And this differs from a software EULA how? I buy Windoze, and I have to open an envelope with the "signify acceptance" phrase - after I have purchased the item.
Has such a software EULA ever been tested in court? I think you'd have a lot of trouble convicting someone of violating an 'agreement' that was not explained to him before he ponied up his cash.
Things are a bit different with the site licenses that major software vendors negotiate (key word here) with their medium-to-large-sized customers. In those cases, both parties agree to the terms before any money changes hands. And my lay understanding of contract law is that the key elements are:
"A meeting of the minds", demonstrated by
Offer
Acceptance
Consideration - You may notice that a lot of contracts use the phrase "For the sum of One Dollar, and other valuable consideration" - the contract has to give some value to each party or it can't be valid.
A quick google on the phrase 'elements of contract' turns up this, which is a Canadian site but still based on the principles of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence that rules 49 States and the District of Columbia (Louisiana is based on the French legal traditions):
No conditions can be attached to the acceptance and the terms of the offer can not be changed. If conditions are attached or terms are changed, the parties are merely negotiating and may ultimately reach agreement on the terms of the contract.
So if the condition is attached by Microsoft in such a manner that the condition is not made known to the purchaser before he pays for the item in question, it can be reasonably argued that no agreement has in fact been reached and you are using the *ware with an implied license rather than the explicit one printed on the envelope.
The big issue with software is that in order to execute a computer program, it must be copied from nonvolatile storage into RAM, which some think invokes Copyright. I'm not convinced that the law has been properly applied here, but that's why I'm a computer geek instead of a lawyer.
There is nothing to keep hardware manufacturers from putting similar EULA's on their devices,
Yes, there is. It's a little thing called the law. A EULA that says 'by opening this seal, you signify your acceptance of these terms' on an inner package that you don't see until after you have purchased the item, is flat-out unenforceable. The only terms and conditions of a transaction are those disclosed to both parties before the transaction.
IANAL, of course, but IHAB, and it seems pretty obvious that the only HW EULA that would pass muster in a court would be one that the consumer reads and signs before completing the transaction. Otherwise, the consumer's belief that he is in fact purchasing the item in question, rather than a license to use it, would be ratified by any court that heard the case.
And of course, getting sh, sed awk grep and whatever else onto Windows systems is so much easier than installing perl.
Well, given that about 90% of the systems I deal with use one flavor of Unix, 5% or so use one other, and only the remaining few percent use Windows or one of a handful of other flavors of Unix, I can't spend much time worrying about that.
In an earlier life, where I had systems I was physically in contact with, I did install a DOS port of perl to make it easy to do some things that needed done. But I can't afford the time to upload large binaries everywhere. If I can get to the point where I know that perl is already installed on the overwhelming majority of sites, I can change. Believe it or not, I like perl. I just don't feel that I can justify installing perl just so that my scripts will run, at least to the higher strata of PHBs who probably don't understand what I'm doing now, much less how to write perl.
Bourne shell is not available for all Unix-like platforms
Where it isn't, something else is that's backward-compatible, and
#!/bin/sh
gets that something else, whether it be a Bourne subset mode of ksh, bash, etc.
Better to write for bash, which is (1) available for all Unix-like environments . . .
There is a big difference between 'available' and 'installed'. I am working with a variant of Unix that does not normally have bash installed. I decided I didn't want the overhead (installing via 9600 bps modem most of the time) of binaries. Just as an example, a compressed copy of/bin/sh on my test server is about the same size as the self-extracting uuencoded compressed tarball I created so that it's easy for anyone to deploy all my scripts on a production server.
... you have more problems than just trying to reconcile an OS.
Yeah. He has a real problem throwing around catch phrases without understanding what they mean. This paragraph sounds like he's mostly parroting what he's heard from the 'missionaries', but clearly without any comprehension of what he's talking about when he tries to explain things (emphasis mine):
I know it sounds mad, but it's a fundamental tenet of this new religion. Here, software is not made by armies of "Microserfs" employed by a giant corporation, but by armies of volunteer programmers
who "donate" their code to the public domain. By making underlying source code available to all, many hands and minds work on the software to improve it - hence "open source".
This guy has heard just enough Linux advocacy verbiage to be dangerous. Anyone who has even attempted to read the GPL knows that it's not about public domain.
Is it just me, or does this stuff read like Dr. Evil, using the finger-quote gesture when he says 'death star' etc.?
Define irony: a bunch of idiots dancing around on a plane to a song made famous by a band that died in a plane crash.
If you ever fly into or out of Oklahoma City, try not to dwell on the fact that the Will Rogers World Airport (an ironic name in and of itself - how many international flights go through there?) is named for a man that died in a plane crash. What a brilliant way to encourage people to use your airport! [example of irony usually mislabeled 'sarcasm' by those who don't know what either word means, much less the subtlety of the related term 'sardonic']
Heh, a couple of hundred lines of C but it needs supported.
I work for the technical support department of my company. Our software was originally sold and serviced by independent vendors, many of which have since been acquired by the company itself. One of the things that makes support difficult is the high configurability of both the application itself and the underlying OS most often used (a flavor of Unix) make it easy for people to write utilities to expedite various common functions, to install system daemons that launch from different-named init scripts,.... When I come across problems at sites that were inherited from the sundry vendors, each of which had its own notion of the right way to do things, I must often waste precious time figuring out the intricacies of these 'couple of hundred lines', which are not documented in any way.
I have become one of those people who writes a 'couple of hundred lines' here or there (gradually assembling a package of tools that I upload to servers whenever possible) but as I am painfully aware of the Dark Side of infinite customizability, I have gone out of my way to document my work.
I write everything to Bourne shell, sed, awk, grep & Co., even though it might be easier to use perl or compile to binary. Even using a Korn shell is something I've avoided because I want my work to be understandable to as many people as possible.
I make liberal use of comments within the scripts to explain what I'm doing and why.
My scripts respond to -h,
--help, or anything remotely resembling either, with some, uh, help, which includes my work email address.
I've set up a documentation web page on a server on our intranet so that if anyone has questions, they can see what's supposed to be happening here, why, and how.
If you don't know that my utilities exist, or they haven't been installed on a site yet, you can get by without them. They in no way intrude upon the functioning of the system so as to be required (as your proxy is).
I've tried to educate others in my department about how these tools can be used, how they fit together,
And, even though I have the support of at least two levels of management above me in the org chart, I'm STILL concerned that someone high enough up the food chain will some day declare my little skunkworks project officially Evil and ban it, if for no reason other than the notion that nobody but I understand it well enough to keep up with the changes that will inevitably be required. What happens if I get hit by the proverbial bus, or just take a better job somewhere else?
For example, I wrote a utility to get around something our software people had done that makes logged-in users of our thin client software not show up in a
who or w. My utility shows those users as well as the ordinary who/w output, and I just found out yesterday that the latest upgrade to our core product changes the rules yet again, requiring me to slightly rewrite the utility to keep it working with all variations of our software and the two main flavors of Unix it runs on.
There is plenty good reason to not want people to become dependent on my tools being in place, since there is no guarantee that we can make the institutional commitment to maintaining them, even though I have plenty of happy customers and support techs who love what I've empowered them to do. I can only hope that the Guys in the Ties will recognize that deriving this much value from my work demands that we make that commitment, rather than abandon it as 'unsupportable'.
One would think that FSF would jump at the opportunity
(Good) lawyers don't JUMP at anything they don't have to jump at. They act more like snipers, studying their target(s) carefully, finding the best angle to attack from, and then fire a single shot designed to do the most damage.
Most of what's come out of SCO is so self-contradictory that the only intelligent response is "What the hell are you saying?" Until they can nail down exactly what they're complaining about, there's nothing else to do but demand that they give the particulars.
It would be more effective if there were many semi-anonymous domains that performed this function.
I guess I didn't make that obvious enough when I mentioned setting up 'one or more' spam trap sub-domains. I don't literally want to specify the word 'spamtrap'
The email server for
spamtrap.domain.org is Teergrube (tarpit) that locks up the spamming computer AND sends notification back to the web site to serve that IP links to a world-wide tarpit ring, so as to get the spammers as many tarpit email addresses as possible
where spamtrap can be filled in with anything the domain admin wants to use, and can even be changed from day to day if it suits his fancy
"SCO Group has assured its Linux customers that any company that's paying for Linux software and services from SCO Group is already paying for SCO's intellectual property."
But what about the intellectual property of everyone else that contributed code to SCO/Caldera Linux? Since that IP was licenced under the GPL, SCO/Caldera has no right to use it unless they release it under the GPL as well. They sent out to their paying customers CDs that include the GPL text. Those customers have every reason to believe that those were the terms of the license granted to them, and (although IANAL, I know people who are, who have explained to me that) courts tend to interpret any 'gray areas' in a license that is not negotiated between parties (but just placed on goods or services 'take it or leave it') in the terms that grant the greatest rights to the customer. So, any customers who paid even $1 to SCO/Caldera and received Linux as part of the package, have had their copies of Linux released to them under the terms of the GPL, which grants those customers the right to redistribute the code royalty-free. I trust that at least one of them has already submitted a copy of the source code they got from SCO/Caldera back to the community.
Even if SCO can somehow win against IBM, they really can't go after anyone else now that they've willingly released code to others under the GPL. Their argument is that they didn't know that the code they willingly released was theirs, but they knew they released it - they were quite willing to let their customers have the rights granted by the GPL over the code so long as they thought someone else owned the original IP, even though the GPL says they're licensing their IP royalty-free. I don't see any way they can navigate this legal minefield and not get a limb blown off.
The article says that these packets are addressed to mostly non-existent IP addresses, and show non-routable, reserved (like the '555' networks 10..., 172..., 192.168...) source IP addresses.
Here's my theory. Some clever Zombie author has reasoned that a packet addressed to the actual address of the Zombie or its controller might help security people track it down. So, the real source 'return address' is either hidden inside the actual data packet (encrypted of course) or established in a config file or Registry entry and only changed when an appropriate message is received. And the destination address is deliberately non-existent, but on the same subnet as the actual destination (or there is a compromised router upstream from that subnet that's part of the scheme), which is sniffing for these packets and responding in kind.
The large window size is probably a red herring - the real protocol being used is probably more like UDP than TCP. Or it's been thrown in to befuddle stateful packet filters. Or perhaps the window size is the signal to the sniffer that this protocol is involved - any packet without that window size need not be further examined.
It's a scheme that would also work quite nicely for people living under repressive regimes that want to be able to communicate with human-rights orgs without leaving a trail of bread crumbs back to themselves or their correspondents.
How much does Boobney or N*STINK get out of one of those compilation CDs with the songs that the Top 40 stations have played to death for the previous 6 months? My guess is 'damned little'. The record companies participate in those for the same reason they have always sold singles:
The single is an ad for the album.
I'd bet that only the top 1% selling artists have the clout to get a provision in their contracts forbidding the sale of one song without the rest of the album to protect the 'integrity of the work'.
Set up one or more machine names on your domain specifically for spam traps.
All email addresses on your page are munged thusly:
When a computer at 123.45.67.89 requests a page containing the email address
Dr. John Q. Doe <john.doe@isp.com>
it becomes
Dr. John Q. Doe (john DOT doe A-T isp DOT com) <16552.IP.123.45.67.89@spamtrap.domain.org >
where the exact formula should be a bit vague, so as not to be easily defeated by bots, but obvious to humans
The email server for spamtrap.domain.org is Teergrube (tarpit) that locks up the spamming computer AND sends notification back to the web site to serve that IP links to a world-wide tarpit ring, so as to get the spammers as many tarpit email addresses as possible
You think that's bad... I live in a state (KS) which has a law that requires people who have Marijuana in their possession to have purchased a valid tax stamp for it, despite the fact that it's illegal to have it anyway. That way, when they catch you with pot, they can not only charge you with that crime, but also for tax evasion, and make you do additional fines and/or jail time as a result. That this law is a fifth amendment violation doesn't seem to matter to anyone.
I understand that every so often, someone actually purchases one of these stamps, but the consensus is that most of them are actually stamp collectors.
criminalize the downloading of material from the Internet without the explicit permission of the copyright holder
How, pray tell, am I to get that permission? via a notice that says:
Copyright 2003 BigMediaConGlomCo. All rights reserved. You are hereby explicitly authorized to download this material for your own personal, noncommercial use. Redistribution without permission is prohibited . . . .
But here's the glorious Catch-22 of it all. The act of typing an URL into an address field of a browser, or of clicking on a link, causes that browser to attempt to . . . wait for it . . . DOWNLOAD material, which by definition is itself copyrighted! Unless you want to send snail mail to a company to secure written authorization to access their website in advance, you are illegal.
This law would effectively outlaw the Internet, which is based on the premise that it provides an infrastructure for moving data between consenting parties. In its place would be the presumption that moving data is illegal unless proven otherwise.
The Only Druid [I don't know Druid at all - all we have in common is The first name.] says:
"Numerous studies have shown that most terrorisits, even "footsoldiers" are highly educated ideologs."
SHow me one single example of these "studies", since I've neither heard of these studies nor seen their information.
Don't have one? What a shock, since you're lying.
Right. And you responded with
PLease make sure your next post is an apology:
here is just one of many such articles...
At this point, I'm looking for you to produce something that proves that education causes terrorism. And you come up with:
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, a consensus quickly emerged that
poverty and lack of education were major causes of terrorist acts and support
for terrorism ...
Although the available data
at the national level are weaker, both types of evidence point in the same
direction and lead us to conclude that any connection between poverty,
education, and terrorism is, at best, indirect, complicated, and probably quite
weak.
Well, that's certainly not a refutation of Druid's position. He said there were no studies that showed that education causes terrorism, and you demand an apology because you have a study that shows that lack of education probably doesn't cause terrorism, at least not too much. But we really don't know. If anything, it actually bolsers his position.
And your post got modded up as informative! I think that you've proven that the attention span of the average/. reader is
Doesn't the Constitution say that all rights not explicitly granted to the federal government are not within the jurisdiction of the federales?
Yes, but the court settlement to which I alluded, Grant v Lee, was a key precedent in changing the interpretation of those words. Under the Interstate Commerce Clause, Congress can (and I believe already has, to some extent) take control over US Internet activity. After all, it was DOD that originally designed and funded it.
As much as I'd love to have the Supremes find a fundamental right to exchange ones and zeroes in the penumbra of the Constitution, I don't think it's going to happen. In fact, I think we're going the opposite direction...
Welcome to the US Constitution.
Please login: root
Password: drugs
# passwd
Please enter new password for 'root': terrorism Please re-enter new password: terrorism
#
The TLD's aren't being used the way they were meant to be used anyway
Because doing away with the concept of a TLD turns DNS into a single directory. Just as it takes forever to do an ls in a directory with 100,000 files in it, DNS lookups in a flat namespace would be a nightmare. The way DNS works, if you can't find whatever.la.ca.us, you query.us, which in turn may direct you to.ca, then to.la, which tells you where whatever is, depending on how the DNS admins of each level want to do it. Taking away the hierarchical structure of DNS means that you have to have root DNS servers with billions of entries, instead of the hundreds now needed to simply direct you to the TLD DNS servers.
The fact that most people don't understand the Tao of *nix
which includes this sort of design decision that distributes configuration information into separate files instead of centralizing it into a giant, easily corrupted Registry
does not mean that it is invalid.
In the original example, the root DNS servers would have to know what.shue is, and every other word in every language that someone wanted to use as a TLD. OK, she's cute, but does she deserve her own entry in the root DNS?
For the same reason why you have directories on your hard drive. There's no reason in theory why you must have them, but a hierarchical delegation of namespace prevents unfortunate collisions. It allows grouping of files based on software packages - dare I say that the Windows scheme of \Program Files\Vendor Name\Product Name is actually pretty decent, because it has a clear delegation of authority, and only sucks because typing long names with spaces at a command line is unfun? (Cygwin saves my sanity with bash tab completion... how hard would it have been to call it \Programs, and leave the extra word out?)If every software vendor insisted on having a [/\]Product Name directory, your root directory would be a mess.
When the Internet first started out, it was a project of a USGOV agency. As soon as it became international, there was a recognition of the fact that governments like to exercise this thing called 'sovereignty' over their territories. So, in addition to the 3-letter TLDs that they started out with, they assigned 2-letter country codes so that every country on the planet could feel like it exercised sovereignty its part of the Internet.
Now, here's the tricky part... Since the government of the City (or County for that matter) of Los Angeles has no sovereignty -- no authority other than what is delegated to it by the State of California and the Constitution of the United States of America, there is no reason for there to exist a separate TLD for it.
Unless and until the court decision of Grant v Lee (look it up - it was decided at Appomatox Courthouse) is reversed and Los Angeles secedes from the Union to form a city-state,.la.ca.us is just fine. It spells out exactly the lines of authority.
It positively drives me nuts, for instance, that my state's Department of Revenue is ksrevenue.org instead of revenue.ks.us like it should be, and the main site for state info is accesskansas.org . . . ORG? Please.
8. Each user has a unique user id and belongs to one or more a groups
9. There is a unique superuser with uid 0, not subject to normal limits.
These are not hard rules by any stretch of the imagination./etc/passwd (and related files such as/etc/shadow, or whatever the flavor in question uses) can have more than one entry with the same uid.
This is a feature, not a bug. It allows multiple username/password pairs that define the same uid for purposes of priveleges, but may have entirely different and customized operating environments via the home directory and login shell specified for that user. It makes it possible, for example, to
Create admin accounts not named root, but with root priveleges, so that none of the admins know 'the root password' and when they leave only their account need be invalidated. If you're really wanting to have some fun, change the uid on the root account to be a Mere User, make it have a null password, and change the login shell to a binary that says:
password:
Invalid Password
then logs the attempt and exits, possibly sending an email to a real admin on the Xth attempt in Y hours.
Create multiple logins without root priveleges, for the same human user:
monster - shell login. Think of this as the 'real' account and the others as aliases monster.x - automatically start X Windows monster.ppp - ppp session.
There is reason to have different things happen when these 'users' are logged in, but no reason for the OS to distinguish between them for file ownership and privelege purposes. It is inherent in the design of unix that the flexibility to do these things is there for those who choose to exercise it. The design of unix is to give users and administrators the tools to make the OS do what they want.
Re:Too many witnesses that will say otherwise
on
Darl & SCO Overview
·
· Score: 1
Novell has essentially publicly ackowledged the validity of the ammendment
They've done no such thing. Re-read their statement - it includes weasel-words like 'appears to' and 'seems', which their legal counsel most likely demanded so that they could cover their butts while simultaneously trying to figure out how this amendment (and apparently, any notes on the negotiations that led up to its adoption - lawyers are almost compulsive about that stuff - everything gets archived) exists nowhere other than in SCO files.
I'd be VERY interested in seeing who witnessed the signatures on that amendment that suddenly showed up after months of SCO negotiating with Novell do buy what it says they've already bought, and if any of the people who supposedly were involved with this amendment, outside of SCO, can recall discussion thereof.
Slashdot Mirror
Things are a bit different with the site licenses that major software vendors negotiate (key word here) with their medium-to-large-sized customers. In those cases, both parties agree to the terms before any money changes hands. And my lay understanding of contract law is that the key elements are:
- "A meeting of the minds", demonstrated by
- Offer
- Acceptance
- Consideration - You may notice that a lot of contracts use the phrase "For the sum of One Dollar, and other valuable consideration" - the contract has to give some value to each party or it can't be valid.
A quick google on the phrase 'elements of contract' turns up this, which is a Canadian site but still based on the principles of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence that rules 49 States and the District of Columbia (Louisiana is based on the French legal traditions): So if the condition is attached by Microsoft in such a manner that the condition is not made known to the purchaser before he pays for the item in question, it can be reasonably argued that no agreement has in fact been reached and you are using the *ware with an implied license rather than the explicit one printed on the envelope.The big issue with software is that in order to execute a computer program, it must be copied from nonvolatile storage into RAM, which some think invokes Copyright. I'm not convinced that the law has been properly applied here, but that's why I'm a computer geek instead of a lawyer.
IANAL, of course, but IHAB, and it seems pretty obvious that the only HW EULA that would pass muster in a court would be one that the consumer reads and signs before completing the transaction. Otherwise, the consumer's belief that he is in fact purchasing the item in question, rather than a license to use it, would be ratified by any court that heard the case.
In an earlier life, where I had systems I was physically in contact with, I did install a DOS port of perl to make it easy to do some things that needed done. But I can't afford the time to upload large binaries everywhere. If I can get to the point where I know that perl is already installed on the overwhelming majority of sites, I can change. Believe it or not, I like perl. I just don't feel that I can justify installing perl just so that my scripts will run, at least to the higher strata of PHBs who probably don't understand what I'm doing now, much less how to write perl.
Is it just me, or does this stuff read like Dr. Evil, using the finger-quote gesture when he says 'death star' etc.?
What a brilliant way to encourage people to use your airport! [example of irony usually mislabeled 'sarcasm' by those who don't know what either word means, much less the subtlety of the related term 'sardonic']
A copy-protected 'CD' is a contradiction in terms.
I have become one of those people who writes a 'couple of hundred lines' here or there (gradually assembling a package of tools that I upload to servers whenever possible) but as I am painfully aware of the Dark Side of infinite customizability, I have gone out of my way to document my work.
- I write everything to Bourne shell, sed, awk, grep & Co., even though it might be easier to use perl or compile to binary. Even using a Korn shell is something I've avoided because I want my work to be understandable to as many people as possible.
- I make liberal use of comments within the scripts to explain what I'm doing and why.
- My scripts respond to -h,
--help, or anything remotely resembling either, with some, uh, help, which includes my work email address.
- I've set up a documentation web page on a server on our intranet so that if anyone has questions, they can see what's supposed to be happening here, why, and how.
- If you don't know that my utilities exist, or they haven't been installed on a site yet, you can get by without them. They in no way intrude upon the functioning of the system so as to be required (as your proxy is).
- I've tried to educate others in my department about how these tools can be used, how they fit together,
And, even though I have the support of at least two levels of management above me in the org chart, I'm STILL concerned that someone high enough up the food chain will some day declare my little skunkworks project officially Evil and ban it, if for no reason other than the notion that nobody but I understand it well enough to keep up with the changes that will inevitably be required. What happens if I get hit by the proverbial bus, or just take a better job somewhere else? There is plenty good reason to not want people to become dependent on my tools being in place, since there is no guarantee that we can make the institutional commitment to maintaining them, even though I have plenty of happy customers and support techs who love what I've empowered them to do. I can only hope that the Guys in the Ties will recognize that deriving this much value from my work demands that we make that commitment, rather than abandon it as 'unsupportable'.Most of what's come out of SCO is so self-contradictory that the only intelligent response is "What the hell are you saying?" Until they can nail down exactly what they're complaining about, there's nothing else to do but demand that they give the particulars.
Even if SCO can somehow win against IBM, they really can't go after anyone else now that they've willingly released code to others under the GPL. Their argument is that they didn't know that the code they willingly released was theirs, but they knew they released it - they were quite willing to let their customers have the rights granted by the GPL over the code so long as they thought someone else owned the original IP, even though the GPL says they're licensing their IP royalty-free. I don't see any way they can navigate this legal minefield and not get a limb blown off.
They wouldn't have you in the Ma-fi-AA!
Why can't we be friends?
. . .
Here's my theory. Some clever Zombie author has reasoned that a packet addressed to the actual address of the Zombie or its controller might help security people track it down. So, the real source 'return address' is either hidden inside the actual data packet (encrypted of course) or established in a config file or Registry entry and only changed when an appropriate message is received. And the destination address is deliberately non-existent, but on the same subnet as the actual destination (or there is a compromised router upstream from that subnet that's part of the scheme), which is sniffing for these packets and responding in kind.
The large window size is probably a red herring - the real protocol being used is probably more like UDP than TCP. Or it's been thrown in to befuddle stateful packet filters. Or perhaps the window size is the signal to the sniffer that this protocol is involved - any packet without that window size need not be further examined.
It's a scheme that would also work quite nicely for people living under repressive regimes that want to be able to communicate with human-rights orgs without leaving a trail of bread crumbs back to themselves or their correspondents.
I understand that every so often, someone actually purchases one of these stamps, but the consensus is that most of them are actually stamp collectors.
This law would effectively outlaw the Internet, which is based on the premise that it provides an infrastructure for moving data between consenting parties. In its place would be the presumption that moving data is illegal unless proven otherwise.
And your post got modded up as informative! I think that you've proven that the attention span of the average /. reader is
As much as I'd love to have the Supremes find a fundamental right to exchange ones and zeroes in the penumbra of the Constitution, I don't think it's going to happen. In fact, I think we're going the opposite direction...
The fact that most people don't understand the Tao of *nix
does not mean that it is invalid. In the original example, the root DNS servers would have to know whatWhen the Internet first started out, it was a project of a USGOV agency. As soon as it became international, there was a recognition of the fact that governments like to exercise this thing called 'sovereignty' over their territories. So, in addition to the 3-letter TLDs that they started out with, they assigned 2-letter country codes so that every country on the planet could feel like it exercised sovereignty its part of the Internet.
Now, here's the tricky part... Since the government of the City (or County for that matter) of Los Angeles has no sovereignty -- no authority other than what is delegated to it by the State of California and the Constitution of the United States of America, there is no reason for there to exist a separate TLD for it.
Unless and until the court decision of Grant v Lee (look it up - it was decided at Appomatox Courthouse) is reversed and Los Angeles secedes from the Union to form a city-state, .la.ca.us is just fine. It spells out exactly the lines of authority.
It positively drives me nuts, for instance, that my state's Department of Revenue is ksrevenue.org instead of revenue.ks.us like it should be, and the main site for state info is accesskansas.org . . . ORG? Please.
This is a feature, not a bug. It allows multiple username/password pairs that define the same uid for purposes of priveleges, but may have entirely different and customized operating environments via the home directory and login shell specified for that user. It makes it possible, for example, to
I'd be VERY interested in seeing who witnessed the signatures on that amendment that suddenly showed up after months of SCO negotiating with Novell do buy what it says they've already bought, and if any of the people who supposedly were involved with this amendment, outside of SCO, can recall discussion thereof.