending me an unsolicited reprint. More often than not, I'd have been one of the author's referrees anyway. Like I said, there's a standard means for self-promotion; it's not like that's a new problem in the scientific community!
Science is a REALLY small world. You need to realize is that there were perhaps ten people in the world whose papers I "needed" to read as a specialist, and perhaps five other papers a year I needed to read to maintain general knowledge of my field. That's not a terribly unusual number.
Surprisingly, the bottom line isn't all that good. I was closely associated with one of the Pergamon Press majors (one of the Math Psych journals) a few years ago. The page costs covered the cost of typesetting and figure pressing. The journal made its money off the subscription fee libraries payed for it, pure and simple.
You're missing the key point in his argument. The services provided by the recording industry are wider and more important to recording artists than the services provided by the scientific publication industry are to scientists.
In the scientific community, journals provide a number of services. They provide editorial support, referreeing support, and a level of public distribution. Those are all important, to a degree, but that degree is quite limited. Assistant editors (the scientists that refer papers out to referrees) aren't payed for their time, so they don't care about the journal's redistribution policy. Referrees aren't payed for their time, so they don't care about the journal's redistribution policy. The consuming public would rather have the paper sooner and freely distributable to their classes, so they don't care about the journal's redistribution policy.
The recording industry provides another important service, and that service has no parallel in the scientific publication industry: publicity. I knew almost all of the names of the people who published in my field, and more than that, they knew mine. There's a standard method by which a newbie became established. I might miss a paper or two from a new star, but I could be confident that I'd know about them "soon enough". I don't know about all the bands I'd be likely to be interested in. That's a facility that the recording industry provides.
Actually, Agent wasn't an MSR project. The Agent team was a small, independent (and INCREDIBLY LOUD) product team -- two devs, one PM, a handful of testers. They were down the hall from us.
The Agent guys did good work, though -- wonder what they're working on now...
If its fair use, then its a legitimate noninfringing use
Actually, no. If it's fair use, then it's a sanctioned infringing use. That's a significant distinction.
A legitimate non-infringing use requires that the copyright holder's monopoly is not violated. "Time-shifting" is non-infringing, because only one copy of the original material is retained in the viewer's possession. The viewer has merely chosen to view the program at a different time, not to make multiple copies of the program and redistribute them. Since the material was broadcast, it was obviously intended to be viewed; the viewer has merely exerted a degree of control over the terms under which he or she viewed the broadcast.
A fair-use defense starts with the presupposition that a copy has been made of a copyrighted work; that is, it starts from the presumption that copyright has been violated. The burden of proof then lies upon the violator to show that this prima facie violation is, in fact, so small and so minor that no real damage was done; the text was propelry attributed, etc. But don't lie to yourself: fair use is infringement, merely tolerated infringement.
Well, actually, the question was about how hard it is to do the remote install -- go look at the original parent to which I responded.
However, the truth is that it's pretty easy to create a remote installer. MS provides a tool for scripting remote installs of workstations called the "Remote Installation Service" (stunningly obvious name, eh?) They even have a KB entry on using RIS to install servers. Setting up the disk is largely wizard driven, either way. It's certainly a great deal easier than, say, maintaining a custom FreeBSD kernel on my dev machine, which is what I do at home.
And the best thing is that I can copy half the contents of /etc and have a similar server up and running in half the time again. Try doing that with NT/2K.
/etc and going from there" just simply doesn't work if the machine's config isn't known in advance.
I did this in my office with a test machine just about a week ago. Wiped the disk. Took the W2K remote install disk that my employer generates, slid it into the floppy drive, booted the machine, clicked "standard Web server, support SSL", hit return.
Went and got myself a coffee.
Came back 30 minutes later to a working box running 2K, IIS, with a server cert generated and installed, with the most recent set of hot fixes and security patches already installed.
Oh, and this machine does not have a standard config. I needed to test some software I was writing, so I scrounged together a junk machine that could sit in my office and provide me with a working web server. You example of "copying
So what was that about W2K being difficult to install?
So what? So there's the podunk place called "eng-bland" or some such -- all the electronics work worth doing is done right here in America: all microchip research is done by Intel, all operating systems are made by Microsoft, and all boxes are designed by Dell.
Why is this offtopic? I'd think that the fact that Macromedia Flash runs on the PocketPC would be clearly on-topic for a discussion of iPaq's...
Gives a new meaning to drag'n drop...or perhaps, dragon drop.
As the great American Song says: "This land is your land, this land is my land..." It's yours, it's mine, it's ours. There is ownership.
You know, Arlo Guthrie tells a great story about coming home from school one day, and singing that song to his father. Woodie responded, "Did you know that I wrote that? Do you know the rest of the song?" Arlo didn't -- but he still sings the whole thing whenever he performs it in concert these days.
You might want to go look up the original lyrics. In gross violation of Judge Kaplan (but in tribute to what Guthrie himself would have wanted...) here's a link.
How do you know that capitalism isn't actually either ascendent or in ascent everywhere? How are you measuring it's status among the evolving economies outside the developed world?
One of the consequences of Da Soto's analysis is that "capitalism" is undermeasured in those economies. The shadow economy is rabidly competitive and fiercely price driven -- a very classical capitalistic system. If, as Da Soto argues, the shadow economy is not counted in your market analysis, you'd see only the failure of the grand projects, but miss the success of the petite (in this case, tres petite) bourgeoisie.
In fact, the Celera assembly is proof positive of the value of the HGP. When HGP started a decade ago, a dedicated scientist with years and years of training might be able to sequence a few tens of base pairs in a day, if he or she did nothing else. Five years later, after the public funded a huge improvement in the basic technology of sequencing, a barely competent technician can be expected to sequence thousands of bases a day without breaking a sweat.
Two years after that, private industry realized that it could make money exploiting that technology. All hail to Celera for doing a good job -- but if they had seen further, it would only be because they stood on the shoulders of public money.
The Unix shell CLI is predicated upon the notion that every piece of code has essentially two input streams: a set of bits that flows in and a set of bits that flows out. That's a fairly powerful metaphor, and, if you have the cycles to throw at it, even universal. Look at XMLTerm if you want: although it's incredibly clumsy and unbelievably slow, it really does allow the user to go back and forth between CLI and GUI.
But there's a problem with the control structure of that model. The computer is in control; it reads from stdin when it wants to do so, and it writes to stdout when it wants to do so, and the user is the slave of the processor. For CLI-like tasks, and particularly those where the computer can itself generate a data stream, process it serially, and then spit out the result, it's exceptionally efficient.
The GUI has an essentially user-centric control model. There is not just one stream of data: the mouse and the keybooard are independent of one another. Components can be embedded in one another in non-linear fashions: the user can enter data into any of several slots, and, when a certain conjunct of data presence is available, a new set of slots or actions can become available to him. In order to build an abstract data model for such a machine, you need to step from the clean and comprehensible linear machine-based Unix CLI into a Petri-machine based system.
Can it be done? Of course. But expressing a Petri machine in text is very hard, and so it's quite unnatural to use a CLI to describe GUI-like processing. Imagine trying to express the idea that "When data are available at each of these two streams simultaneously, do x and send the result to component seven" for a system with twenty or thirty components. Then understand that my screen has approximately one hundred different active elements on it right now. How do you describe that as a pipe-stream?
So, let me get this straight...there's an exploit based on an element of the RFC (read and return receipts) and an element of the display code (DOM/CSS support). From this, you immediately conclude that the DOM/CSS/HTML support is the problem. I suggest that you're showing the typical NIH attitude of unix-geeks: if we didn't create it, it's wrong. I'd like to advance the notion that the novel idea might be fine, and that the original RFC is clearly wrong.
Why do you, the sender, need to know that I read your e-mail, much less be able to insert an arbitrary message body into that read receipt? You don't! It's not HTML/DOM/CSS support that's a problem here, it's the original designers that put a clear invasion of privacy into their mail protocol. E-mail was designed to mimic memoranda, and the parallel is pretty good -- but it isn't perfect. For my part, I'd rather that e-mail clients didn't ever send rr's; that would have been better design. If I want you to know that I read your mail, I'll respond, thank you very much.
HTML e-mail is pervasive because the bulk of users find it useful. Just because you and I don't doesn't make it less useful to them.