You lost me. I haven't addressed Shuttleworth's article at all -- I simply quoted the sections of the agreement that I have trouble with, and those are mostly with the fact that Novell's negotiated exceptions seem to open the door to MS for a lot of patent litigation nonsense that bypasses Novell but that strikes much of the Open Source movement right in the cookie jar. Because on the surface it appears to be a valid contract -- even if it can't truly constrain Linux totally because of the number of distributions -- but a contract that a judge might find valid -- including the provisions that would set the exclusions as available to be used as precedent. I.e. "we (presumably Microsoft) can sue you (third party developer of "foundry" software) because the judge said our contract with (presumably Novell) was valid and your product was excluded from protection."
As to substance or no substance, I suppose that is a matter for your own personal judgement -- the substance of the message is that there are other aspects besides "clone products" that I have a serious problem with in the Novell/M$ deal.
Read on... the agreement excludes patent suits with the following exceptions: clone products, foundry products, and other excluded products. Here's the parts I have trouble with:
The clone product part of the agreement includes the following text "...that are compliant with a specification of a standards organization as to which the other Party has consented to the use of its Patents therefor, shall not be considered in determining whether the product is a Clone Product." in other words, if a product is compliant with a web standard for which MS or Novell holds a patent, they can't use the inclusion of the functionality standard to defend against a lawsuit. Great. Wanna bet MS has patents related to browser rendering (a major component) functionality that hits this?
More fun language... "even if a new product (or major component thereof) meets such requirements, only those Patents covering inventions in new features and functionality in such Clone Product may be asserted against such Clone Product, and only with regard to Clone Product Functionality." In other words, if MS adds something that may or may not have patent to a product, if a "clone" figures out how to duplicate it, the patent protection agreement doesn't apply. Hmmm. Sound familiar?
Notwithstanding subsection (i) above, Wine, OpenXchange, StarOffice and OpenOffice are not subject to such subsection (i)... AKA reverse engineered clean room code which began development before the DMCA existed isn't going to be protected from lawsuits -- even though there is no copyright infringement and no digital rights law that relates to that early code.
It gets worse: "Foundry Products" i.e. third part products not designed by or specified by Novell etc. aren't covered. So if I read this right any tools, demos, etc. that might exist on a SUSE distribution are excluded from patent litigation protection and are explicitly denied protection by the clause which states that software which is " made, reproduced, sold, licensed or otherwise transferred through or by the Acting Party for the primary purpose of attempting to make such product subject to the covenants under the Covered Patents of the other Party so that a third party's customers can receive the benefit of such covenants." will be excluded. Hooray. Good job Novell -- cover yourself but shoot all third party developer's ability to protect ourselves by excluding our work -- even if you distribute it.
and finally my personal favorites. Other excluded products include (a) office productivity applications (word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software, etc.).... (b) new features and functions in the following categories of products of the Parties, but not to the extent the products embody operating system software or other enabling technologies: (i) video game consoles, console games, video game applications designed to run on a computer, and on-line video gaming services... (ii) business applications designed, marketed and used to meet the data processing requirements of particular business functions, such as accounting, payroll, human resources, project management, personnel performance management, sales management, financial forecasting, financial reporting, customer relationship management, and supply chain management; (iii) mail transfer agents (aka email servers); and (iv) unified communications. In other words, none of the major applications or application types usable by a business are covered by the no-suit ingredient.
Sounds like a good enough set of reasons to not support Suse Linux any more. Ubuntu anyone?
Because no matter what I say here there will be critics to the right and the left. So to start with I am an active Christian believer AND actively involved in scientific endeavors and have no trouble reconciling both and thinking impartially for myself when I read both religious articles AND scientific articles.
My criticism of the article is that much of it is retreads old studies that have looked at how people with certain forms of brain damage are less empathic than the average person. Ergo logically an undamaged brain has a higher empathy/altruistic level and that is a GOOD thing. Which others extrapolate to pointing towards the existence of God, etc.
Of more interest to me is the fact that they now have done detailed brainwave pattern analysis that showed that a "horrible" AKA evil decision sets off a mental storm between parts of the brain. From what I can determine, this storm between parts doesn't happen when a so-called "good" (altruistic) decision is to be made. Which could be construed to be a form of "hard wired" design except for one problem: Socio-pathic individuals don't seem to suffer from the mental storm. Which then leads me to another interesting question: why do normal individuals react with visceral horror to a person known to be sociopath but not to an undetected one, where some extremely attuned individuals who will react with the same visceral horror to the sociopath even when they do not know whom they are interacting with?
It is as if the very concept of differentiating the so called morally good choices from morally reprehensible choices seems to part and parcel of the human organism as well as the social implications of following those implications (admiring the saint, shunning the baby killer) -- and that -- for me is an indicator of design, not evolution.
Small radio stations inherently have profit margin problems -- because they have many of the same costs as a bigger station (as an example, does your "business model" know of any "free" receptionists?) yet are a valuable local information distribution source specifically because they are not beholden to large corporate interests "out of town" so to say.
Now the RIAA companies seem to think it is okay to to make others pay them for what they are getting for free -- advertising, i.e. the benefit of free air play. Because -- catch a clue here RIAA -- I haven't ever bought a song or album in 30+ years that I didn't first here on free radio.
that as an owner of a well-run small radio station I have an "X" close-to-the-max amount of advertising revenue that I am earning currently to spend including all of my license expenses, promotional expenses, DJ and other employee expenses, music acquisition expenses,news feed expenses, etc.
that as an owner of a music station, to compete I have to play a high percentage of popular/RIAA company artist's, music, and finally
that suddenly I am essentially "taxed" by the RIAA to pay for the right to play the most popular music.
Any money taken out of promotion, music acquisition, news feed expense lowers the quality of the "acquired" entertainment, and lowering employee expenses means that I will never have consistent quality in the booth. Or that I will simply go out of business because my station can no longer turn a profit
Which in turn favors the Clear Channels of the world who have nothing better to do than negotiate better rates than the little guys are going to get from the RIAA and then have the RIAA use those negotiated rates to encourage the bigger stations to continue to play the kind of music which I refer to as "corporate fodder crap". i.e. one shot groups producing cheaply low quality crappy music (be it grunge, Rap, or whatever) with little or no playability beyond the 3-6 week post-release horizon.
Sure, music stations play a lot of RIAA related songs, and currently many stations are owned by one entity (Clear Channel). But there are still many small stations that realistically can't afford to dish out money to the RIAA that also provide a lot better news coverage and more musical variety (including local talent) than the Clear Channel/RIAA dominated stations.
Unless we consider this a "freedom of expression" versus "corporate interests" battle for control of a major block of frequency ranges, we all lose because if the RIAA wins (i.e. the mammoth music production companies such as EMI, Sony, etc.) ), the little guys automatically lose, and we get more of the corporate fodder-crap music, etc. and NO outlets for true expression.
I partially agree and partially disagree. The disagreement is that if mankind had the ability to divert a hurricane's path by say a medium fraction of a percent per hour, it would theoretically become possible to nearly always cause the hurricane to come over land at the least damaging, most advantageous point, or to "steer" a big storm into cooler waters where it will lose power.
But I agree that those areas designated as "better targets" wouldn't like the idea much because then they would be in for it in terms of potential for infrastructure damage, flooding, etc.
Because advance information is the only way to stop bad legislation before backroom deals make it impossible. How many of us knew what the dirty deals were taking place behind closed doors regarding the DMCA and the Sonny Bono copyright extensions before they gathered enough momentum to pass the floor votes?
What positive effects might have happened to both of these bills if there had been a huge negative outcry while the bills were still in committee or at least before they reached the president's desk for signature?
That fits the idea of rewarding the involved population, but unless I miss something completely, it would reward states without a problem and punish states with a problem. For example, if an election were held in the Gulf Coast states around the time of a massive hurricane such as Katrina, and the voter turnout was forced lower, why would it make sense for that state's primary schedule to be punitively damaged? A better variation might be to schedule elections using an algorithm that would essentially track census and demographic data in some useful way. Or *grin* in reverse order by the total number of votes missed by members of the House of Repr. and the Senate, AKA the more votes they miss, the later the election.
I have an extant CAE course created prior to the net designed to teach 1st year College Algebra, but not in an open source stack that I can support at this point. Pass the CAE course and I could just about guarantee you that you can pass just about any accredited 1st year College Algebra course. Now then, once converted to a good open source stack, I would be glad to "sell" the course for about $10US a credit hour in terms of registering it as an online course as part of a course set IF I had an accreditation source acceptable to the major accreditation organizations so that a person doesn't have to pay the $100 per credit hour over and above my meager $ request or more to test out of the course at their local university.
Assuming I got that, and could then add say, most of the general education requirements at the same cost, using the same stack, etc. and have the same accreditation.
This would mean that anyone with a) access to a computer (say via the ODPC or local library?), b) the source of the coursework via the web, and c) a sponsoring proctoring organization (also maybe the library?) could now do about 40% of their bacclaureate college education for what, about $600?
That doesn't even begin to match the significance of an accredited K-12 set of courses on a single online app stack.
That's why computers + an open source stack are so useful.
What it simply means is that the Supreme Court is being consistent with existing law regarding patents, i.e. the method that M$ uses to export Windows to foreign companies means that certain types of patents don't apply therefore MS can't be sued for using patented code oversees if it obeys certain export rules.
But this has nothing to do with "pirated copies", because software piracy is a matter of copyright law, not patent law, and there are numerous treaties governing the protection of copyrights internationally that still apply.
True. But we already have the Linux experience in house anyway, and the amount we spend on Windows security issues in terms of head count would be enough to pay for an added Linux resource not even counting the original $20K.
Seriously. Because Vista is a horrible upgrade if you can do it at all, a memory hog, more open to virus attacks, etc., and expensive to boot. Contrast with the Linux memory model which is much cleaner, less open to attacks, and hello -- you can install it on multiple machines with one CD. Vs. the per seat model favored by M$. Consider that just our medium size IT department would have to spend $20K+ to upgrade to Vista, not counting any new machines where older machines can't support it -- vs. the cost of one Ubuntu install per workstation type, burn the correct images, and begin the migration process. Of course it is not so easy given all the documents extant in the company, but $20K can buy a lot of migration scripts.
Maybe the Ubuntu folks will finally end up (with Apple) being the David that finally bring downs Goliath for good.
Let's say GM left something wide open in their cars that allows a bad guy to steal a Chevy, then blow up fifty or a hundred or a thousand other GM vehicles by remote control. You bet I would sue GM if my family was in one of the cars that blew up.
Actually for Japanese, etc. this would still be a godsend, because most OCR work comes from typed sources, and the "typed" Chinese characters (also used in Japan, etc.) there are only a limited number of fonts in use. Which presumably would lead to a great amount of work on identifying those font libraries and characters that cause problems in the OCR and the gradual elimination of those problems by inclusion in the recognition files.
Essentially, what this would open up would be a process of converting the vast library of pre-'Net hand-typed texts to scanning via OCR, and being open sourced-- it doesn't necessarily have to run on Google's machines.
AKA, the security programmer's favorite adage: "The user is the enemy."
That is, when ANY new technique or code module is to be used in a production environment, it should not be considered ready until it has been thoroughly attacked by a person who has the kind of mind-set that will expose code vulnerabilities before a user (or set of users) finds them.
Trouble is, most IT organizations have a hard sell to get that type of person within the company -- first, because an "inside the firewall" attacker is counter-intuitive to the idea that a company should trust their employees, and second, the position seems redundant IF the programmers are up to speed on writing secure applications. Which -- catch 22 here -- they won't know until it is too late. Secondarily, inside the wire attackers are much more dangerous than outside attackers, because the inside the wire person comes to know exactly what is vulnerable, and what can be done with that knowledge.
Good point. i.e. does enoughed weakened virus (repeated bites) stack up to a bio- hazard level. Or does the first bite give the person's immune system enough warning that it is already ramping up so that the "re-infections with the weakened virii" from repeated bites simply get killed off quicker and quicker.
Also, introducing even weakened virus versions versus an HIV- or other immuno-compromised immune system is a horribly BAD idea, so on the surface this pretty much eliminates mosquito based vaccine vectoring as a possibility. Unless of course it was initially the HIV virus being targeted by the vaccine, is some way that repeated bites simply increased the speed that the body kills the HIV with.
Actually there are several promising vaccines, because the immune system can be taught to attack protozoans as well as the other microbes such as germs and viruses. Malaria has just historically been the toughest of the tough to beat.
Great point -- I did not know that about malaria weakening the mosquitoes. With that in mind, this does seem like a free lunch method of drastically lowering malarial incidence.
Just so you know, a malaria vaccine is one of medicine's holy grails and there are researchers that have been working on that exact problem their whole adult lives.
Thing is, anything that lowers the infection rate -- with the stipulation that there are no other unintended bio-consequences -- at the mosquito level -- is superior because every dose of the vaccine has an associated production cost, where mosquitoes breed for free. So if the disease vector is disrupted for free 70% of the time now (and perhaps a higher percentage down the road), this gives the researchers an edge the race to develop a human malaria vaccine before the damned parasite can re-adapt.
Well, less anyway. But the other part of your comment has a truly interesting thought in it... What if human biting mosquitoes could be genetically modified (with the stipulation that there be no unintended side effects) to pass on a vaccine or class of vaccines?
Okay, so they have a malaria resistant mosquito, and if there were no other effect of the GM, it seems like releasing the beastie to the environment would be a good thing as it substitutes a "less bad biter" for a "known bad biter" it the food chain and implicitly lowers the malarial infection rates.
My question is "what about the other major mosquito-transmitted illnesses carried by the same type(s)? AKA yellow fever, west nile, etc.?" as I assume there is a limit to how many disease vectors could be prevented by this technique without introducing unintended and perhaps unstoppable effects later on.
I just finished reading how much the Strider group at M$ has accomplished and how, and it is rather amazing. They lifted the covers off of typo-domain squatters exploiting Google's programs, a progressive honeypot setup that detects which levels of XP are attackable by different mal-ware attacks (up to and including reporting zero-day exploits if the latest "patch hardened" machine is exploited], and now this project. Even better, they are publishing the "how", and any OS (AKA Mac OS or any of the Linux distros) could benefit by using similar approaches on even more machines.
So -- from an admitted open source advocate -- here's a rare kudo to the giant in Redmond for keeping a "white hat" and his group -- and letting them work.
...there are still only two basic ways to get the hydrogen you want to store: by breaking it down from water (a hugely energy inefficient process) or by splitting it off the carbon molecules of an existing fuel source such as natural gas [methane (CH4)].
Given those problems and assuming that the remaining carbon were used as fuel somewhere else (say in a power plant), even given the higher efficiencies associated with the hydrogen as the primary fuel for a vehicle or other prime mover [based on the Carnot numbers etc.] in isolation, there's still no guarantee that overall the process is any greener than just burning the full hydrocarbon fuel more fully (under stochiometric conditions) -- which is why the big low speed diesels are on the order of twice as fuel efficient as current IC gasoline engines using radically less processed fuels.
In my book, an efficient biodiesel based engine is still the best source for the next century's engines.
That's the exact issue. Think about it in the paper world, using my theoretical novel as an example, and assume I "self published" it, e.g. paid for the printing, etc. and that it automagically going to be so popular that I don't need to spend another dime promoting it.
The act of printing it, making it available for distribution, and authorizing the bookstore to collect revenues and send a percentage to me are all part of my rights as the copyright holder. If anyone else copies the book (printing it) places it in a store for distribution, etc. without my authorization -- or getting my permission and sending me my percentage -- [which is what the RIAA is after anyway....] can be sued for violating the copyright act.
Analagously, on the web, I am the only one authorized to place copies available for distribution, and the intentional placement for availability of an unauthorized paper copy of information in a library has been determined by the courts to be infringing, even if the paper copy is never checked out.
My problem with this court case is that the plaintiff's argument seems to be "well, there are these copies (which could be legal for me if I bought the CDs, etc.) that file sharing networks "make available", ergo the defendant has violated the law. That's like saying that if I put up a great big boom box on a playground and start playing music that I like to listen to -- with my own CDs, and am not getting paid for it -- and all of the kids start to dance without paying for a copy themselves, I'm infringing.
But this is also where the 'Net muddies things, because in the real world, an object has to change hands for an exchange (and therefore a two-person transaction) to be valid, where in the 'net, nothing "real" has to change hands -- just a bunch of 1's and 0's that can be selectively rebroadcast to create music, DVD video, etc. -- so making the collection of 1's and 0's available in a copyable format does facilitate illegal activity. And knowingly contributing to an illegal activity is in fact grounds for civil and criminal actions here in the US. Odd stuff, this.
Slashdot Mirror
As to substance or no substance, I suppose that is a matter for your own personal judgement -- the substance of the message is that there are other aspects besides "clone products" that I have a serious problem with in the Novell/M$ deal.
Sounds like a good enough set of reasons to not support Suse Linux any more. Ubuntu anyone?
My criticism of the article is that much of it is retreads old studies that have looked at how people with certain forms of brain damage are less empathic than the average person. Ergo logically an undamaged brain has a higher empathy/altruistic level and that is a GOOD thing. Which others extrapolate to pointing towards the existence of God, etc.
Of more interest to me is the fact that they now have done detailed brainwave pattern analysis that showed that a "horrible" AKA evil decision sets off a mental storm between parts of the brain. From what I can determine, this storm between parts doesn't happen when a so-called "good" (altruistic) decision is to be made. Which could be construed to be a form of "hard wired" design except for one problem: Socio-pathic individuals don't seem to suffer from the mental storm. Which then leads me to another interesting question: why do normal individuals react with visceral horror to a person known to be sociopath but not to an undetected one, where some extremely attuned individuals who will react with the same visceral horror to the sociopath even when they do not know whom they are interacting with?
It is as if the very concept of differentiating the so called morally good choices from morally reprehensible choices seems to part and parcel of the human organism as well as the social implications of following those implications (admiring the saint, shunning the baby killer) -- and that -- for me is an indicator of design, not evolution.
In KJV speak, then Slashdotters, what think ye?
My point exactly.
Small radio stations inherently have profit margin problems -- because they have many of the same costs as a bigger station (as an example, does your "business model" know of any "free" receptionists?) yet are a valuable local information distribution source specifically because they are not beholden to large corporate interests "out of town" so to say.
Now the RIAA companies seem to think it is okay to to make others pay them for what they are getting for free -- advertising, i.e. the benefit of free air play. Because -- catch a clue here RIAA -- I haven't ever bought a song or album in 30+ years that I didn't first here on free radio.
Any money taken out of promotion, music acquisition, news feed expense lowers the quality of the "acquired" entertainment, and lowering employee expenses means that I will never have consistent quality in the booth. Or that I will simply go out of business because my station can no longer turn a profit
Which in turn favors the Clear Channels of the world who have nothing better to do than negotiate better rates than the little guys are going to get from the RIAA and then have the RIAA use those negotiated rates to encourage the bigger stations to continue to play the kind of music which I refer to as "corporate fodder crap". i.e. one shot groups producing cheaply low quality crappy music (be it grunge, Rap, or whatever) with little or no playability beyond the 3-6 week post-release horizon.
Unless we consider this a "freedom of expression" versus "corporate interests" battle for control of a major block of frequency ranges, we all lose because if the RIAA wins (i.e. the mammoth music production companies such as EMI, Sony, etc.) ), the little guys automatically lose, and we get more of the corporate fodder-crap music, etc. and NO outlets for true expression.
I partially agree and partially disagree. The disagreement is that if mankind had the ability to divert a hurricane's path by say a medium fraction of a percent per hour, it would theoretically become possible to nearly always cause the hurricane to come over land at the least damaging, most advantageous point, or to "steer" a big storm into cooler waters where it will lose power.
But I agree that those areas designated as "better targets" wouldn't like the idea much because then they would be in for it in terms of potential for infrastructure damage, flooding, etc.
What positive effects might have happened to both of these bills if there had been a huge negative outcry while the bills were still in committee or at least before they reached the president's desk for signature?
That fits the idea of rewarding the involved population, but unless I miss something completely, it would reward states without a problem and punish states with a problem. For example, if an election were held in the Gulf Coast states around the time of a massive hurricane such as Katrina, and the voter turnout was forced lower, why would it make sense for that state's primary schedule to be punitively damaged? A better variation might be to schedule elections using an algorithm that would essentially track census and demographic data in some useful way. Or *grin* in reverse order by the total number of votes missed by members of the House of Repr. and the Senate, AKA the more votes they miss, the later the election.
Consider the following:
I have an extant CAE course created prior to the net designed to teach 1st year College Algebra, but not in an open source stack that I can support at this point. Pass the CAE course and I could just about guarantee you that you can pass just about any accredited 1st year College Algebra course. Now then, once converted to a good open source stack, I would be glad to "sell" the course for about $10US a credit hour in terms of registering it as an online course as part of a course set IF I had an accreditation source acceptable to the major accreditation organizations so that a person doesn't have to pay the $100 per credit hour over and above my meager $ request or more to test out of the course at their local university.
Assuming I got that, and could then add say, most of the general education requirements at the same cost, using the same stack, etc. and have the same accreditation.
This would mean that anyone with a) access to a computer (say via the ODPC or local library?), b) the source of the coursework via the web, and c) a sponsoring proctoring organization (also maybe the library?) could now do about 40% of their bacclaureate college education for what, about $600?
That doesn't even begin to match the significance of an accredited K-12 set of courses on a single online app stack.
That's why computers + an open source stack are so useful.
But this has nothing to do with "pirated copies", because software piracy is a matter of copyright law, not patent law, and there are numerous treaties governing the protection of copyrights internationally that still apply.
True. But we already have the Linux experience in house anyway, and the amount we spend on Windows security issues in terms of head count would be enough to pay for an added Linux resource not even counting the original $20K.
Seriously. Because Vista is a horrible upgrade if you can do it at all, a memory hog, more open to virus attacks, etc., and expensive to boot. Contrast with the Linux memory model which is much cleaner, less open to attacks, and hello -- you can install it on multiple machines with one CD. Vs. the per seat model favored by M$. Consider that just our medium size IT department would have to spend $20K+ to upgrade to Vista, not counting any new machines where older machines can't support it -- vs. the cost of one Ubuntu install per workstation type, burn the correct images, and begin the migration process. Of course it is not so easy given all the documents extant in the company, but $20K can buy a lot of migration scripts.
Maybe the Ubuntu folks will finally end up (with Apple) being the David that finally bring downs Goliath for good.
Let's say GM left something wide open in their cars that allows a bad guy to steal a Chevy, then blow up fifty or a hundred or a thousand other GM vehicles by remote control. You bet I would sue GM if my family was in one of the cars that blew up.
Essentially, what this would open up would be a process of converting the vast library of pre-'Net hand-typed texts to scanning via OCR, and being open sourced-- it doesn't necessarily have to run on Google's machines.
That is, when ANY new technique or code module is to be used in a production environment, it should not be considered ready until it has been thoroughly attacked by a person who has the kind of mind-set that will expose code vulnerabilities before a user (or set of users) finds them.
Trouble is, most IT organizations have a hard sell to get that type of person within the company -- first, because an "inside the firewall" attacker is counter-intuitive to the idea that a company should trust their employees, and second, the position seems redundant IF the programmers are up to speed on writing secure applications. Which -- catch 22 here -- they won't know until it is too late. Secondarily, inside the wire attackers are much more dangerous than outside attackers, because the inside the wire person comes to know exactly what is vulnerable, and what can be done with that knowledge.
Any thoughts?
Also, introducing even weakened virus versions versus an HIV- or other immuno-compromised immune system is a horribly BAD idea, so on the surface this pretty much eliminates mosquito based vaccine vectoring as a possibility. Unless of course it was initially the HIV virus being targeted by the vaccine, is some way that repeated bites simply increased the speed that the body kills the HIV with.
Actually there are several promising vaccines, because the immune system can be taught to attack protozoans as well as the other microbes such as germs and viruses. Malaria has just historically been the toughest of the tough to beat.
Great point -- I did not know that about malaria weakening the mosquitoes. With that in mind, this does seem like a free lunch method of drastically lowering malarial incidence.
Thing is, anything that lowers the infection rate -- with the stipulation that there are no other unintended bio-consequences -- at the mosquito level -- is superior because every dose of the vaccine has an associated production cost, where mosquitoes breed for free. So if the disease vector is disrupted for free 70% of the time now (and perhaps a higher percentage down the road), this gives the researchers an edge the race to develop a human malaria vaccine before the damned parasite can re-adapt.
Well, less anyway. But the other part of your comment has a truly interesting thought in it... What if human biting mosquitoes could be genetically modified (with the stipulation that there be no unintended side effects) to pass on a vaccine or class of vaccines?
My question is "what about the other major mosquito-transmitted illnesses carried by the same type(s)? AKA yellow fever, west nile, etc.?" as I assume there is a limit to how many disease vectors could be prevented by this technique without introducing unintended and perhaps unstoppable effects later on.
I just finished reading how much the Strider group at M$ has accomplished and how, and it is rather amazing. They lifted the covers off of typo-domain squatters exploiting Google's programs, a progressive honeypot setup that detects which levels of XP are attackable by different mal-ware attacks (up to and including reporting zero-day exploits if the latest "patch hardened" machine is exploited], and now this project. Even better, they are publishing the "how", and any OS (AKA Mac OS or any of the Linux distros) could benefit by using similar approaches on even more machines.
So -- from an admitted open source advocate -- here's a rare kudo to the giant in Redmond for keeping a "white hat" and his group -- and letting them work.
Given those problems and assuming that the remaining carbon were used as fuel somewhere else (say in a power plant), even given the higher efficiencies associated with the hydrogen as the primary fuel for a vehicle or other prime mover [based on the Carnot numbers etc.] in isolation, there's still no guarantee that overall the process is any greener than just burning the full hydrocarbon fuel more fully (under stochiometric conditions) -- which is why the big low speed diesels are on the order of twice as fuel efficient as current IC gasoline engines using radically less processed fuels.
In my book, an efficient biodiesel based engine is still the best source for the next century's engines.
The act of printing it, making it available for distribution, and authorizing the bookstore to collect revenues and send a percentage to me are all part of my rights as the copyright holder. If anyone else copies the book (printing it) places it in a store for distribution, etc. without my authorization -- or getting my permission and sending me my percentage -- [which is what the RIAA is after anyway....] can be sued for violating the copyright act.
Analagously, on the web, I am the only one authorized to place copies available for distribution, and the intentional placement for availability of an unauthorized paper copy of information in a library has been determined by the courts to be infringing, even if the paper copy is never checked out.
My problem with this court case is that the plaintiff's argument seems to be "well, there are these copies (which could be legal for me if I bought the CDs, etc.) that file sharing networks "make available", ergo the defendant has violated the law. That's like saying that if I put up a great big boom box on a playground and start playing music that I like to listen to -- with my own CDs, and am not getting paid for it -- and all of the kids start to dance without paying for a copy themselves, I'm infringing.
But this is also where the 'Net muddies things, because in the real world, an object has to change hands for an exchange (and therefore a two-person transaction) to be valid, where in the 'net, nothing "real" has to change hands -- just a bunch of 1's and 0's that can be selectively rebroadcast to create music, DVD video, etc. -- so making the collection of 1's and 0's available in a copyable format does facilitate illegal activity. And knowingly contributing to an illegal activity is in fact grounds for civil and criminal actions here in the US. Odd stuff, this.