Where did you find a price mentioned? The article I read said """ Availability
Availability was not announced. A short video clip of the..."""
Given the target audience, I don't think that's a realistic price. And remember, it's only about a foot tall. They didn't talk about connectivity, but I hope the managed to squeeze bluetooth or wi-fi into it. (Short range only, of course. About the range of a mobile phone should be correct.)
I *am* worried about power consumption. Batteries are heavy AND expensive...and apparently have a tendency to explode, but short range radio shouldn't significantly impact that, not compared to moving, and it would allow external computers with reasonable capabilities to control it. (Yeah, this has been tried before, but local intelligence could make a big difference, like the difference between transmission of "draw a circle around with radius r" and "draw this bit, draw that bit, draw the other bit, draw the next bit.....".
I more or less agree with you about the key coming from the same server as the files...but this is a development system rather than a production system, so I don't mind an occasional re-install. (Mind it or not, it's GOING to happen!)
OTOH, if it WERE a production server, how SHOULD keys be distributed?
That's the way it's *supposed* to work, and I'm willing to grant that it may well work that way on stable. I'm running testing.
(OTOH, I was shocked whin an install of debian-keyring didn't tell me "you already have the newest version installed". Something strange here... but AFTER installing it, and running update again: Reading package lists... Done W: GPG error: http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 010908312D230C5F W: GPG error: ftp://mirrors.kernel.org etch Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 010908312D230C5F W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
Just like before [though *I think* there were two unknown keys before I did the install].)
FWIW, I do have some non-debian repositories in my sources...but previously it has complained about packages not-being signed with a known key that I have KNOWN were from the Debian repository. Now it isn't saying what package it's referring to, so I can't tell if this is still true. (I'm also quite certain that I've installed debian-keyring before, though I'm only "rather certain" that it's been since I last did a clean install.) I'd been presuming that this was a common problem with Etch...
Because heros aren't allowed to have flaws. Read your Greek myths. If a hero is found to have a flaw, he will be destroyed. (P.S.: They are all found to be flawed.)
Well...they're signed, but an unfortunately large number of them are signed by an unknown key. (Apt tells me to run update to fix the problem...immediately after I've run update.)
Sorry, I'd like to give Debian lots of credit for this, but they only get partial credit. And that may be being generous. (I'm not sure, not being a security specialist...but my suspicion is that something signed by an unknown key isn't trustworthy.) I sure hope they start fixing THAT soon. (That worries me more than the break in. Break-ins can happen anywhere...and THOSE they are known to be working on fixing.)
We can hope that the various countries will have permeable borders...but look at AOL if you want to see how this is likely to work out. AOL *without* an intrusive internet drawing it's customers away.
No, ectogenesis involves an artificial womb (see Brave New World by A.Huxley). Host mother is a different concept. Dolly had a host mother, artificial wombs are still only in science fiction...but they're working towards them. (They aren't working *on* them yet that I've heard of, as they aren't quite close enough...)
What else is there to say? Partially it's a matter of trust, of course. I don't trust MS, so I'm skeptical of anything that says they are good. I trust Apple in some ways, and not in others. If you praise the design of Apple, I won't demand proof. Especially if the design you are praising is esthetic, as opposed to software or interface. (Apple *used* to have the best interface design...but somewhere along the way they lost all those designers.) If you praise Apple's pricing, I'll want to see proof. Linux is nearly Apple in reverse. I accept praises of technical design without checking, but if you praise esthetics... I need proof. (OTOH, Linux is SO highly variable, that you can find nearly anything if you go looking, even esthetic designs. And over time they tend to dominate, so these days both KDE and Gnome *look* pretty...in most default configurations.)
Longer answer: The easy way is to have/home be a separate partition, and set it to mount noexec (in/etc/fstab).
You can be even more secure if you want to. This presumes that everyone with root access is well intentioned. Another choice just presumes that everyone with physical access if well intentioned. (Don't know a feasible way around that one.)
We both use the same Mac, and it's HER computer, so I don't mess with things like the double-click speed.
Probably if I used it frequently enough, I'd get used to those "tricks". I don't want to, however. With the original Mac, I wanted to get used to it's OS. With Linux, I wanted to get used to it's OS. Since I wanted to, learning the details wasn't annoying. The Mac OSX had never given me a reason to want to use it, so it's quirks are annoying, and I try to avoid it.
In a way it's like my attitude towards Gnome. I'm certain that if I devoted time and effort to the task, I could learn to use it, but I don't want to. When they disabled the menu editor, I lost interest, and without a decent menu editor I see no reason to regain interest. I keep it installed as an emergency backup for when an upgrade breaks KDE, and use it occasionally to test that it's working. But I can't customize the menu as I desire, so I don't like using it. (Actually, that't the MAJOR gripe I have against Gnome, but to me it IS a major gripe. I tend to use applications that they don't have in their menu, and I tend to not use ones they do have, so I REALLY want to reorganize the thing. KDE starts out better adjusted to my tastes, and is easy to customize. [N.B.: Gnome used to be the one that was easy to customize, and when it was, I tended to prefer Gnome, except that KDE could automatically decompress files, and at that point Gnome couldn't...so it was a tossup. I used to essentially flip a coin to decide which window manager to use today...though actually it depended on whether I was planning on extracting a bunch of files {not all at the same time, for that the command line is easier}]).
So, yes, it's partially dependant on what you are used to. But not entirely. I found the old Mac convention of flower-uparrow to be easier to remember for "how to go up in the path", and I don't know why they ever discarded it.
O, going up or back in a folder hierarchy is one blatant thing. Yes, I *know* you can do it. I can always figure out how to do it, though I need to think about it. My wife gets totally lost.
There's so many small infelicitudes that it's hard to particularize then...when I'm not swearing at one of them, that is. (I'll grant you, they are all SMALL infelicitudes.)
Here's another: to change the name of a file you click on it, select get info from the menu, and they change the name. (You may need to changs some permissions...and I suppose that's reasonable..can close at hand, given that you are already in the appropriate menu.) If I try to rename the file by clicking on the name I almost invariably end up opening the file instead of renaming it...which introduces such a delay in the process that I NEVER try to do it that way. My wife just doesn't rename files.
Interesting. I have access to both a Mac and a Linux box. I use Linux as my desktop. Occasionally I'll move over to the Mac for games.
OTOH, my wife, who is a musician and agraphic artist, prefers the Mac. I'd try to convert her, but the Linux music composition programs don't work on my machine. Possibly I don't have a working midi card, I've never been sure, so that might be the reason, but without that I can't even try to convert her.
However, whenever I am forced to help her on the Mac I end up swearing at the OS. Yes, you *CAN* do nearly anything, with enough effort. But you can say the same thing about assembler. (Well, that's a bit of an extravagant comparison. The Mac OS isn't THAT bad, but I sure don't like it. I prefer Gnome (and I'm a KDE fan).
Actually, I've long thought that the Mac made some serious mistakes in the transition from OS9 to OSX, but that may just be because I was a solid Mac user up until System 7.5, when my job switched me to MSWind95. Still, they COULD have retained the resource forks (just have an invisible directory for each application [named, say.application]...you'ld need to adapt the cp program so that it moved the resources when it moved the application, but that wouldn't be difficult).
I really doubt that it's up to 15% again. It's been decades since Apple was that high. (Unless you are also counting iPods, of course. That would bump the numbers up.)
I'm no conspiracy theorist - but in true reality, this smells like other countries making hardware under specifications that do not match ours - and therefore may pose a security risk to us. Yea - I know, far-fetched. Damned far-fetched. But think about it. The greatest threat/companoin to us right now truly is China - they hold the majority of our worldwide currency, and they produce a damned-good percentage of our products. If they withdrew, and took our money with them, and left us our debt - we'd be in some DEEP shit. We'd be 3rd-world classification without any warning.
Try it this way: Many companies, in this country and others, cut corners where they don't think it will show. One of the things they do is claim to be compliant with standards that they haven't actually done the hard parts of being compliant with....
Actually, sometimes it isn't that "innocent", like the non-compliant CDs, but frequently it's done without malice, but only greed as a driver.
I would need a detailed genetic analysis before I would accept your statement as either true or false. I suspect it of being false. (Isolated populations generally are only relatively isolated. There is generally occasionall traffic in both directions, even if only once every couple of hundred years.)
Tasmania isn't a problem for his argument, only for the one you are interpreting him as having made.
What he said basically translates into "Anyone you could shake hands with today is a relative of yours if to go back around 2000 years." (or 5000 years if you put some unrealistically pessimistic assumptions into the model).
Some people appear to be arguing for a date even more recent than 2000 years, but that's not what he's saying. And his data are based on probability theory, anthropology, and population genetics, but don't include molecular biology. That would allow them to tighten up some places where their current model is still a bit "loose".
One of his points had to do with Innuits travelling back and forth from Siberia to Alaska. Many others were mentioned in the article, which was a popularization of the scientific papers (which I didn't bother to read).
Guess what? I don't care. If you are threatening to shut down my computer, that's an excellent reason NOT to use your product. Ever. Under any circumstances. Or ever recommend it.
Now I'm not a typical user, since I read the nlank-dashed MS EULA and decided already that I didn't want to go there. Over 5 years ago. That MS has just gotten worse since then only re-confirms that I made the correct decision. When I must, I use a Mac. Otherwise I use Linux. And when I use a Mac, I don't use MSOffice and I don't use MSIE. I use Seamonkey and NeoOffice (or, recently, OpenOffice2).
You'd never guess that I started out as an MS appologist "Not that bad, for a monopoly" I said. Well, at the time it was true, but it's not true anymore.
So. Do I beleive that "They won't shut down your computer."? No. I *DO* believe that that's the official party line, and that if the hoorah is too much they may delay implementing it until Vista has people more securely locked in. And I believe that this comment was a "trial baloon", but I don't think that it being shot down will change their plans, only the timing.
You left out one important one: You want the information to appear to be protected, but to leak anyway.
If you want this to ever work, you need to routinely use weak encryption on things of varying importance, so that the importance of a message is unpredictable from the contents. (Naturally you will make sure that nothing REALLY important ever gets encrypted weakly... unless either you want it to leak, or a mistake was made.
This is the category that includes easter eggs, etc. And I suspect that the Wimbledon scores count as easter eggs.
That actually makes a LOT of sense. But if they *do* set up an ISP, I may investigate just where the service boundaries are. (If their service area includes BOTH San Francisco and Mt. View, then there's a fair chance that it includes me.)
I don't know about most people. I feel that stealing from WalMart is wrong... of course, I also feel that shopping there is wrong.
OTOH, I don't feel that stealing from the MPAA is wrong. In fact, I don't think I'd believe that putting all the directors at ground zero of a test site was wrong...outside of the air pollution, that is.
Which distros are those (i.e., which distros use a default kernel)? Not Red Hat. Not Ubuntu. Not SuSE. Caldera? (I haven't checked...and they're out of the business anyway.) Not Mandrake. Not Debian. Gentoo? I think not.
Possibly Slackware. I expect Linux From Scratch uses a standard kernel. I doubt that Peanut Linux does.
MOST distros hack the kernel. They add something, or take something away. Not usually anything difficult (though it may be major).
(Warning: This information is a few years old, back when I was looking at such things and worrying about them, and is directly related to 2.4, as 2.6 wasn't yet out. Still, I doubt that it's changed much.)
Also, Debian has several different kernel choices...and it's not entirely "what's your processor". Now as to how major those changes are... I really don't know.
All that said, BOTH sides have valid points here. BOTH. Yes, it's a hassel. Yes, they really need to do it. (But, as has been pointed out, they don't need them on an ftp server. Distribution via DVD with "handling charges" is perfectly legit. And you don't have to accept credit cards. And you can wait for the check to clear.)
OTOH, you DO need to ensure that you have decent backups. And CDs don't last forever...or even as long as mag tape used to. The shiney patches spontaneously revert over time, and NOBODY burns pits any longer. (The metalic foil in a glass sandwich CDs probably WERE good essentially forever...but we don't use those anymore.)
OK. But even though the reason IS significant, it doesn't immediately tell you the solution(s).
E.g., even if we know that the sun has become slightly warmer, we also know that CO2 acts to prevent (well, slow) re-radiation of absorbed energy as heat. One thing doesn't cancel the other. Thus if we want to retard the rate of heating one thing we could do is reduce the amount of CO2 in the air. Another option is an orbital sunshade. There may be others. (E.g., appearantly atmospheric simple sulphides tend to retard absorption of heat...either reflect it or absorb it high in the atmosphere where it can be easily transported and re-radiated. Unfortunately they tend to rain out as acid rain.)
One choice that would be good would be to capture the solar energy on it's way in and use that for power. This would become heat when used as, e.g., electrical energy...but this would replace other primary sources that would ALSO have become heat when degraded. This may well not be sufficient, but it's an reasonable choice to help. And it's already, without factoring in the costs of alternative cooling measures, almost economic.
Consider this if you use air conditioning: If you cover your roof with solar cells standing 8" off the roof, then: 1) You are collecting electricity to run your air conditioning 2) You are reducing your requirement for air conditioning Even if either one alone would be uneconomic, it's quite plausible that the combination would be economic. Since I had solar cells installed on a part of the roof, I've noticed a definite change. It's cooler in the summer, and SLIGHTLY cooler in the winter. (The cells block re-radiation of heat from the house as well as preventing direct absorbtion of heat from the sun.) If the cells were cheaper, walls could be covered too. This wouldn't do anything much for conductive heat transmission, but it might have a large effect on radiative absorbtion/losses.
Now on a global level the effect of MANY people doing this is that less energy is spend on generating the electricity to run the air conditioners, which decreases slightly the amount of energy that needs to be re-radiated. This is a small effect at any one time and place, but over time it might be significant.
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Where did you find a price mentioned? The article I read said """
Availability
Availability was not announced. A short video clip of the..."""
Given the target audience, I don't think that's a realistic price. And remember, it's only about a foot tall. They didn't talk about connectivity, but I hope the managed to squeeze bluetooth or wi-fi into it. (Short range only, of course. About the range of a mobile phone should be correct.)
I *am* worried about power consumption. Batteries are heavy AND expensive...and apparently have a tendency to explode, but short range radio shouldn't significantly impact that, not compared to moving, and it would allow external computers with reasonable capabilities to control it. (Yeah, this has been tried before, but local intelligence could make a big difference, like the difference between transmission of "draw a circle around with radius r" and "draw this bit, draw that bit, draw the other bit, draw the next bit.....".
Mod +1 Funny
Of course, that's partially because at the moment NOTHING runs the HURD.
(No NOTHING is not an acronym...yet. That's an idea! Build something that runs the HURD and give it a [recursive] acronym that displays as NOTHING.)
That's a part of reality. Another part is that MS forged evidence in court and wasn't disciplined for it. (Remember the fake video?)
So even under the Jackson court MS was being given an insane amount of leeway.
Thanks. The archive-keyring did the job.
I more or less agree with you about the key coming from the same server as the files...but this is a development system rather than a production system, so I don't mind an occasional re-install. (Mind it or not, it's GOING to happen!)
OTOH, if it WERE a production server, how SHOULD keys be distributed?
That's the way it's *supposed* to work, and I'm willing to grant that it may well work that way on stable. I'm running testing.
(OTOH, I was shocked whin an install of debian-keyring didn't tell me "you already have the newest version installed". Something strange here... but AFTER installing it, and running update again:
Reading package lists... Done
W: GPG error: http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 010908312D230C5F
W: GPG error: ftp://mirrors.kernel.org etch Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 010908312D230C5F
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
Just like before [though *I think* there were two unknown keys before I did the install].)
FWIW, I do have some non-debian repositories in my sources...but previously it has complained about packages not-being signed with a known key that I have KNOWN were from the Debian repository. Now it isn't saying what package it's referring to, so I can't tell if this is still true. (I'm also quite certain that I've installed debian-keyring before, though I'm only "rather certain" that it's been since I last did a clean install.) I'd been presuming that this was a common problem with Etch...
Why all the flak?
Because heros aren't allowed to have flaws. Read your Greek myths. If a hero is found to have a flaw, he will be destroyed. (P.S.: They are all found to be flawed.)
Well...they're signed, but an unfortunately large number of them are signed by an unknown key. (Apt tells me to run update to fix the problem...immediately after I've run update.)
Sorry, I'd like to give Debian lots of credit for this, but they only get partial credit. And that may be being generous. (I'm not sure, not being a security specialist...but my suspicion is that something signed by an unknown key isn't trustworthy.) I sure hope they start fixing THAT soon. (That worries me more than the break in. Break-ins can happen anywhere...and THOSE they are known to be working on fixing.)
We can hope that the various countries will have permeable borders...but look at AOL if you want to see how this is likely to work out. AOL *without* an intrusive internet drawing it's customers away.
No, ectogenesis involves an artificial womb (see Brave New World by A.Huxley). Host mother is a different concept. Dolly had a host mother, artificial wombs are still only in science fiction...but they're working towards them. (They aren't working *on* them yet that I've heard of, as they aren't quite close enough...)
Exceptional claims require exceptional proof.
What else is there to say? Partially it's a matter of trust, of course. I don't trust MS, so I'm skeptical of anything that says they are good. I trust Apple in some ways, and not in others. If you praise the design of Apple, I won't demand proof. Especially if the design you are praising is esthetic, as opposed to software or interface. (Apple *used* to have the best interface design...but somewhere along the way they lost all those designers.) If you praise Apple's pricing, I'll want to see proof. Linux is nearly Apple in reverse. I accept praises of technical design without checking, but if you praise esthetics... I need proof. (OTOH, Linux is SO highly variable, that you can find nearly anything if you go looking, even esthetic designs. And over time they tend to dominate, so these days both KDE and Gnome *look* pretty...in most default configurations.)
Short answer: Yes.
/home be a separate partition, and set it to mount noexec (in /etc/fstab).
Longer answer: The easy way is to have
You can be even more secure if you want to. This presumes that everyone with root access is well intentioned. Another choice just presumes that everyone with physical access if well intentioned. (Don't know a feasible way around that one.)
We both use the same Mac, and it's HER computer, so I don't mess with things like the double-click speed.
Probably if I used it frequently enough, I'd get used to those "tricks". I don't want to, however. With the original Mac, I wanted to get used to it's OS. With Linux, I wanted to get used to it's OS. Since I wanted to, learning the details wasn't annoying. The Mac OSX had never given me a reason to want to use it, so it's quirks are annoying, and I try to avoid it.
In a way it's like my attitude towards Gnome. I'm certain that if I devoted time and effort to the task, I could learn to use it, but I don't want to. When they disabled the menu editor, I lost interest, and without a decent menu editor I see no reason to regain interest. I keep it installed as an emergency backup for when an upgrade breaks KDE, and use it occasionally to test that it's working. But I can't customize the menu as I desire, so I don't like using it. (Actually, that't the MAJOR gripe I have against Gnome, but to me it IS a major gripe. I tend to use applications that they don't have in their menu, and I tend to not use ones they do have, so I REALLY want to reorganize the thing. KDE starts out better adjusted to my tastes, and is easy to customize. [N.B.: Gnome used to be the one that was easy to customize, and when it was, I tended to prefer Gnome, except that KDE could automatically decompress files, and at that point Gnome couldn't...so it was a tossup. I used to essentially flip a coin to decide which window manager to use today...though actually it depended on whether I was planning on extracting a bunch of files {not all at the same time, for that the command line is easier}]).
So, yes, it's partially dependant on what you are used to. But not entirely. I found the old Mac convention of flower-uparrow to be easier to remember for "how to go up in the path", and I don't know why they ever discarded it.
O, going up or back in a folder hierarchy is one blatant thing. Yes, I *know* you can do it. I can always figure out how to do it, though I need to think about it. My wife gets totally lost.
There's so many small infelicitudes that it's hard to particularize then...when I'm not swearing at one of them, that is. (I'll grant you, they are all SMALL infelicitudes.)
Here's another: to change the name of a file you click on it, select get info from the menu, and they change the name. (You may need to changs some permissions...and I suppose that's reasonable..can close at hand, given that you are already in the appropriate menu.) If I try to rename the file by clicking on the name I almost invariably end up opening the file instead of renaming it...which introduces such a delay in the process that I NEVER try to do it that way. My wife just doesn't rename files.
Interesting. I have access to both a Mac and a Linux box. I use Linux as my desktop. Occasionally I'll move over to the Mac for games.
.application]...you'ld need to adapt the cp program so that it moved the resources when it moved the application, but that wouldn't be difficult).
OTOH, my wife, who is a musician and agraphic artist, prefers the Mac. I'd try to convert her, but the Linux music composition programs don't work on my machine. Possibly I don't have a working midi card, I've never been sure, so that might be the reason, but without that I can't even try to convert her.
However, whenever I am forced to help her on the Mac I end up swearing at the OS. Yes, you *CAN* do nearly anything, with enough effort. But you can say the same thing about assembler. (Well, that's a bit of an extravagant comparison. The Mac OS isn't THAT bad, but I sure don't like it. I prefer Gnome (and I'm a KDE fan).
Actually, I've long thought that the Mac made some serious mistakes in the transition from OS9 to OSX, but that may just be because I was a solid Mac user up until System 7.5, when my job switched me to MSWind95. Still, they COULD have retained the resource forks (just have an invisible directory for each application [named, say
I really doubt that it's up to 15% again. It's been decades since Apple was that high. (Unless you are also counting iPods, of course. That would bump the numbers up.)
I'm no conspiracy theorist - but in true reality, this smells like other countries making hardware under specifications that do not match ours - and therefore may pose a security risk to us. Yea - I know, far-fetched. Damned far-fetched. But think about it. The greatest threat/companoin to us right now truly is China - they hold the majority of our worldwide currency, and they produce a damned-good percentage of our products. If they withdrew, and took our money with them, and left us our debt - we'd be in some DEEP shit. We'd be 3rd-world classification without any warning.
...
Try it this way: Many companies, in this country and others, cut corners where they don't think it will show. One of the things they do is claim to be compliant with standards that they haven't actually done the hard parts of being compliant with.
Actually, sometimes it isn't that "innocent", like the non-compliant CDs, but frequently it's done without malice, but only greed as a driver.
I would need a detailed genetic analysis before I would accept your statement as either true or false. I suspect it of being false. (Isolated populations generally are only relatively isolated. There is generally occasionall traffic in both directions, even if only once every couple of hundred years.)
Tasmania isn't a problem for his argument, only for the one you are interpreting him as having made.
What he said basically translates into "Anyone you could shake hands with today is a relative of yours if to go back around 2000 years." (or 5000 years if you put some unrealistically pessimistic assumptions into the model).
Some people appear to be arguing for a date even more recent than 2000 years, but that's not what he's saying. And his data are based on probability theory, anthropology, and population genetics, but don't include molecular biology. That would allow them to tighten up some places where their current model is still a bit "loose".
One of his points had to do with Innuits travelling back and forth from Siberia to Alaska. Many others were mentioned in the article, which was a popularization of the scientific papers (which I didn't bother to read).
So 500 years ago is irrelevant.
Interesting justification. Possibly even true.
Guess what? I don't care. If you are threatening to shut down my computer, that's an excellent reason NOT to use your product. Ever. Under any circumstances. Or ever recommend it.
Now I'm not a typical user, since I read the nlank-dashed MS EULA and decided already that I didn't want to go there. Over 5 years ago. That MS has just gotten worse since then only re-confirms that I made the correct decision. When I must, I use a Mac. Otherwise I use Linux. And when I use a Mac, I don't use MSOffice and I don't use MSIE. I use Seamonkey and NeoOffice (or, recently, OpenOffice2).
You'd never guess that I started out as an MS appologist "Not that bad, for a monopoly" I said. Well, at the time it was true, but it's not true anymore.
So. Do I beleive that "They won't shut down your computer."? No. I *DO* believe that that's the official party line, and that if the hoorah is too much they may delay implementing it until Vista has people more securely locked in. And I believe that this comment was a "trial baloon", but I don't think that it being shot down will change their plans, only the timing.
You left out one important one:
... unless either you want it to leak, or a mistake was made.
You want the information to appear to be protected, but to leak anyway.
If you want this to ever work, you need to routinely use weak encryption on things of varying importance, so that the importance of a message is unpredictable from the contents. (Naturally you will make sure that nothing REALLY important ever gets encrypted weakly
This is the category that includes easter eggs, etc. And I suspect that the Wimbledon scores count as easter eggs.
That actually makes a LOT of sense. But if they *do* set up an ISP, I may investigate just where the service boundaries are. (If their service area includes BOTH San Francisco and Mt. View, then there's a fair chance that it includes me.)
I don't know about most people. I feel that stealing from WalMart is wrong... of course, I also feel that shopping there is wrong.
OTOH, I don't feel that stealing from the MPAA is wrong. In fact, I don't think I'd believe that putting all the directors at ground zero of a test site was wrong...outside of the air pollution, that is.
Which distros are those (i.e., which distros use a default kernel)? Not Red Hat. Not Ubuntu. Not SuSE. Caldera? (I haven't checked...and they're out of the business anyway.) Not Mandrake. Not Debian. Gentoo? I think not.
Possibly Slackware. I expect Linux From Scratch uses a standard kernel. I doubt that Peanut Linux does.
MOST distros hack the kernel. They add something, or take something away. Not usually anything difficult (though it may be major).
(Warning: This information is a few years old, back when I was looking at such things and worrying about them, and is directly related to 2.4, as 2.6 wasn't yet out. Still, I doubt that it's changed much.)
Also, Debian has several different kernel choices...and it's not entirely "what's your processor". Now as to how major those changes are... I really don't know.
All that said, BOTH sides have valid points here. BOTH. Yes, it's a hassel. Yes, they really need to do it. (But, as has been pointed out, they don't need them on an ftp server. Distribution via DVD with "handling charges" is perfectly legit. And you don't have to accept credit cards. And you can wait for the check to clear.)
OTOH, you DO need to ensure that you have decent backups. And CDs don't last forever...or even as long as mag tape used to. The shiney patches spontaneously revert over time, and NOBODY burns pits any longer. (The metalic foil in a glass sandwich CDs probably WERE good essentially forever...but we don't use those anymore.)
OK. But even though the reason IS significant, it doesn't immediately tell you the solution(s).
E.g., even if we know that the sun has become slightly warmer, we also know that CO2 acts to prevent (well, slow) re-radiation of absorbed energy as heat. One thing doesn't cancel the other. Thus if we want to retard the rate of heating one thing we could do is reduce the amount of CO2 in the air. Another option is an orbital sunshade. There may be others. (E.g., appearantly atmospheric simple sulphides tend to retard absorption of heat...either reflect it or absorb it high in the atmosphere where it can be easily transported and re-radiated. Unfortunately they tend to rain out as acid rain.)
One choice that would be good would be to capture the solar energy on it's way in and use that for power. This would become heat when used as, e.g., electrical energy...but this would replace other primary sources that would ALSO have become heat when degraded. This may well not be sufficient, but it's an reasonable choice to help. And it's already, without factoring in the costs of alternative cooling measures, almost economic.
Consider this if you use air conditioning: If you cover your roof with solar cells standing 8" off the roof, then:
1) You are collecting electricity to run your air conditioning
2) You are reducing your requirement for air conditioning
Even if either one alone would be uneconomic, it's quite plausible that the combination would be economic. Since I had solar cells installed on a part of the roof, I've noticed a definite change. It's cooler in the summer, and SLIGHTLY cooler in the winter. (The cells block re-radiation of heat from the house as well as preventing direct absorbtion of heat from the sun.) If the cells were cheaper, walls could be covered too. This wouldn't do anything much for conductive heat transmission, but it might have a large effect on radiative absorbtion/losses.
Now on a global level the effect of MANY people doing this is that less energy is spend on generating the electricity to run the air conditioners, which decreases slightly the amount of energy that needs to be re-radiated. This is a small effect at any one time and place, but over time it might be significant.