Okay, you're talking about a different quota than the one I was thinking of.
But it's VMS, there's a quota for everything. You can cap per-login resource usage for pretty much everything. Back in the Day, the most common one I hit was CPU; my first CS account was limited to 5 minutes of CPU time, per login, IIRC. When I hit the limit (every 15 minutes?:) I got booted.
Hmm, well, barbecuing in Texas would be like hell for me, but I see your point. It's good that they've indicted Lay, but I'd have preferred it if they'd charged him (as they could have) quickly, and with the full spread of fraud charges. The amount of money that he defrauded investors of alone would be enough to earn him several life sentences in most jurisdictions.
But there's a general reluctance on the part of the various executive branches to charge CEOs with fraud for their misconduct towards investors. Why this is, I don't know. I thought investors were supposed to be the backbone of the capitalist economy. Letting CEOs, who are basically bureaucrats, do whatever they want is more reminiscent of a Stalinist type of organization.
Anyway, certainly the laws are in place to give Lay and the others the punishment they deserve. They just aren't often enforced.
VMS has process quotas to enable a qualified memory to boot processes off the system when the system runs out of memory. Nothing can stop you from running out of memory. Trust me on this one:)
Incidentally, I just saw somebody mentioning Tru64. This is quite possibly the worst commercial Unix ever. Do not run Tru64. Do not take the CDs out of the shrinkwrap. Treat them as you would mail from AOL.
God. I once had an account on a Tru64 system. It was every bad thing you ever heard about Unix, all rolled into one. Make your machine happy, put NetBSD or something useful on it, if you must have your Unix.
Incorrect. A local root exploit means any remote shell-access exploit becomes a remote root exploit. There are plenty of remote exploit that don't give you shell access.
Give it to me. Then all I need is a copy of VMS, and I'm good to go:)
Ah yes, elderly VMS hackers. You kids, with your GNU, and your EMACS. You don't know what real programming is until you've learned what the difference is between EVE and TPU.
(1) is not the answer. VAX clusters are groups of machines that share a lot of resources (most commonly, hard drives; even then, RAID arrays are popular in the bigger systems). Believe me, VMS' impressive uptime figures (and they're still very impressive) are largely because of (2).
You see, there's another respect in which humans are different: Being real, we can actually think for ourselves. The Governing Mind (represented people such as the beloved Mr. Lay) that lies so near to a corporate lawyer's heart is a legal fiction, just like a corporation.
(As an aside - You guys have no sense of humour. Of course I know what's up with Mr. Lay, it was a rhetorical question. Trying to make a point about corporate responsibility. Sheesh.)
Incidentally, where do incorporations cost a thousand bucks? Last time I handled one, I think it was $40 CDN. Admittedly, it was for a non-profit society, but I think the for-profit rates were only about $200 CDN. Maybe you guys should incorporate up here:)
It's been a while, but patents have been invalidated by courts in the U.S. because of selective enforcement. It's one of the forms of patent abuse that is recognized.
This is the only defense against submarine patents, and overall it's not a very good one. The problem with submarine patents is that you can never be sure that the court is going to rule that patent abuse has occurred, and a lot of times people will just settle to avoid going to court.
This is also different from the way trademark law works. In trademark law, your trademark stops being a trademark if people refer to it in a generic way. For example, I will say something like "I need a thermos." Thermos used to be a trademark; now it's a generic term referring to a type of bottle. The Thermos company used to sue anybody who referred to the class of bottle as Thermos, instead of calling them vacuum bottles (a more technically correct way of describing them), for example by hanging signs in stores above the section labelled "Thermos." However, it was a losing battle (er, bottle?) and now people just use the term in a generic way. Anyway, the point is that the lawsuits were not aimed at "if we don't sue, the fact that we haven't sued will be used against us in court" but rather "if we don't sue, this term is going to become generic in a hurry, we better sue."
Patent law works on the first principle, trademark the second.
Er, movie theaters do this all the time. Of course, I'm not an American, but up here in the Frozen North, any time I go into a movie theater (or even wander near one), my cellphone tends to lose its signal.
I consider this a good thing, actually; cellphone rings are irritating in movies, and it saves me from having to bother turning it off (my old, cheap Nokia stops its clock when it's switched off).
Here's a question point: If I have an FCC-approved wireless networking device (say, a cellphone), and I take it to work, can my employer prohibit me from using it?
I'll bet you anything the answer is "yes" if my employer's the NSA.:)
Yes, it was true. However, I don't know if what I'm about to say applies to the Amiga.
On the C-64, you could gain direct access to the track the drive head was on. In some protection schemes, the drive head would be stepped off the disk itself. No, I don't know why, at least not for certain, I only read the code, and went "Huh?"
I believe the idea was to realign the head by stepping it off the end of the disk, and then quickly re-step it back to the disk, only now slightly out of alignment. If the disk was formatted "correctly" (i.e. out of alignment), then the drive might have been able to read it in this fashion.
However, I could be wrong. The one thing I am certain of is the head was flown off the disk in some schemes. (That code is pretty easy to recognize:)
It's this flying-head system that shortens your drive life. When the head is stepped off of the disk, it bangs against the wall of the drive. This does physical damage.
'Course, that didn't stop C-64 hackers from making their floppy drives 'sing' by headbanging.:)
Anyway, I don't know if the Amiga's floppy error-correction will allow this kind of behaviour. I never went inside Amiga internals to that extent. Modern floppies, incidentally, will completely refuse to step off of their disks; this hasn't been a problem for quite some time.
Lots of bands sign insane record contracts when they're starting out. Look into the history of the Scorpions; they signed a deal for 20 (!) albums when they were just starting out.
Ten-album deals are pretty common. And no, that doesn't mean the record company will distribute ten of their albums; it means that if the record company asks for ten albums, it gets ten albums, and nobody else (including the band) is allowed to distribute the band's records.
The Beasties have only had, what, five-seven albums or so? They're probably still on their first contract.
The artist would not be legally bound to hand that $20 over to the label, unless they were in debt to the label (as many artists are). That would be considered a gift.
However, you'd still be breaking the law, subject to federal prosecution, blah blah blah...:)
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But it's VMS, there's a quota for everything. You can cap per-login resource usage for pretty much everything. Back in the Day, the most common one I hit was CPU; my first CS account was limited to 5 minutes of CPU time, per login, IIRC. When I hit the limit (every 15 minutes? :) I got booted.
We agree on the "will not crash" part, anyway.
Not sure what EDI was, if it's not EDT.
But there's a general reluctance on the part of the various executive branches to charge CEOs with fraud for their misconduct towards investors. Why this is, I don't know. I thought investors were supposed to be the backbone of the capitalist economy. Letting CEOs, who are basically bureaucrats, do whatever they want is more reminiscent of a Stalinist type of organization.
Anyway, certainly the laws are in place to give Lay and the others the punishment they deserve. They just aren't often enforced.
VMS has process quotas to enable a qualified memory to boot processes off the system when the system runs out of memory. Nothing can stop you from running out of memory. Trust me on this one :)
VMS' time counts in sixtieths of a second ('ticks') IIRC. And yeah, 64-bit. I'm guessing rollover might happen after the sun goes nova :)
God. I once had an account on a Tru64 system. It was every bad thing you ever heard about Unix, all rolled into one. Make your machine happy, put NetBSD or something useful on it, if you must have your Unix.
However, your point is a good one, if overstated.
Help is easier than man, though. So there :)
Ah yes, elderly VMS hackers. You kids, with your GNU, and your EMACS. You don't know what real programming is until you've learned what the difference is between EVE and TPU.
(1) is not the answer. VAX clusters are groups of machines that share a lot of resources (most commonly, hard drives; even then, RAID arrays are popular in the bigger systems). Believe me, VMS' impressive uptime figures (and they're still very impressive) are largely because of (2).
It's a VAX. They're older than commercial electricity. Obviously he had his own gas-fired generator running it :)
You see, there's another respect in which humans are different: Being real, we can actually think for ourselves. The Governing Mind (represented people such as the beloved Mr. Lay) that lies so near to a corporate lawyer's heart is a legal fiction, just like a corporation.
(As an aside - You guys have no sense of humour. Of course I know what's up with Mr. Lay, it was a rhetorical question. Trying to make a point about corporate responsibility. Sheesh.)
Incidentally, where do incorporations cost a thousand bucks? Last time I handled one, I think it was $40 CDN. Admittedly, it was for a non-profit society, but I think the for-profit rates were only about $200 CDN. Maybe you guys should incorporate up here :)
Guys, this is so Not A Big Deal. Most countries require this. When I saw this article, I was like, the U.S. doesn't? How odd.
Where'd Ma Bell go? Oh wait. How about Enron?
They can also be fined, and plus their Controlling Minds can be prosecuted for their actions (what's up with Ken Lay these days?)
This is the only defense against submarine patents, and overall it's not a very good one. The problem with submarine patents is that you can never be sure that the court is going to rule that patent abuse has occurred, and a lot of times people will just settle to avoid going to court.
This is also different from the way trademark law works. In trademark law, your trademark stops being a trademark if people refer to it in a generic way. For example, I will say something like "I need a thermos." Thermos used to be a trademark; now it's a generic term referring to a type of bottle. The Thermos company used to sue anybody who referred to the class of bottle as Thermos, instead of calling them vacuum bottles (a more technically correct way of describing them), for example by hanging signs in stores above the section labelled "Thermos." However, it was a losing battle (er, bottle?) and now people just use the term in a generic way. Anyway, the point is that the lawsuits were not aimed at "if we don't sue, the fact that we haven't sued will be used against us in court" but rather "if we don't sue, this term is going to become generic in a hurry, we better sue."
Patent law works on the first principle, trademark the second.
Sadly, it doesn't actually do anything. Oh well :)
The FCC has no jurisdiction up here; the equivalent agency is the CRTC.
I consider this a good thing, actually; cellphone rings are irritating in movies, and it saves me from having to bother turning it off (my old, cheap Nokia stops its clock when it's switched off).
Here's a question point: If I have an FCC-approved wireless networking device (say, a cellphone), and I take it to work, can my employer prohibit me from using it?
I'll bet you anything the answer is "yes" if my employer's the NSA. :)
As for the phone#, all you need is a pay-as-you-go phone, which takes a card that you pay for with cash.
I wonder if it's possible to write a Perl script that's also a message in leet-speak? Hmm. Perhaps a task for the JAPH crew.
The hacker vs. cracker debate has been raging since at least the '70s. It was in full force when I hit university, back in '87.
Perhaps you missed it, but... cracker way predates Mitnick.
On the C-64, you could gain direct access to the track the drive head was on. In some protection schemes, the drive head would be stepped off the disk itself. No, I don't know why, at least not for certain, I only read the code, and went "Huh?"
I believe the idea was to realign the head by stepping it off the end of the disk, and then quickly re-step it back to the disk, only now slightly out of alignment. If the disk was formatted "correctly" (i.e. out of alignment), then the drive might have been able to read it in this fashion.
However, I could be wrong. The one thing I am certain of is the head was flown off the disk in some schemes. (That code is pretty easy to recognize :)
It's this flying-head system that shortens your drive life. When the head is stepped off of the disk, it bangs against the wall of the drive. This does physical damage.
'Course, that didn't stop C-64 hackers from making their floppy drives 'sing' by headbanging. :)
Anyway, I don't know if the Amiga's floppy error-correction will allow this kind of behaviour. I never went inside Amiga internals to that extent. Modern floppies, incidentally, will completely refuse to step off of their disks; this hasn't been a problem for quite some time.
Ten-album deals are pretty common. And no, that doesn't mean the record company will distribute ten of their albums; it means that if the record company asks for ten albums, it gets ten albums, and nobody else (including the band) is allowed to distribute the band's records.
The Beasties have only had, what, five-seven albums or so? They're probably still on their first contract.
However, you'd still be breaking the law, subject to federal prosecution, blah blah blah... :)