In the case of defending yourself physically, you can be pretty certain that you're hitting the right person. Your life may also be in danger if you don't fight back.
When your machine is under attack, and you strike back, you can not be certain that you're toasting the right machine.
Whatever you may think of a person who's machine is so open to attack that someone can successfully use it to launch an attack against yours, they do not deserve to have their machine toasted for it. If you do that, you're little better than the cracker you're trying to hit back at.
I can perfectly understand the desire to attack, but the likelihood of hitting the worng person is just too high for my liking.
We all have a duty to be responsible netizens, after all.
As tempting as it may be to give them "a taste of their own medicine", the chances are that you're just going to be attacking an innocent bystander whose machine has been cracked, and is being used to launch the attack on yours.
Even if you do hit back at the actual cracker, so what? So you trash his PC and some files; it's not like it's going to put him out of business, or cost him thousands of pounds to restore it.
IMHO, the best thing to do is just find out as much as you can, co-operate with the authorities, and let them deal out any punishment.
The supermarket would have to require customers to "log on" and "block" those who never buy stuff (Would that be legal?).
As far as I am aware, that would be perfectly legal.
Do not forget that shops, despite being open to the public, are still private property. If you don't want to let someone in your shop, you don't have to. If you want to bar people that come in without buying anything too often, you can - although I would expect it to be bad for business, it certainly wouldn't be illegal.
You do not have a God-given right to enter a shop, or any other privately-owned premises.
If you try to download Netscape 4.7, it will refuse to send it to you if you have a non-US IP address.
No, it doesn't, at least not any more.
I am, as I type, sat in a building in the centre of London (UK), downloading the 128bit encryption version of Netscape 4.7.
There were some terms to agree to, basically that I wasn't in or a citizen of a proscribed country (Iarq, etc), and that I wouldn't export it to anyone that was, but I was allowed to download and install it.
The export restrictions on the crypto that goes into web browsers were relaxed several months ago; looks like Fortify might have problems making any money in future...
This sort of thing can be considered a sort of direct action.
Execpt, of course, that it's totally indiscriminate; it affects ordinary home users as well as corporations (and, of course it affects the corporate user's personal files too).
I guess that there are innocent bystanders injured in any "war", but you're supposed to try not to hit them...
Unless you've got something to hide, why do you need your privacy?
I like my privacy. I have nothing to hide, but I still like to know that what I do, where I go, etc, is my business, and no-one else's.
Why, if I have nothing to hide?
Well, it depends on your definition of what you need, or want, to hide. Me, I want to hide my spending patterns, how much I earn, what sort of things I like (hobbies, favourite music, even favourite TV shows and foods, etc). Why?
Because I'm fast becoming tired of all the advertising.
(And that's without addressing any other concerns; I'll leave that for now, as I really ought to be working)
It's getting so that you can't make a move in the on- or off-line worlds without being bombarded by the stuff. Giving more information about what I'm likely to spend my money on to the people that try to get me to spend it is only going to increase the amount of advertising that is thrown at me.
I dislike online advertising because it costs me time and money to download the stuff (until I add it to my junkbuster block file), and clutters up web pages (that's an aesthetic objection:-) ).
I dislike real-world spam mail because it's a waste of resources, and just helps add to the mountains of rubbish we have to deal with.
I dislike TV advertising because it breaks up the flow of whatever I'm watching, wastes my time, and is generally quite irritating in itself.
You seem to have accepted the slow erosion of your privacy; that is your right. I do not, as is my right, and I will fight to keep what little privacy I still have.
There's a big difference between Open Source and Free (as in beer) Software.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with charging for the software you write. After all, we all have bills to pay. If you think that you can afford to give it away, or just don't think that you'd make any money if you tried to sell it, then that's great; if not, then that's fine, too.
Open Source software is merely software for which the source code is available. That does not preclude the possibility of selling the software. Hands up everyone here that has bought a copy of a Linux distribution, even though most of them are freely available for download?
Selling Open Source software may not be easy, but I don't see that it's that much harder than selling closed source software; there's nothing special about a CD full of code that I don't have the source to that prevents me from burning a copy, after all.
Surely there's nothing to stop a company from sitting down with a couple of lawyers and thrashing out a licencing agreement that lets you look at and learn from the source, but prevents you from distributing illegal copies of the software and/or ripping off large chunks of code verbatim?
There's no conflict there - the first bit means "they're going to (have to) sell it", and the second bit means "so we're going to have to wait a while before we get a free one".
Cheers,
Tim
Re:No, it's something else
on
Boo No More
·
· Score: 2
you don't need one large book/sport ware/whatever vendor in each region for the internet, you just need one globally
If, by that, you mean a company that is in one geographic location and nowhere else, then you are forgetting one thing: shipping.
Not just shipping costs, which are currently pretty high between eg the States and the UK (generally more than any discount you'll be getting on the goods, in my experience), but the time it takes.
If I order a book from amazon.co.uk (assuming I can find one that has a discount that covers the postage costs, of course...), then I generally get it the next day (dependent on stock levels, etc). How long would it take to get the same book delivered from the States? 3 days without paying through the nose for it to go by air?
If I can get it for a comparable price, right now, form the bookshop down the street, why would I bother?
Yes, the companies may be owned elsewhere, and may have their head offices elsewhere, but they are still going to need warehouses and distributors globally if they want to sell globally and remain competitive.
Even American owned companies are going to create jobs in Europe (and vice versa), if they want to sell there.
I agree with your point about metering of internet calls, and would add that the slooooooooow roll out of ADSL and similar broad-band access is also crippling the widespread adoption of the internet here in the UK. Until there is widespread availability of (relatively) cheap, high-speed net access, the UK isn't evengoing to be a minor "internet player", let alone one of the leading ones, as our Government would like us to be. (I'll ignore for now some of the proposed laws that will have just as adverse an effect...)
This is pretty much the same idea a couple of us had where I work, only rather than informing the user of their stupidity, we were going to have it email the System Administration team, and tell them of the user's stupidity:-)
We decided against it when we realised that it probably wouldn't go down too well with the management...
Cheers,
Tim
PS Yeah, I know the idea is right out of Snow Crash too:-)
if they blew up big nukes, well they could potentially (without much difficulty since themoon is quite a bit smaller than the earth) blow it up entirely.
Woah there, time for a reality check I think!
Yes, the moon is quite a bit smaller than the Earth. I forget how much smaller, but the gravitiatioanl force is roughly a sixth, so that'll give you some idea (gravitational force depends upon mass/(square of radius), don't forget, so it's not as easy as being a sixth the mass)
But blow it up entirely? We are still talking about billions upon billions of tons of rock; I personally doubt that we'd be able to blow up an average-sized asteroid if ever we needed to (a la "Armagedon")
I've tried, filling in the registration form, etc, but neither of the links (ftp://openmotif.opengroup.org/pub/openmotif/tars and ftp://ftp.opengroup.org/pub/openmotif/tars) seem to work. Netscape gives a "Unable to find the file or directory" error...
I, for one, always deploy KDE when setting up Linux systems for my customers, be they desktop systems or server systems.
Why do you install it on servers? Or do you not mean the sort of server that generally sits in a machine room without a monitor attached?
One of my (many:-) ) objections to using NT as a server platform is the fact that whether it's used or not, you cannot switch off the GUI, let alone not install it.
Surely you want as little unnescessary stuff on a server as possible?
That said, I'll certainly be giving it a whirl on my desktop:-)
If it doesn't cover some countries in the area, that's evidence that it is geographic.
Ah, but not in any simple, "this patch of land here" sort of way. There are "isolated" countries that are members of the EU (ie member countries that do not share a border with any other member countries).
Note that I'm neither for nor against this new TLD. Personally, I think the entire system needs a good rethink and overhaul. However, with the system as it is, it's only really fair enough that the EU gets a TLD of it's own. Otherwise, it would kind of be like each individual US state having a TLD, while the US itself did not.
The next stage is when you are actually able to buy things through the glass teat.
Already here - and I don't just mean the shopping channels. Here in the UK at least, the latest thing in TV is digital TV. Not only does this finally let us all have the 2000000000000 channels we obviously so dearly need, it also brings email and, you guessed it, shopping to the TV.
AFAIK (I don't have digital myself), you access screens from your remote control, kinda like teletext but with real pictures and resolution, and flip through the pages. Once you find an item you want, you literally just hit buy on the remote (and enter a PIN, I assume), sit back, and wait for it to be delivered.
So, your little flight of fancy is already a reality over here. A great boon to the housebound that don't have a computer and a net connection, I guess. OTOH, I can see it further entrenching future generations on the couch - it's not like the people of the developed world are in danger of exercising themselves to death any time soon...
I think it is amazing that someone can be arrested for creating macro viruses at all - the mere creation of them should not place liability on the creator.. only the person who maliciously spreads it.
That, of course, assumes that they are not the same person.
Creating a virus as a purely academic endeavour is fine. Releasing it, or causing it to be released, by your negiligence or otherwise, is quite another thing, and should be punishable.
In other words I should be free to create as many virii as I wish, as long as they never leave my possesion. The moment they get out, I should be liable. Let the courts decide whether or not it was my fault (eg someone stole my machine, found the virii, and let them loose vs I let them loose/gave them to someone that released them) - that's what they're there for.
This virus (and yes, I have seen the source code) deiberately sought out files of a variety of different types, including mp3s, html, gifs, etc, and wrote itself over the files (it also appended.vbs to the filename, presumably to get it to be run the next time the user double-clicked the file, thus helping to keep itself "alive").
If that isn't "deliberately malicious", then I don't know what is...
The difference is that this is random and malicious, and causes the destruction of the user's own data, not just installed programs.
Also, the increase in email activity (as the virus mailed itself to the first 50 or 60 people in the victim's Outlook address book) caused the usual overloaded servers, crawling networks, etc. In addition to this, some companies simply shut down all operations in an effort to contain the virus and repair the damage it had done (one of our clients, for example, who run an mp3 website...)
I think that charges for similar cases in the past have included malicious damage and theft of computing resources, although I may be wrong on that. Here in the UK at least, unauthorised use of a computer system is a crime - it could be argued that this applies in this case, as the virus writer certainly didn't ask if his/her virus could use up all the resources it needed to propagate itself.
Personally, I don't care what the public thinks that hacker means, because I don't refer to myself as one, but I can see whyt those that do might be upset about it.
I suspect that the hackers are kinda miffed because it means that, in the popular imagination at least, they're lumped together with the script kiddies and virus writers of this world.
When someone says that they're a hacker, they mean something akin to "dedicated programmer", and have a right to be miffed when someone else thinks they mean "common vandal".
Would you like it if people thought of you as a criminal, just because of a misused term?
It's an interesting idea, but although EM is very much stronger than gravity, we are talking about an awful lot of mass here.
I vaguely remember that we did a rough calculation on the charge that the Earth would have to have in order to produce as strong an EM force as its gravitational one. I don't remember the numbers (or have time to do it now, but it's pretty easy), but the charge required was huge.
You are right in saying that the effect would be indistinguishable, but I do think that the amount of charge that would be required almost certainly rules it out as an explanation.
(You've got me thinking though - gonna have to sit down and work it out when I get home:-) )
Why dose this dark matter exist ? Because without it the Big Bang is called into question.
Actaully, Dark matter is absolutely not required for the Big Bang to have happened.
The issue is more serious than that. Without it, the whole of Newtonian Mechanics is called into question. Okay, so we already know that in the quantum and relativistic limits, Newtonian mechanics no longer holds. However, on galactic scales, Newtonian mechanics is supposed to hold true.
This is not what is being observed. The problem is connected to the speed of rotation of stellar objects. Now, I admit that it's been a couple of years since I last studied Astrophysics, so I'm a little rusty, but IIRC the rotational speed of objects "orbiting" our galaxy is too high to be explained by the amount of visible matter. (There is more to it than that, but like I said, it's been a couple of years...)
For more info, hit your local library, or try google
...and I've lost cout of the number of "Perfect Fried Chicken", "Tennessee Fried Chicken", "Texas Fried Chicken" and "Favorite Fried Chicken"s (etc etc etc ad nauseum) there are here in London (UK).
OTOH, if you brought out a range of introductory level books, and called them " for Almost Dumbies", it'd probably all be down to the court on the day when you were sued - I guess KFC either don't care, found/feel that they don't have a case, or just plain lost.
In addition, "For Dummies" is a collection (however small) of words, not just one word. I think you'll find that MS has trademarked "Where do you want to go today?", and that Sun has trademarked something along the lines of being "the dot in dot com".
OTOH, I don't think that MS managed to get Windows trademarked, just each of Windows 95, Windows 98, etc, although I could be wrong on that one.
The average joe on the street doesn't know anything about Open Source, and is waiting for the organization with the most advertising bucks to tell them what it means.
There is also a belief, and one that seems quite common amongst the avaerage jo on the street, that if it's a Microsoft product, it must be the best one.
If Microsoft's Marketing goons do their stuff just right, we may end up with an army of end-users who think that Microsoft invented Open Source.
Suddenly, there'll be another way (in the public's eyes) that "that linux thing" is playing catch-up with Windows - just another reason not to use it...
Slashdot Mirror
In the case of defending yourself physically, you can be pretty certain that you're hitting the right person. Your life may also be in danger if you don't fight back.
When your machine is under attack, and you strike back, you can not be certain that you're toasting the right machine.
Whatever you may think of a person who's machine is so open to attack that someone can successfully use it to launch an attack against yours, they do not deserve to have their machine toasted for it. If you do that, you're little better than the cracker you're trying to hit back at.
I can perfectly understand the desire to attack, but the likelihood of hitting the worng person is just too high for my liking.
We all have a duty to be responsible netizens, after all.
Cheers,
Tim
"Two wrongs don't make a right"
As tempting as it may be to give them "a taste of their own medicine", the chances are that you're just going to be attacking an innocent bystander whose machine has been cracked, and is being used to launch the attack on yours.
Even if you do hit back at the actual cracker, so what? So you trash his PC and some files; it's not like it's going to put him out of business, or cost him thousands of pounds to restore it.
IMHO, the best thing to do is just find out as much as you can, co-operate with the authorities, and let them deal out any punishment.
Cheers,
Tim
The supermarket would have to require customers to "log on" and "block" those who never buy stuff (Would that be legal?).
As far as I am aware, that would be perfectly legal.
Do not forget that shops, despite being open to the public, are still private property. If you don't want to let someone in your shop, you don't have to. If you want to bar people that come in without buying anything too often, you can - although I would expect it to be bad for business, it certainly wouldn't be illegal.
You do not have a God-given right to enter a shop, or any other privately-owned premises.
Cheers,
Tim
No, it doesn't, at least not any more.
I am, as I type, sat in a building in the centre of London (UK), downloading the 128bit encryption version of Netscape 4.7.
There were some terms to agree to, basically that I wasn't in or a citizen of a proscribed country (Iarq, etc), and that I wouldn't export it to anyone that was, but I was allowed to download and install it.
The export restrictions on the crypto that goes into web browsers were relaxed several months ago; looks like Fortify might have problems making any money in future...
Cheers,
Tim
This sort of thing can be considered a sort of direct action.
Execpt, of course, that it's totally indiscriminate; it affects ordinary home users as well as corporations (and, of course it affects the corporate user's personal files too).
I guess that there are innocent bystanders injured in any "war", but you're supposed to try not to hit them...
Cheers,
Tim
Unless you've got something to hide, why do you need your privacy?
:-) ).
I like my privacy. I have nothing to hide, but I still like to know that what I do, where I go, etc, is my business, and no-one else's.
Why, if I have nothing to hide?
Well, it depends on your definition of what you need, or want, to hide. Me, I want to hide my spending patterns, how much I earn, what sort of things I like (hobbies, favourite music, even favourite TV shows and foods, etc). Why?
Because I'm fast becoming tired of all the advertising.
(And that's without addressing any other concerns; I'll leave that for now, as I really ought to be working)
It's getting so that you can't make a move in the on- or off-line worlds without being bombarded by the stuff. Giving more information about what I'm likely to spend my money on to the people that try to get me to spend it is only going to increase the amount of advertising that is thrown at me.
I dislike online advertising because it costs me time and money to download the stuff (until I add it to my junkbuster block file), and clutters up web pages (that's an aesthetic objection
I dislike real-world spam mail because it's a waste of resources, and just helps add to the mountains of rubbish we have to deal with.
I dislike TV advertising because it breaks up the flow of whatever I'm watching, wastes my time, and is generally quite irritating in itself.
You seem to have accepted the slow erosion of your privacy; that is your right. I do not, as is my right, and I will fight to keep what little privacy I still have.
Cheers,
Tim
There's a big difference between Open Source and Free (as in beer) Software.
I see absolutely nothing wrong with charging for the software you write. After all, we all have bills to pay. If you think that you can afford to give it away, or just don't think that you'd make any money if you tried to sell it, then that's great; if not, then that's fine, too.
Open Source software is merely software for which the source code is available. That does not preclude the possibility of selling the software. Hands up everyone here that has bought a copy of a Linux distribution, even though most of them are freely available for download?
Selling Open Source software may not be easy, but I don't see that it's that much harder than selling closed source software; there's nothing special about a CD full of code that I don't have the source to that prevents me from burning a copy, after all.
Surely there's nothing to stop a company from sitting down with a couple of lawyers and thrashing out a licencing agreement that lets you look at and learn from the source, but prevents you from distributing illegal copies of the software and/or ripping off large chunks of code verbatim?
Anyone have any thoughts on the matter?
Cheers,
Tim
There's no conflict there - the first bit means "they're going to (have to) sell it", and the second bit means "so we're going to have to wait a while before we get a free one".
Cheers,
Tim
you don't need one large book/sport ware/whatever vendor in each region for the internet, you just need one globally
If, by that, you mean a company that is in one geographic location and nowhere else, then you are forgetting one thing: shipping.
Not just shipping costs, which are currently pretty high between eg the States and the UK (generally more than any discount you'll be getting on the goods, in my experience), but the time it takes.
If I order a book from amazon.co.uk (assuming I can find one that has a discount that covers the postage costs, of course...), then I generally get it the next day (dependent on stock levels, etc). How long would it take to get the same book delivered from the States? 3 days without paying through the nose for it to go by air?
If I can get it for a comparable price, right now, form the bookshop down the street, why would I bother?
Yes, the companies may be owned elsewhere, and may have their head offices elsewhere, but they are still going to need warehouses and distributors globally if they want to sell globally and remain competitive.
Even American owned companies are going to create jobs in Europe (and vice versa), if they want to sell there.
I agree with your point about metering of internet calls, and would add that the slooooooooow roll out of ADSL and similar broad-band access is also crippling the widespread adoption of the internet here in the UK. Until there is widespread availability of (relatively) cheap, high-speed net access, the UK isn't evengoing to be a minor "internet player", let alone one of the leading ones, as our Government would like us to be. (I'll ignore for now some of the proposed laws that will have just as adverse an effect...)
Cheers,
Tim
This is pretty much the same idea a couple of us had where I work, only rather than informing the user of their stupidity, we were going to have it email the System Administration team, and tell them of the user's stupidity :-)
:-)
We decided against it when we realised that it probably wouldn't go down too well with the management...
Cheers,
Tim
PS Yeah, I know the idea is right out of Snow Crash too
if they blew up big nukes, well they could potentially (without much difficulty since themoon is quite a bit smaller than the earth) blow it up entirely.
Woah there, time for a reality check I think!
Yes, the moon is quite a bit smaller than the Earth. I forget how much smaller, but the gravitiatioanl force is roughly a sixth, so that'll give you some idea (gravitational force depends upon mass/(square of radius), don't forget, so it's not as easy as being a sixth the mass)
But blow it up entirely? We are still talking about billions upon billions of tons of rock; I personally doubt that we'd be able to blow up an average-sized asteroid if ever we needed to (a la "Armagedon")
Cheers,
Tim
I've tried, filling in the registration form, etc, but neither of the links (ftp://openmotif.opengroup.org/pub/openmotif/tars and ftp://ftp.opengroup.org/pub/openmotif/tars) seem to work. Netscape gives a "Unable to find the file or directory" error...
Anyone had any better luck?
Cheers,
Tim
I, for one, always deploy KDE when setting up Linux systems for my customers, be they desktop systems or server systems.
:-) ) objections to using NT as a server platform is the fact that whether it's used or not, you cannot switch off the GUI, let alone not install it.
:-)
Why do you install it on servers? Or do you not mean the sort of server that generally sits in a machine room without a monitor attached?
One of my (many
Surely you want as little unnescessary stuff on a server as possible?
That said, I'll certainly be giving it a whirl on my desktop
Cheers,
Tim
If it doesn't cover some countries in the area, that's evidence that it is geographic.
Ah, but not in any simple, "this patch of land here" sort of way. There are "isolated" countries that are members of the EU (ie member countries that do not share a border with any other member countries).
Note that I'm neither for nor against this new TLD. Personally, I think the entire system needs a good rethink and overhaul. However, with the system as it is, it's only really fair enough that the EU gets a TLD of it's own. Otherwise, it would kind of be like each individual US state having a TLD, while the US itself did not.
Cheers,
Tim
The next stage is when you are actually able to buy things through the glass teat.
Already here - and I don't just mean the shopping channels. Here in the UK at least, the latest thing in TV is digital TV. Not only does this finally let us all have the 2000000000000 channels we obviously so dearly need, it also brings email and, you guessed it, shopping to the TV.
AFAIK (I don't have digital myself), you access screens from your remote control, kinda like teletext but with real pictures and resolution, and flip through the pages. Once you find an item you want, you literally just hit buy on the remote (and enter a PIN, I assume), sit back, and wait for it to be delivered.
So, your little flight of fancy is already a reality over here. A great boon to the housebound that don't have a computer and a net connection, I guess. OTOH, I can see it further entrenching future generations on the couch - it's not like the people of the developed world are in danger of exercising themselves to death any time soon...
Cheers,
Tim
I think it is amazing that someone can be arrested for creating macro viruses at all - the mere creation of them should not place liability on the creator.. only the person who maliciously spreads it.
That, of course, assumes that they are not the same person.
Creating a virus as a purely academic endeavour is fine. Releasing it, or causing it to be released, by your negiligence or otherwise, is quite another thing, and should be punishable.
In other words I should be free to create as many virii as I wish, as long as they never leave my possesion. The moment they get out, I should be liable. Let the courts decide whether or not it was my fault (eg someone stole my machine, found the virii, and let them loose vs I let them loose/gave them to someone that released them) - that's what they're there for.
Just my two penn'orth.
Cheers,
Tim
Even ILOVEYOU was not deliberately malicious
.vbs to the filename, presumably to get it to be run the next time the user double-clicked the file, thus helping to keep itself "alive").
You are joking, right?
This virus (and yes, I have seen the source code) deiberately sought out files of a variety of different types, including mp3s, html, gifs, etc, and wrote itself over the files (it also appended
If that isn't "deliberately malicious", then I don't know what is...
Cheers,
Tim
The difference is that this is random and malicious, and causes the destruction of the user's own data, not just installed programs.
Also, the increase in email activity (as the virus mailed itself to the first 50 or 60 people in the victim's Outlook address book) caused the usual overloaded servers, crawling networks, etc. In addition to this, some companies simply shut down all operations in an effort to contain the virus and repair the damage it had done (one of our clients, for example, who run an mp3 website...)
I think that charges for similar cases in the past have included malicious damage and theft of computing resources, although I may be wrong on that. Here in the UK at least, unauthorised use of a computer system is a crime - it could be argued that this applies in this case, as the virus writer certainly didn't ask if his/her virus could use up all the resources it needed to propagate itself.
Cheers,
Tim
Personally, I don't care what the public thinks that hacker means, because I don't refer to myself as one, but I can see whyt those that do might be upset about it.
I suspect that the hackers are kinda miffed because it means that, in the popular imagination at least, they're lumped together with the script kiddies and virus writers of this world.
When someone says that they're a hacker, they mean something akin to "dedicated programmer", and have a right to be miffed when someone else thinks they mean "common vandal".
Would you like it if people thought of you as a criminal, just because of a misused term?
Cheers,
Tim
It's an interesting idea, but although EM is very much stronger than gravity, we are talking about an awful lot of mass here.
:-) )
I vaguely remember that we did a rough calculation on the charge that the Earth would have to have in order to produce as strong an EM force as its gravitational one. I don't remember the numbers (or have time to do it now, but it's pretty easy), but the charge required was huge.
You are right in saying that the effect would be indistinguishable, but I do think that the amount of charge that would be required almost certainly rules it out as an explanation.
(You've got me thinking though - gonna have to sit down and work it out when I get home
Cheers,
Tim
Why dose this dark matter exist ? Because without it the Big Bang is called into question.
Actaully, Dark matter is absolutely not required for the Big Bang to have happened.
The issue is more serious than that. Without it, the whole of Newtonian Mechanics is called into question. Okay, so we already know that in the quantum and relativistic limits, Newtonian mechanics no longer holds. However, on galactic scales, Newtonian mechanics is supposed to hold true.
This is not what is being observed. The problem is connected to the speed of rotation of stellar objects. Now, I admit that it's been a couple of years since I last studied Astrophysics, so I'm a little rusty, but IIRC the rotational speed of objects "orbiting" our galaxy is too high to be explained by the amount of visible matter. (There is more to it than that, but like I said, it's been a couple of years...)
For more info, hit your local library, or try google
Cheers,
Tim
You couldn't change it if you wanted to.
:-)
He meant in his sig, not in the post
Cheers,
Tim
...and I've lost cout of the number of "Perfect Fried Chicken", "Tennessee Fried Chicken", "Texas Fried Chicken" and "Favorite Fried Chicken"s (etc etc etc ad nauseum) there are here in London (UK).
OTOH, if you brought out a range of introductory level books, and called them " for Almost Dumbies", it'd probably all be down to the court on the day when you were sued - I guess KFC either don't care, found/feel that they don't have a case, or just plain lost.
Cheers,
Tim
In addition, "For Dummies" is a collection (however small) of words, not just one word. I think you'll find that MS has trademarked "Where do you want to go today?", and that Sun has trademarked something along the lines of being "the dot in dot com".
OTOH, I don't think that MS managed to get Windows trademarked, just each of Windows 95, Windows 98, etc, although I could be wrong on that one.
Cheers,
Tim
The average joe on the street doesn't know anything about Open Source, and is waiting for the organization with the most advertising bucks to tell them what it means.
There is also a belief, and one that seems quite common amongst the avaerage jo on the street, that if it's a Microsoft product, it must be the best one.
If Microsoft's Marketing goons do their stuff just right, we may end up with an army of end-users who think that Microsoft invented Open Source.
Suddenly, there'll be another way (in the public's eyes) that "that linux thing" is playing catch-up with Windows - just another reason not to use it...
Cheers,
Tim