There are 3 RM downloads at the MS site. The first is the one in the article - the Client piece. There are also a part for the Server and SDKs for CLient and Server. The Server SDK is not available to just anyone. MS has to license you. They do this via a form of their security Certificate Server. The SDK lets 2 users connect for development work, but beyond that you need a license to code for it.
They mention some of the technologies used: COM+, an Active Directory server,.NET, SOAP, IE 6 and IIS. This all has the feel of an end-to-end "solution" that they will market to the RIAA and MPAA types. It looks like a substantial infrastructure needs to be in place in order to enable Rights Management content, and the consumer^H^H^H^H user will access protected material by going to a specially engineered web site using IE 6. They also mention a "lockbox", whatever that is.
Your average hobbyist programmer or shareware programmer isn't going to be able to participate in this. Something tells me the licensing fees won't be cheap. The "right" to access protected material obviously come from certificates, and that model of PKI has proved to be troublesome at best. Furthermore, the "rights" being protected by this setup are those that perpetuate the aims of the RIAA, the MPAA and the like.
They're not about to let anybody get in on this protection racket. The certificates will no doubt be VERY expensive for the content producers so that the barrier to entry is high. They don't want some kid in Hong Kong to encode his music files using this technology and then give them away to others, fully within the confines of this system. This is really bad, because anyone even tinkering around with the technology without a license will automatically become a criminal under the DMA.
I flew them earlier this year. After already being on the plane 15 minutes at the gate a guy comes on board, calls my name, and escorts me off. Apparently they had marked me for the double-secret security scanning and failed to do it at the security checkpoint. No problems, really, and I was back on the plane about 10 minutes later in plenty of time for departure. Of course, my carry on bag was left in the overhead compartment the whole time I was off the plane.
It was the security folks who failed to do the extra scanning at the checkpoint, but it was Jet Blue's guy who got me off the plane. He didn't know and didn't care that I might have already snuck something onto the plane. If Jet Blue wants to help fight terror in the skies they'd better re-think their priorities. Paying lip-service to security is a long tradition in commercial aviation. Just think about this: if there was no law passed mandating crash-proof cockpit doors, most airlines wouldn't have put them in.
Not at all. Look at how much we've learned. The experience we've gained has been enormous. We learned that building a reusable winged spaceship is doable, but doing so on less-than-shoestring budget isn't the smart way to go. Once we've established a real infrastructure in orbit, in another hundred years or so, I think a reusable shuttle will again make sense. Right now it doesn't. It was supposed to be cheap. It's not. It was supposed to be safe. It's not as good as it could be. When you think about it, both Challenger and Columbia were doomed by the Rube Goldberg contraption that boosts the orbiter into space. The original design called for a reusable flyback booster as well. That was scrapped early in the program to save money.
It's too bad that companies don't stand for principals. They can't. Their raison d'etre is to enhance shareholder value, and that means cutting a favorable deal when it's practical to do so. The reason I lament this is that MS once again gets away scott free while admitting no wrongdoing. A person - an individual - might stay the course and see a case like this through to its end provided they had the resources to pay their legal bills (which of course, almost no one has). That end would ideally involve their adversary admitting to wrongdoing, and then paying. Such an admission could be useful to others who find themselves in the same boat. Unfortunately, it IS all about the money.
Perhaps that's true, I don't know. But I do know they just sold some very expensive licenses to Microsoft. What will happen if Microsoft goes ahead and starts cherry-picking the codebase for their own purposes without so much as a nod to the GPL? SCO will be long gone when the turds hit the fan in that case. They will claim "Hey, we licensed the rights from SCO. They told us not to worry about all that GPL crap."
I'm afraid that at that point a whole new can of worms will be opened. The current SCO case IS NEVER GOING TO TRIAL, IMO. SCO will either file for bankruptcy or settle. What then? Nothing will have been decided as far as legal precedents go. Nobody knows what terms were in Microsoft's licensing agreement with SCO. What if SCO granted them 'rights' in perpetuity that no successor-in-interest can ever revoke? Isn't that what IBM is claiming now vis-a-vis their agreements with AT&T for the rights to Unix?
THAT will be the big test. Right now, SCO is like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. Microsoft will not be so easy to take on in court. Hell, they took the entire U.S. government for a ride recently and all they got was a slap on the wrist! If and when that happens Microsoft will have already learned valuable lessons from this case. Maybe that's why IBM is reluctant to show their cards in this case so far.
In big-time legal circles and among high-level business executives there's the feeling that "If you're not being sued then you're nobody." I kid you not, I have seen it action. Believe it or not, being involved in a big case bestows upon you a certain air of respectability and status.
It's not like this is going to drag on for years. It might not be a bad thing to get into the sewer with the rats and kick some ass. Open Source Software, Free Software and the GPL will come out of this fiasco with a new mantle of respectability. I think it's pretty clear that this SCO case is never going to trial. If SCO doesn't settle soon, IBM will bankrupt them just by dragging out the legal process. IMO, and IANAL yada yada, this case is not going to establish any real legal precedents. IMO this case is Microsoft's way of testing the waters. The real test will come when MS decides in a year or so that they have the right to incorporate any and all of the code SCO just 'licensed' to them in their products without owing anything to anybody in return for its use. The current SCO fiasco only serves to help them guage the depth of the waters and the direction of the current they will be facing when that happens. Does anyone think IBM can squish Microsoft the way they will SCO? That future case will be the real DeathMatch and take years to pan out. That case will be the one where the GPL is seriously litigated.
Getting back to my original thought... being embroiled in a big lawsuit is not necessarily a bad thing. Will you really be surprised if, when this debacle is over, that Darth McFraud walks away still driving his Benz and living in his million dollar mansion? It will probably be even more obscene than that. Big corporations will be falling all over themselves to hire him because of the creative ways that he tried to boost SCO's stock price, even if the only investors that ultimately benefit are the insiders. Come on, you just know that's going to happen! Being tangled up in all these lawsuits isn't going to hurt him one iota.
I have seen arguments that legal counter-attacks might not be the best course of action right now. I have to disagree. I would like to see the FSF, as copyright holder for a lot of the GPL'ed code in GNU software get into this toute suite with all barrels blazing.
However, over the last several years demand for commercial launches eroded while global launch capacity increased. In light of the continuing severe downturn in the commercial launch market, the company has determined that a meaningful recovery of demand and pricing is unlikely for the foreseeable future.
I'm hoping the Chinese have some serious success in their announced manned space program. Perhaps that will incentivize the U.S. to get off their butts and start doing some serious exploration.
This may or may not be hype. The Japanese have been known to do it before. In the 1980s Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) launched a grand 10-year project to develop "5th generation" computer technology. They expected to leapfrog existing technology by orders of magnitude and create compnents for "intelligent" computing in the process. By most accounts, that project failed. It was a huge and embarrassing failure.
To be fair, the project did achieve some success. And I give them credit for at least finishing what they started. Nevertheless, just because they hype a fantastic multi-year project doesn't mean they'll succeed, and the Japanes have been known to hype projects deliberately just to drum up interest (also not a totally bad thing). I'll believe it when I see it.
MySQL AB didn't "win" anything. The parties agreed to settle out-of-court. There is a world of difference between a case that is settled out-of-court and one that progresses through a trial and where a verdict is rendered at the end. Furthermore, the opinion of the judge re. the GPL, while a good thing, establishes no precedent whatsoever. A case that is decided at the end by verdict does not automatically establish a legal precedent. A case must be appealed and the decision upheld (or reversed!) for a judicial precedent to be established.
Even if the MySQL suit had gone all the way through to a verdict, it still would not be considered to be a legal precedent unless the loser appealed and the higher court ruled that the applicable parts of the GPL were valid and enforceable.
I want to see the GPL litigated at least to an appeals court level. So far all we've seen on the legality and enforceability of the GPL are cases that get dismissed or the parties settle out of court. Nobody really knows how the GPL would stand up in a real Pier 6 brawl. I would like to see that test happen, and the sooner the better.
My biggest fear in the Open World is that the GPL will be held to be invalid in some way, shape or form and if that happens the greedheads will have a field day. If the provisions of the GPL are not enforceable - even after the original copyright holder is no longer around - we are all in some serious shit.
I was pulled off a plane recently because TSA forgot to do the extra security number on me. I had been randomly selected for this honor. They took me all the way back to the security chekpoint and then when they were done they took me back to the plane. No problem, right? Right. Except for the fact that my carry on bag never left the overhead compartment. Oh, and have you ever tried to get off of a plane from row 25 while there are still passengers boarding? That's a lot of fun, I can tell you! It only takes about 15 minutes in a crowded aisle going against the traffic to walk the 50 feet to the front door. Whew! Anyway, I was glad they didn't find the WMD I had in my carry-on bag that was on the plane the whole time! Not that I was worried. With Bush the Lesser in office I'm not worried about them finding any WMDs.
But seriously, I'l be using my middle finger for just about everything now on when I fly SWA, from adjusting the air nozzle to looking through the magazine rack.
What's next? I know - and I'm going to patent this system, too - bar code tattoos on the forehead. That way the airlines can automatically search their flight logs for a particular passenger going back 10 years. Too intrusive you say? Well, gee, if you don't want to get the tatto just don't fly on that airline! It's completely optional and won't affect your privacy at all.
The only people who ever collect anything meaningful under a class action lawsuit are the lawyers. A meaningful federal anti-spam law will have to allow for private action to be brought by individuals. With a $1000 per unsolicited email penalty, I (and many others) am prepared to march into court to collect. If I receive notice that Big Company A has engaged in spamming and I am entitled to join a class action, I'm likely to forget about it. What, I want a coupon for $0.50 off the next BigCo A penis enlarger I buy? While the lawyers take 1/3 of the $10 million off the top? No thanks. I'd rather sue them myself.
Some are saying the spammer will be impossible to find, or out of your local jurisdiction. I point out that most of these proposed laws require the spammer to use verifiable addresses. Sure, not all of them will comply, but the ones that do will be the more legitimate companies that are chomping at the bit to get into spamming once it becomes "legal". These companies are referred to as "mainsleaze".
Department of Homeland Security Chief Patriot Tom Ridge just announced a new push aimed at thwarting economic aid to you-know-who. This glorious new program will result in all financial transactions being monitored and recorded and archived forever. In this way credit card fraud will be stopped. In fact, it's going to be called the War On Credit Card Fraud And Money Laundering. Once appropriate policies are in place in the U.S., other nations of the world will also adopt the same standards. Or else. Recent action by the OECD and the FATF in blacklisting offshore tax havens was just the opening salvo in the War.
So, be Happy! Soon, thanks to the efforts of the patriots at the Department of Homeland Security, the entire WORLD-Wide-Web will be safe for you to reliably conduct credit card transactions. More importantly, it will be safe for merchants to collect their payments and banks to earn their interest. (You didn't really think anyone cared about you, did you?)
I'm only commenting because I actually wasted 20 minutes RTFA. The thing is a standard, scheduled, report that has to be filed every 6 months. It outlines the steps that the gubmint and MS have taken with respect to the different parts of the settlement agreement. It also lists the complaints received in the last 6 months (less than a dozen). MS could move a little faster on some of its action items, and that's it. Nothing more.
The premise of GIA is that if the government has a right to know personal details about citizens, then citizens have a right to similar information about the government.
This is all fine and dandy except for one small thing: the government does not have a right to know personal details about citizens with the force of Big Brother's dream come true: TIA. I think it would be more beneficial to channel the energy that goes into GIA into making sure we elect leaders who will kill TIA before it really gets rolling. And un-electing those who permitted it to be born in the first place. Besides, if Big Brother has anything to say about it, this MIT Media Lab project will last only until the first time MIT is unexpectedly denied a government research grant or contract.
I'm very close to that location. I don't know who lives there, but it's a house on a canal that's probably worth between $300,000 and $450,000 with annual property taxes in the area of $8,000. It's in a very dsireable location. I seriously doubt anyone with this type of asset would put it at risk by engaging in stupidly illegal behavior.
"We'll be giving the dog what the dog wants to eat," James F. Lyons, president of direct-marketing consultancy Optima Direct told the paper.
I usually flush shit down the toilet, not feed it to my dog. What goes around, comes around. I predict there will be a backlash against the sleaziest of these direct marketing firms and the slime that hire them. I already refuse to deal with companies that make me play touch-tone tag on their badly designed voice systems.
MS wasn't happy with the "premature" disclosure on BugTraq of the new IE6 bug.
"Its publication may put our customers at risk or at the very least cause customers needless confusion and apprehension"
Of course, the existence of the bug in the first place never put their customers at risk. What a crock of shite. Reminds me of MS's recent purchase of a virus protection sooftware company.
1. Sell software with security holes 2. Sell protection against those same holes 3. Profit!
Intent doesn't matter. Many a prosecutor has made his career by stretching laws beyond their original intent to cover the activities of defendants. This is commonly used when "throwing the book" at somebody. They pile up charge after charge to encourage the defendent to plea bargain.
Case in point: The mayor of a medium-sized town was caught and arrested a couple of years ago for a really heinous crime. The Eff Bee Eye obtained damming evidence by tapping his phones. The only problem is that the evidence they got was for a crime totally separate from what they were investigating him for. What they caught him doing was not a federal crime, so they had to invent one. They charged him with interstate something-or-other because he used a telephone to arrange his evil deeds, and a telephone is considered a device used in interstate commerce.
It didn't matter that the phone calls he made never left the boundaries of his town. The fact that a telephone could be used for interstate commerce was enough for federal prosecutors to charge and ultimately convict him. IMO this is wrong. His crimes were truly horrific, yes, and he did deserve a harsh sentence, but this twisting of laws to suit the whims of prosecutors is dangerous. There were plenty of state laws that covered his crimes, but the state was not investigating him and the Feds just couldn't legally turn over incidental evidence they had collected to the state. Some would say that's a technicality. I say it's an abuse of prosecutorial power.
What scares me about all this is that in the future they can start this activity by just repealing the legislation that prohibits this surveillance in the first place. Someone needs to step up and get a consensus that this is flat-out unconstitutional and declare it as such, and make it clear that this kind of surveillance will never be allowed. Furthermore, anyone who proposes such a program should be expelled from the House or the Senate for violating their oath.
This site in Finland has some pretty interesting information on the initial designs that were proposed for the Space Shuttle. In some of the concepts it's interesting to see shuttles docked with a space station of some sort and astronauts outside buzzing around.
Over on the sci.space.shuttle newsgroup there's been a flood of posts from space newbies asking what are considered "ridiculous" questions like "why didn't they take a spacewalk to survey the damage" and "why didn't they go to the space station for repairs?" At first glance, these questions are uninformed, but in the larger sense if you consider the vision that was presented to us (I was around then, albeit as a child) the reality we finally got didn't even come close to the grand scope of it all. Basically there were some mighty big plans afoot after Apollo, but they got squashed pretty fast when Nixon taught NASA a significant lesson: Just because one president wants to do something doesn't mean the next president has to sign up for it. Sad, really, but that's the way it goes.
Your nickname is appropriate. Consider this: an airliner's black box is in the tail. In an accident, the tail separates from the rest of the fuselage. Where does that leave you? You still lose the very last bit of data that was capable of being recorded. No difference. There's always the chance that there's *some* data you're not going to get when the shit hits the fan.
Ejection seats were not "phased out". The weight penalty was huge compared to the degree of safety they added. They were only there in the first place because until the first flight, nobody was sure the thing would even be able to fly and actually glide to a safe landing. The first test flights proved that it could.
That funny feeling you have is your tin-foil hat is on too tight.
Except for those brief moments in an airliner when the data the box is recording get cut off from the box itself. Even if a plane's black box is working it's kind of hard to know what was happening with the $CRITICAL_AC_PART when it's cable has been cut dur to the airframe breaking in half.
What's really scary is not that fair use is being destroyed, or that copyright extension after copyright extension gets passed due to the bribing of elected officials. What really scares me is that the gubmint is going to look at the music and film industries as thriving industries and do whatever needs to be done to protect them. Sure, the thinly disguised bribery will continue, but thses "industries" will sell the pols on the overall economic impact of their decisions. Since people vote with their wallets for the most part, not even the Constitution will ultimately stand up to $$$ forces at work.
Even if the natural order of things is for the old money music publishers to go out of business, do you really think the Congresscritters are going to just stand by while a multi-billion dollar industry goes down the drain? Certainly not! There are way too many jobs and livlihoods dependent on Hollywood to just have them disappear because of some newfangled technology that punks think they can abuse. (note sarcasm, please). Back in the late 1970s a guy named Frank Zappa summed it up nicely on the album "Joe's Garage":
... it is my responsibility to enforce all the laws that haven't been passed yet. It is also my responsibility to alert each and every one of you to the potential consequences of various ordinary everyday activities you might be performing which could eventually lead to *The Death Penalty* (or affect your parents' credit rating). Our criminal institutions are full of little creeps like you who do wrong things...and many of them were driven to these crimes by a horrible force called MUSIC!
Our studies have shown that this horrible force is so dangerous to society at large that laws are being drawn up at this very moment to stop it forever! Cruel and inhuman punishments are being carefully described in tiny paragraphs so they won't conflict with the Constitution (which, itself, is being modified in order to accommodate THE FUTURE).
Man oh man, Zappa was WAY ahead of his time. Well, at least by 20 years or so.
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There are 3 RM downloads at the MS site. The first is the one in the article - the Client piece. There are also a part for the Server and SDKs for CLient and Server. The Server SDK is not available to just anyone. MS has to license you. They do this via a form of their security Certificate Server. The SDK lets 2 users connect for development work, but beyond that you need a license to code for it.
.NET, SOAP, IE 6 and IIS. This all has the feel of an end-to-end "solution" that they will market to the RIAA and MPAA types. It looks like a substantial infrastructure needs to be in place in order to enable Rights Management content, and the consumer^H^H^H^H user will access protected material by going to a specially engineered web site using IE 6. They also mention a "lockbox", whatever that is.
They mention some of the technologies used: COM+, an Active Directory server,
Your average hobbyist programmer or shareware programmer isn't going to be able to participate in this. Something tells me the licensing fees won't be cheap. The "right" to access protected material obviously come from certificates, and that model of PKI has proved to be troublesome at best. Furthermore, the "rights" being protected by this setup are those that perpetuate the aims of the RIAA, the MPAA and the like.
They're not about to let anybody get in on this protection racket. The certificates will no doubt be VERY expensive for the content producers so that the barrier to entry is high. They don't want some kid in Hong Kong to encode his music files using this technology and then give them away to others, fully within the confines of this system. This is really bad, because anyone even tinkering around with the technology without a license will automatically become a criminal under the DMA.
I flew them earlier this year. After already being on the plane 15 minutes at the gate a guy comes on board, calls my name, and escorts me off. Apparently they had marked me for the double-secret security scanning and failed to do it at the security checkpoint. No problems, really, and I was back on the plane about 10 minutes later in plenty of time for departure. Of course, my carry on bag was left in the overhead compartment the whole time I was off the plane.
It was the security folks who failed to do the extra scanning at the checkpoint, but it was Jet Blue's guy who got me off the plane. He didn't know and didn't care that I might have already snuck something onto the plane. If Jet Blue wants to help fight terror in the skies they'd better re-think their priorities. Paying lip-service to security is a long tradition in commercial aviation. Just think about this: if there was no law passed mandating crash-proof cockpit doors, most airlines wouldn't have put them in.
Not at all. Look at how much we've learned. The experience we've gained has been enormous. We learned that building a reusable winged spaceship is doable, but doing so on less-than-shoestring budget isn't the smart way to go. Once we've established a real infrastructure in orbit, in another hundred years or so, I think a reusable shuttle will again make sense. Right now it doesn't. It was supposed to be cheap. It's not. It was supposed to be safe. It's not as good as it could be. When you think about it, both Challenger and Columbia were doomed by the Rube Goldberg contraption that boosts the orbiter into space. The original design called for a reusable flyback booster as well. That was scrapped early in the program to save money.
It's too bad that companies don't stand for principals. They can't. Their raison d'etre is to enhance shareholder value, and that means cutting a favorable deal when it's practical to do so. The reason I lament this is that MS once again gets away scott free while admitting no wrongdoing . A person - an individual - might stay the course and see a case like this through to its end provided they had the resources to pay their legal bills (which of course, almost no one has). That end would ideally involve their adversary admitting to wrongdoing, and then paying. Such an admission could be useful to others who find themselves in the same boat. Unfortunately, it IS all about the money.
Perhaps that's true, I don't know. But I do know they just sold some very expensive licenses to Microsoft. What will happen if Microsoft goes ahead and starts cherry-picking the codebase for their own purposes without so much as a nod to the GPL? SCO will be long gone when the turds hit the fan in that case. They will claim "Hey, we licensed the rights from SCO. They told us not to worry about all that GPL crap."
I'm afraid that at that point a whole new can of worms will be opened. The current SCO case IS NEVER GOING TO TRIAL, IMO. SCO will either file for bankruptcy or settle. What then? Nothing will have been decided as far as legal precedents go. Nobody knows what terms were in Microsoft's licensing agreement with SCO. What if SCO granted them 'rights' in perpetuity that no successor-in-interest can ever revoke? Isn't that what IBM is claiming now vis-a-vis their agreements with AT&T for the rights to Unix?
THAT will be the big test. Right now, SCO is like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. Microsoft will not be so easy to take on in court. Hell, they took the entire U.S. government for a ride recently and all they got was a slap on the wrist! If and when that happens Microsoft will have already learned valuable lessons from this case. Maybe that's why IBM is reluctant to show their cards in this case so far.
In big-time legal circles and among high-level business executives there's the feeling that "If you're not being sued then you're nobody." I kid you not, I have seen it action. Believe it or not, being involved in a big case bestows upon you a certain air of respectability and status.
It's not like this is going to drag on for years. It might not be a bad thing to get into the sewer with the rats and kick some ass. Open Source Software, Free Software and the GPL will come out of this fiasco with a new mantle of respectability. I think it's pretty clear that this SCO case is never going to trial. If SCO doesn't settle soon, IBM will bankrupt them just by dragging out the legal process. IMO, and IANAL yada yada, this case is not going to establish any real legal precedents. IMO this case is Microsoft's way of testing the waters. The real test will come when MS decides in a year or so that they have the right to incorporate any and all of the code SCO just 'licensed' to them in their products without owing anything to anybody in return for its use. The current SCO fiasco only serves to help them guage the depth of the waters and the direction of the current they will be facing when that happens. Does anyone think IBM can squish Microsoft the way they will SCO? That future case will be the real DeathMatch and take years to pan out. That case will be the one where the GPL is seriously litigated.
Getting back to my original thought... being embroiled in a big lawsuit is not necessarily a bad thing. Will you really be surprised if, when this debacle is over, that Darth McFraud walks away still driving his Benz and living in his million dollar mansion? It will probably be even more obscene than that. Big corporations will be falling all over themselves to hire him because of the creative ways that he tried to boost SCO's stock price, even if the only investors that ultimately benefit are the insiders. Come on, you just know that's going to happen! Being tangled up in all these lawsuits isn't going to hurt him one iota.
I have seen arguments that legal counter-attacks might not be the best course of action right now. I have to disagree. I would like to see the FSF, as copyright holder for a lot of the GPL'ed code in GNU software get into this toute suite with all barrels blazing.
I'm hoping the Chinese have some serious success in their announced manned space program. Perhaps that will incentivize the U.S. to get off their butts and start doing some serious exploration.
This may or may not be hype. The Japanese have been known to do it before. In the 1980s Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) launched a grand 10-year project to develop "5th generation" computer technology. They expected to leapfrog existing technology by orders of magnitude and create compnents for "intelligent" computing in the process. By most accounts, that project failed. It was a huge and embarrassing failure.
To be fair, the project did achieve some success. And I give them credit for at least finishing what they started. Nevertheless, just because they hype a fantastic multi-year project doesn't mean they'll succeed, and the Japanes have been known to hype projects deliberately just to drum up interest (also not a totally bad thing). I'll believe it when I see it.
MySQL AB didn't "win" anything. The parties agreed to settle out-of-court. There is a world of difference between a case that is settled out-of-court and one that progresses through a trial and where a verdict is rendered at the end. Furthermore, the opinion of the judge re. the GPL, while a good thing, establishes no precedent whatsoever. A case that is decided at the end by verdict does not automatically establish a legal precedent. A case must be appealed and the decision upheld (or reversed!) for a judicial precedent to be established.
Even if the MySQL suit had gone all the way through to a verdict, it still would not be considered to be a legal precedent unless the loser appealed and the higher court ruled that the applicable parts of the GPL were valid and enforceable.
I want to see the GPL litigated at least to an appeals court level. So far all we've seen on the legality and enforceability of the GPL are cases that get dismissed or the parties settle out of court. Nobody really knows how the GPL would stand up in a real Pier 6 brawl. I would like to see that test happen, and the sooner the better.
My biggest fear in the Open World is that the GPL will be held to be invalid in some way, shape or form and if that happens the greedheads will have a field day. If the provisions of the GPL are not enforceable - even after the original copyright holder is no longer around - we are all in some serious shit.
I was pulled off a plane recently because TSA forgot to do the extra security number on me. I had been randomly selected for this honor. They took me all the way back to the security chekpoint and then when they were done they took me back to the plane. No problem, right? Right. Except for the fact that my carry on bag never left the overhead compartment. Oh, and have you ever tried to get off of a plane from row 25 while there are still passengers boarding? That's a lot of fun, I can tell you! It only takes about 15 minutes in a crowded aisle going against the traffic to walk the 50 feet to the front door. Whew! Anyway, I was glad they didn't find the WMD I had in my carry-on bag that was on the plane the whole time! Not that I was worried. With Bush the Lesser in office I'm not worried about them finding any WMDs.
But seriously, I'l be using my middle finger for just about everything now on when I fly SWA, from adjusting the air nozzle to looking through the magazine rack.
What's next? I know - and I'm going to patent this system, too - bar code tattoos on the forehead. That way the airlines can automatically search their flight logs for a particular passenger going back 10 years. Too intrusive you say? Well, gee, if you don't want to get the tatto just don't fly on that airline! It's completely optional and won't affect your privacy at all.
The only people who ever collect anything meaningful under a class action lawsuit are the lawyers. A meaningful federal anti-spam law will have to allow for private action to be brought by individuals. With a $1000 per unsolicited email penalty, I (and many others) am prepared to march into court to collect. If I receive notice that Big Company A has engaged in spamming and I am entitled to join a class action, I'm likely to forget about it. What, I want a coupon for $0.50 off the next BigCo A penis enlarger I buy? While the lawyers take 1/3 of the $10 million off the top? No thanks. I'd rather sue them myself.
Some are saying the spammer will be impossible to find, or out of your local jurisdiction. I point out that most of these proposed laws require the spammer to use verifiable addresses. Sure, not all of them will comply, but the ones that do will be the more legitimate companies that are chomping at the bit to get into spamming once it becomes "legal". These companies are referred to as "mainsleaze".
Department of Homeland Security Chief Patriot Tom Ridge just announced a new push aimed at thwarting economic aid to you-know-who. This glorious new program will result in all financial transactions being monitored and recorded and archived forever. In this way credit card fraud will be stopped. In fact, it's going to be called the War On Credit Card Fraud And Money Laundering. Once appropriate policies are in place in the U.S., other nations of the world will also adopt the same standards. Or else. Recent action by the OECD and the FATF in blacklisting offshore tax havens was just the opening salvo in the War.
So, be Happy! Soon, thanks to the efforts of the patriots at the Department of Homeland Security, the entire WORLD-Wide-Web will be safe for you to reliably conduct credit card transactions. More importantly, it will be safe for merchants to collect their payments and banks to earn their interest. (You didn't really think anyone cared about you, did you?)
The dangerous fallacy that "since it's worked N times before" that it "will work N more times."
How do you reconcile this "dangerous fallacy" to the other old adage:
If it ain't broke don't fix it."
???? You can't have your cake and eat it too!
I'm only commenting because I actually wasted 20 minutes RTFA. The thing is a standard, scheduled, report that has to be filed every 6 months. It outlines the steps that the gubmint and MS have taken with respect to the different parts of the settlement agreement. It also lists the complaints received in the last 6 months (less than a dozen). MS could move a little faster on some of its action items, and that's it. Nothing more.
The premise of GIA is that if the government has a right to know personal details about citizens, then citizens have a right to similar information about the government.
This is all fine and dandy except for one small thing: the government does not have a right to know personal details about citizens with the force of Big Brother's dream come true: TIA. I think it would be more beneficial to channel the energy that goes into GIA into making sure we elect leaders who will kill TIA before it really gets rolling. And un-electing those who permitted it to be born in the first place. Besides, if Big Brother has anything to say about it, this MIT Media Lab project will last only until the first time MIT is unexpectedly denied a government research grant or contract.
I'm very close to that location. I don't know who lives there, but it's a house on a canal that's probably worth between $300,000 and $450,000 with annual property taxes in the area of $8,000. It's in a very dsireable location. I seriously doubt anyone with this type of asset would put it at risk by engaging in stupidly illegal behavior.
"We'll be giving the dog what the dog wants to eat," James F. Lyons, president of direct-marketing consultancy Optima Direct told the paper.
I usually flush shit down the toilet, not feed it to my dog. What goes around, comes around. I predict there will be a backlash against the sleaziest of these direct marketing firms and the slime that hire them. I already refuse to deal with companies that make me play touch-tone tag on their badly designed voice systems.
Of course, the existence of the bug in the first place never put their customers at risk. What a crock of shite. Reminds me of MS's recent purchase of a virus protection sooftware company.
1. Sell software with security holes
2. Sell protection against those same holes
3. Profit!
The arrogance is astounding.
Intent doesn't matter. Many a prosecutor has made his career by stretching laws beyond their original intent to cover the activities of defendants. This is commonly used when "throwing the book" at somebody. They pile up charge after charge to encourage the defendent to plea bargain.
Case in point: The mayor of a medium-sized town was caught and arrested a couple of years ago for a really heinous crime. The Eff Bee Eye obtained damming evidence by tapping his phones. The only problem is that the evidence they got was for a crime totally separate from what they were investigating him for. What they caught him doing was not a federal crime, so they had to invent one. They charged him with interstate something-or-other because he used a telephone to arrange his evil deeds, and a telephone is considered a device used in interstate commerce.
It didn't matter that the phone calls he made never left the boundaries of his town. The fact that a telephone could be used for interstate commerce was enough for federal prosecutors to charge and ultimately convict him. IMO this is wrong. His crimes were truly horrific, yes, and he did deserve a harsh sentence, but this twisting of laws to suit the whims of prosecutors is dangerous. There were plenty of state laws that covered his crimes, but the state was not investigating him and the Feds just couldn't legally turn over incidental evidence they had collected to the state. Some would say that's a technicality. I say it's an abuse of prosecutorial power.
What scares me about all this is that in the future they can start this activity by just repealing the legislation that prohibits this surveillance in the first place. Someone needs to step up and get a consensus that this is flat-out unconstitutional and declare it as such, and make it clear that this kind of surveillance will never be allowed. Furthermore, anyone who proposes such a program should be expelled from the House or the Senate for violating their oath.
This site in Finland has some pretty interesting information on the initial designs that were proposed for the Space Shuttle. In some of the concepts it's interesting to see shuttles docked with a space station of some sort and astronauts outside buzzing around.
Over on the sci.space.shuttle newsgroup there's been a flood of posts from space newbies asking what are considered "ridiculous" questions like "why didn't they take a spacewalk to survey the damage" and "why didn't they go to the space station for repairs?" At first glance, these questions are uninformed, but in the larger sense if you consider the vision that was presented to us (I was around then, albeit as a child) the reality we finally got didn't even come close to the grand scope of it all. Basically there were some mighty big plans afoot after Apollo, but they got squashed pretty fast when Nixon taught NASA a significant lesson: Just because one president wants to do something doesn't mean the next president has to sign up for it. Sad, really, but that's the way it goes.
Your nickname is appropriate. Consider this: an airliner's black box is in the tail. In an accident, the tail separates from the rest of the fuselage. Where does that leave you? You still lose the very last bit of data that was capable of being recorded. No difference. There's always the chance that there's *some* data you're not going to get when the shit hits the fan.
Ejection seats were not "phased out". The weight penalty was huge compared to the degree of safety they added. They were only there in the first place because until the first flight, nobody was sure the thing would even be able to fly and actually glide to a safe landing. The first test flights proved that it could.
That funny feeling you have is your tin-foil hat is on too tight.
Except for those brief moments in an airliner when the data the box is recording get cut off from the box itself. Even if a plane's black box is working it's kind of hard to know what was happening with the $CRITICAL_AC_PART when it's cable has been cut dur to the airframe breaking in half.
Even if the natural order of things is for the old money music publishers to go out of business, do you really think the Congresscritters are going to just stand by while a multi-billion dollar industry goes down the drain? Certainly not! There are way too many jobs and livlihoods dependent on Hollywood to just have them disappear because of some newfangled technology that punks think they can abuse. (note sarcasm, please). Back in the late 1970s a guy named Frank Zappa summed it up nicely on the album "Joe's Garage":
Man oh man, Zappa was WAY ahead of his time. Well, at least by 20 years or so.