The threat of a suit at some unspecified time in the future is a classic FUD tactic, crafted to stimulate the Herd Mentality Nexus in a PHB's brain. (This is the source of the "Nobody ever got fired for buying MS." maxim.) They then contact the guys in Legal, who either don't know Jack Schidt about patent law, in which case they advise steering clear of the minefield, or know it well enough to realize that patents are a fustercluck, in which case they advise steering clear of the minefield.
An actual suit could result in MS having some or all those patents thrown out, at which point they are no longer able to affect a PHB-HMN.
You can't install crapware on a server. Any admin (I would hope) would promptly wipe the drive anyway and start over from scratch if you included anything close to crapware (or even if you didn't, just because they wanted to do everything from scratch).
I think any admin worth a damn would want to install from scratch just to be sure it could be done again if need be. There has to be a contingency plan for it, and the only way to know for sure you can do it, is to do it.
Since the alternative of going into Add/Remove Programs and wacking the crapware is never really 100% in Windows (where supposedly uninstalled programs tend to leave droppings in the Registry), the only way to be sure is to nuke it from orbit.
I had seen the spelling 'cajones' on furniture, and had imputed that it meant 'drawers'. Gracias por la explicación. So the question is not whether one has cajones, but whether there are cojones in the cajones.
If you determine that people wont pay enough to make up the cost of the item you don't sell it. If you find out they will pay what it costs and then some you will almost certainly sell it. ...
Theft cuts into profits but it absolutely does not raise the price for the consumer. When shopping carts are stolen from the supermarket it does not raise the cost of food.
This is nonsense. You haven't followed the above line of thinking far enough. If some potential producers decide they can't make a good enough profit from selling a particular commodity, they'll do something more profitable instead. Reducing the number of producers would tend to reduce the quantity of the commodity produced, which would push the equilibrium point along the demand curve toward higher price/lower quantity.
Another factor to consider is that decisions about investing in production capacity are made based on the expected profitability of the commodity over the life of the investment. If the actual theft rate is much higher than was expected when the production capacity was built out, that capacity represents a 'sunk cost' which might as well be exploited, even at a lower level of profit. But it will affect future production decisions.
A high expected rate of shopping cart theft and shoplifting leads to less grocery stores in the high-crime areas, which in turn can get away with charging higher prices to a captive customer base. This is a real phenomenon, often mischaracterized by civil-rights groups as racism against the inner-city folks who have to pay those higher prices.
The biggest impact this will have is that it will make it easier for stores to lay the DVDs out in the open, without having to pay for an employee to closely monitor customers for shoplifting. That means that there will be more stores selling DVDs, pushing the equilibrium point towards lower price/higher quantity. And that will indeed reduce the price of DVDs (compared to what it would otherwise be).
Yes but it is a *fake* ID. It does not identify the holder.
All nine of them apparently have pictures of the people who used them. (I can't see the picture of the one that was retracted.) At least one apparently did have the name of the perp on it. That's the one that caused this controversy, in fact.
By posting these fake IDs, she is educating others who serve alcohol, cigarettes, or work at gaming establishments, as to what the fake IDs look like, and the pictures of people who have tried to use them in the past. She even provided a link to a place that makes fake IDs, which every person in those jobs should look at, download the pictures, and maybe even print them out for reference. I checked out their version for my state, and it looks somewhat like the style we used a few years ago, (on the license I just replaced because it's expiring later this month) but is missing enough details that no bartender or casino employee in this part of the country would be fooled by it.
...or real?
and furthermore could be stolen, leading to false accusations and future problems for the true owner
If we were talking about a stolen real ID, then you'd have a point. That isn't what happened here. She knows the difference between a real ID and a fake one. She sees hundreds of IDs a day. You should look at some of the pictures; there are some obvious fakes there, even in a 2-D picture. Given the opportunity to hold the card in my hand and change the angles of viewing and light incidence, I'm pretty sure I'd be able to tell that most of them are fakes even without the experience carding people that she has.
But even if it were a stolen real ID, the person identified by the card (not the 'owner', who technically would be the state government) probably wouldn't look like the kid trying to use it. If someone did see their ID on her website, they could contact her and tell her that it was stolen. It would be fairly simple to prove that's what happened, and I'm sure she'd amend her story on that ID to say that it was stolen by a kid who happened to look like the victim.
"I can take this fake ID, refuse you entrance, and you can be on your merry way or I can call the cops, which do you choose?"
That's precisely what she does. If you read the other fake ID stories, you'll see she had a Gang of Four that came in together. She took their IDs, and when they said give them back, she said that she can't do that, but the cops can. She picked up the phone and called the police, and the 4 kids ran out the door.
That seems like a sound policy to me. So now the only question is whether it's righteous for her to post the fake IDs on her website. I doubt there's a law against it, and since these people don't see anything wrong with putting her job in jeopardy, I think she's got the moral high ground.
What Bruce thinks is that as computing becomes a utility the security needs will decrease.
No, he thinks that as computing becomes a utility, the market for selling security to end users will fade away, because the 'utilities' will be buying the security wholesale. Users won't care about whether any anti-virus products are running on Google's servers; they'll only care if they can get access to the shared documents that they run their businesses on.
What Schneier is saying is that security won't be an add-on, after-the-fact product that people buy to protect their computing infrastructure. It will be integrated into the design of every program that a 'utility' runs, because the best way to assure your customers they'll have five nines of reliability is to build every piece of the system to be as secure as possible from the ground up.
(Insert folk tale of the impracticality of retrieving scattered livestock vs. maintaining the structural integrity of their enclosure and preventing their escape in the first place.)
So a bad driver caused him to give up on W2K, then he proceeds to spend endless hours of creating drivers for those crappy webcams?
Wouldn't it be better that an ill-supported webcam gets abandoned by the consumers, thus giving the market better-supported webcams as manufacturers are forced to lift up their games?
Or, wouldn't it be even better if hundreds of low-price webcams have good drivers to run under Linux, and an ill-supported OS (W2K) gets abandoned in its favor?
He knew the W2K driver was buggy, but didn't have a way to fix it, short of rewriting it from scratch, in which case why not write it for Linux?
Because even RMS is more warm and fuzzy than Theo.
You're INHUMAN! And your inhumanity retroactively excuses code theft. Which we didn't do. How dare you accuse one of our developers of code theft! It wasn't deliberate; it was a mistake. We meant to rewrite the copied code before committing it to the tree, and thereby create merely a derived work of the original, but not 'derived' in the legal sense, mind you. We didn't really steal anything because it didn't actually run or anything.
You inhuman bastards are the reason we hate Linux.
I just don't trust anything that comes out and says "trust me,I'm safe."
Like politicians?
Then there's the girls who wear t-shirts that say "Cutie". If you really are a "cutie", you don't have to wear a label to tell us that you are. It therfore follows that the people who wear those shirts are roughly as "cute" as politicians are trustworthy.
I loved RPN. It was kind of like running Linux; if someone asked to borrow my calculator, they'd freak out because they couldn't find the equals key, and I'd have to explain how to use the thing.
They could easily just sell all their US debt and send the US into hyperinflation.
How do you figure? First they'd have to find buyers for the debt, which belies your 'easily'. But let's suppose they do find those buyers. Now instead of China holding the debt, someone else does, and China holds some assets that the others had before.
How does changing to whom we owe money from 'China' to some other name cause inflation, much less hyperinflation?
It blamed congress for the change in Daylight savings time, and last I checked, congress is run by the Democrats.
But it wasn't a year and a half ago when they passed the bill, and Bush signed it into law.
People who oppose DST don't realize that it's just an attempt to recapture what people used to do automatically: Get up when the sun rises. The greater your latitude, the more variation there is in sunrise times between the solstices. We've settled on an hour as a good compromise that works for most people.
All we need to do is to have some ingenious hacker screw up an election by injecting viruses into the voting machines and having the results come back so absolutely outrageous its not even funny
With 90% of the precincts of California in, we're calling the race in favor of the surprise write-in candidates "Heywood Jablome" and "Mike Hunt". Pollsters are at a loss to explain this phenomenon. Attempts to locate the apparent President- and Vice-President-elect have been thus far fruitless.
a bootable linux disc could really scare them if they accidentally leave it in the machine when they shut down
I think that Knoppix set the gold standard for this. When you shut down, it pops the CD tray open, and asks you to remove the CD from the drive. Every live CD I've used since that copies this feature.
Slashdot Mirror
An actual suit could result in MS having some or all those patents thrown out, at which point they are no longer able to affect a PHB-HMN.
Since the alternative of going into Add/Remove Programs and wacking the crapware is never really 100% in Windows (where supposedly uninstalled programs tend to leave droppings in the Registry), the only way to be sure is to nuke it from orbit.
Oh, you didn't mean motion picture?
I had seen the spelling 'cajones' on furniture, and had imputed that it meant 'drawers'. Gracias por la explicación. So the question is not whether one has cajones, but whether there are cojones in the cajones.
Another factor to consider is that decisions about investing in production capacity are made based on the expected profitability of the commodity over the life of the investment. If the actual theft rate is much higher than was expected when the production capacity was built out, that capacity represents a 'sunk cost' which might as well be exploited, even at a lower level of profit. But it will affect future production decisions.
A high expected rate of shopping cart theft and shoplifting leads to less grocery stores in the high-crime areas, which in turn can get away with charging higher prices to a captive customer base. This is a real phenomenon, often mischaracterized by civil-rights groups as racism against the inner-city folks who have to pay those higher prices.
The biggest impact this will have is that it will make it easier for stores to lay the DVDs out in the open, without having to pay for an employee to closely monitor customers for shoplifting. That means that there will be more stores selling DVDs, pushing the equilibrium point towards lower price/higher quantity. And that will indeed reduce the price of DVDs (compared to what it would otherwise be).
By posting these fake IDs, she is educating others who serve alcohol, cigarettes, or work at gaming establishments, as to what the fake IDs look like, and the pictures of people who have tried to use them in the past. She even provided a link to a place that makes fake IDs, which every person in those jobs should look at, download the pictures, and maybe even print them out for reference. I checked out their version for my state, and it looks somewhat like the style we used a few years ago, (on the license I just replaced because it's expiring later this month) but is missing enough details that no bartender or casino employee in this part of the country would be fooled by it.
...or real?
If we were talking about a stolen real ID, then you'd have a point. That isn't what happened here. She knows the difference between a real ID and a fake one. She sees hundreds of IDs a day. You should look at some of the pictures; there are some obvious fakes there, even in a 2-D picture. Given the opportunity to hold the card in my hand and change the angles of viewing and light incidence, I'm pretty sure I'd be able to tell that most of them are fakes even without the experience carding people that she has.But even if it were a stolen real ID, the person identified by the card (not the 'owner', who technically would be the state government) probably wouldn't look like the kid trying to use it. If someone did see their ID on her website, they could contact her and tell her that it was stolen. It would be fairly simple to prove that's what happened, and I'm sure she'd amend her story on that ID to say that it was stolen by a kid who happened to look like the victim.
That seems like a sound policy to me. So now the only question is whether it's righteous for her to post the fake IDs on her website. I doubt there's a law against it, and since these people don't see anything wrong with putting her job in jeopardy, I think she's got the moral high ground.
#include
(irrelevant text to prevent tripping lameness filter)
What Schneier is saying is that security won't be an add-on, after-the-fact product that people buy to protect their computing infrastructure. It will be integrated into the design of every program that a 'utility' runs, because the best way to assure your customers they'll have five nines of reliability is to build every piece of the system to be as secure as possible from the ground up.
(Insert folk tale of the impracticality of retrieving scattered livestock vs. maintaining the structural integrity of their enclosure and preventing their escape in the first place.)
He knew the W2K driver was buggy, but didn't have a way to fix it, short of rewriting it from scratch, in which case why not write it for Linux?
The analogy extends nicely to DNS=Directory Assistance, so it's a pretty handy model.
You inhuman bastards are the reason we hate Linux.
</Theo>
Then there's the girls who wear t-shirts that say "Cutie". If you really are a "cutie", you don't have to wear a label to tell us that you are. It therfore follows that the people who wear those shirts are roughly as "cute" as politicians are trustworthy.
I loved RPN. It was kind of like running Linux; if someone asked to borrow my calculator, they'd freak out because they couldn't find the equals key, and I'd have to explain how to use the thing.
Every day begins with the announcements over the intercom, called the 'talking points memo'.
Kids who ask questions the teacher doesn't like get called 'pinhead'.
Guest lecturer Geraldo Rivera is brought in just so the student body can heckle him.
How does changing to whom we owe money from 'China' to some other name cause inflation, much less hyperinflation?
People who oppose DST don't realize that it's just an attempt to recapture what people used to do automatically: Get up when the sun rises. The greater your latitude, the more variation there is in sunrise times between the solstices. We've settled on an hour as a good compromise that works for most people.