Re:Are they going to give back .de, .uk, .fr, etc?
on
.eu Opens for Registration
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· Score: 3, Informative
Since the European Union (.eu) is a federation of states not all that different in the gross sense from the United States (.us), consistency argumes that the members of.eu should relinquish their individual top level ccTLDs, such as.uk, and.de.
Actually, it is quite different in many ways from the US. The EU doesn't have a consistent foreign policy or central taxation, no consistent internal criminal legal framework (except for a very few special cases, all European law deals with economic matters -- the Convention on Human Rights is a notable exception to this). There is no eu-wide system of education, telecommunications or postal service. We have no equivalents to the FBI, CIA or NSA, nor indeed many of the other US national agencies. There are multiple currencies in use within the borders of the EU.
The.eu domain is somewhat perverted, if you ask me. 'eu.int' has sufficed to date, and I see no reason it wouldn't have continued to do so. But the EU parliament wanted.eu, so they got it.
And ICANN has granted a top level domain for speakers of the Catalonian language. (Why not ones for English, Mandarin, or Boontling?)
Catalunya is a semi-autonomous state with its own government independent of the Spanish government. There's an argument that it almost qualifies as a country, therefore a country code may be useful for it.
However, the same argument would, I believe, also apply to Scotland and Wales, and probably to US states.
Unless I misunderstand the documents you're quoting (I haven't read them all, certainly), there doesn't seem to be a requirement in them that the description given is that of a physical device that performs the method patented (i.e., not simply a general purpose computer with software loaded to make it perform the method), which is what the GP is suggesting.
I've heard similar things said about the "loser pays costs" system of civil claims, that it would result in almost nobody ever suing.
I live in a country that uses this system, and a look at the listings in my local court/the number of ambulance chasers advertising in the media tells me that this just ain't true.
I'd leave the "triple" aspect of the GP's post to the discretion of the judge: if the judge thinks the plaintiff is, essentially, taking the piss, then he can award it. Otherwise, I'd suggest: return of all payments, plus interest at 6 percent over base lending rate, plus compensation for the defendant's time in dealing with it, plus a small percentage extra as a slight deterrant.
Perhaps all payments made should be held in escrow until the case is settled, just to ensure that at least most of these funds are available when the time comes. This solves the problem raised in the other response to the poster.
In the software engineering world, people will be interested in all sorts of code metrics such as cyclomatic complexity, operator/operand counts, lines of code per module, and such as well as object oriented metrics for the C++ code (depth of inheritance, for example).
Nah. What we really want to know is, which open source project has the most obscenities in its comments?
The internet's structure (sans spam) seems to be working well.
* ICANN's dispute resolution policy which interferes with the ability to register domains similar to people's trademarks by automatically treating a domain name as if it were a trademark. * ICANN's failure to implement a.xxx domain due to US government concerns * ICANN's fucked up procedures for transferring GTLD domain names between registrars
All of these issues might be solved by replacing ICANN with a body more competent and more politically independent. (For reference, the.uk registrar, Nominet, has much more sensible policies on both the first and the third of these; they've never tackled the second as far as I can tell, but I suspect they would do better than ICANN have so far).
Really? Just tried it on a scaled-up MPEG4 avi file with media player classic, and it dropped six frames out of a 50 frame sample. Not great, but not exactly what I'd call a "choke and die" outcome.
Now, maybe the fact that the AVI was scaled up from a 720x576 source made it easier, but I don't really see how.
The investment in question is that of the "old ineffective giants" reinvesting profits in order to improve their services, if I understand the article corrctly.
Unfortunately, it doesn't link to the original study, so we have to rely on a journalist's interpretation of the findings, which isn't always accurate.
Good point. But one question: where are you getting your HD source media from? I've not found anywhere that supplies them, so have concluded that it's something that I don't have an application for yet.
My old AMD 950MHz system is more than happy handling any media you care to throw at it. Its Hauppauge WinTV PVR capture card handles MPG conversion on the hardware, so there's really no need for a fast CPU for that. Being single core, cooling is less of an issue, and it's got a fanless graphics card that was much cheaper than $115. More like $20 (an ATI Rage 3D card with 8Mb). And what's the point of 2Gigs of RAM in a media system?
The description of "quiet" made me think "fanless", not "just as many fans as my existing system".
Wait, the Vorlons were "Angels", right? Beings of pure energy?
Uh, I don't know where you get this idea from. It's questioned whether or not it is the case during the show, but I don't think anything particularly points to the side you're taking. I think there is more "evidence" in favour of coming down on the other side, and that as suggested the Vorlons had visited Earth and manipulated our religions into containing references to beings somewhat like them. Telepathic suggestion then takes care of the rest (which is why it is tiring for them to be seen by many people at once). They're not angels, they just try to make us think they are.
You have to understand the reasons for that phrase being in there. Describing B5 as "the last, best hope for peace" is meant to be reminiscent of political speeches and campaigning. In case you hadn't noticed, cliche is a politician's basic language. And that kind of speech is what gets something like B5 built.
Then, of course, war comes anyway. It didn't manage to do what it was built for, because of course it was all just political hyperbole. The phrase is basically in the intro sequence to make a theme related point in the later series.
I can't say as I blame you, actually. Despite the fact that I think B5 was some of the best TV ever produced.
The problem is, most of the episodes in series 1 sucked badly in many ways. And watching the rest without season 1 is difficult, because it relies heavily on backplot that you pick up in the early stages of the show to have a clue what's going on.
I don't have a solution. Perhaps just try to ignore the low budget, bad acting and clunky scripts. And skip the worst episodes (TKO stands out, in my opinion, but there are other bad ones). Look at the listing on the lurker's guide (linked in the article above) and watch the ones that are described as important arc episodes, but skip anything else you think is corny. I promise you, by half way through season 2 you'll be hooked.
A researcher could write up an article on his latest topic of study, a scientist could write up an article about her little known subject. Of course it isn't vetted, but it isn't supposed to be.
I'm afraid you're missing the point of wikipedia. This is *not* what it's about at all -- it intends to produce a high quality encyclopaedia.
The goal of Wikipedia is to become a complete and reliable encyclopedia. Verifiability is the key to becoming a reliable resource, so editors should cite credible sources so that their edits can be easily verified by readers and other editors.
One of the keys to writing good encyclopedia articles is to understand that they should refer only to facts, assertions, theories, ideas, claims, opinions, and arguments that have already been published by a reputable publisher. (source)
--
Wikipedia is not the place for original research. Citing sources and avoiding original research are inextricably linked: the only way to verify that you are not doing original research is to cite sources who discuss material that is directly related to the article, and to stick closely to what the sources say. (source)
According to espacenet.com Inpro Licensing have only got 6 EU patents.
Espacenet also searches US and Japanese databases. 3 of those patents are from the US database.
My suspicion is that we're talking about "System in which a Proxy-Server translates information received from the Internet into a form/format readily usable by low power portable computers", or perhaps "Remote Proxy Server Agent".
I've been reading the latter, and this looks very easily invalidatable. From the abstract:
There is a market for proxy services that is essentially not addressed in prior art. This market is the middle segment comprising small businesses or (cooperative) groups of business individuals that cannot afford to implement and maintain complex proxy services and may not have access to a corporate Intranet. These smaller entities often have an ongoing and real need for the types of services available from a proxy service package.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a remote proxy agent and system that could be shared in terms of use and cost by a group of small business users. Such an agent and system would offer many more and complex services than those available to consumers through a standard service provider but would not require the prohibitive expense and technical expertise required to implement corporate solutions.
So they're definining the invention in terms of a business model: provide advanced proxy services of the kind used by large businesses to groups of small businesses. The description of the invention describes a typical proxy server setup, and describes a number of ways of using it, none of which are novel (such as, requiring authentication at the proxy server, using it to perform many requests and collate the results, using it for access from a wireless device to a fixed network, etc.) The only unusual thing is that the proxy server is shared between several separate organisations, and this is clearly a business method, not a technical invention, and is therefore not patentable in the EU.
The other is simply a proxy server performing rewriting of documents into a format more suitable for low power devices such as mobile phones. This was, I believe, a very common arrangment for WAP services by the time the patent was published in December 2003. I highly doubt that Mr Kinkinis actually invented this technique.
I thought the EU directive "on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions" was defeated.
There were 3 possible outcomes of the EU directive process:
* Rewrite EU patent law to specifically include software as a patentable field (this was the original proposed directive), * rewrite EU patent law to specifically exclude software as a patentable field (this is what FFII et al were campaigning for), or * keep the same system we already have, which makes software patents a grey area that are difficult to work with, but where some software patents are definitely accepted (this is what we ended up with).
It is, therefore, possible for software to be patented in the EU. It is just no possible to patent software "as such" (to use the UK patent act's phrase for it) -- the software patented must do something new that would be patentable however it was implemented. Therefore, some patents would be considered valid (e.g. Unisys's now expired patent on LZW compression, which achieves a technical effect of compressing data) while others aren't (e.g. Amazon's "one click" system, which sells stuff -- not a technical effect).
Google says "about 779,000 results" for me. But then if you try paging through them, you find that actually, there are less than 400 of them.
I believe the "about... results" figures are generated statistically based on the frequency of the words in the phrase whenever there more than some threshold amount. They're not particularly reliable.
If this is true, then sony just lost them court cases we've been hearing about. Having been told about it and not issued a product recall at the earliest opportunity (i.e. within a day or two) means that they were intentionally subverting people's computers.
The only defence available to them was that they didn't realise this was happening. They've just lost that.
threats in other contexts that are multiple orders of magnitude more likely: - We've been broadcasting our location clearly to the universe since Marconi first threw the switch, if not earlier. - Any sufficiently hostile, technologically capable civilization could wipe us out with a large, well-aimed ROCK. - If they wanted to make it nearly un-interceptable they'd accelerate it to a high fraction of c. - If they REALLY were ticked off (say, they watched Gilligan's Island or something) they'd lob a small singularity at us, or heck, into our sun.
All of these things assume that an alien race is able to physically reach us. Now start from the assumption that they're 5000 light years away, and c really is the absolute limit of speed for any travel within the universe. They don't even know that we're here yet, but they have a pretty good idea that somebody might be. A broadcast signal is the only available means such a civilisation has to attack us[1].
Of course, while an alien signal may be a carrier for an attack, the vector used will almost certainly not be the one suggested in the article, which is basically the same sort of vector used by worms like Code Red and MSBlast. A much more likely scenario is a social engineering attack of some kind, as these are likely to be much less dependent on... err... knowing or being able to guess details of the exact kind of computer technology used by your victim.
Amusingly, the guy's web site mentions a book, A for Andromeda by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot, which describes just such an attack vector. He's read about the likely way such an attack may occur, and discarded it in favour of discussin a much more unlikely one.
[1]: Why they would want to is an interesting question, but there are answers to it that at least vaguely make sense. If you were the right kind of alien intelligence they may make a lot of sense. One is that they want to convert all intelligent races in the universe to follow their own model of civilisation, and that's a model that we don't want.
Given that Seti only checks data, but doesn't try to execute it, shields us even further from the whole thing...
It's worth noting that, e.g., Microsoft IIS only "checks" data that it receives from client connections, rather than trying to execute it. This doesn't stop it from actually executing it, if you happen to be running an unpatched version and the request is in the correct format.
That said, IIS processes structured data which contains variable-length and which critically affects its operation, causing it to branch into many possible execution paths. Seti processes unstructured fixed-length data and does not perform different operations based on its content. The latter is much easier to write securely than the former.
1. Raw signal in memory must bootstrap to status of operating program
2. Program must then untangle the inner workings of the host. (Is it possible to now build a diagnosis program to determine the operating set of an unfamiliar computer?)
Actually, I don't know why he concentrates on this as the attack vector, because it's a highly unlikely one for reasons he point outs. And from the site:
Some science fiction works on the SETI virus possibility include [...] A is for Andromeda, F. Hoyle and J. Elliot, Souvenir Press (1962).
A very interesting book, which does highlight the potential dangers of a much more realistic attack vector: the message itself is not dangerous, but describes a technology (in this case the design of and programming for a new kind of computer) that is.
In response to some concerns of other posters, the sequel of A for Andromeda (in addition to describing the plans of evil corporation INTEL to steal the design for this computer) also goes into the motivations of the sender for mounting such an attack: an intent to spread close relatives of their own species throughout the universe by persuading sentient species on other worlds to (effectively) genetically engineer themselves into the originator of the message. In a universe without effective interstellar travel this would be the only way of "colonising" other star systems, and you can certainly understand how a desire to do it would arise.
A "conventional DVD" has two layers, and holds roughly 9Gb of data. 300 / 9 = 33 1/3, not 60. Even recordable DVDs are well and truly available in 9Gb formats by now, and have been for some time. OK, the media is more expensive than single layer discs, but the technology is in people's PCs now. And how much are these discs going to cost for the first few years of their existence?
Dell is a no-buy in my "house". For many reasons starting from being very non-standard (just disassemble one for a change and see how many parts are custom)
Hmmm...? My optiplex has a non-standard motherboard/backplane arrangement for plugging expansion cards in, but the rest of it is absolutely standard. And I've never seen a slimline desktop without such an arrangement, either.
HP/Compaq machines are much worse, unless they've improved in the last few years. Last Compaq machine I disassembled had fucked-up weird screws that took ages to remove because none of my standard tools fitted them. Last Fujitsu I disassembled seemed fairly standard (other than similar motherboad/backplane to the dell), but the case was a PITA to put back together afterwards.
If you want standard components and cases, I think the only choice is to use less well-known regional suppliers. Just check that they've been around a while first, so you can be reasonably sure they'll be there to back up their warranties.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the European Union (.eu) is a federation of states not all that different in the gross sense from the United States (.us), consistency argumes that the members of .eu should relinquish their individual top level ccTLDs, such as .uk, and .de.
.eu domain is somewhat perverted, if you ask me. 'eu.int' has sufficed to date, and I see no reason it wouldn't have continued to do so. But the EU parliament wanted .eu, so they got it.
Actually, it is quite different in many ways from the US. The EU doesn't have a consistent foreign policy or central taxation, no consistent internal criminal legal framework (except for a very few special cases, all European law deals with economic matters -- the Convention on Human Rights is a notable exception to this). There is no eu-wide system of education, telecommunications or postal service. We have no equivalents to the FBI, CIA or NSA, nor indeed many of the other US national agencies. There are multiple currencies in use within the borders of the EU.
The
And ICANN has granted a top level domain for speakers of the Catalonian language. (Why not ones for English, Mandarin, or Boontling?)
Catalunya is a semi-autonomous state with its own government independent of the Spanish government. There's an argument that it almost qualifies as a country, therefore a country code may be useful for it.
However, the same argument would, I believe, also apply to Scotland and Wales, and probably to US states.
Unless I misunderstand the documents you're quoting (I haven't read them all, certainly), there doesn't seem to be a requirement in them that the description given is that of a physical device that performs the method patented (i.e., not simply a general purpose computer with software loaded to make it perform the method), which is what the GP is suggesting.
I've heard similar things said about the "loser pays costs" system of civil claims, that it would result in almost nobody ever suing.
I live in a country that uses this system, and a look at the listings in my local court/the number of ambulance chasers advertising in the media tells me that this just ain't true.
I'd leave the "triple" aspect of the GP's post to the discretion of the judge: if the judge thinks the plaintiff is, essentially, taking the piss, then he can award it. Otherwise, I'd suggest: return of all payments, plus interest at 6 percent over base lending rate, plus compensation for the defendant's time in dealing with it, plus a small percentage extra as a slight deterrant.
Perhaps all payments made should be held in escrow until the case is settled, just to ensure that at least most of these funds are available when the time comes. This solves the problem raised in the other response to the poster.
In the software engineering world, people will be interested in all sorts of code metrics such as cyclomatic complexity, operator/operand counts, lines of code per module, and such as well as object oriented metrics for the C++ code (depth of inheritance, for example).
Nah. What we really want to know is, which open source project has the most obscenities in its comments?
The internet's structure (sans spam) seems to be working well.
.xxx domain due to US government concerns
.uk registrar, Nominet, has much more sensible policies on both the first and the third of these; they've never tackled the second as far as I can tell, but I suspect they would do better than ICANN have so far).
* ICANN's dispute resolution policy which interferes with the ability to register domains similar to people's trademarks by automatically treating a domain name as if it were a trademark.
* ICANN's failure to implement a
* ICANN's fucked up procedures for transferring GTLD domain names between registrars
All of these issues might be solved by replacing ICANN with a body more competent and more politically independent. (For reference, the
Really? Just tried it on a scaled-up MPEG4 avi file with media player classic, and it dropped six frames out of a 50 frame sample. Not great, but not exactly what I'd call a "choke and die" outcome.
Now, maybe the fact that the AVI was scaled up from a 720x576 source made it easier, but I don't really see how.
I really want to work for "Ner." Do you think they'd give me a job?
The investment in question is that of the "old ineffective giants" reinvesting profits in order to improve their services, if I understand the article corrctly.
Unfortunately, it doesn't link to the original study, so we have to rely on a journalist's interpretation of the findings, which isn't always accurate.
Well, yes, but given that in my area at least there aren't any HDTV broadcasts, that's not a lot of use to me. :)
Good point. But one question: where are you getting your HD source media from? I've not found anywhere that supplies them, so have concluded that it's something that I don't have an application for yet.
My old AMD 950MHz system is more than happy handling any media you care to throw at it. Its Hauppauge WinTV PVR capture card handles MPG conversion on the hardware, so there's really no need for a fast CPU for that. Being single core, cooling is less of an issue, and it's got a fanless graphics card that was much cheaper than $115. More like $20 (an ATI Rage 3D card with 8Mb). And what's the point of 2Gigs of RAM in a media system?
The description of "quiet" made me think "fanless", not "just as many fans as my existing system".
Perhaps a link to the winner would be more appropriate than to the list of nominations?
r -is.html
Here it is, in all its glory: http://5thnovember.blogspot.com/2005/12/and-winne
Wait, the Vorlons were "Angels", right? Beings of pure energy?
Uh, I don't know where you get this idea from. It's questioned whether or not it is the case during the show, but I don't think anything particularly points to the side you're taking. I think there is more "evidence" in favour of coming down on the other side, and that as suggested the Vorlons had visited Earth and manipulated our religions into containing references to beings somewhat like them. Telepathic suggestion then takes care of the rest (which is why it is tiring for them to be seen by many people at once). They're not angels, they just try to make us think they are.
You have to understand the reasons for that phrase being in there. Describing B5 as "the last, best hope for peace" is meant to be reminiscent of political speeches and campaigning. In case you hadn't noticed, cliche is a politician's basic language. And that kind of speech is what gets something like B5 built.
Then, of course, war comes anyway. It didn't manage to do what it was built for, because of course it was all just political hyperbole. The phrase is basically in the intro sequence to make a theme related point in the later series.
I can't say as I blame you, actually. Despite the fact that I think B5 was some of the best TV ever produced.
The problem is, most of the episodes in series 1 sucked badly in many ways. And watching the rest without season 1 is difficult, because it relies heavily on backplot that you pick up in the early stages of the show to have a clue what's going on.
I don't have a solution. Perhaps just try to ignore the low budget, bad acting and clunky scripts. And skip the worst episodes (TKO stands out, in my opinion, but there are other bad ones). Look at the listing on the lurker's guide (linked in the article above) and watch the ones that are described as important arc episodes, but skip anything else you think is corny. I promise you, by half way through season 2 you'll be hooked.
I'm afraid you're missing the point of wikipedia. This is *not* what it's about at all -- it intends to produce a high quality encyclopaedia.
Espacenet also searches US and Japanese databases. 3 of those patents are from the US database.
My suspicion is that we're talking about "System in which a Proxy-Server translates information received from the Internet into a form/format readily usable by low power portable computers", or perhaps "Remote Proxy Server Agent".
I've been reading the latter, and this looks very easily invalidatable. From the abstract:
So they're definining the invention in terms of a business model: provide advanced proxy services of the kind used by large businesses to groups of small businesses. The description of the invention describes a typical proxy server setup, and describes a number of ways of using it, none of which are novel (such as, requiring authentication at the proxy server, using it to perform many requests and collate the results, using it for access from a wireless device to a fixed network, etc.) The only unusual thing is that the proxy server is shared between several separate organisations, and this is clearly a business method, not a technical invention, and is therefore not patentable in the EU.
The other is simply a proxy server performing rewriting of documents into a format more suitable for low power devices such as mobile phones. This was, I believe, a very common arrangment for WAP services by the time the patent was published in December 2003. I highly doubt that Mr Kinkinis actually invented this technique.
I thought the EU directive "on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions" was defeated.
There were 3 possible outcomes of the EU directive process:
* Rewrite EU patent law to specifically include software as a patentable field (this was the original proposed directive),
* rewrite EU patent law to specifically exclude software as a patentable field (this is what FFII et al were campaigning for), or
* keep the same system we already have, which makes software patents a grey area that are difficult to work with, but where some software patents are definitely accepted (this is what we ended up with).
It is, therefore, possible for software to be patented in the EU. It is just no possible to patent software "as such" (to use the UK patent act's phrase for it) -- the software patented must do something new that would be patentable however it was implemented. Therefore, some patents would be considered valid (e.g. Unisys's now expired patent on LZW compression, which achieves a technical effect of compressing data) while others aren't (e.g. Amazon's "one click" system, which sells stuff -- not a technical effect).
Google says "about 779,000 results" for me. But then if you try paging through them, you find that actually, there are less than 400 of them.
... results" figures are generated statistically based on the frequency of the words in the phrase whenever there more than some threshold amount. They're not particularly reliable.
I believe the "about
Still, it's a lot of articles.
If this is true, then sony just lost them court cases we've been hearing about. Having been told about it and not issued a product recall at the earliest opportunity (i.e. within a day or two) means that they were intentionally subverting people's computers.
The only defence available to them was that they didn't realise this was happening. They've just lost that.
threats in other contexts that are multiple orders of magnitude more likely:
... err ... knowing or being able to guess details of the exact kind of computer technology used by your victim.
- We've been broadcasting our location clearly to the universe since Marconi first threw the switch, if not earlier.
- Any sufficiently hostile, technologically capable civilization could wipe us out with a large, well-aimed ROCK.
- If they wanted to make it nearly un-interceptable they'd accelerate it to a high fraction of c.
- If they REALLY were ticked off (say, they watched Gilligan's Island or something) they'd lob a small singularity at us, or heck, into our sun.
All of these things assume that an alien race is able to physically reach us. Now start from the assumption that they're 5000 light years away, and c really is the absolute limit of speed for any travel within the universe. They don't even know that we're here yet, but they have a pretty good idea that somebody might be. A broadcast signal is the only available means such a civilisation has to attack us[1].
Of course, while an alien signal may be a carrier for an attack, the vector used will almost certainly not be the one suggested in the article, which is basically the same sort of vector used by worms like Code Red and MSBlast. A much more likely scenario is a social engineering attack of some kind, as these are likely to be much less dependent on
Amusingly, the guy's web site mentions a book, A for Andromeda by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot, which describes just such an attack vector. He's read about the likely way such an attack may occur, and discarded it in favour of discussin a much more unlikely one.
[1]: Why they would want to is an interesting question, but there are answers to it that at least vaguely make sense. If you were the right kind of alien intelligence they may make a lot of sense. One is that they want to convert all intelligent races in the universe to follow their own model of civilisation, and that's a model that we don't want.
Given that Seti only checks data, but doesn't try to execute it, shields us even further from the whole thing...
It's worth noting that, e.g., Microsoft IIS only "checks" data that it receives from client connections, rather than trying to execute it. This doesn't stop it from actually executing it, if you happen to be running an unpatched version and the request is in the correct format.
That said, IIS processes structured data which contains variable-length and which critically affects its operation, causing it to branch into many possible execution paths. Seti processes unstructured fixed-length data and does not perform different operations based on its content. The latter is much easier to write securely than the former.
From TFA:
1. Raw signal in memory must bootstrap to status of operating program
2. Program must then untangle the inner workings of the host. (Is it possible to now build a diagnosis program to determine the operating set of an unfamiliar computer?)
Actually, I don't know why he concentrates on this as the attack vector, because it's a highly unlikely one for reasons he point outs. And from the site:
Some science fiction works on the SETI virus possibility include [...] A is for Andromeda, F. Hoyle and J. Elliot, Souvenir Press (1962).
A very interesting book, which does highlight the potential dangers of a much more realistic attack vector: the message itself is not dangerous, but describes a technology (in this case the design of and programming for a new kind of computer) that is.
In response to some concerns of other posters, the sequel of A for Andromeda (in addition to describing the plans of evil corporation INTEL to steal the design for this computer) also goes into the motivations of the sender for mounting such an attack: an intent to spread close relatives of their own species throughout the universe by persuading sentient species on other worlds to (effectively) genetically engineer themselves into the originator of the message. In a universe without effective interstellar travel this would be the only way of "colonising" other star systems, and you can certainly understand how a desire to do it would arise.
A "conventional DVD" has two layers, and holds roughly 9Gb of data. 300 / 9 = 33 1/3, not 60. Even recordable DVDs are well and truly available in 9Gb formats by now, and have been for some time. OK, the media is more expensive than single layer discs, but the technology is in people's PCs now. And how much are these discs going to cost for the first few years of their existence?
Dell is a no-buy in my "house". For many reasons starting from being very non-standard (just disassemble one for a change and see how many parts are custom)
Hmmm...? My optiplex has a non-standard motherboard/backplane arrangement for plugging expansion cards in, but the rest of it is absolutely standard. And I've never seen a slimline desktop without such an arrangement, either.
HP/Compaq machines are much worse, unless they've improved in the last few years. Last Compaq machine I disassembled had fucked-up weird screws that took ages to remove because none of my standard tools fitted them. Last Fujitsu I disassembled seemed fairly standard (other than similar motherboad/backplane to the dell), but the case was a PITA to put back together afterwards.
If you want standard components and cases, I think the only choice is to use less well-known regional suppliers. Just check that they've been around a while first, so you can be reasonably sure they'll be there to back up their warranties.