You seen to have missed the syntax of the DOCTYPE element. The first identifier, the one immediately after PUBLIC, is what you describe. It's a system identifier useful for looking up the DTD in the machine's local store of DTDs. The second identifier, the one that's a URL, is a fallback intended to allow software that needs the DTD to fetch a copy when there isn't one stored locally.
Yes, the telemarketers have rights. In this case specifically, the right to free speech. They're free to talk about their product all they want. Nobody disputes this (well, nobody sane anyway).
But that's not what they want. What they want is to use my phone line for their speech. And when they ask that, the question of their free-speech rights doesn't even come into it because they aren't asking for free speech. They're asking for the right to appropriate someone else's property without authorization or permission. And nowhere under law is anyone (except the government) given that right. In fact most laws that speak to the subject deny that as a right and classify it as one variety or another of crime or civil tort.
Yes, phone numbers are "public" in the sense that they're published in the phone directory. My address is "public" in the sense that it's clearly marked on my mailbox and house. That doesn't mean, though, that J. Random Passerby has permission to come barging into my house and make himself at home. The same with phone numbers.
If the telemarketers want the right to speak freely using a particular phone, they can foot the bill for it. As long as I'm footing the bill, though, they use it at my sufferance. And if I don't suffer them to use it, that's just tough for them.
Because there's a good chance there's a sucker out there who doesn't know AOL's dial-up business is going down the tubes. Said sucker will pay good money for the spun-off property. Why throw something in the trash when you can get some cash for it and make winding it down somebody else's problem?
Similarly, nothing in this statement is intended to relieve Sun of its obligations, if any, under the applicable rules of OASIS.
And this statement in Sun's license disagrees with you. Remember that ODF 2.0 woudln't be a new specification, it'd be a new version of an existing specification. And patent grants are for the specification, not any particular version of it. See the OASIS IPR document, particularly section 11.1 which says that a contributor or participant is permanently subject to their contributor or participation obligations even after they withdraw from the TC, and 11.2 which says they're permanently subject to those obligations even if they withdraw from OASIS completely. The obligations, and the grants, don't retroactively disappear just because a new draft is issued or a new version approved.
In short, Sun can withdraw rather than license their patents to OASIS but they can't withdraw license grants they've already, by earlier contribution or participation, been obligated to give. In shorter, OASIS rules say "No take-backs.", and Sun agreed to be bound by those rules and they say so right in their covenant.
No, ODF 2.0 would be entirely eligible for ISO approval. Now, it wouldn't be eligible if it contained anything covered by Sun's patents that weren't already licensed for use in it, but then OASIS rules prohibit including anything like that anyway so that'd only be an issue if OASIS broke their own rules. And anything included in ODF 1.0 would be covered by the licenses Sun granted as part of it's agreement with OASIS (again, this is required by OASIS rules), so ODF 2.0 could include any of that without problems. If Sun tried to claim infringement, OASIS would just wave the license with Sun's signature on it and that'd be the end of that.
If you're thinking that the patent license for things in ODF 1.0 only cover them in ODF 1.0 and aren't valid for ODF 2.0, I'm afraid that's wrong. The licenses are for use in implementations of the ODF spec, current and all future versions. If Sun didn't agree to that in their license, OASIS wouldn't've accepted the material into the ODF 1.0 spec in the first place.
Well, if Sun doesn't participate in the OASIS process, Sun gets no say in what OASIS does with the spec. So saying that Sun would have control is simply wrong. If anything, Sun not participating means Sun would have no control over what OASIS does with the spec.
Any patents that would be required for ODF 1.0 will continue to be covered regardless of what Sun does later. If they walk away from ODF 2.0, they can't unilaterally revoke the patent licenses already granted. The OASIS rules already cover this, and notice that Sun agrees that nothing they say can relieve them of their independent obligations under OASIS rules. Sun could, after walking away, enforce patents on anything not currently in ODF 1.0, but that's not a problem. OASIS rules already prohibit including things in a standard if they're potentially subject to patent until a patent agreement is in place covering them. And OASIS does run patent searches, so if Sun has something patented it'll turn up. It's possible to game this, but it requires some fancy footwork with the applications.
They'd have to really work at it. The normal IPv6 link configuration process only allows the ISP to set the leading/64 prefix. The trailing 64 bits are entirely determined by the host, and can't be forced to any particular value by the upstream router. It's possible to force the issue by way of MAC registration and DHCPv6 or a firewall, but it takes a fair amount of configuration to do it and it doesn't work well with the Windows IPv6 stack (which much prefers that you use stateless autoconfiguration of interfaces).
I don't think you can get an injunction. However, when someone claims patent infringement by a product, I believe there's a legal procedure the maker of that product can follow to basically demand that the claimant identify the specific patents or acknowledge there is no infringement. And if that procedure's followed, the claimant has to identify the patents. If they don't then the maker can hold the claimant to that silence, preventing the claimant from asserting any patents they didn't identify in response to the demand. You'd need a lawyer to look up the details, and AFAIK the only people who can make such a demand are people actually in the business of making and selling the allegedly-infringing product, nobody else.
IMHO Microsoft's "defense" of it's patents (if any) has been anything but aggressive. Yes, they've made a lot of hot air in the media about how Linux might infringe some unknown patents they claim to hold. But if they were being aggressive, they wouldn't be making such a nebulous claim. They'd be sending letters demanding royalties and quoting patent numbers, and filing infringement cases when violators refused to pay. They haven't. They haven't even mentioned a single patent number they claim Linux infringes. And not without cause. My recollection is that Microsoft themselves said openly that the reason they aren't claiming specific patent numbers is that they're afraid if they got that specific that the open-source community would be successful in having those patents invalidated.
If you don't have a patent number, you don't have a patent. I'll consider Microsoft to be aggressively defending their patents against infringement in Linux when they start citing specific patent numbers.
So far I've had good luck with Dotster. Everything I've had to do I've been able to do through their Web interface, including requesting and entering transfer authorization codes. No problems renewing domains through them. They offer domain parking, but it seems more a sideline than a main part of their business.
And you've now learned a few valuable lessons about domains:
Make sure your name and address are listed as the registrant for the domain. Never ever accept someone else registering the domain for you, no matter how much you trust them. Also make sure you're listed as the billing and administrative contact.
Always, always, always enable domain locking. Set your domain so it can only be transferred by you getting an authorization code and providing it to the new registrar. Combined with the first item this makes it as hard as possible for someone else to take control of your domain without you knowingly giving it to them.
Don't register your domain through your Web host, register it through a regular registrar. If your Web host's going to run DNS for you you can make them the technical contact and just set your domain's NS records up with the nameserver information they give you, but keep the registration separate. That way you can move hosts without having to worry about domain registration issues.
If you absolutely insist on registering your domain through a Web host, make sure you transfer the registration elsewhere before cancelling your hosting contract or letting it expire.
To which they'd respond "Our records show it's a Best Buy TV. If you bought it from someone else, produce the receipt proving that. If you can't, we're charging you with theft of Best Buy's TV.".
Yes, but there's a problem: it's going to cost a lot of money to defend yourself in court, even if you win. And, except in very exceptional circumstances, you will not be allowed to counter-sue for your costs. If you manage to prove that you do have licenses for all the software the BSA wants to audit, you're guaranteed not to be able to recover costs. The EULA for the software you just proved you legally have (and whose EULA you accepted) is almost guaranteed to provide for BSA audits at your expense, and the court's very unlikely to rule that you aren't bound by the terms you accepted. The only way you'll have any chance at recovering costs is if you don't use even a single copy of any piece of software from a BSA member, have never at any point used such software, and can document the installation history of every bit of software on every machine your company owns in sufficient detail to convince a judge of this despite the best efforts of the BSA to poke holes in your records. And even in that case you'll have to spend large sums of money now, while any recovery you get (if you get it) will be years down the road after all the appeals are settled.
The BSA knows all this. They count on it. If they think you're balking, the first thing they'll do is point out just how much more they can cost you if you don't co-operate. And most businesses do the short-term economic calculation and decide it's cheaper to roll over than to fight and win.
Go look at the BSA's website. What they want is two parts: proof that your copy is legitimate (product key or certificate of authenticity) and proof that your copy was paid for (actual receipt made out to you). Note that this is entirely reasonable, the unreasonable part is the BSA's standards of proof being far more strict than the law allows for. They then use the cost of your going into court and proving that they don't have a case to get a settlement from you.
You haven't dealt with the BSA, have you? Having unique product keys isn't enough, the BSA says that outright. All you having that key means is that someone somewhere paid for that software. The BSA wants proof that it was you that paid for that product, not your friend down the street who gave you a copy of his stuff. You can wave product keys and certificates of authenticity around all you want, they won't accept those without the receipt to go with them.
And no, they will get upset with you if it's only one computer missing the receipt. Maybe especially if that's all they can find. After all, if they don't find something to pin on you, you might very well be able to sue them for the (rather high) costs you had to incur. Ask Sterling Ball about that.
But what happens when I do buy a TV from Best Buy. I hand them my credit card, the charge is approved, it shows up on my bill and I pay it, in short I bought and paid for that TV. 2 years later, Best Buy comes around demanding that I prove to them that I really did pay for that TV, and if I can't they're going to charge me with theft. I show them my credit-card statement showing their charge for the price of the TV, and they say "Not enough. You need to show us a printed store receipt for it.". Now, after 2 years the warranty's expired. The credit-card charge is long since paid and history. The TV's not something I can take as a deduction on my taxes or anything. Why in the world would I have the receipt still around? But Best Buy still says that they'll charge me with theft if I can't cough up that receipt.
Now, should Best Buy be demonizing me, calling me a thief? Or should I be demonizing them as clueless nut-cases?
My experience is that the engineering/science mindset makes people less inclined to extreme conservative or religious positions. More likely explanation: the terrorists realize that the things one learns in science, engineering and medical curriculums are useful for their operations, so they concentrate in those fields for the benefits they'll gain. Another more likely explanation: the countries terrorists tend to mostly come from have good reasons, because of their economies, to encourage large portions of their population to go into science, engineering and medical fields, and when the base population the terrorists are recruiting from have high percentages of graduates in those fields it only stands to reason that the terrorist groups will have similar percentages.
They're mutually exclusive. The only way to enforce DRM is to encrypt the contents and only permit decryption when authorized. But, to decrypt the content you have to have the decryption key present. If the software is open-source, anyone can simply change the code to dump out the decryption key. Once they have the key, they can decrypt the content exactly as if they were authorized to do so. Or, they can simply change the code so the enforcing application always gets back "Yes." as the answer to "Is this operation authorized?". And protecting the code using signatures won't work either, since the user can simply change the signature-verification key and sign the modified application himself or simply remove the signature check entirely.
DRM requires preventing the user from seeing the internals of the program and preventing him from modifying the program. Open source starts with the user being able to see every bit of the internals of the program and being able to modify the program in any way he wants. You've invalidated DRM's basic requirements before you've even begun.
Your point #1 is false, I'm afraid. Yes, the components were designed to work over a wide temperature range. The problem is the change. Gradual or not, components made of different materials expand and contract at different rates as temperature changes. As long as the temperature stays steady, regardless of what that steady temperature is, there's no problem. But if it's changing, even slowly, then the different materials want to change size relative to each other. That produces stress. You can see this in the thermostat that controls your home's heating and cooling. It's made of strips of 2 metals with drastically different thermal expansion ratios bonded together. As the temperature changes, the bimetallic strip physically warps. The same thing happens inside every chip and solder joint in your computer every time it warms up or cools down. And eventually those joins start to crack apart. That does two things. First, it increases the electrical resistance of the joint. Higher resistance = more heat. Second, it disrupts the thermal transfer from the chips themselves into their carriers by disrupting the tight physical contact between them. So now the chips aren't being cooled quite as well, and at the same time they're running hotter internally. All that turns into a shorter lifespan.
As for #2, not anymore. That surge effect's confined to the power supply itself. It still affects the PSU, but no worse than normal power-line noise will. The big effect is actually on the drive motors and bearings. Stopped, the bearings settle a bit. When the platters are spun up, it takes a moment for the bearings to lift up on their film of lubricant again. One cycle like that puts as much wear on the bearings as many hours of steady spinning. And the power cost of keeping a drive spinning is minimal. Think about spinning a wheel, which is all the drive's platters are. It takes a fair amount of effort to start a heavy wheel spinning and get it up to speed, but once it's going it takes very little effort to keep it spinning at that speed. It's enough on my large drives that I can actually see the spike in power draw at the wall socket when a drive is spun up from a dead stop.
When people comment about how their machines aren't having problems, I'm often a bit skeptical. I've had quite a few people ask me for help with a computer that "just started having problems a few days ago". When I throw my hardware diagnostic program at it, I get a veritable flood of red malfunction and error indications. On the last one, "Every now and then it won't boot, and occasionally a program dies for no reason." turned into having to replace the motherboard and all the RAM (every stick of memory had at least 2 bad columns, and the EIDE controller was fried and corrupting data during large DMA transfers) and restore the entire system from original media and backups (losing about 10% of the data in the process, the backups didn't go back far enough to contain uncorrupted copies of the files).
At work, LCDs are too expensive. Yes, they're cheaper than buying a monitor these days. But work doesn't have to buy a monitor, it's already there and paid for. So, LCDs get bought only when either a) an entire desktop system is being replaced and we can just spec an LCD when ordering the new system, or b) the monitor's failed and a replacement would have to be bought.
Work's using Dell and HP mini-desktops. The main thing is that most of the office systems still use big clunky CRTs that literally draw almost as much power as the computer itself does going full-out. We're slowly replacing those with LCDs, but my guess is it's going to be another 2-3 years before we see the last of the monitors go out the door.
I tend to leave the computer on overnight, but with things like monitor power-down and CPU idling enabled. When it's not doing anything it drops about 90% of it's power consumption after 15 minutes, and even when working with the monitor off (eg. running the nightly backup) it's still running at less than 50% of full power. If I power it off, by comparison, it can't run it's virus scan, backup, update check and the like overnight and has to do those things while I'm trying to use it during the day. Plus there's wear and tear to consider, I've noticed that the office computers that get turned off and on every day tend to fail and need replacing several times before mine (that stays on all the time) has a failure.
So my preference is to leave computers running but with power-saving features set to minimize power without shutting things down. This means hard drives continue to spin but the CPU goes into low-power idle mode. The monitor goes to suspend mode (beam and deflection power is off but the circuits and coils are kept warm), not powered-down completely. That seems to be the best balance between reducing power consumption, allowing it to run maintenance operations overnight and minimizing wear and tear and thermal stress on the components. If management absolutely insists on ignoring those last two in favor of the first, wake-on-LAN is essential to allow nightly maintenance to happen.
Not the same technology. Those theft-deterrent tags are just a small piece of metal foil shaped/sized so it's resonant frequency falls at a particular RF frequency. Broadcast on that frequency near it and it "pings" back with a signal. Hit it with a strong enough signal, the heat generated melts the foil and the tag no longer reacts. Notice that there's no data at all here, the tag's just a reflector. The gates near the store doors transmit a low-power signal and sound an alarm if they hear an echo from a theft-deterrent tag, while the pads at the registers transmit a higher-power short-range signal to disable the tags (the cashier runs the item across the pad after they've rung it up and before putting it in your bag).
The RFID tags Walmart wants aren't just a piece of foil, they've got an actual antenna, a few bytes of data storage and an RF transmitter inside. When presented with a radio signal they leech power from the RF field and transmit the data stored inside them for a receiver to pick up. This can be done fairly cheaply, but it's still much more expensive than the simple passive theft-deterrent tags. One tag per pallet is probably not too bad. One tag per item, though, even at a nickel per tag is probably in a lot of cases costing more than the distributor's profit margin on that item. Combine with the distributor's knowing that Walmart expects the distributor's prices to go down year-over-year and some distributors are undoubtably going to decide they can't afford to do business with Walmart anymore. It may be better to make a penny an item on a million items than a dime on a thousand, but it's not better to lose a penny an item on that million.
You aren't keeping up on things, then. Almost every current DRM system is aimed directly at preventing the file from being played on any device except the original one it was bought for and preventing the transfer of the file to anyone else. Whether a new copy's being made or the original is being transferred fully... isn't even a consideration for the DRM system.
As I noted, the RIAA (through their attorney) has explicitly told Congress that an individual taking a CD they own and putting songs from it on their own personal MP3 player for their own personal use is illegal and DRM needs to be able to prevent it. The protections on DVDs are considered by the major labels and studios to be a complete and utter failure.
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You seen to have missed the syntax of the DOCTYPE element. The first identifier, the one immediately after PUBLIC, is what you describe. It's a system identifier useful for looking up the DTD in the machine's local store of DTDs. The second identifier, the one that's a URL, is a fallback intended to allow software that needs the DTD to fetch a copy when there isn't one stored locally.
Yes, the telemarketers have rights. In this case specifically, the right to free speech. They're free to talk about their product all they want. Nobody disputes this (well, nobody sane anyway).
But that's not what they want. What they want is to use my phone line for their speech. And when they ask that, the question of their free-speech rights doesn't even come into it because they aren't asking for free speech. They're asking for the right to appropriate someone else's property without authorization or permission. And nowhere under law is anyone (except the government) given that right. In fact most laws that speak to the subject deny that as a right and classify it as one variety or another of crime or civil tort.
Yes, phone numbers are "public" in the sense that they're published in the phone directory. My address is "public" in the sense that it's clearly marked on my mailbox and house. That doesn't mean, though, that J. Random Passerby has permission to come barging into my house and make himself at home. The same with phone numbers.
If the telemarketers want the right to speak freely using a particular phone, they can foot the bill for it. As long as I'm footing the bill, though, they use it at my sufferance. And if I don't suffer them to use it, that's just tough for them.
Because there's a good chance there's a sucker out there who doesn't know AOL's dial-up business is going down the tubes. Said sucker will pay good money for the spun-off property. Why throw something in the trash when you can get some cash for it and make winding it down somebody else's problem?
Similarly, nothing in this statement is intended to relieve Sun of its obligations, if any, under the applicable rules of OASIS.
And this statement in Sun's license disagrees with you. Remember that ODF 2.0 woudln't be a new specification, it'd be a new version of an existing specification. And patent grants are for the specification, not any particular version of it. See the OASIS IPR document, particularly section 11.1 which says that a contributor or participant is permanently subject to their contributor or participation obligations even after they withdraw from the TC, and 11.2 which says they're permanently subject to those obligations even if they withdraw from OASIS completely. The obligations, and the grants, don't retroactively disappear just because a new draft is issued or a new version approved.
In short, Sun can withdraw rather than license their patents to OASIS but they can't withdraw license grants they've already, by earlier contribution or participation, been obligated to give. In shorter, OASIS rules say "No take-backs.", and Sun agreed to be bound by those rules and they say so right in their covenant.
No, ODF 2.0 would be entirely eligible for ISO approval. Now, it wouldn't be eligible if it contained anything covered by Sun's patents that weren't already licensed for use in it, but then OASIS rules prohibit including anything like that anyway so that'd only be an issue if OASIS broke their own rules. And anything included in ODF 1.0 would be covered by the licenses Sun granted as part of it's agreement with OASIS (again, this is required by OASIS rules), so ODF 2.0 could include any of that without problems. If Sun tried to claim infringement, OASIS would just wave the license with Sun's signature on it and that'd be the end of that.
If you're thinking that the patent license for things in ODF 1.0 only cover them in ODF 1.0 and aren't valid for ODF 2.0, I'm afraid that's wrong. The licenses are for use in implementations of the ODF spec, current and all future versions. If Sun didn't agree to that in their license, OASIS wouldn't've accepted the material into the ODF 1.0 spec in the first place.
Well, if Sun doesn't participate in the OASIS process, Sun gets no say in what OASIS does with the spec. So saying that Sun would have control is simply wrong. If anything, Sun not participating means Sun would have no control over what OASIS does with the spec.
Any patents that would be required for ODF 1.0 will continue to be covered regardless of what Sun does later. If they walk away from ODF 2.0, they can't unilaterally revoke the patent licenses already granted. The OASIS rules already cover this, and notice that Sun agrees that nothing they say can relieve them of their independent obligations under OASIS rules. Sun could, after walking away, enforce patents on anything not currently in ODF 1.0, but that's not a problem. OASIS rules already prohibit including things in a standard if they're potentially subject to patent until a patent agreement is in place covering them. And OASIS does run patent searches, so if Sun has something patented it'll turn up. It's possible to game this, but it requires some fancy footwork with the applications.
They'd have to really work at it. The normal IPv6 link configuration process only allows the ISP to set the leading /64 prefix. The trailing 64 bits are entirely determined by the host, and can't be forced to any particular value by the upstream router. It's possible to force the issue by way of MAC registration and DHCPv6 or a firewall, but it takes a fair amount of configuration to do it and it doesn't work well with the Windows IPv6 stack (which much prefers that you use stateless autoconfiguration of interfaces).
I don't think you can get an injunction. However, when someone claims patent infringement by a product, I believe there's a legal procedure the maker of that product can follow to basically demand that the claimant identify the specific patents or acknowledge there is no infringement. And if that procedure's followed, the claimant has to identify the patents. If they don't then the maker can hold the claimant to that silence, preventing the claimant from asserting any patents they didn't identify in response to the demand. You'd need a lawyer to look up the details, and AFAIK the only people who can make such a demand are people actually in the business of making and selling the allegedly-infringing product, nobody else.
IMHO Microsoft's "defense" of it's patents (if any) has been anything but aggressive. Yes, they've made a lot of hot air in the media about how Linux might infringe some unknown patents they claim to hold. But if they were being aggressive, they wouldn't be making such a nebulous claim. They'd be sending letters demanding royalties and quoting patent numbers, and filing infringement cases when violators refused to pay. They haven't. They haven't even mentioned a single patent number they claim Linux infringes. And not without cause. My recollection is that Microsoft themselves said openly that the reason they aren't claiming specific patent numbers is that they're afraid if they got that specific that the open-source community would be successful in having those patents invalidated.
If you don't have a patent number, you don't have a patent. I'll consider Microsoft to be aggressively defending their patents against infringement in Linux when they start citing specific patent numbers.
So far I've had good luck with Dotster. Everything I've had to do I've been able to do through their Web interface, including requesting and entering transfer authorization codes. No problems renewing domains through them. They offer domain parking, but it seems more a sideline than a main part of their business.
And you've now learned a few valuable lessons about domains:
To which they'd respond "Our records show it's a Best Buy TV. If you bought it from someone else, produce the receipt proving that. If you can't, we're charging you with theft of Best Buy's TV.".
Yes, but there's a problem: it's going to cost a lot of money to defend yourself in court, even if you win. And, except in very exceptional circumstances, you will not be allowed to counter-sue for your costs. If you manage to prove that you do have licenses for all the software the BSA wants to audit, you're guaranteed not to be able to recover costs. The EULA for the software you just proved you legally have (and whose EULA you accepted) is almost guaranteed to provide for BSA audits at your expense, and the court's very unlikely to rule that you aren't bound by the terms you accepted. The only way you'll have any chance at recovering costs is if you don't use even a single copy of any piece of software from a BSA member, have never at any point used such software, and can document the installation history of every bit of software on every machine your company owns in sufficient detail to convince a judge of this despite the best efforts of the BSA to poke holes in your records. And even in that case you'll have to spend large sums of money now, while any recovery you get (if you get it) will be years down the road after all the appeals are settled.
The BSA knows all this. They count on it. If they think you're balking, the first thing they'll do is point out just how much more they can cost you if you don't co-operate. And most businesses do the short-term economic calculation and decide it's cheaper to roll over than to fight and win.
Go look at the BSA's website. What they want is two parts: proof that your copy is legitimate (product key or certificate of authenticity) and proof that your copy was paid for (actual receipt made out to you). Note that this is entirely reasonable, the unreasonable part is the BSA's standards of proof being far more strict than the law allows for. They then use the cost of your going into court and proving that they don't have a case to get a settlement from you.
You haven't dealt with the BSA, have you? Having unique product keys isn't enough, the BSA says that outright. All you having that key means is that someone somewhere paid for that software. The BSA wants proof that it was you that paid for that product, not your friend down the street who gave you a copy of his stuff. You can wave product keys and certificates of authenticity around all you want, they won't accept those without the receipt to go with them.
And no, they will get upset with you if it's only one computer missing the receipt. Maybe especially if that's all they can find. After all, if they don't find something to pin on you, you might very well be able to sue them for the (rather high) costs you had to incur. Ask Sterling Ball about that.
But what happens when I do buy a TV from Best Buy. I hand them my credit card, the charge is approved, it shows up on my bill and I pay it, in short I bought and paid for that TV. 2 years later, Best Buy comes around demanding that I prove to them that I really did pay for that TV, and if I can't they're going to charge me with theft. I show them my credit-card statement showing their charge for the price of the TV, and they say "Not enough. You need to show us a printed store receipt for it.". Now, after 2 years the warranty's expired. The credit-card charge is long since paid and history. The TV's not something I can take as a deduction on my taxes or anything. Why in the world would I have the receipt still around? But Best Buy still says that they'll charge me with theft if I can't cough up that receipt.
Now, should Best Buy be demonizing me, calling me a thief? Or should I be demonizing them as clueless nut-cases?
My experience is that the engineering/science mindset makes people less inclined to extreme conservative or religious positions. More likely explanation: the terrorists realize that the things one learns in science, engineering and medical curriculums are useful for their operations, so they concentrate in those fields for the benefits they'll gain. Another more likely explanation: the countries terrorists tend to mostly come from have good reasons, because of their economies, to encourage large portions of their population to go into science, engineering and medical fields, and when the base population the terrorists are recruiting from have high percentages of graduates in those fields it only stands to reason that the terrorist groups will have similar percentages.
They're mutually exclusive. The only way to enforce DRM is to encrypt the contents and only permit decryption when authorized. But, to decrypt the content you have to have the decryption key present. If the software is open-source, anyone can simply change the code to dump out the decryption key. Once they have the key, they can decrypt the content exactly as if they were authorized to do so. Or, they can simply change the code so the enforcing application always gets back "Yes." as the answer to "Is this operation authorized?". And protecting the code using signatures won't work either, since the user can simply change the signature-verification key and sign the modified application himself or simply remove the signature check entirely.
DRM requires preventing the user from seeing the internals of the program and preventing him from modifying the program. Open source starts with the user being able to see every bit of the internals of the program and being able to modify the program in any way he wants. You've invalidated DRM's basic requirements before you've even begun.
Your point #1 is false, I'm afraid. Yes, the components were designed to work over a wide temperature range. The problem is the change. Gradual or not, components made of different materials expand and contract at different rates as temperature changes. As long as the temperature stays steady, regardless of what that steady temperature is, there's no problem. But if it's changing, even slowly, then the different materials want to change size relative to each other. That produces stress. You can see this in the thermostat that controls your home's heating and cooling. It's made of strips of 2 metals with drastically different thermal expansion ratios bonded together. As the temperature changes, the bimetallic strip physically warps. The same thing happens inside every chip and solder joint in your computer every time it warms up or cools down. And eventually those joins start to crack apart. That does two things. First, it increases the electrical resistance of the joint. Higher resistance = more heat. Second, it disrupts the thermal transfer from the chips themselves into their carriers by disrupting the tight physical contact between them. So now the chips aren't being cooled quite as well, and at the same time they're running hotter internally. All that turns into a shorter lifespan.
As for #2, not anymore. That surge effect's confined to the power supply itself. It still affects the PSU, but no worse than normal power-line noise will. The big effect is actually on the drive motors and bearings. Stopped, the bearings settle a bit. When the platters are spun up, it takes a moment for the bearings to lift up on their film of lubricant again. One cycle like that puts as much wear on the bearings as many hours of steady spinning. And the power cost of keeping a drive spinning is minimal. Think about spinning a wheel, which is all the drive's platters are. It takes a fair amount of effort to start a heavy wheel spinning and get it up to speed, but once it's going it takes very little effort to keep it spinning at that speed. It's enough on my large drives that I can actually see the spike in power draw at the wall socket when a drive is spun up from a dead stop.
When people comment about how their machines aren't having problems, I'm often a bit skeptical. I've had quite a few people ask me for help with a computer that "just started having problems a few days ago". When I throw my hardware diagnostic program at it, I get a veritable flood of red malfunction and error indications. On the last one, "Every now and then it won't boot, and occasionally a program dies for no reason." turned into having to replace the motherboard and all the RAM (every stick of memory had at least 2 bad columns, and the EIDE controller was fried and corrupting data during large DMA transfers) and restore the entire system from original media and backups (losing about 10% of the data in the process, the backups didn't go back far enough to contain uncorrupted copies of the files).
At work, LCDs are too expensive. Yes, they're cheaper than buying a monitor these days. But work doesn't have to buy a monitor, it's already there and paid for. So, LCDs get bought only when either a) an entire desktop system is being replaced and we can just spec an LCD when ordering the new system, or b) the monitor's failed and a replacement would have to be bought.
Work's using Dell and HP mini-desktops. The main thing is that most of the office systems still use big clunky CRTs that literally draw almost as much power as the computer itself does going full-out. We're slowly replacing those with LCDs, but my guess is it's going to be another 2-3 years before we see the last of the monitors go out the door.
I tend to leave the computer on overnight, but with things like monitor power-down and CPU idling enabled. When it's not doing anything it drops about 90% of it's power consumption after 15 minutes, and even when working with the monitor off (eg. running the nightly backup) it's still running at less than 50% of full power. If I power it off, by comparison, it can't run it's virus scan, backup, update check and the like overnight and has to do those things while I'm trying to use it during the day. Plus there's wear and tear to consider, I've noticed that the office computers that get turned off and on every day tend to fail and need replacing several times before mine (that stays on all the time) has a failure.
So my preference is to leave computers running but with power-saving features set to minimize power without shutting things down. This means hard drives continue to spin but the CPU goes into low-power idle mode. The monitor goes to suspend mode (beam and deflection power is off but the circuits and coils are kept warm), not powered-down completely. That seems to be the best balance between reducing power consumption, allowing it to run maintenance operations overnight and minimizing wear and tear and thermal stress on the components. If management absolutely insists on ignoring those last two in favor of the first, wake-on-LAN is essential to allow nightly maintenance to happen.
Not the same technology. Those theft-deterrent tags are just a small piece of metal foil shaped/sized so it's resonant frequency falls at a particular RF frequency. Broadcast on that frequency near it and it "pings" back with a signal. Hit it with a strong enough signal, the heat generated melts the foil and the tag no longer reacts. Notice that there's no data at all here, the tag's just a reflector. The gates near the store doors transmit a low-power signal and sound an alarm if they hear an echo from a theft-deterrent tag, while the pads at the registers transmit a higher-power short-range signal to disable the tags (the cashier runs the item across the pad after they've rung it up and before putting it in your bag).
The RFID tags Walmart wants aren't just a piece of foil, they've got an actual antenna, a few bytes of data storage and an RF transmitter inside. When presented with a radio signal they leech power from the RF field and transmit the data stored inside them for a receiver to pick up. This can be done fairly cheaply, but it's still much more expensive than the simple passive theft-deterrent tags. One tag per pallet is probably not too bad. One tag per item, though, even at a nickel per tag is probably in a lot of cases costing more than the distributor's profit margin on that item. Combine with the distributor's knowing that Walmart expects the distributor's prices to go down year-over-year and some distributors are undoubtably going to decide they can't afford to do business with Walmart anymore. It may be better to make a penny an item on a million items than a dime on a thousand, but it's not better to lose a penny an item on that million.
In SWG they've got an even more satisfying solution to the farmers: flag offender for PvP, followed by a server-wide announcement of the offender.
"Plague of locusts" pretty much summarizes what follows.
You aren't keeping up on things, then. Almost every current DRM system is aimed directly at preventing the file from being played on any device except the original one it was bought for and preventing the transfer of the file to anyone else. Whether a new copy's being made or the original is being transferred fully... isn't even a consideration for the DRM system.
As I noted, the RIAA (through their attorney) has explicitly told Congress that an individual taking a CD they own and putting songs from it on their own personal MP3 player for their own personal use is illegal and DRM needs to be able to prevent it. The protections on DVDs are considered by the major labels and studios to be a complete and utter failure.