> Stefan Boltzmann applies to a perfect blackbody. The Earth is not a perfect blackbody. In fact, not alot > of things are. Doesn't it seem wrong to say that energy exposure always raises temperature to the same > degree regardless of the object?
I'm no chrome dome math/physics type but I do know how to read. So I'd say the difference between a perfect black body and reality is what explains the author's assertion that the 'correct' calue is with a different range. To quote the article, since actually reading it is too hard for the religious left.....
"The bigger the value of lambda, the bigger the temperature increase the UN could predict. Using poor Ludwig Boltzmann's law, lambda's true value is just 0.22-0.3C per watt. In 2001, the UN effectively repealed the law, doubling lambda to 0.5C per watt. A recent paper by James Hansen says lambda should be 0.67, 0.75 or 1C: take your pick. Sir John Houghton, who chaired the UN's scientific assessment working group until recently, tells me it now puts lambda at 0.8C: that's 3C for a 3.7-watt doubling of airborne CO2. Most of the UN's computer models have used 1C. Stern implies 1.9C."
> I think the biggest problem with the whole climate change debate, is that the common man > can't easily do all the research to come to their own good conclusion.
Exactly. I don't have the time to duplicate all that research and work and neither do 99.99% of people who are still responsible for voting. Most of us do what I do and apply some simple rules of thumb.
Judge the people making the doomesday claim. That includes the pointy headed scientists AND the supporters.
Global Warming fails this test for me. Look at the track record of the so called 'scientists' pushing the theory. Mostly the same bunch of misfits and freaks we have seen behind most of the othe missuses of science in 20th Century. Same bunch of environmentalist whack jobs, Alar scaremongers, Nuclear Freeze supporters, Fat Nazis, etc. And this time they are making the most extrodinary claims and demanding unprecedented upheavals in the world's economic and political systems on the flimisest of evidence.
Now we get to the political supporters of GW theory. An almost perfect mapping between belief in GW theory with non belief in both individual Freedom and representive forms of government. It seems impossible to believe in GW and a Free market, personal liberty or property rights. Given a choice of a slightly warmer and Free world vs a Gaian utipia with a population groaning in the chains of marxist despots I say screw the environment.
> Slashdotters falling on themselves to praise Microsoft for doing what they should've done in the first place.
And why not? They did something evil and stupid, people (read customers) yelled bloody murder and they listened. This is progress.... of a sort. When an evil & stupid corporatation (especially a monopolist like Microsoft) actually listens and responds favorably it should be singled out for praise. Praise them when they do the right thing and damn them when they do evil, perhaps enough stimulus/response will alter their behaviour.
Ok, hell might freeze over too but I'd rather be a mild mannered paranoid with an optimistic outlook. Constantly having a pessemistic outlook and raging, raging about the evil corporations followed by a good dose of fresh seething over the fact that Bushitler lives, just makes one a sad KosKid.
> So year over year there something like 40-50% growth in the number of sites. The question is why?
You have questions.... and since I ain't Radio Shack I have more than blank stares for ya.:)
Blogs. Microsoft, Google and a lot more bit players are in a race to see how many domains they can host for free. And these days they don't call em personal homepages (that is so 20th Century and conjures up visions of crapy geocities pages) anymore, now we call them blogs. Plus Microsoft gets to boost their netcraft server share ranking with every free domain they host on IIS. And probably cheaper than what they spent bribing Godaddy to move their parked domains from Apache.
> If we stopped feeding animals this grain, there would be a lot more for people to eat
Plants are what food eats.
Ok, old joke and I know we H. Sapiens are actuallu omnivores who need a balanced diet of both to thrive but the point is still valid. We aren't made to be vegetarians and I damned sure ain't giving up yummy meat. Besides, who wants to get vaginatitus.:)
The book is especially timely given yesterday's news that a new, antibiotics-resistant variant of H5N1 has been detected in China."
Slashdot folk should be bright enough to know better. ALL viri are 100% immune to antibiotics. Antibiotics only work against germ based diseases.
Anyway.... Someday we will get another major pandemic, and yes our modern industrial livestock methods will contribute some to it. But they popped up before and will still pop up if we abandoned it. The question for debate is: are the potential savings from lowering the odds of a pandenic worth the certain loss of life from famine and all it's attendant problems that would result from losing the food production capacity gained from industrialization.
Dude! Go read the fscking website again and tell me it is FOSS! It is no more Free Software (or Open Source) than WMP is.
From the license link:
"Redistribution of modified binaries or modified setup packages allowed only with prior written permission of the author."
The lack of downloadable source should have been your other big clue. It's freeware. As soon as the principle author tires it will stagnate, die and be forgotten.
Oh So if the Neo Nazi's want to use my art work to promote their agenda I should not be able to say NO.
That might be exactly the case. If the Nazis happen to be broadcasting on the radio the mandatory license rules apply. That measn as long as the station is paying their fees to the licensing authorities they can play ANY song. Ask the Pretenders if they approved of Rush Limbaugh using their My City Was Gone for his theme song. Hint: like most artists they aren't even close to being on the same planet politically.
Your problem, like most people, is buying into the concept of "Intellectual Property" and believing you "own" your art. You don't, it belongs to humanity as a whole. To encourage you to create art and then share it most governments (for the most part the Berne Convention signatories) grant creators a limited monopoly over reproduction and public performance. But those monpolies have exceptions like the mandatory licensing rules, fair use, etc. Property Rights do not have to balance so much.
> Code segments are typically only mapped in read-only mode, so they are never written back to disk, nor should they be.
Ok, I can see how that interpretation can apply, especially after your comment got me to go reread it again. They just discard memory with program text and reload from the binary file later, so no worries about writing unencrypted bits ending up in swap. Of course on the downside it would mean rerunning the decrypt every time. And they probably can't cache the executables in memory if they are encrypted. And unless they make other layers aware of what is going on they won't even be caching the raw disk blocks, thus would have to go back to the drive each time. Kinda limits the apps it makes sense to encrypt to big things that tend to stay in memory a long time.
> WM's are huge apps and decrypting one before every startup would add a lot of work that has to be done at boot.
I suspect the reason is because according to the article all encrypted apps are locked into memory and unswappable. If an attempt somehow manages to be made to page part of one out the system panics. Talk about a major reason NOT to want those versions of the binaries on one's system.....
Notice though how this Apple fan manages to describe all of the details except how to remove the crap. The DSMOS extension, by definition, can't itself be encrypted so why didn't he run dump of it and either extract the key or confirm IntelMacs are using TCPA hardware so the wailing can begin?
I suspect Apple power users would love a utility that would walk the bin directories and decrypt any apps it finds. Looks like it would at least be a minor performance tweak with zero downside.
> Also, have you heard about the houses you can buy? You can only renovate them or add on to them one time. > What?!? Doesn't make sense? That's because when you buy something you should be able to do what you want with it.
Sorry dude, the infection has already spread. Go buy a house, cash money. Think you own it? Only if you bought a chunk of land in a very red state far away from any town.... of course most places like that are subject to being declared a wetland, wildlife preserve or national park with no prior warning.
That house you think you bought was probably built by a developer in a major development project. They retained first dibs on it, selling you limited 'rights'. And if you will notice you agreed to annual fees to a 'homeowners association' that can and will tell you exactly what sort of renovations you can and can't do, what vehicles you can park, etc. Many even regulate against you erecting a TV antenna.
And if that isn't enough, if your home is inside a city you may only use it for non-commercial purposes. And regardless of whether you live in a city/town, don't forget you get the 'right' to pay and pay property taxes to find any and all crazy schemes the government can invent.
So yes, shrink wrap EULAs are horrible, but only because you can't see em until you pay, but we already bent over and surrendered the idea of property rights a century ago.
> About the technology - I *thought* some IBM notebooks were already doing encryption on the disk..
Nope. It just requires a password to get access to the drive. And it stores the password in a small eeprom inside the drive bubble so getting at it is a pita. There are several data recovery houses that will crack it for you, and they only require one of two things:
1. An invoice with the machine's serial number.
2. A request on letterhead of any law enforcement agency.
Safe against random stupid criminals, but totally unsafe against anyone willing to forge up an invoice (read, spend ten minutes with Word).
Pirate caught and hung, film at 11. Or as 'hung' as our justice system can manage; I mean hell, murder only rates a couple of years if it is your first offense and it wasn't a brutal gangland slaying or anything like that.
The Napster kerfluffle should have told anyone with three brain cells that building a site for the express purpose of putting people with a copy of a copyrighted file in contact with people who want a copy is infringement. The technology that implements it isn't all that important, it is the intent. And elitetorrents was ALL about warez. Just because the guy wasn't running an FTP site hosting the files wasn't going to save his butt and he should have known it wouldn't.
Don't like the laws? Either work to change em or violate them as an act of civil disobedience and accept the consequences in the hope of gaining sympathy for your cause and eventual change. But don't act shocked that the operator of what was a major warez site got busted and sent up the river.
> So please... give me a break and don't come with this nonsense. gcj isn't Java compatible, has never > been Java compatible and most definatly can't keep up with the current pase one single bit.
And I suspect the GCJ developers would agree with your criticisms but reply thus:
"Yes, GCJ isn't complete yet and doesn't run many programs yet. On the other hand we are continuing to work on it and welcome any and all assistance."
The distro maintainers who ship GCJ as the default Java would probably say: "We ship Free Software. GCJ is the only solution to the Java problem available. It runs all of the Java applications we support."
Especially RedHat, they have sunk tons of resources into GCJ because it was the only way around several thorny problems where careless/thoughtless developers wrote key components in a language that had no Free implementation. Of course politics was at the root of most. OO.o added a dependency on Java for the new DB component.... no suprise most of the development was by Sun developers. Eclipse started life as a Java SDK, no suprise it was written in Java.
Go look through Fedora and Fedora Extras for Java based apps. They all run using GCJ because Sun's Java is forbidden by the bylaws of the Fedora Project on the grounds of it being non-Free.
Ok, somewhere in there is a pitch for somebody to do something in space, but I'm damned if I can find it amongst the whinging about global warming and Bush Derangement Syndrome filling most of the wordcount.
The problem is Gore was speaking at an X-Prize function and the article is at space.com so they had to either spin some message about space out his drivel or write an article tearing him a new one for misuse of the speaking slot. Being good Democrats they opted for #1.
Yes space is good, private industry should, and is, working on the problems. Gore and government are no longer needed, and in fact only slow things down.
I'll believe it when it happens. My money is on them releasing under a horrid unfree license and calling it Open Source.
But at this point it really doesn't matter anymore. GCJ already builds many major Java based apps into either Java bytecode or native executables and has long since passed the point where development would be hindered by a Open Source/Free Software release of Sun's version.
GCJ is now bringing a lot more to the table than just cloning the Sun stuff. Sun would never do native executables because it doesn't fit into their 'vision.' The JVM and Write Once Debug Everywhere has no real place in the Free Software world. In the Free world portability comes from automake/autoconf and doesn't need to pay the emulation overhead of a virtual machine or any of the other problems. Problems like each major Java app tending to bring along an entire JVM and set of libraries to solve compatibility issues.
Something I have been wondering.... GCC now accepts Java source and emits either native binaries or Java bytecode. Can it take C/C++/etc and emit bytecode? If it is treating bytecode as just another target what if a C# frontend were written? Could gcc take C# on input and emit Java bytecode on the other end? And if a mono backend were added could it compile Java source to it? And if this all came to pass would it be a sure sign the end of times were at hand?
> To all those AMD fanboi's that cried "Why not AMD"? when Apple choose Intel, this is why.
Wrong. Had Apple signed AMD to supply them they would have certainly been in a position to have demanded first dibs on production. Seeing as there is zero likelyhood of Apple consuming the entirety of AMD's fab capacity......
Apple would have went with Intel regardless of quality of the good, delivery problems or anything else. Apple isn't about hardware or software or even technology, they sell a brand experience. To do that any subcomponent that is seen by the buying public as a seperately branded item must also be perceived as a 'premium' brand. Intel has spent billions creating that impression in the general public while AMD has courted the tech savvy customer.
Think of Apple as more like Nike. Like Apple, Nike does R&D and innovates in their products, but that ISN'T what they are selling. Same with Apple, they are selling the brand, not individual products. The Nike swoosh increases the value of a baseball cap, obviously there isn't anything 'better' about it other than the logo itself. Apple hasn't quite managed that feat... yet.
> A cap won't work. They will simply file the extra patents using a shell company.
You misunderstand. I didn't mean a 1000 limit per entity. I meant 1000 per year, total. As in patent numbers could be reworked as (SOMEPREFIX)YYYYNNN. Really, when you think of 'invention' you think of real inventions, the stuff that is clever enough to warrant a government monopoly, most people do not envision the crap that gets issued nowadays. I'm saying restrict em to the big ones that nobody would dispute. The light bulb, vulcanized rubber, major new drugs, etc. There isn't 1000 per year of those, so my solution would still allow hundreds of bogus patents to be issued, but would reduce the problem to managable proportions.
If one wanted to REALLY cut em down require them to issue from Congress as individually passed bills with a stipulation that they always be by roll call vote. Would probably require an Amendment, but it would put some accountability into the system, slow the process to a crawl and generally gum up the works. Downside is that it would hopelessly politicize the process.
So leave the patent office and their examiners in the loop, just force a cap on em. And here is another idea I just had. Change the submission fee schedule to prevent the flood of dodgy apps. Require a $100,000 (cash or bond) to submit an application. If the idea really is patent worthy return the money minus some small administrative fee, otherwise keep the whole wad as a disincentive to wasting the examiners time.
I think we can now see the first salvo of the Patent Wars we have all feared were coming. It seems every dying company decides that they need to 'monitize their patent portfolio.' as soon as the customers disappear. And SGI will be horrible in their death throes. Thankfully most of Xerox was bought instead of us all having to suffer through their death spasms because they had even more patents to abuse when they were dying, although by now many of the most dangerous ones are probably expired.
But this is still unfocused thrashing. Wait until they, like SCO, sucumb to the temptations of the monopolist in Redmond to focus their attack.
The patent system doesn't need reform, it needs to be scraped and rethought. I'd say cap em at 1000 per year. With a number that low only real inventions would make it through and the number in any particular industry would be small enough anyone in that industry could be expected to be aware of them.
> Sure, the cards might have been resold, but they are branded cisco items bearing the entire cisco interface > and functionality - somehow I doubt outright fake chipsets and devices like this can be produced by anyone > other than cisco themselves.
Not really. A lot of Cisco cards are pretty simple products, off the shelf chips from 3rd party vendors with some common glue logic and some connectors. Some are more difficult, granted. Now consider Cisco doesn't actually manufacture much of anything. And finally consider that getting the complete files for the board and component list wouldn't cost much, just bribe an employee. Happens all the time.
The reason this is happening is that Cisco is trying to keep a closed market on an increasingly large segment of the the world's information infrastructure. They do it by requiring all equipment to be under service contract (or no updates or other support of any sort) and forbidding clone/generic add ons. This creates tremendous market pressure which someone is bound to find a way to satisfy. If you can't install a clone part, buy a really lowball 'genuine' one. Everyone with a clue knows what is happening but doesn't care as long as the customer can retain enough plausable deniability to avoid having service contracts voided if they get caught.
The marketplace has been ripe for cutting Cisco out of the loop now for a decade. Hopefully the new open source based routers will be able to get some high end interfaces available and end their dominance of routing. There really isn't much left that a 1U PC with some new PCI Express slots turned in such a way as to get several cards to slide in along the back of the box couldn't handle.
And I'd certainly rather configure with vi instead of Cisco's fudged up CLI.
> DT isn't even the first, Real was looking to license their reverse engineering results.
What Real was trying was totally different and could NOT have been stopped by a patent fight. Real was trying to add a module to an iPod to support THEIR closed garden DRM scheme. And as should have been obvious to a small child, Apple thwarted it by continually changing the firmware/software in the iPod. Real produced code implementing Real's DRM schemes was totally legal and immune to a patent fight though.
This is different. If I'm reading this right DT would produce FairPlay encoded tracks. Apparently Apple really was stupid enough to produce a system that didn't sign every track with a public key known only to Apple (or not even DVD-Jon could have done squat to break it open) so an iPod won't be able to tell the difference between an iTunes store produced track and a Walmart.com track. Obviously Apple has patents on FairPlay (yea, patenting DRM, crypto, being cool enough to have Steve bless it, exactly what is non-obvious but they certainly will fight) along with DMCA and any other legal (or not) anti-competitive tricks they can think up.
All of Apple's anti-competitive tricks probably won't be enough legal noise to stop anyone of even moderate means though. There isn't a single thing in FairPlay that isn't self evident to anyone with half a clue so it would only be a matter of someone being willing to spend the cash to push the case to a win. The actaul payload behind the DRM is a standard. While AC3 IS encumbered with patents (that would probably stand up) they aren't owned by Apple and are available under RAND terms.
> People talk about him like he is the Computing Savior or something to Bill Gates' Satan, but he is just > really a different flavor of evil -- with better marketing.
Can I get a big ol AMEN! And DVD-Jon has found the weakest link to attack Steve's dreams of empire. Left unchecked, Steve is on course to pretty much own media distribution. But this new product will have one of two results;
1. DT passes legal muster. iTunes is dead and Steve's odds are zero. Hint: Walmart is one of iPods major retail outlets now. Walmart.com currently must content itself with selling PlaysForSure content. Open up FairPlay to em and watch kiosks appear in stores next to the iPod case. Nobody competes with Walmart; certainly not a company like Apple, long accustomed to insane margins.
2. DT gets squashed like a bug. Doing so will almost certainly cause the media industry to realize have another look and hopefully see what it should have from day one, that Apple is attempting to build a monopoly on playback hardware and later leverage it to drive the existing media distribution companies out of business. Or again, the idiots in the recording and movie industries ARE pretty dimwitted.
> They simply need a new category "political controversy" that people can optionally block, for items/sites > where it's subjective to label them as "hate."
No need, everybody with a clue understands that "hate speech" is newspeak for "disagrees with liberal orthodoxy" because it certainly doesn't have anything to do with supressing "hate". Go look at ANY website where 'progressives' (also known as liberals (US), Democrats, socialists depending on country and audience) hang out. Hate will drip from their every word. Hate for Chimpy McBusHitler, America, Christians, etc. Now find one listed in a filter as 'hate speech.' Ok, so now we now that catagory isn't for hate filled people spewing venom. So lets look at who does get catagorized there.
Most probably agree the skinheads and nazis are fair game. So we are saying raging racists should have their speech supressed. But notice the double standard. Who do nazis hate? Blacks and jews for the most part. So why aren't any anti-semetic arab/muslim organizations ever catagorized? And hell, look at 'progressives' throwing Oreos at a Senate candidate for the sin of being a black republican. Certainly looks like some racially motivated 'hate' going on there, do we drop a block on the DNC website now?
Point being, where does it end? Madness. We need a different catagory than 'hate' because hate isn't even always a bad thing in the first place. Heck, I HATE Nazis and I bet I won't be thought a bad person by 99% of the readers on this site. Of course when I extend that statement to say I hate ALL socialists, not just National Socialism, I'll get branded a 'hater.'
I just wish "Progressives' had the balls to quit hiding behind language tricks and just start stamping "politically incorrect" on sites they disapprove of. If they REALLY had stones they would brand em "Crimethinkers".
Really, except for very young and overly impressionable children, blocking any speech is offensive. You deal with speech you disagree with by disagreeing with it. I just wish we could get the 1st Amendment back.
Yes these first attempts at computerized voting machines have some serious problems. No it doesn't really matter in the end though.
Either we trust the people running our elections or we don't. If we don't there isn't a technological measure possible to prevent fraud. If we do it is mostly a moot point. Personally I have seen enough examples to believe Democrats routinely steal enough votes to gain a 1 or 2 point advantage in any national election and substantially more in certain local races. But we Republicans simply spot em the handicap and go on to win elections.
And yes I said DEMOCRATS steal elections. Think about it, who runs the elections in every major city? Who runs the elections in most smaller cities? How many precincts are entirely run by Democrats vs how many can you find without a single Democrat in the audit loop? Ok. So we have now established who has opportunity. Motive is easy; Democrats, like most politicians desire power. Democrats also tend to believe the ends justify the means.
Consider that every important documented case of election fraud in the 20th Century was Democrats cheating. Lets start with the dead in Chicago putting JFK over the top, along with some outragous fraud by LBJ's machine in Texas of course. I live in Louisiana and can still remember Sen Landrieu winning her first election from a strong turnout among the dead in New Orleans. Now lets consider the multiple smelly elections in WA and we won't even discuss what passes for government in NJ, and I'm comparing and contrasting to my own legendary LA.
And I'll even give a pass on FL in 2000 even though the recount conducted by the press gave the state to the Republicans. After all the Democrats were trying something totally new in that case, lose and have the courts award the race after the polls closed. That is nothing any change in voting machines or elections laws can fix.
But like I said, there is enough transparency that in any national election fraud can't swing the totals more than a point or two and the Electoral College minimizes the damage in Presidential elections.
Slashdot Mirror
> Stefan Boltzmann applies to a perfect blackbody. The Earth is not a perfect blackbody. In fact, not alot
> of things are. Doesn't it seem wrong to say that energy exposure always raises temperature to the same
> degree regardless of the object?
I'm no chrome dome math/physics type but I do know how to read. So I'd say the difference between a perfect black body and reality is what explains the author's assertion that the 'correct' calue is with a different range. To quote the article, since actually reading it is too hard for the religious left.....
"The bigger the value of lambda, the bigger the temperature increase the UN could predict. Using poor Ludwig Boltzmann's law, lambda's true value is just 0.22-0.3C per watt. In 2001, the UN effectively repealed the law, doubling lambda to 0.5C per watt. A recent paper by James Hansen says lambda should be 0.67, 0.75 or 1C: take your pick. Sir John Houghton, who chaired the UN's scientific assessment working group until recently, tells me it now puts lambda at 0.8C: that's 3C for a 3.7-watt doubling of airborne CO2. Most of the UN's computer models have used 1C. Stern implies 1.9C."
> I think the biggest problem with the whole climate change debate, is that the common man
> can't easily do all the research to come to their own good conclusion.
Exactly. I don't have the time to duplicate all that research and work and neither do 99.99% of people who are still responsible for voting. Most of us do what I do and apply some simple rules of thumb.
Judge the people making the doomesday claim. That includes the pointy headed scientists AND the supporters.
Global Warming fails this test for me. Look at the track record of the so called 'scientists' pushing the theory. Mostly the same bunch of misfits and freaks we have seen behind most of the othe missuses of science in 20th Century. Same bunch of environmentalist whack jobs, Alar scaremongers, Nuclear Freeze supporters, Fat Nazis, etc. And this time they are making the most extrodinary claims and demanding unprecedented upheavals in the world's economic and political systems on the flimisest of evidence.
Now we get to the political supporters of GW theory. An almost perfect mapping between belief in GW theory with non belief in both individual Freedom and representive forms of government. It seems impossible to believe in GW and a Free market, personal liberty or property rights. Given a choice of a slightly warmer and Free world vs a Gaian utipia with a population groaning in the chains of marxist despots I say screw the environment.
> Slashdotters falling on themselves to praise Microsoft for doing what they should've done in the first place.
And why not? They did something evil and stupid, people (read customers) yelled bloody murder and they listened. This is progress.... of a sort. When an evil & stupid corporatation (especially a monopolist like Microsoft) actually listens and responds favorably it should be singled out for praise. Praise them when they do the right thing and damn them when they do evil, perhaps enough stimulus/response will alter their behaviour.
Ok, hell might freeze over too but I'd rather be a mild mannered paranoid with an optimistic outlook. Constantly having a pessemistic outlook and raging, raging about the evil corporations followed by a good dose of fresh seething over the fact that Bushitler lives, just makes one a sad KosKid.
> So year over year there something like 40-50% growth in the number of sites. The question is why?
:)
You have questions.... and since I ain't Radio Shack I have more than blank stares for ya.
Blogs. Microsoft, Google and a lot more bit players are in a race to see how many domains they can host for free. And these days they don't call em personal homepages (that is so 20th Century and conjures up visions of crapy geocities pages) anymore, now we call them blogs. Plus Microsoft gets to boost their netcraft server share ranking with every free domain they host on IIS. And probably cheaper than what they spent bribing Godaddy to move their parked domains from Apache.
See South Park, Episode 0605, Fun With Veal.
> If we stopped feeding animals this grain, there would be a lot more for people to eat
:)
Plants are what food eats.
Ok, old joke and I know we H. Sapiens are actuallu omnivores who need a balanced diet of both to thrive but the point is still valid. We aren't made to be vegetarians and I damned sure ain't giving up yummy meat. Besides, who wants to get vaginatitus.
Slashdot folk should be bright enough to know better. ALL viri are 100% immune to antibiotics. Antibiotics only work against germ based diseases.
Anyway.... Someday we will get another major pandemic, and yes our modern industrial livestock methods will contribute some to it. But they popped up before and will still pop up if we abandoned it. The question for debate is: are the potential savings from lowering the odds of a pandenic worth the certain loss of life from famine and all it's attendant problems that would result from losing the food production capacity gained from industrialization.
> Foobar 2000
> It's FOSS,....
Dude! Go read the fscking website again and tell me it is FOSS! It is no more Free Software (or Open Source) than WMP is.
From the license link:
"Redistribution of modified binaries or modified setup packages allowed only with prior written permission of the author."
The lack of downloadable source should have been your other big clue. It's freeware. As soon as the principle author tires it will stagnate, die and be forgotten.
That might be exactly the case. If the Nazis happen to be broadcasting on the radio the mandatory license rules apply. That measn as long as the station is paying their fees to the licensing authorities they can play ANY song. Ask the Pretenders if they approved of Rush Limbaugh using their My City Was Gone for his theme song. Hint: like most artists they aren't even close to being on the same planet politically.
Your problem, like most people, is buying into the concept of "Intellectual Property" and believing you "own" your art. You don't, it belongs to humanity as a whole. To encourage you to create art and then share it most governments (for the most part the Berne Convention signatories) grant creators a limited monopoly over reproduction and public performance. But those monpolies have exceptions like the mandatory licensing rules, fair use, etc. Property Rights do not have to balance so much.
> Code segments are typically only mapped in read-only mode, so they are never written back to disk, nor should they be.
Ok, I can see how that interpretation can apply, especially after your comment got me to go reread it again. They just discard memory with program text and reload from the binary file later, so no worries about writing unencrypted bits ending up in swap. Of course on the downside it would mean rerunning the decrypt every time. And they probably can't cache the executables in memory if they are encrypted. And unless they make other layers aware of what is going on they won't even be caching the raw disk blocks, thus would have to go back to the drive each time. Kinda limits the apps it makes sense to encrypt to big things that tend to stay in memory a long time.
> WM's are huge apps and decrypting one before every startup would add a lot of work that has to be done at boot.
I suspect the reason is because according to the article all encrypted apps are locked into memory and unswappable. If an attempt somehow manages to be made to page part of one out the system panics. Talk about a major reason NOT to want those versions of the binaries on one's system.....
Notice though how this Apple fan manages to describe all of the details except how to remove the crap. The DSMOS extension, by definition, can't itself be encrypted so why didn't he run dump of it and either extract the key or confirm IntelMacs are using TCPA hardware so the wailing can begin?
I suspect Apple power users would love a utility that would walk the bin directories and decrypt any apps it finds. Looks like it would at least be a minor performance tweak with zero downside.
> Also, have you heard about the houses you can buy? You can only renovate them or add on to them one time.
> What?!? Doesn't make sense? That's because when you buy something you should be able to do what you want with it.
Sorry dude, the infection has already spread. Go buy a house, cash money. Think you own it? Only if you bought a chunk of land in a very red state far away from any town.... of course most places like that are subject to being declared a wetland, wildlife preserve or national park with no prior warning.
That house you think you bought was probably built by a developer in a major development project. They retained first dibs on it, selling you limited 'rights'. And if you will notice you agreed to annual fees to a 'homeowners association' that can and will tell you exactly what sort of renovations you can and can't do, what vehicles you can park, etc. Many even regulate against you erecting a TV antenna.
And if that isn't enough, if your home is inside a city you may only use it for non-commercial purposes. And regardless of whether you live in a city/town, don't forget you get the 'right' to pay and pay property taxes to find any and all crazy schemes the government can invent.
So yes, shrink wrap EULAs are horrible, but only because you can't see em until you pay, but we already bent over and surrendered the idea of property rights a century ago.
> About the technology - I *thought* some IBM notebooks were already doing encryption on the disk..
Nope. It just requires a password to get access to the drive. And it stores the password in a small eeprom inside the drive bubble so getting at it is a pita. There are several data recovery houses that will crack it for you, and they only require one of two things:
1. An invoice with the machine's serial number.
2. A request on letterhead of any law enforcement agency.
Safe against random stupid criminals, but totally unsafe against anyone willing to forge up an invoice (read, spend ten minutes with Word).
Pirate caught and hung, film at 11. Or as 'hung' as our justice system can manage; I mean hell, murder only rates a couple of years if it is your first offense and it wasn't a brutal gangland slaying or anything like that.
The Napster kerfluffle should have told anyone with three brain cells that building a site for the express purpose of putting people with a copy of a copyrighted file in contact with people who want a copy is infringement. The technology that implements it isn't all that important, it is the intent. And elitetorrents was ALL about warez. Just because the guy wasn't running an FTP site hosting the files wasn't going to save his butt and he should have known it wouldn't.
Don't like the laws? Either work to change em or violate them as an act of civil disobedience and accept the consequences in the hope of gaining sympathy for your cause and eventual change. But don't act shocked that the operator of what was a major warez site got busted and sent up the river.
> So please... give me a break and don't come with this nonsense. gcj isn't Java compatible, has never
> been Java compatible and most definatly can't keep up with the current pase one single bit.
And I suspect the GCJ developers would agree with your criticisms but reply thus:
"Yes, GCJ isn't complete yet and doesn't run many programs yet. On the other hand we are continuing to work on it and welcome any and all assistance."
The distro maintainers who ship GCJ as the default Java would probably say: "We ship Free Software. GCJ is the only solution to the Java problem available. It runs all of the Java applications we support."
Especially RedHat, they have sunk tons of resources into GCJ because it was the only way around several thorny problems where careless/thoughtless developers wrote key components in a language that had no Free implementation. Of course politics was at the root of most. OO.o added a dependency on Java for the new DB component.... no suprise most of the development was by Sun developers. Eclipse started life as a Java SDK, no suprise it was written in Java.
Go look through Fedora and Fedora Extras for Java based apps. They all run using GCJ because Sun's Java is forbidden by the bylaws of the Fedora Project on the grounds of it being non-Free.
Ok, somewhere in there is a pitch for somebody to do something in space, but I'm damned if I can find it amongst the whinging about global warming and Bush Derangement Syndrome filling most of the wordcount.
The problem is Gore was speaking at an X-Prize function and the article is at space.com so they had to either spin some message about space out his drivel or write an article tearing him a new one for misuse of the speaking slot. Being good Democrats they opted for #1.
Yes space is good, private industry should, and is, working on the problems. Gore and government are no longer needed, and in fact only slow things down.
I'll believe it when it happens. My money is on them releasing under a horrid unfree license and calling it Open Source.
But at this point it really doesn't matter anymore. GCJ already builds many major Java based apps into either Java bytecode or native executables and has long since passed the point where development would be hindered by a Open Source/Free Software release of Sun's version.
GCJ is now bringing a lot more to the table than just cloning the Sun stuff. Sun would never do native executables because it doesn't fit into their 'vision.' The JVM and Write Once Debug Everywhere has no real place in the Free Software world. In the Free world portability comes from automake/autoconf and doesn't need to pay the emulation overhead of a virtual machine or any of the other problems. Problems like each major Java app tending to bring along an entire JVM and set of libraries to solve compatibility issues.
Something I have been wondering.... GCC now accepts Java source and emits either native binaries or Java bytecode. Can it take C/C++/etc and emit bytecode? If it is treating bytecode as just another target what if a C# frontend were written? Could gcc take C# on input and emit Java bytecode on the other end? And if a mono backend were added could it compile Java source to it? And if this all came to pass would it be a sure sign the end of times were at hand?
> To all those AMD fanboi's that cried "Why not AMD"? when Apple choose Intel, this is why.
Wrong. Had Apple signed AMD to supply them they would have certainly been in a position to have demanded first dibs on production. Seeing as there is zero likelyhood of Apple consuming the entirety of AMD's fab capacity......
Apple would have went with Intel regardless of quality of the good, delivery problems or anything else. Apple isn't about hardware or software or even technology, they sell a brand experience. To do that any subcomponent that is seen by the buying public as a seperately branded item must also be perceived as a 'premium' brand. Intel has spent billions creating that impression in the general public while AMD has courted the tech savvy customer.
Think of Apple as more like Nike. Like Apple, Nike does R&D and innovates in their products, but that ISN'T what they are selling. Same with Apple, they are selling the brand, not individual products. The Nike swoosh increases the value of a baseball cap, obviously there isn't anything 'better' about it other than the logo itself. Apple hasn't quite managed that feat... yet.
> A cap won't work. They will simply file the extra patents using a shell company.
You misunderstand. I didn't mean a 1000 limit per entity. I meant 1000 per year, total. As in patent numbers could be reworked as (SOMEPREFIX)YYYYNNN. Really, when you think of 'invention' you think of real inventions, the stuff that is clever enough to warrant a government monopoly, most people do not envision the crap that gets issued nowadays. I'm saying restrict em to the big ones that nobody would dispute. The light bulb, vulcanized rubber, major new drugs, etc. There isn't 1000 per year of those, so my solution would still allow hundreds of bogus patents to be issued, but would reduce the problem to managable proportions.
If one wanted to REALLY cut em down require them to issue from Congress as individually passed bills with a stipulation that they always be by roll call vote. Would probably require an Amendment, but it would put some accountability into the system, slow the process to a crawl and generally gum up the works. Downside is that it would hopelessly politicize the process.
So leave the patent office and their examiners in the loop, just force a cap on em. And here is another idea I just had. Change the submission fee schedule to prevent the flood of dodgy apps. Require a $100,000 (cash or bond) to submit an application. If the idea really is patent worthy return the money minus some small administrative fee, otherwise keep the whole wad as a disincentive to wasting the examiners time.
I think we can now see the first salvo of the Patent Wars we have all feared were coming. It seems every dying company decides that they need to 'monitize their patent portfolio.' as soon as the customers disappear. And SGI will be horrible in their death throes. Thankfully most of Xerox was bought instead of us all having to suffer through their death spasms because they had even more patents to abuse when they were dying, although by now many of the most dangerous ones are probably expired.
But this is still unfocused thrashing. Wait until they, like SCO, sucumb to the temptations of the monopolist in Redmond to focus their attack.
The patent system doesn't need reform, it needs to be scraped and rethought. I'd say cap em at 1000 per year. With a number that low only real inventions would make it through and the number in any particular industry would be small enough anyone in that industry could be expected to be aware of them.
> Sure, the cards might have been resold, but they are branded cisco items bearing the entire cisco interface
> and functionality - somehow I doubt outright fake chipsets and devices like this can be produced by anyone
> other than cisco themselves.
Not really. A lot of Cisco cards are pretty simple products, off the shelf chips from 3rd party vendors with some common glue logic and some connectors. Some are more difficult, granted. Now consider Cisco doesn't actually manufacture much of anything. And finally consider that getting the complete files for the board and component list wouldn't cost much, just bribe an employee. Happens all the time.
The reason this is happening is that Cisco is trying to keep a closed market on an increasingly large segment of the the world's information infrastructure. They do it by requiring all equipment to be under service contract (or no updates or other support of any sort) and forbidding clone/generic add ons. This creates tremendous market pressure which someone is bound to find a way to satisfy. If you can't install a clone part, buy a really lowball 'genuine' one. Everyone with a clue knows what is happening but doesn't care as long as the customer can retain enough plausable deniability to avoid having service contracts voided if they get caught.
The marketplace has been ripe for cutting Cisco out of the loop now for a decade. Hopefully the new open source based routers will be able to get some high end interfaces available and end their dominance of routing. There really isn't much left that a 1U PC with some new PCI Express slots turned in such a way as to get several cards to slide in along the back of the box couldn't handle.
And I'd certainly rather configure with vi instead of Cisco's fudged up CLI.
> DT isn't even the first, Real was looking to license their reverse engineering results.
What Real was trying was totally different and could NOT have been stopped by a patent fight. Real was trying to add a module to an iPod to support THEIR closed garden DRM scheme. And as should have been obvious to a small child, Apple thwarted it by continually changing the firmware/software in the iPod. Real produced code implementing Real's DRM schemes was totally legal and immune to a patent fight though.
This is different. If I'm reading this right DT would produce FairPlay encoded tracks. Apparently Apple really was stupid enough to produce a system that didn't sign every track with a public key known only to Apple (or not even DVD-Jon could have done squat to break it open) so an iPod won't be able to tell the difference between an iTunes store produced track and a Walmart.com track. Obviously Apple has patents on FairPlay (yea, patenting DRM, crypto, being cool enough to have Steve bless it, exactly what is non-obvious but they certainly will fight) along with DMCA and any other legal (or not) anti-competitive tricks they can think up.
All of Apple's anti-competitive tricks probably won't be enough legal noise to stop anyone of even moderate means though. There isn't a single thing in FairPlay that isn't self evident to anyone with half a clue so it would only be a matter of someone being willing to spend the cash to push the case to a win. The actaul payload behind the DRM is a standard. While AC3 IS encumbered with patents (that would probably stand up) they aren't owned by Apple and are available under RAND terms.
> People talk about him like he is the Computing Savior or something to Bill Gates' Satan, but he is just
> really a different flavor of evil -- with better marketing.
Can I get a big ol AMEN! And DVD-Jon has found the weakest link to attack Steve's dreams of empire. Left unchecked, Steve is on course to pretty much own media distribution. But this new product will have one of two results;
1. DT passes legal muster. iTunes is dead and Steve's odds are zero. Hint: Walmart is one of iPods major retail outlets now. Walmart.com currently must content itself with selling PlaysForSure content. Open up FairPlay to em and watch kiosks appear in stores next to the iPod case. Nobody competes with Walmart; certainly not a company like Apple, long accustomed to insane margins.
2. DT gets squashed like a bug. Doing so will almost certainly cause the media industry to realize have another look and hopefully see what it should have from day one, that Apple is attempting to build a monopoly on playback hardware and later leverage it to drive the existing media distribution companies out of business. Or again, the idiots in the recording and movie industries ARE pretty dimwitted.
> They simply need a new category "political controversy" that people can optionally block, for items/sites
> where it's subjective to label them as "hate."
No need, everybody with a clue understands that "hate speech" is newspeak for "disagrees with liberal orthodoxy" because it certainly doesn't have anything to do with supressing "hate". Go look at ANY website where 'progressives' (also known as liberals (US), Democrats, socialists depending on country and audience) hang out. Hate will drip from their every word. Hate for Chimpy McBusHitler, America, Christians, etc. Now find one listed in a filter as 'hate speech.' Ok, so now we now that catagory isn't for hate filled people spewing venom. So lets look at who does get catagorized there.
Most probably agree the skinheads and nazis are fair game. So we are saying raging racists should have their speech supressed. But notice the double standard. Who do nazis hate? Blacks and jews for the most part. So why aren't any anti-semetic arab/muslim organizations ever catagorized? And hell, look at 'progressives' throwing Oreos at a Senate candidate for the sin of being a black republican. Certainly looks like some racially motivated 'hate' going on there, do we drop a block on the DNC website now?
Point being, where does it end? Madness. We need a different catagory than 'hate' because hate isn't even always a bad thing in the first place. Heck, I HATE Nazis and I bet I won't be thought a bad person by 99% of the readers on this site. Of course when I extend that statement to say I hate ALL socialists, not just National Socialism, I'll get branded a 'hater.'
I just wish "Progressives' had the balls to quit hiding behind language tricks and just start stamping "politically incorrect" on sites they disapprove of. If they REALLY had stones they would brand em "Crimethinkers".
Really, except for very young and overly impressionable children, blocking any speech is offensive. You deal with speech you disagree with by disagreeing with it. I just wish we could get the 1st Amendment back.
Yes these first attempts at computerized voting machines have some serious problems. No it doesn't really matter in the end though.
Either we trust the people running our elections or we don't. If we don't there isn't a technological measure possible to prevent fraud. If we do it is mostly a moot point. Personally I have seen enough examples to believe Democrats routinely steal enough votes to gain a 1 or 2 point advantage in any national election and substantially more in certain local races. But we Republicans simply spot em the handicap and go on to win elections.
And yes I said DEMOCRATS steal elections. Think about it, who runs the elections in every major city? Who runs the elections in most smaller cities? How many precincts are entirely run by Democrats vs how many can you find without a single Democrat in the audit loop? Ok. So we have now established who has opportunity. Motive is easy; Democrats, like most politicians desire power. Democrats also tend to believe the ends justify the means.
Consider that every important documented case of election fraud in the 20th Century was Democrats cheating. Lets start with the dead in Chicago putting JFK over the top, along with some outragous fraud by LBJ's machine in Texas of course. I live in Louisiana and can still remember Sen Landrieu winning her first election from a strong turnout among the dead in New Orleans. Now lets consider the multiple smelly elections in WA and we won't even discuss what passes for government in NJ, and I'm comparing and contrasting to my own legendary LA.
And I'll even give a pass on FL in 2000 even though the recount conducted by the press gave the state to the Republicans. After all the Democrats were trying something totally new in that case, lose and have the courts award the race after the polls closed. That is nothing any change in voting machines or elections laws can fix.
But like I said, there is enough transparency that in any national election fraud can't swing the totals more than a point or two and the Electoral College minimizes the damage in Presidential elections.