Generally speaking, when a company funds an "independent" study of this nature they use several relatively subtle techniques to predetermine the results.
A) They pick the researcher. Every researcher or research group has biases which are hinted at by their previous research. These biases are generally more reflective of the researchers' skill set than of any malfeasance, but they are biases nevertheless, and they bias the results.
B) They choose the research to be performed. For example, if you do a random sampling of the man on the street he'll show a preference for Windows because he's seen it before. Microsoft could then tout that result claiming that "folks like Windows better" even though the research doesn't really justify that claim. By doing some informal in-house studies and then selecting the ones that did well for independent research, the results can be all but guaranteed.
C) They choose which results to show you. The studies which didn't work out well for Windows got round-filed, with perhaps a couple of straw-man studies making it to light so that the paranoid won't go looking for the missing research. While no self-respecting independent researcher would allow the funding agency to prevent publication of the research, its very likely they're prohibited from identifying the funding agency without permission. There are a number of studies out there favoring Linux whose funding sources were not disclosed. How many of them were funded by Microsoft?
First, make a call. Navigate your way to someone senior and offer to sell them a license to use your code as they see fit. After all, why shouldn't you make some money off your code too?
Follow up with a letter in which you inform them that you have determined that your software appears in their code without a license. Offer to sell them a license for some reasonable amount. Point out that you have also offered them use of the software under the GPL license if they prefer.
Direct your letter to their legal counsel if they have one. Otherwise, look for someone near the top. The head of the salesforce is generally a good bet; they're very vocal within the company and will tend to get the necessary folks to deal with you.
You leave no room for the concept that a current employee has a job, gets up in the morning, goes to work, does their work, goes home, goes to bed just so they can get money to pay the rent.
I leave plenty of room for that concept... But outside the lowest ranks, I'm looking for someone who is dedicated to their career and not just "looking for a job."
If the individual is as dedicated to their career as I think they ought to be, then how could they be willing to work for SCO during the Linux Lawsuit period? Either they have "flexible" ethics or they're a nine-to-fiver. I don't want either type on my high-talent IT team.
Also, in a cost-heavy field like IT I'd prefer someone with enough fiscal sense that they're not living paycheck to paycheck. I've heard every excuse, and it just about always boils down to choices that individual made that they should have known better. Sometimes the choice was made 10 years ago, but it was always a choice. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'd really prefer to hire a pinch-penny.
I have a bunch of pictures, including the formation which included two A10's, an F15 and a P51.
I missed yesterday though, and I havn't uploaded today's meager pickings yet. Between the rain and the crowd, I didn't get many worthwhile today anyway.
Where I work, we changed our advertising from "unlimited" to "unrestricted" for this very reason. Unrestricted sounds about the same but gives us an out to require more money for that top 1%.
Among other job duties, I am the company's cost analyst. I studied the heavy usage issue. The results would surprise only a fool.
What drives the cost of a dialin? Well, its usage during the daily peak time, of course. As an ISP, you generally pay based on the 95% peak consumption of bandwidth plus you have to have incoming lines and backhaul lines sufficient to handle the daily peak.
This means that any account which is online at every daily peak consumes the same cost of resources as an account which is on 24 hours a day.
So, do the monthly hour consumption and the daily peak usage correlate? They do. Starting somewhere between 180 and 240 hours, 95% of the accounts are online at more than 95% of the weekday peaks (our weekend peaks are lower, and thus excluded from the equation).
That means that for all practical purposes we have to have an entire network port and bandwidth just for that one customer.
Now, how much does your home phone line cost? And your dialup internet account? The dialup is less, right? Well, guess what: all told your ISP is paying more like what your home phone line costs to deliver that account. They're in business to make money, not lose it.
Using a GPS system to track the snow plows just makes good sense.
Everybody who lives in an area that gets snow knows just how capricious the plowing schedule is. In the big snow last year, my street was plowed after the first two inches fell, and it didn't see another plow for four days.
With GPS, the coordinating agency can figure out where the plows missed without falling victim to the squeaky wheel syndrome.
As for the Orwellian concerns, I'm inclined to poo-poo them in this instance. This is not about Big Brother snooping on my private life or anyone else's private life; its about making sure that a company spending my hard-earned tax dollars is accomplishing what I've paid for it to do.
With that in mind, the GPS unit should, IMHO, have an off switch. The operator can turn it off any time he wants; he just shouldn't get credit for plowing unless its on.
If it involves trade secrets, that's true. The problem is that publication, even if accidental, destroys a trade secret.
Any code inserted into the Linux kernel is no longer a trade secret. Period. If such code exists and if IBM put it there then IBM could be liable for monetary damages for destroying the trade secret... But the cat is out of the bag and the trade secret is already gone.
I think I'm the only person on the freaking planet who actually considers paying taxes a civic duty, and that pays them willingly and with the knowledge that it is in my best interest to do so.
No, you're not. I also pay my taxes with pride.
I do not, however, proudly fill out my form 1040. That nosey and incomprehensible instrument should not exist. It is none of the federal government's damn business how I get my money or what I do with it.
We should, IMHO, replace the income tax with a national sales tax or some other instrument that does not require an individual to disclose extensive personal information. We could even achieve the same policy objectives that income tax deductions attempt by altering the sales tax rate so that its higher on luxuries and lower on staples... All without ever identifying WHO is buying what.
Interestingly enough, I have not been able to identify an actual penalty that can be applied for failing to file the form 1040. There are a bunch of penalties that can be applied for underpaying taxes, and there are penalties for failing to file in conjunction with underpaying taxes, but I havn't been able to find any for failing to file all on its own. Perhaps someone more familiar with tax law can offer a reference?
The US was the first to land men on the moon, therefore it belongs to the US. Why is that so complicated for the rest of the world to understand?
Perhaps because we've signed and ratified a treaty in which we agree that no nation or other organization (including us) can own the moon or anything else off Earth that we didn't actually put there. As I recall, the same treaty disclaimed ownership of Antarctica as well.
Look, there go some one-dimensional bad guys! Look, there goes the one-dimensional good guy (well, person)! Look, she's put in impossible tactical odds and yet somehow still manages to triumph! Look, she gets no respect back at home! Look, the next book rehashes the EXACT SAME PLOT.
And this is different from any other war fiction how? In pretty much all of the fiction written about war where war is the focus of the plot rather than an incidental part of the setting things unfold something like this:
1) Bad guys attack because a) They're evil b) An unfortunate misunderstanding c) Mutual irreconcilable differences
2) Good guys respond. The battle wages back and forth.
3) Either a) The good guys triumph against the odds b) Nobody really wins because the moral of the story is the horror of war.
4) Good guys return to drab or even ignominious existance.
For that matter, most of the non-fiction accounts of war work out about the same way as well.
If you're looking for something more inspired, don't read war stories.
How much do you want to bet that this came about because some flash-card manufacturer asked Microsoft for licensing terms and not the other way around?
Seriously, think it though. Patents protect the method of doing something, not its results. Formatting a disk might be covered, but once created the resulting data on the disk is not.
The card manufacturers aren't actually running a DOS format on each flash card; they're doing a block-by-block copy of the data from an already formatted flash card. And even if they're not currently, they trivially could. The block-copy method would not be covered by any conceivable patent.
Remember, patent is not copyright. Copyright applies to the duplication of a work; patent does not. Patent only applies to the actual use of a particular method or device.
There are always some suckers out there convinced they need a license for everything. Why shouldn't Microsoft accept their "gifts"?
There are a number of machines that are accessable to all Debian developers for various reasons. These all run sshd, which is very likely the entry vector used by the attacker
IMHO, this is and has been debian's weakest link. Ssh is used by debian in a whole lot of places where systems which do not entail shell access would have been appropriate. Shell access to a system is not necessary to insert a package into the build system or to push the archive down to the mirrors.
Whoops, you're right, 802.11a isn't in the same frequency range as 802.11b.
The original point is valid though: frequency hopping spread spectrum radios (FHSS) will not coexist in the same spectrum as direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) radios. They clobber each other. And there are FHSS devices sold which use the 2.4ghz spectrum like 802.11b... Even if they're not 802.11a.
Yes they do, but the FCC has specified that a device may use the whole spectrum up there. The 11 channels are an IEEE standard, not an FCC rule. As long as it uses spread spectrum, is under the ERP limit, and has been put through the appropriate certification testing, it can use as much or as little of that frequency band as it wants.
For example, FHSS radios (like 802.11a) DO use the entire spectrum. If you use an 802.11a radio near an 802.11b system, it'll stomp all over the 802.11b system severely degrading performance. Also, think: 2.4ghz range extender telephones. These don't use channels the way 802.11b does either.
Also note that even under the IEEE's channels, the side by side channels have sidebands which stomp on each other. That's why your manual tells you to leave an empty channel between the one you're using and the ones that other 802.11b networks in your area are using.
That means that you don't have to be licensed to *use* equipment that operates in that band. The systems themselves still have to go through certification testing at a licensed lab to make sure they comply with the rules for a given band.
When adjusted for population, Murray's numbers show a decline in accomplishment after 1800. When numbers are used that take not only total population in account, but also urban population and educated population, the decline has brought us down to nearly pre-Renaissance levels.
Stand that argument on its head and it becomes interesting. The modern rate of accomplishment puts the Renaissance to shame, yet the per-capita rate of accomplishment is Dark Ages or worse. That means that the modern impact of each accomplishment is far greater than it was then.
It also means that if we find new ways to increase population (space colonies anyone?) we should also see a rise in the rate of accomplishmet of the human race as a whole.
(4) Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling of the ebook's read-aloud function and that prevent the enabling of screen readers to render the text into a specialized format.
Doesn't this mean that clit is now legal where the ebook isn't available in another format?
AOL is advertising that if you use their service and software, they will block popup adds.
The particular microsoft software you're talking about is named "WinPopup". Its intended use was for LAN system administrators to send notices about network events such as shutting down a server for a backup.
They promise to block popups. They block popups. What's the problem?
This is good news. The courts shouldn't have much trouble rejecting this, and it'll help build the precedent necessary to reject eula claims in newer technologies like software.
Slashdot Mirror
Generally speaking, when a company funds an "independent" study of this nature they use several relatively subtle techniques to predetermine the results.
A) They pick the researcher. Every researcher or research group has biases which are hinted at by their previous research. These biases are generally more reflective of the researchers' skill set than of any malfeasance, but they are biases nevertheless, and they bias the results.
B) They choose the research to be performed. For example, if you do a random sampling of the man on the street he'll show a preference for Windows because he's seen it before. Microsoft could then tout that result claiming that "folks like Windows better" even though the research doesn't really justify that claim. By doing some informal in-house studies and then selecting the ones that did well for independent research, the results can be all but guaranteed.
C) They choose which results to show you. The studies which didn't work out well for Windows got round-filed, with perhaps a couple of straw-man studies making it to light so that the paranoid won't go looking for the missing research. While no self-respecting independent researcher would allow the funding agency to prevent publication of the research, its very likely they're prohibited from identifying the funding agency without permission. There are a number of studies out there favoring Linux whose funding sources were not disclosed. How many of them were funded by Microsoft?
Food for thought.
And once again, my ISP is immune to it because they don't allow windows-executable attachments in email.
Sometimes the simple solutions are best.
First, make a call. Navigate your way to someone senior and offer to sell them a license to use your code as they see fit. After all, why shouldn't you make some money off your code too?
Follow up with a letter in which you inform them that you have determined that your software appears in their code without a license. Offer to sell them a license for some reasonable amount. Point out that you have also offered them use of the software under the GPL license if they prefer.
Direct your letter to their legal counsel if they have one. Otherwise, look for someone near the top. The head of the salesforce is generally a good bet; they're very vocal within the company and will tend to get the necessary folks to deal with you.
Wow. That's just, wow. Publishing the correspondence like that is tantamount to saying, "Screw you. We have nothing more to say outside of court."
You leave no room for the concept that a current employee has a job, gets up in the morning, goes to work, does their work, goes home, goes to bed just so they can get money to pay the rent.
I leave plenty of room for that concept... But outside the lowest ranks, I'm looking for someone who is dedicated to their career and not just "looking for a job."
If the individual is as dedicated to their career as I think they ought to be, then how could they be willing to work for SCO during the Linux Lawsuit period? Either they have "flexible" ethics or they're a nine-to-fiver. I don't want either type on my high-talent IT team.
Also, in a cost-heavy field like IT I'd prefer someone with enough fiscal sense that they're not living paycheck to paycheck. I've heard every excuse, and it just about always boils down to choices that individual made that they should have known better. Sometimes the choice was made 10 years ago, but it was always a choice. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'd really prefer to hire a pinch-penny.
If anyone wants pictures of previous some of the earlier days down here, check out:
h t/
http://bill.herrin.us/pictures/200312-firstflig
I have a bunch of pictures, including the formation which included two A10's, an F15 and a P51.
I missed yesterday though, and I havn't uploaded today's meager pickings yet. Between the rain and the crowd, I didn't get many worthwhile today anyway.
Where I work, we changed our advertising from "unlimited" to "unrestricted" for this very reason. Unrestricted sounds about the same but gives us an out to require more money for that top 1%.
Among other job duties, I am the company's cost analyst. I studied the heavy usage issue. The results would surprise only a fool.
What drives the cost of a dialin? Well, its usage during the daily peak time, of course. As an ISP, you generally pay based on the 95% peak consumption of bandwidth plus you have to have incoming lines and backhaul lines sufficient to handle the daily peak.
This means that any account which is online at every daily peak consumes the same cost of resources as an account which is on 24 hours a day.
So, do the monthly hour consumption and the daily peak usage correlate? They do. Starting somewhere between 180 and 240 hours, 95% of the accounts are online at more than 95% of the weekday peaks (our weekend peaks are lower, and thus excluded from the equation).
That means that for all practical purposes we have to have an entire network port and bandwidth just for that one customer.
Now, how much does your home phone line cost? And your dialup internet account? The dialup is less, right? Well, guess what: all told your ISP is paying more like what your home phone line costs to deliver that account. They're in business to make money, not lose it.
Using a GPS system to track the snow plows just makes good sense.
Everybody who lives in an area that gets snow knows just how capricious the plowing schedule is. In the big snow last year, my street was plowed after the first two inches fell, and it didn't see another plow for four days.
With GPS, the coordinating agency can figure out where the plows missed without falling victim to the squeaky wheel syndrome.
As for the Orwellian concerns, I'm inclined to poo-poo them in this instance. This is not about Big Brother snooping on my private life or anyone else's private life; its about making sure that a company spending my hard-earned tax dollars is accomplishing what I've paid for it to do.
With that in mind, the GPS unit should, IMHO, have an off switch. The operator can turn it off any time he wants; he just shouldn't get credit for plowing unless its on.
If it involves trade secrets, that's true. The problem is that publication, even if accidental, destroys a trade secret.
Any code inserted into the Linux kernel is no longer a trade secret. Period. If such code exists and if IBM put it there then IBM could be liable for monetary damages for destroying the trade secret... But the cat is out of the bag and the trade secret is already gone.
Way off the topic, but...
I think I'm the only person on the freaking planet who actually considers paying taxes a civic duty, and that pays them willingly and with the knowledge that it is in my best interest to do so.
No, you're not. I also pay my taxes with pride.
I do not, however, proudly fill out my form 1040. That nosey and incomprehensible instrument should not exist. It is none of the federal government's damn business how I get my money or what I do with it.
We should, IMHO, replace the income tax with a national sales tax or some other instrument that does not require an individual to disclose extensive personal information. We could even achieve the same policy objectives that income tax deductions attempt by altering the sales tax rate so that its higher on luxuries and lower on staples... All without ever identifying WHO is buying what.
Interestingly enough, I have not been able to identify an actual penalty that can be applied for failing to file the form 1040. There are a bunch of penalties that can be applied for underpaying taxes, and there are penalties for failing to file in conjunction with underpaying taxes, but I havn't been able to find any for failing to file all on its own. Perhaps someone more familiar with tax law can offer a reference?
The US was the first to land men on the moon, therefore it belongs to the US. Why is that so complicated for the rest of the world to understand?
Perhaps because we've signed and ratified a treaty in which we agree that no nation or other organization (including us) can own the moon or anything else off Earth that we didn't actually put there. As I recall, the same treaty disclaimed ownership of Antarctica as well.
Look, there go some one-dimensional bad guys! Look, there goes the one-dimensional good guy (well, person)! Look, she's put in impossible tactical odds and yet somehow still manages to triumph! Look, she gets no respect back at home! Look, the next book rehashes the EXACT SAME PLOT.
And this is different from any other war fiction how? In pretty much all of the fiction written about war where war is the focus of the plot rather than an incidental part of the setting things unfold something like this:
1) Bad guys attack because
a) They're evil
b) An unfortunate misunderstanding
c) Mutual irreconcilable differences
2) Good guys respond. The battle wages back and forth.
3) Either
a) The good guys triumph against the odds
b) Nobody really wins because the moral of the story is the horror of war.
4) Good guys return to drab or even ignominious existance.
For that matter, most of the non-fiction accounts of war work out about the same way as well.
If you're looking for something more inspired, don't read war stories.
How much do you want to bet that this came about because some flash-card manufacturer asked Microsoft for licensing terms and not the other way around?
Seriously, think it though. Patents protect the method of doing something, not its results. Formatting a disk might be covered, but once created the resulting data on the disk is not.
The card manufacturers aren't actually running a DOS format on each flash card; they're doing a block-by-block copy of the data from an already formatted flash card. And even if they're not currently, they trivially could. The block-copy method would not be covered by any conceivable patent.
Remember, patent is not copyright. Copyright applies to the duplication of a work; patent does not. Patent only applies to the actual use of a particular method or device.
There are always some suckers out there convinced they need a license for everything. Why shouldn't Microsoft accept their "gifts"?
There are a number of machines that are accessable to all Debian developers for various reasons. These all run sshd, which is very likely the entry vector used by the attacker
IMHO, this is and has been debian's weakest link. Ssh is used by debian in a whole lot of places where systems which do not entail shell access would have been appropriate. Shell access to a system is not necessary to insert a package into the build system or to push the archive down to the mirrors.
The first line in that file is:
[Note: The original announcement didn't have a GnuPG signature.]
Whoops, you're right, 802.11a isn't in the same frequency range as 802.11b.
The original point is valid though: frequency hopping spread spectrum radios (FHSS) will not coexist in the same spectrum as direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) radios. They clobber each other. And there are FHSS devices sold which use the 2.4ghz spectrum like 802.11b... Even if they're not 802.11a.
Yes and no.
Yes they do, but the FCC has specified that a device may use the whole spectrum up there. The 11 channels are an IEEE standard, not an FCC rule. As long as it uses spread spectrum, is under the ERP limit, and has been put through the appropriate certification testing, it can use as much or as little of that frequency band as it wants.
For example, FHSS radios (like 802.11a) DO use the entire spectrum. If you use an 802.11a radio near an 802.11b system, it'll stomp all over the 802.11b system severely degrading performance. Also, think: 2.4ghz range extender telephones. These don't use channels the way 802.11b does either.
Also note that even under the IEEE's channels, the side by side channels have sidebands which stomp on each other. That's why your manual tells you to leave an empty channel between the one you're using and the ones that other 802.11b networks in your area are using.
That means that you don't have to be licensed to *use* equipment that operates in that band. The systems themselves still have to go through certification testing at a licensed lab to make sure they comply with the rules for a given band.
How is this a conflict of interest? It would only be a conflict of interest if the lawyers were working for the other side of the argument.
When adjusted for population, Murray's numbers show a decline in accomplishment after 1800. When numbers are used that take not only total population in account, but also urban population and educated population, the decline has brought us down to nearly pre-Renaissance levels.
Stand that argument on its head and it becomes interesting. The modern rate of accomplishment puts the Renaissance to shame, yet the per-capita rate of accomplishment is Dark Ages or worse. That means that the modern impact of each accomplishment is far greater than it was then.
It also means that if we find new ways to increase population (space colonies anyone?) we should also see a rise in the rate of accomplishmet of the human race as a whole.
(4) Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling of the ebook's read-aloud function and that prevent the enabling of screen readers to render the text into a specialized format.
Doesn't this mean that clit is now legal where the ebook isn't available in another format?
AOL is advertising that if you use their service and software, they will block popup adds.
The particular microsoft software you're talking about is named "WinPopup". Its intended use was for LAN system administrators to send notices about network events such as shutting down a server for a backup.
They promise to block popups. They block popups. What's the problem?
This is good news. The courts shouldn't have much trouble rejecting this, and it'll help build the precedent necessary to reject eula claims in newer technologies like software.
That's good to hear. I'll open back up my spam filter accordingly.
Favorite Web-Hosting Service: RACKSPACE
Rackspace.com? Aren't they the ones that can't seem to keep spammers off their network? Or have they cleaned up their act?