There is no reason......for online (or catalog) merchants to be given special advantage over the brick and mortar kind.
There are lots of good reasons, both legal and practical.
First of all, in state catalog and internet sales are already taxed, so let's just assume we're not talking about those for this conversation.
Out of state catalogs and internet sites are involved in interstate commerce, which is explicitly the juristiction of the federal government. These sales are already taxed in almost every state as "Use Tax" instead of sales tax because of this limitation. "Use Tax" is hardly ever enforced for individuals because it costs more money to police it than the revenue increase would justify. This leads to the second point: It would be impracitcal to enforce interstate sales tax on catalog and online vendors. First the state would have no way to keep track of which vendors shipped goods into their state, or what was in the box. Secondly, the 50x increase in the number of forms the merchants would have to file would give them a disadvantage over traditional retail outlets. Lastly, the catalog vendors don't have an advantage of retail stores because there is nothing stopping traditional retailers from selling over the internet or mail-order along side of their regular business.
you can say that no business can be taxed... . . . The people who quote Heinlein whenever the **AA come up should also gripe about the advantage given to companies - in this case, those who are given advantageous tax exclusions.
Your argument here is flawed. It is the consumer that is being taxed, not the business. The advantage is given to you not the company you are purchasing from.
That's lovely. We're supposed to know about that how? First you have to figure out that kudzu is what is pissing you off (not hard, but stupid name). Then you have to figure out that this "chkconfig" thing is what you use to turn it off. I never have the patience to figure out what redhat has utilities for. I alway just delete the symlinks in the init directories, or rename the init script in init.d to break the symlinks.
If you have unusual hardware it's just as much a pain in the ass to install redhat as it is to install debian as it is to install windows 2000*. All this bickering about how much easier one is over the other just proves that everybody thinks their OS of choice is the easiest.
*(Well, windows 2000 gets special mention, because if you have hardware that is required for boot but not supported by default there is both no shell to help you figure out what it is and no method of installing the drivers other then pressing F6 in the designated 5 second window (would a menu selection have killed them?) and supplying the drivers on a floppy disk (no other media types allowed). That means that if you only have one machine, it has no OS on it, and your SCSI/IDE-RAID driver came on a CD-ROM it is literaly impossible to install windows 2000. Yay Microsoft! It gets my vote for the most obnoxious OS install procedure behind Netware 4.)
People seem to think its far superior without any grounding in fact.
I think my TiVo is superior because I paid $150 for it over 3 years ago. It took ReplayTV too long to get it right. Their early versions were crap. In the time it took them to make it worthwhile, lots of people already bought TiVo. What you have already is better than what you can buy for more money.
Seriously, though. What are you using as pigeons, users (currently connected)? And the 10 license seats as pigeon holes?
Nope, I was thinking of user/seconds as pigeons and seconds as pigeon holes. You're right that it doesn't make sense at all using the license seats as pigeon holes.
Thus, after 17 years, a little over half the time you will have had more than 10 users connected. (That wasn't as clear as I'd like. What I meant to say is that for each 34 years you will violate the concurrent connection policy an average of 1 time). That is making the assumption that all 100 computers are continuously on and polling the server at a rate of once per two minutes, regardless of it being day or night.
Exactly, but you don't need to be in violation. You'll just have to make somebody wait an extra second once every three decades.
Another solution would be to reduce class size by allowing kids to go to schools that aren't failing. Take just half of what the average public school is spending per child ($5,987 in 1999 according to the Digest of Education Statistics - of course remembering that most inner city schools are spending ABOVE average.) and give it as a voucher to interested parents and you have almost comletely covered the average tuition for that "exclusive" private school ($3,116 - same source) or more than cover the average tuition of a parochial school ($2,178). KEEP the other half (or better) and spend it on the kids that don't chose private schools.The problem with this plan isn't that there isn't enough money to spend on the kids, it's that there isn't enough money to spend on union jobs. If (for example) half the kids choose vouchers you will have 50% of the kids left at the school but have still have 75% of the money. You can spend all of that money on retaining 75% of the teachers and have much smaller class sizes. BUT you are going to have to lay-off 25% of the teachers. It doesn't really matter to a layed-off employee that his former employer is now producing a better product. That employee's union is (appropriately) more concerned about his job than the quality of the product he produces. To bring it back on topic that union is spending more than all but any other group in the country to keep that from happening.
Thank you for collection all those statistics in one place. It seems to me that it's taken as "common knowledge" that there not being enough money is the cause of schools being bad, when from what I've seen things would get alot better if the union negotiated contracts could be changed. You see, laying off 25% of the teachers wouldn't be difficult, but it wouldn't save you 25% in salaries. The union contracts protect the teachers with longer careers and enforce mandatory yearly rases. You can't cut their salary (as high as $90,000 in some cases, and they can take a part time position in the summer too), and you can't lay them off, you have to get rid of the new teachers that only make $20-30k per year first. Guess which teaches are more likely to still care about the children? It's hard to improve the schools when the teachers union is fighting harder than you can afford to keep them the way they are.
The probelm isn't the temperature necissarily, but the air flow. You are correct that ~70 degrees should be OK, but can you keep it 70 degrees everywhere in the room? Unlikely. It would take alot of fans pointing in the right direction. I'd rather have it too cold than too loud. I don't know about you...
Most server rooms/labs are chilled well below 70 degrees to make sure that no crucial point in the room goes above ~70 degrees. Even in our lab where it's 65 degrees all the time it was still ~80 degrees behind the rack of alphas.
Ridiculous example for a mail server. Expect 100% of the people in the office to be connected to the server.
Alright! Somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about!
In an office with 100 users, you can expect the server to have zero users connected to it most of the time. You see, you don't stay connected to the server, you just poll for updates. Typically you poll every 5 minutes, but even if you poll every two minutes the server will still be inactive more often than not. There are 300 seconds in five minutes, and usually if your network is up to date you're not going to take more then 1 second to update. That means your server is idle two thirds of the time. Now, having a 10 concurrent access license is still a good idea because some users will likely access the server at the same time, but you are certainly not going to have everybody connected at once.
Check a local CS or discrete mathematics book about the "pigeonhole principal" for the probabilities. (and people say that CS is just programming, and all those theoretical classes aren't important!...)
I've got a Comcast (formerly @Home) cable modem, and I would happily pay more for DSL from somebody like speakeasy, but it's not available in my area.
The techs laughed at my circuit-- it was the dirtiest they had seen in some time, especially in a major city. Bridge taps, unterminated pairs (one nearly a mile long), some sort of coil, and so on. He said every problem on their list was present more than once, on top of the distance being 50% outside their max window for IDSL (which would have been a whopping 144kbps anyway).
Your problem is not your line, but your choice of providers. Don't get me wrong, speakeasy is a great provider if your line is clean to start with, but they can't afford to fix existing problems when you sign up because they're not charging you for the instalation. You have to get a different CLEC. I have worldcom at my current place of residence (not as the ISP though). They found the best of the available pairs and switched my line on to it. Then they spent over a week fixing all the little problems on it. Sure I paid over $400 for instalation, but every other company laughed at my line and said it was impossible. Not impossible, just expensive.
Also, you're line may not be too long. The distance is estimated by an impeadance measurement. With the right equipment a tech can figure out if the problem is due to a partial short or some other cable quality problem instead of distance. They can also estimate the location of the probelm and replace that section of the loop. It's hard to believe that you'd be out of range in a big city.
Satellite is out because of the ridiculous ping. Okay for web access, crap for games.
You also have a motivation problem. If you use your connection for work then it's easy to justify the cost of a first rate provider. If all you do is play games then I can understand having a hard time justifying the cost of a good connection. I'm not saying you shouldn't play games, but if you turn your line in to an income source on top of it's entertainment qualities it is much easier to write that big check.
If you're going to put Linux on a notebook, go for the hardware with the most bang for the buck.
Because powerbooks are the hardware with the most bang for the buck. They're less expensive then PC laptops with comprable features (go look) and, most importantly, they beat the pants off of any x86 compatable laptop in battery life.
I love my Powerbook. It runs linux instead of OSX because I use linux for work.
Or you can get the same effect by going to home depot and buying two rolls of pipe insulation tape for $3 each. Two layers works just as well as dynamat and weighs almost half as much.
Well, admittedly, there are other sorts of mice. However, I thought that the idea would be obvious enough. Apparently, either it wasn't, or you didn't learn cursive in grade school.
I did, but I still put spaces between words. I still also don't understand how you plan on drawing diagrams without lifting the pen.
The bottom of my mouse has a red light on it. Yours may have a ball or two disks. Either way, when I pick it up off the table the cursor stops moving. Imagine trying to draw a picture or a diagram, or write words, but every time you try to make a mark it starts exactly where the last one ended...
1a) Look into summasketch pens from the 1980s
They have a special tablet and a coil of wire to detect their position. How is that different from having a special pad?
I can certainly imagine ways of doing that that DON'T require digital paper.
Just out of curiosity, how else would you do it? You need to compensate for the fact that people pick up the pen and move to a different spot on the paper while they're writing/drawing. How would you deal with that without special paper.
No, you idiot. Throwing people into an arbitrary group based on a stereotype degrades them. Implying that somebody is too stupid to figure something out based on their age and gender is degrading. It has nothing to do with computer skills.
The fact that you didn't understand that is scary.
On the other hand, I have been trolled... yadda yadda...
Maybe your grandma doesn't grep... Some of them grok shell, and some 20 year old jocks can't find the power switch. Let's not degrade our grandparents.
The people you're talking about don't use explorer either. They click the little application icon, and use the file->open menu. To them their files aren't in a directory (or, blech, a folder), they're in "Word" or in "Outlook". Regular users don't browse filesystems. People who do browse filesystems tend to find the command line as easy once they're shown the basics of how to use it.
MIMEDefang is the most annoying useless piece of crap that has ever been forced on end users. I don't use outlook, and I don't need to be protected from windows viruses. I *DO* want MIME to work as intended. When my system administrator imposed MIMEDefiang on us at work I promptly wrote a procmail filter and perl script to UNDefang the mime headers. It's just an inconvienience, and it doesn't accomplish anything. The people who are smart enough to figure out how to turn it off are smart enough to avoid getting viruses. Everybody else is going to save the file and rename it and get the virus anyway. You're going to have to teach them how to do this so they can still read word documents that are sent to them as attachments.
Education is the answer. Breaking MIME should be a criminal offense.
The last three places I've been I've drilled holes when I wasn't allowed. If you've got baseboard heat, hide the holes behind the radiator. Otherwise make the holes 1/4" in diameter, and some joint compound will cover the hole in minutes before you move out. At the hardware store you can buy a spray can that you can put standard latex paint in. Match the color and feather out from the center of the patch when you're done. Furniture will keep the hole invisible if the landlord comes over to visit. Believe me, even the most obsessive compulsive/invasive landlord isn't going to notice holes like that. My last evil landlord lady couldn't find the single hole that wasn't behind the radiator when she did her rediculous inspection. I think that I'm the first person she ever had to (begrudgingly) give the entire security deposit back to.
If that were true then you can open the executable in a hex editor, change the security checks into noop and your former security restriciton requiring program no longer requires security restriction. That is the same trick used on alot of 0-day warez. Imagine hacked palladium programs being on the net before the OS is officially available.:P
A palladium protected application will likely be encrypted on disk and only the Palladium protected windows OS will know how to decrypt it. (Pretty much exactly what you said in your next paragraph).
I still see this being brakeable, but only with special hardware. It's technically infeasable to encrypt the memory bus...
Otherwise anyone could boot off a floppy or mount the Palladium protected drive in another computer and copy anything they wanted. Hmmm? What would be accomplished if this were not true?
Smart application developers who don't want you to be able to access their applications data from a non Palladium compliant OS will encrypt the data on the disk. Then only their application can manipulate it, and their application will only run on a Palladium enable system.
I don't really care if MS uses Palladium to stop people from pirating software, good on them. The REAL problem is them using Digital Rights Management to control what software you can run on your computer regardless of license.
Yep, you're wrong here. You can still use Palladium capable machines to run arbitrary code. Palladium enables software to require restrictions management to be enabled, and specify the restrictions; It doesn't enforce anything that the running software doesn't ask it to. If you don't put Palladium support in the software you run then Palladium has no effect on your code.
When two parties file for patents on the same technology, the patent is awarded to whomever filed first, unless prior art can be proven.
If enough patents are filed for the same idea at roughly the same time, the patent should not be granted (and sometime is not) due to the apparent obviousness of the invention. Lack obviousness to people sikilled in the area the patent pertains is one of the requirements for a patent to be granted, but if you want a patent invalidated on the grounds that it's obvious, you better do it before the patent is granted. It's hard (impossible) to show that something is obvious after it's been explained to you via a patent.
Seems like a waste to me. If I'm going to buy a good tube based amp I'd want it to be seperate so I wouldn't have to re-buy it for upgrades and I'd have more choice in the matter. I'd also not connect it to AC97 hardware. I like my A/D conversion electrically decoupled from my (electrically) noisy PC. When you have good headphones it's easy to tell.
Besides, people are just going to connect indpendantly (solid state) amplified speakers to this thing and cancel out the potential benifit.
First of all the companies are trying to recoup their R&D costs (and make a profit).
I agree, but I think we need to look at the consequences of how we achieve the protection of profits we need to provide. This will make more sense in a moment I hope.
Second of all, I think it's better the way they are created at the moment, that is, unable to reproduce. I don't want super-plants spreading all over the place (outside of farmers' fields) and destroying our eco-system.
If they couldn't reproduce that would be better. The problem is that they CAN reproduce, but produce low quality seed. If you're a farmer that uses traditional seed, and your crop gets cross-polinated from your neighbors GM crop, your seed will produce inferior plants. That's a problem.
I'm not against Genetically altered food, if it offers something legititely _good, such as rice modified to have vitamin C or A, or what have you.
The only thing you have to worry about is that most companies selling GM seeds make the plants unable to pass the modification on to future generations of seeds. This can be a problem if good, freely available species of plants get diluted or lost, and later the GM seeds become unavailable. You should necissarily have to worry about using GM foods, but you should be aware of the practices of the companies you are buying such foods from. The food itself may be better, but the overall situation may not be in your best interests.
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There is no reason... ...for online (or catalog) merchants to be given special advantage over the brick and mortar kind.
There are lots of good reasons, both legal and practical.
First of all, in state catalog and internet sales are already taxed, so let's just assume we're not talking about those for this conversation.
Out of state catalogs and internet sites are involved in interstate commerce, which is explicitly the juristiction of the federal government. These sales are already taxed in almost every state as "Use Tax" instead of sales tax because of this limitation. "Use Tax" is hardly ever enforced for individuals because it costs more money to police it than the revenue increase would justify. This leads to the second point: It would be impracitcal to enforce interstate sales tax on catalog and online vendors. First the state would have no way to keep track of which vendors shipped goods into their state, or what was in the box. Secondly, the 50x increase in the number of forms the merchants would have to file would give them a disadvantage over traditional retail outlets. Lastly, the catalog vendors don't have an advantage of retail stores because there is nothing stopping traditional retailers from selling over the internet or mail-order along side of their regular business.
you can say that no business can be taxed...
.
.
.
The people who quote Heinlein whenever the **AA come up should also gripe about the advantage given to companies - in this case, those who are given advantageous tax exclusions.
Your argument here is flawed. It is the consumer that is being taxed, not the business. The advantage is given to you not the company you are purchasing from.
#/sbin/chkconfig kudzu off
That's lovely. We're supposed to know about that how? First you have to figure out that kudzu is what is pissing you off (not hard, but stupid name). Then you have to figure out that this "chkconfig" thing is what you use to turn it off. I never have the patience to figure out what redhat has utilities for. I alway just delete the symlinks in the init directories, or rename the init script in init.d to break the symlinks.
If you have unusual hardware it's just as much a pain in the ass to install redhat as it is to install debian as it is to install windows 2000*. All this bickering about how much easier one is over the other just proves that everybody thinks their OS of choice is the easiest.
*(Well, windows 2000 gets special mention, because if you have hardware that is required for boot but not supported by default there is both no shell to help you figure out what it is and no method of installing the drivers other then pressing F6 in the designated 5 second window (would a menu selection have killed them?) and supplying the drivers on a floppy disk (no other media types allowed). That means that if you only have one machine, it has no OS on it, and your SCSI/IDE-RAID driver came on a CD-ROM it is literaly impossible to install windows 2000. Yay Microsoft! It gets my vote for the most obnoxious OS install procedure behind Netware 4.)
People seem to think its far superior without any grounding in fact.
I think my TiVo is superior because I paid $150 for it over 3 years ago. It took ReplayTV too long to get it right. Their early versions were crap. In the time it took them to make it worthwhile, lots of people already bought TiVo. What you have already is better than what you can buy for more money.
Seriously, though. What are you using as pigeons, users (currently connected)? And the 10 license seats as pigeon holes?
Nope, I was thinking of user/seconds as pigeons and seconds as pigeon holes. You're right that it doesn't make sense at all using the license seats as pigeon holes.
Thus, after 17 years, a little over half the time you will have had more than 10 users connected. (That wasn't as clear as I'd like. What I meant to say is that for each 34 years you will violate the concurrent connection policy an average of 1 time). That is making the assumption that all 100 computers are continuously on and polling the server at a rate of once per two minutes, regardless of it being day or night.
Exactly, but you don't need to be in violation. You'll just have to make somebody wait an extra second once every three decades.
Another solution would be to reduce class size by allowing kids to go to schools that aren't failing. Take just half of what the average public school is spending per child ($5,987 in 1999 according to the Digest of Education Statistics - of course remembering that most inner city schools are spending ABOVE average.) and give it as a voucher to interested parents and you have almost comletely covered the average tuition for that "exclusive" private school ($3,116 - same source) or more than cover the average tuition of a parochial school ($2,178). KEEP the other half (or better) and spend it on the kids that don't chose private schools.The problem with this plan isn't that there isn't enough money to spend on the kids, it's that there isn't enough money to spend on union jobs. If (for example) half the kids choose vouchers you will have 50% of the kids left at the school but have still have 75% of the money. You can spend all of that money on retaining 75% of the teachers and have much smaller class sizes. BUT you are going to have to lay-off 25% of the teachers. It doesn't really matter to a layed-off employee that his former employer is now producing a better product. That employee's union is (appropriately) more concerned about his job than the quality of the product he produces. To bring it back on topic that union is spending more than all but any other group in the country to keep that from happening.
Thank you for collection all those statistics in one place. It seems to me that it's taken as "common knowledge" that there not being enough money is the cause of schools being bad, when from what I've seen things would get alot better if the union negotiated contracts could be changed. You see, laying off 25% of the teachers wouldn't be difficult, but it wouldn't save you 25% in salaries. The union contracts protect the teachers with longer careers and enforce mandatory yearly rases. You can't cut their salary (as high as $90,000 in some cases, and they can take a part time position in the summer too), and you can't lay them off, you have to get rid of the new teachers that only make $20-30k per year first. Guess which teaches are more likely to still care about the children? It's hard to improve the schools when the teachers union is fighting harder than you can afford to keep them the way they are.
The probelm isn't the temperature necissarily, but the air flow. You are correct that ~70 degrees should be OK, but can you keep it 70 degrees everywhere in the room? Unlikely. It would take alot of fans pointing in the right direction. I'd rather have it too cold than too loud. I don't know about you...
Most server rooms/labs are chilled well below 70 degrees to make sure that no crucial point in the room goes above ~70 degrees. Even in our lab where it's 65 degrees all the time it was still ~80 degrees behind the rack of alphas.
Ridiculous example for a mail server. Expect 100% of the people in the office to be connected to the server.
Alright! Somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about!
In an office with 100 users, you can expect the server to have zero users connected to it most of the time. You see, you don't stay connected to the server, you just poll for updates. Typically you poll every 5 minutes, but even if you poll every two minutes the server will still be inactive more often than not. There are 300 seconds in five minutes, and usually if your network is up to date you're not going to take more then 1 second to update. That means your server is idle two thirds of the time. Now, having a 10 concurrent access license is still a good idea because some users will likely access the server at the same time, but you are certainly not going to have everybody connected at once.
Check a local CS or discrete mathematics book about the "pigeonhole principal" for the probabilities. (and people say that CS is just programming, and all those theoretical classes aren't important!...)
I've got a Comcast (formerly @Home) cable modem, and I would happily pay more for DSL from somebody like speakeasy, but it's not available in my area.
The techs laughed at my circuit-- it was the dirtiest they had seen in some time, especially in a major city. Bridge taps, unterminated pairs (one nearly a mile long), some sort of coil, and so on. He said every problem on their list was present more than once, on top of the distance being 50% outside their max window for IDSL (which would have been a whopping 144kbps anyway).
Your problem is not your line, but your choice of providers. Don't get me wrong, speakeasy is a great provider if your line is clean to start with, but they can't afford to fix existing problems when you sign up because they're not charging you for the instalation. You have to get a different CLEC. I have worldcom at my current place of residence (not as the ISP though). They found the best of the available pairs and switched my line on to it. Then they spent over a week fixing all the little problems on it. Sure I paid over $400 for instalation, but every other company laughed at my line and said it was impossible. Not impossible, just expensive.
Also, you're line may not be too long. The distance is estimated by an impeadance measurement. With the right equipment a tech can figure out if the problem is due to a partial short or some other cable quality problem instead of distance. They can also estimate the location of the probelm and replace that section of the loop. It's hard to believe that you'd be out of range in a big city.
Satellite is out because of the ridiculous ping. Okay for web access, crap for games.
You also have a motivation problem. If you use your connection for work then it's easy to justify the cost of a first rate provider. If all you do is play games then I can understand having a hard time justifying the cost of a good connection. I'm not saying you shouldn't play games, but if you turn your line in to an income source on top of it's entertainment qualities it is much easier to write that big check.
If you're going to put Linux on a notebook, go for the hardware with the most bang for the buck.
Because powerbooks are the hardware with the most bang for the buck. They're less expensive then PC laptops with comprable features (go look) and, most importantly, they beat the pants off of any x86 compatable laptop in battery life.
I love my Powerbook. It runs linux instead of OSX because I use linux for work.
Or you can get the same effect by going to home depot and buying two rolls of pipe insulation tape for $3 each. Two layers works just as well as dynamat and weighs almost half as much.
Well, admittedly, there are other sorts of mice. However, I thought that the idea would be obvious enough. Apparently, either it wasn't, or you didn't learn cursive in grade school.
I did, but I still put spaces between words. I still also don't understand how you plan on drawing diagrams without lifting the pen.
1) Look at the bottom of your mouse.
The bottom of my mouse has a red light on it. Yours may have a ball or two disks. Either way, when I pick it up off the table the cursor stops moving. Imagine trying to draw a picture or a diagram, or write words, but every time you try to make a mark it starts exactly where the last one ended...
1a) Look into summasketch pens from the 1980s
They have a special tablet and a coil of wire to detect their position. How is that different from having a special pad?
1b) Hang head in shame.
I'll leave that part to you.
I can certainly imagine ways of doing that that DON'T require digital paper.
Just out of curiosity, how else would you do it? You need to compensate for the fact that people pick up the pen and move to a different spot on the paper while they're writing/drawing. How would you deal with that without special paper.
No, you idiot. Throwing people into an arbitrary group based on a stereotype degrades them. Implying that somebody is too stupid to figure something out based on their age and gender is degrading. It has nothing to do with computer skills.
The fact that you didn't understand that is scary.
On the other hand, I have been trolled... yadda yadda...
Grandma doesn't grep.
Maybe your grandma doesn't grep... Some of them grok shell, and some 20 year old jocks can't find the power switch. Let's not degrade our grandparents.
The people you're talking about don't use explorer either. They click the little application icon, and use the file->open menu. To them their files aren't in a directory (or, blech, a folder), they're in "Word" or in "Outlook". Regular users don't browse filesystems. People who do browse filesystems tend to find the command line as easy once they're shown the basics of how to use it.
MIMEDefang is the most annoying useless piece of crap that has ever been forced on end users. I don't use outlook, and I don't need to be protected from windows viruses. I *DO* want MIME to work as intended. When my system administrator imposed MIMEDefiang on us at work I promptly wrote a procmail filter and perl script to UNDefang the mime headers. It's just an inconvienience, and it doesn't accomplish anything. The people who are smart enough to figure out how to turn it off are smart enough to avoid getting viruses. Everybody else is going to save the file and rename it and get the virus anyway. You're going to have to teach them how to do this so they can still read word documents that are sent to them as attachments.
Education is the answer. Breaking MIME should be a criminal offense.
The last three places I've been I've drilled holes when I wasn't allowed. If you've got baseboard heat, hide the holes behind the radiator. Otherwise make the holes 1/4" in diameter, and some joint compound will cover the hole in minutes before you move out. At the hardware store you can buy a spray can that you can put standard latex paint in. Match the color and feather out from the center of the patch when you're done. Furniture will keep the hole invisible if the landlord comes over to visit. Believe me, even the most obsessive compulsive/invasive landlord isn't going to notice holes like that. My last evil landlord lady couldn't find the single hole that wasn't behind the radiator when she did her rediculous inspection. I think that I'm the first person she ever had to (begrudgingly) give the entire security deposit back to.
If that were true then you can open the executable in a hex editor, change the security checks into noop and your former security restriciton requiring program no longer requires security restriction. That is the same trick used on alot of 0-day warez. Imagine hacked palladium programs being on the net before the OS is officially available. :P
A palladium protected application will likely be encrypted on disk and only the Palladium protected windows OS will know how to decrypt it. (Pretty much exactly what you said in your next paragraph).
I still see this being brakeable, but only with special hardware. It's technically infeasable to encrypt the memory bus...
Otherwise anyone could boot off a floppy or mount the Palladium protected drive in another computer and copy anything they wanted. Hmmm? What would be accomplished if this were not true?
Smart application developers who don't want you to be able to access their applications data from a non Palladium compliant OS will encrypt the data on the disk. Then only their application can manipulate it, and their application will only run on a Palladium enable system.
I don't really care if MS uses Palladium to stop people from pirating software, good on them. The REAL problem is them using Digital Rights Management to control what software you can run on your computer regardless of license.
Yep, you're wrong here. You can still use Palladium capable machines to run arbitrary code. Palladium enables software to require restrictions management to be enabled, and specify the restrictions; It doesn't enforce anything that the running software doesn't ask it to. If you don't put Palladium support in the software you run then Palladium has no effect on your code.
When two parties file for patents on the same technology, the patent is awarded to whomever filed first, unless prior art can be proven.
If enough patents are filed for the same idea at roughly the same time, the patent should not be granted (and sometime is not) due to the apparent obviousness of the invention. Lack obviousness to people sikilled in the area the patent pertains is one of the requirements for a patent to be granted, but if you want a patent invalidated on the grounds that it's obvious, you better do it before the patent is granted. It's hard (impossible) to show that something is obvious after it's been explained to you via a patent.
Seems like a waste to me. If I'm going to buy a good tube based amp I'd want it to be seperate so I wouldn't have to re-buy it for upgrades and I'd have more choice in the matter. I'd also not connect it to AC97 hardware. I like my A/D conversion electrically decoupled from my (electrically) noisy PC. When you have good headphones it's easy to tell.
Besides, people are just going to connect indpendantly (solid state) amplified speakers to this thing and cancel out the potential benifit.
First of all the companies are trying to recoup their R&D costs (and make a profit).
I agree, but I think we need to look at the consequences of how we achieve the protection of profits we need to provide. This will make more sense in a moment I hope.
Second of all, I think it's better the way they are created at the moment, that is, unable to reproduce. I don't want super-plants spreading all over the place (outside of farmers' fields) and destroying our eco-system.
If they couldn't reproduce that would be better. The problem is that they CAN reproduce, but produce low quality seed. If you're a farmer that uses traditional seed, and your crop gets cross-polinated from your neighbors GM crop, your seed will produce inferior plants. That's a problem.
I'm not against Genetically altered food, if it offers something legititely _good, such as rice modified to have vitamin C or A, or what have you.
The only thing you have to worry about is that most companies selling GM seeds make the plants unable to pass the modification on to future generations of seeds. This can be a problem if good, freely available species of plants get diluted or lost, and later the GM seeds become unavailable. You should necissarily have to worry about using GM foods, but you should be aware of the practices of the companies you are buying such foods from. The food itself may be better, but the overall situation may not be in your best interests.
Clearly you've never driven through New York. ;p
Clearly you've never driven in Boston. It makes driving in Ney Your seem like a dream come true.