In other words, it seems to be about the bank making policies that give a minor improvement in their own internal security, at the expense of inconveniencing and reducing the security of their customers.
IIRC - The password aging was part of IBM's recommendations for implementing DES. This is a proven best practice for perfect systems. This advice on changing passwords monthly is based on the assumption that the ends are secure, for example mainframe to mainframe communications.
Reality is that for well under a million dollars you can probably get a keylogger on the client system which is probably running a vulnerable version of Adobe Flash.
I suspect that banks that make you change your password monthly are just making sure that everyone has the same password policy instead of figuring out who does and does not need to change their password and maybe getting it wrong. It also has a chance of limiting losses if they are making sure that you are not using any of the last three passwords you used. Password aging is based on the idea that you will have a security breach and you need to proactively limit your losses.
A weak password can eventually be cracked by a slow, dispersed dictionary attack;
This way, you don't have to worry about someone you gave the password to a year ago, or who otherwise found out about it (post-it, etc.) and now decides to do something about it because you p*ssed them off;
Also, you're right - a "system' for your password will definitely decrease security, no question about it, since any system is by definition non-random.
Correct advice wrong reasoning. The reason to expire passwords and passkeys, is that by sampling encrypted content, the key can eventually be brute forced off line.
You can be reasonably certain this will take months/years. The higher the value of the payload, the more frequently you need to change your keys,
The other issue is that when a crypto key fails, if the data is of high value, you really want to have already changed the key, so that recently encrypted data is not compromised.
If you change your key annually, you have one years data compromised if the key fails, if you change the key weekly, you have one weeks data exposed if the key fails.
The general rule of thumb is never set keys for longer than ten years no matter how minimally valuable the payload.
If you are not doing e-commerce, you can probably get away with changing your keys and passwords with your major OS upgrades. If you are doing e-commerce and storing credit card information you need someone to carefully plan out your data retention and security of that data.
Overall, it is a good practice, but unlikely to be the reason a system gets owned, unless it is a high value target. (by high value I mean worth throwing a few million in resources to break in, be aware, that there are a handful of college students that are paid to administer many millions of dollars of idle computer resources, so the bar for being a victim is lower than you might guess).
Sure the default colours in Ubuntu are ugly, but it's the amateur look of the UI that most bothers me. It's good that they are taking a step in the right direction.
I think that Linux Mint got their UI spot on. It looks great and I even love their black and green colour scheme.
Linux mint is something that I can sit at and use all day, ubuntu makes me need to mess with the colors.
I thought the current color scheme was unattractive, but professional, the new color scheme is just painful. XP and windows 3.0 were not as bad, and those were the two ugliest schemes that I can recall,
The other place that Amazon really shines is for startups that are bootstrapping themselves, you don't have any sunk costs, and if nobody buys, you don't have a huge bill.
If you know what your storage needs are going to be in two years, you can probably beat Amazon pretty easily in price, but if the storage numbers for two years from now are pulled out of your ass because there is no data, just hopes and an untested business model, use Amazon.
He just brushed away the two very important issues of the Kubuntu Desktop and sound. Now, what he was doing there is is meeting a "your distro sucks" accusation with a "does not!" reply which is to some degree fair. However that doesn't change the apparently common opinion that the Kubuntu desktop is crap, and sound is just flat out broken. I like KDE because it has more features and looks better, but it's just too damn buggy so I had to switch back to gnome just so me and my wife could use the computer. And I have NEVER had sound work properly out of the Ubuntu box. It is downright embarassing. I don't know to what extent these problems are the fault of Ubuntu as opposed to KDE, or the fault of the Linux kernel using Pulse or what. I just know that the Kubuntu desktop is highly unpolished and the sound situation is dire. These things were addressed in the Q&A because they are important and the only answer we got is "It works fine for me".
The problem with using Kubuntu or Xubuntu is that they are not supported by Canonical nor Debian.
If you have a problem and report it to Canonical you will find that it is community supported, but the community support is Debian, and most Debian package maintainers do not support Ubuntu packages.
You can get yourself out of that position by installing Debian. A huge amount of Canonical's work does make it upstream to Debian, so the Debian of two years ago is not the Debian of today. The one problem that Debian is pretty much alone in is getting firefox to work on other than i386 or amd64, so iceweasel(firefox) is still at 3.5 because Debian just managed to get the bugs shaken out enough to get it to compile on mips in February.
Part, of Debian being behind is because of the buggy nature of the software that they are behind on. Non-buggy software that actually compiles and runs debian is generally very up to date on, with the slowness being from fixing bugs, and not going, works for me.
If you are using the same computer since 6.06, that might be an issue unto itself, in part. Off brand and "special deal" low end pre-built computers have all kinds of goofy cheap hardware with enough soft drivers to make one wonder how the computer even turns on. I can hardly imagine anyone wanting to hack together a soft driver for a crappy piece of hardware. It would be so much more work for that developer than to just buy better hardware.
It is one thing to write a driver for something like audigy pro, or other real sound card, and another thing to write a driver for a wire, 2 magnets, and a plastic cone.
The problem that linux (and windows and freebsd) has with specific hardware is not the cheap nature of it, as the os can emulate it in software, the problem is that some low, and high end lie about what they can and cannot do so you have to know that if hardware id = X know that it lies about being able to perform Y.
Linux seems to do better about blacklisting devices do to it's larger number of bug testers. But one computer that windows was crashing on every five hours or so I installed linux on it and the boot screen showed lots of messages about hardware features being disabled because the hardware was known to perform out of spec, so linux was more stable than windows on that machine. I will leave others figure out who's fault it is that windows would not work reliably on the machine.
Inflation since then runs close to 1000-1500% (depending on initial year) than 60,000%, actually. Please check out this inflation calculator if you would like to see for yourself.
Inflation adjustment is not as simple as what the westegg calculator makes it out to be.
Look at the results at measuringworth.com. I would agree that I over estimated off the top of my head, as I over estimated inflation in the 1800's. Personally, I would say that the $70k number is probably the more relevant number as it puts the punishment about the twice the cost of hiring someone at minimum wage for the year.
Well the US has been privatizing almost everything for a long time. San Francisco even had a private police station in North Beach funded by the merchants for the merchants, for most of the city's history.
The huge awards in the US courts tend to be around the idea of disgorgement of profits from the illegal act.
The biggest problem with the US legal system is that the wealthy know that to successfully litigate a case of 25k in damages is probably going to run 80k plus, as the cost of a deposition is about 5-10k for each side and you probably need at least six depositions. He said, she said is just out of reach for the lower middle class and the poor.
Also factor into inflation, and the $500 per item fine in the 1800's when the law was passed was real money. I doubt that those numbers would have shown up if the fine was closer to $300,000 per item, which is probably what the original fine was in an inflation adjusted basis. Patents used to mean something, now they are for peanut butter sandwiches with the crust cut off.
The reality of the artist scene is that Van Goughs works were used to patch leaky hay carts (or at least one hay cart) during his lifetime. The value of artistic works is extremely volatile and varies with the whims of fashion. Many successful artists have spent time below the poverty line, while practicing their trade.
Most artists suffer the same fate, until they become known in popular culture. It is possible, that if Disney were to use your work without compensation beyond credit, you would be in a financially better off in a year than if that did not happen. Someone with a hit is in much more demand than someone that is merely talented, due to most people's inability to judge artistic talent. There is always going to be anecdotes about how person X in situation Y did better under copyright law M. The question is what is the best compromise, and it pretty clear that a lot of people feel that the current copyright system is not in their best interests.
I don't see copyright, as it is currently implemented, helping the majority of people that try and survive off of their artistic endeavors. I suspect that a more limited copyright that is more in the spirit of academic papers, with attributing your sources, might work better for the general public and the majority of artists. Creative Commons licenses are popular for a reason, and maybe copyright should move in that direction.
What I am trying to say is that copyright does not address the sunk costs of production, which is the biggest issue for most artists I know.
While copyright does allow finished works that are fit for mass production to prosper, it does leave a lot of artists and writers below the poverty line in the U.S.
I just think that if we through out copyright, we should replace it with something that helps the unknowns, more than the successful artists. But, that is just my view
Do corporate decision makers have to pay for their crimes, or do they get to hide behind the corporate veil?
Management has a lot to do with the safety of a power plant, and if there is $40,000,000 in your bonus if you shave the safety margins 40% and have a 99% chance of getting away with it, you take the risk, at least most risk takers will take those odds.
What this means is that the buyer of this toolkit can then create customized malware or botnets with different command-and-controls and configurations (such as which banks to attack), but having all the flexibility and power of the original toolkit. Having such a toolkit in the hands of multiple criminal groups paints a scary picture. It's simply not enough to eliminate a particular botnet and criminal group to solve this problem.
I agree it's not enough. They should also eliminate the use of any Windows computer by all banks. Seriously, name just one large botnet that contains no infected Windows machines. I dare you.
iServices.A is a mac only botnet that is distributed with pirated copies of iwork.
I am not sure that the risks are mitigated by much.
The percentage of starving artists that can afford $80,000 to go to court with full legal representation is small enough that I cannot see the Disney's of the world being overly concerned, beyond offering a small sum for the rights to avoid litigation.
Copyright does increase the size of the jackpot if you get lucky, but that is not so much a reduction in risk as a decrease in the risk/reward ratio./p.
Take Slashdot hivemind favorite Neal Stephenson. Are you trying to tell me that I -- or better yet, some e-e-e-e-vil Hollywood studio -- should be able to make a movie today from his "Snowcrash" -- same title, characters, lift the dialogue, whole nine yards -- and not pay Stephenson a dime? Is that what you are proposing? Seriously?
After sixteen years, why not?
Maybe extend it to thirty two years. The current copyright law is not how things have worked for the majority of human history.
Note that Shakespeare managed to make a decent living without copyright, although he was not one of the richest people in the world, unlike J.K. Rowling.
I know a lot of struggling writers, and I really don't see how current copyright law helps them any more than lottery tickets do. Copyright does not pay you to write a book, it pays you if people like your book after all the costs and effort has been expended. Personally I favor copyright of Books, Maps, and Movies for sixteen years renewable by the aothor for a total of thirty-two, or maybe renewable twice for a total of forty-eight years.
Given that 800 new books are published *every day* - it is fair to say that copyright does entice people to produce.
The "there is not such thing as imaginary property" crowd haven't come anywhere near proving that a system without copyright would generate anywhere near this amount of new content (which, because of copyright, isn't just rehashes and remixes of existing copyrighted material).
Is dismantling a system that entices authors in English speaking countries to publish 800 new books *every day* worth risking so that less-than-original works based on existing concepts can exist?
A good question, but considering how infrequently it is made by advocates of copyright extension, I don't believe that much over 40 years is justifiable under any model.
I would also point out that a percentage of those 800 books are not based on original content but content that is old enough to be used without credit, compendiums of Shakespeare and Dickens and derivative works of those authors among others make up a large portion of our literature, so your case is over stated, but the question is do we have more new works, or do we have cultural stagnation as the 800 books a day are prone to build off of older works?
Should J.K Rowling have had to pay a royalty to the Egyptian consulate for using a Sphinx in Harry Potter?
Ironically, the people that suffer the most from cultural stagnation are the vary ones arguing for longer copyrights.
The fastest way to get as much into the Public Domain as soon as possible is to abandon copyright, therefore I cannot agree with your premise.
I believe that Copyright exists to provide a person with the legal right of control over works which they own (and recourse should their control be usurped) up to a reasonable point, when the ownership is transferred to the state. That "reasonable point" has been debated and extended over time, complicating our current system.
Abandonware, or orphaned works, don't have a legal entity beyond works which do not have an identifiable owner, however so long as we have a date for the work's creation the work is still subject to that "reasonable point", and any time an owner can be identified, the work is no longer abandoned or orphaned.
If your principle of abandonware were instituted, how would a work be declared as abandonware, and how would you deal with the situation when the owner of an abandoned work comes forward after-the-fact?
The theory is that if you have copyright protections, people will produce more, and therefore more will wind up in the public domain.
If this is not true, then why should the general populous allow copyright to exist? Being as we are not benefiting from copyright law, should we not scrap it?
Is there any effort to separate X from XDMCP to speed up local X server? X (local) just doesn't seem as snappy as Windows. Does OSX use X for windowing?
X is reasonably snappy on a 50mhz machine with 64 meg of ram and a four meg of video ram if you are running blackbox.
I don't know what crippled hardware you are running on that makes X seem slow, but I suggest you pull something faster out of a dumpster.
Yes, I know that the 3D code for a lot of video drivers are pretty slow and incomplete. But that is not an architecture problem, it is a beta/alpha quality code issue.
Let's see, who are the two groups of people who would make up lies about Windows 7, the best OS Microsoft has made? Hmmm, there's only two groups - can you think of them? Oh, right, Mac fanboys and Linux fanboys. Taking a guess and picking one of the two is NOT being off topic.
But hey, why use common sense when you can just troll anyone who doesn't blindly bash Windows.
People short MSFT would have a better reason to lie than the fan boys.
But do you have sound working? Can you plug in a usb drive on your client and see it on your desktop? Yes you can do all that, but you also need to manage it, and LTSP supports installations of as large as 30,000 desktop clients.
The point is to have a thin client work like a desktop.When it works it is a huge time saver for admins, as you have one server cluster to back up and maintain, and a bunch of diskless workstations that can be unplugged and replaced with no configuration or installation beyond maybe needing to put the mac address in dhcpd.conf
LTSP is probably more work than it's worth if you have less than five work stations, but more than five workstations, and the long term savings probably make it worth the initial time investment, as you need beefy servers and good redundancies, but after you have a high availability server cluster that people are logging into, management as become a lot easier.
[_] some of us aren't cheap - we can buy a second hard disk and devote it to an entire OS;
[_] we don't want to look at that "other OS" more than once every 6 months,
[X] that "other OS" has legal restrictions on virtualization.
[_] What is this "other OS" you speak of? I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
[_] In Soviet Russia, other OS boots YOU!
[X] I don't run "that other OS", you insensitive clod!
I am pretty sure that there are know restrictions on installing windows XP, or Windows 7 in a VM
I have been trying virtual machines since about 2000 and the first usable VM for desktop use that I have used was KVM on linux with qemu. I keep windows 2k with IE6, xp with IE7 and win7 with IE8 as VM images that I use for testing websites, I tend to forget that I can run other windows programs on them, because IE is the only application I have to use that I need windows for. As an aside, I find that the startup time for win2k in a VM is not that much slower than IE6 on wine, and much more reliable for multimedia sites.
I always use a linux mint live cd for a week, telling them that it is a little slow because they are running off of a cd rom, but this way they can reboot and still get to windows if it doesn't work out.
After a week they should know if they can use Linux or not.
A big advantage of using debian over ubuntu is that a lot of the packages in ubuntu are unsupported recompiles of Debian packages, that the debian maintainer won't support because it is running on debian, and ubuntu won't support because it's a debian package that has been ported for your convenience but is really a debian package so go talk to the debian maintainer, who won't support the package because he only supports debian, not ubuntu...
The core of ubuntu is a bit more polished than debian i386 and amd64 but if you step away from there you wind up in a place like chrome os where google wound up moving over to gentoo as it's base.
Another advantage of debian over ubuntu is that debian takes upgrades seriously, ubuntu is back to the windows world of reinstall to make sure the upgrade works.
Ubuntu does have a few advantages - you probably know someone else that uses ubuntu, it has a marketing budget, you can ask them to mail you a copy of ubuntu, and they will - free of charge, it includes firefox and firefox artwork, it comes on a bootable cd. I am sure there are other cool things about ubuntu, but despite those things the long term ease of use causes me to prefer debian.
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In other words, it seems to be about the bank making policies that give a minor improvement in their own internal security, at the expense of inconveniencing and reducing the security of their customers.
IIRC - The password aging was part of IBM's recommendations for implementing DES. This is a proven best practice for perfect systems. This advice on changing passwords monthly is based on the assumption that the ends are secure, for example mainframe to mainframe communications.
Reality is that for well under a million dollars you can probably get a keylogger on the client system which is probably running a vulnerable version of Adobe Flash.
I suspect that banks that make you change your password monthly are just making sure that everyone has the same password policy instead of figuring out who does and does not need to change their password and maybe getting it wrong. It also has a chance of limiting losses if they are making sure that you are not using any of the last three passwords you used. Password aging is based on the idea that you will have a security breach and you need to proactively limit your losses.
Two reasons:
Also, you're right - a "system' for your password will definitely decrease security, no question about it, since any system is by definition non-random.
Correct advice wrong reasoning. The reason to expire passwords and passkeys, is that by sampling encrypted content, the key can eventually be brute forced off line.
You can be reasonably certain this will take months/years. The higher the value of the payload, the more frequently you need to change your keys,
The other issue is that when a crypto key fails, if the data is of high value, you really want to have already changed the key, so that recently encrypted data is not compromised.
If you change your key annually, you have one years data compromised if the key fails, if you change the key weekly, you have one weeks data exposed if the key fails.
The general rule of thumb is never set keys for longer than ten years no matter how minimally valuable the payload.
If you are not doing e-commerce, you can probably get away with changing your keys and passwords with your major OS upgrades. If you are doing e-commerce and storing credit card information you need someone to carefully plan out your data retention and security of that data.
Overall, it is a good practice, but unlikely to be the reason a system gets owned, unless it is a high value target. (by high value I mean worth throwing a few million in resources to break in, be aware, that there are a handful of college students that are paid to administer many millions of dollars of idle computer resources, so the bar for being a victim is lower than you might guess).
Enough for my late night ramblings.
Nobody's going to guess a 2048-bit RSA key.
http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/o/openssh-blacklist/openssh-blacklist_0.4.1.tar.gz
If the 2048 RSA key is one of these they probably will, get it, especially if they have a million chances.
Windows 1.01 was worse - fire engine red and bright yellow. It literally looked like Dante's GUI.
I only saw windows 1 on a Heracles amber graphics card IIRC. It was amber an black for me :-)
Sure the default colours in Ubuntu are ugly, but it's the amateur look of the UI that most bothers me. It's good that they are taking a step in the right direction.
I think that Linux Mint got their UI spot on. It looks great and I even love their black and green colour scheme.
Linux mint is something that I can sit at and use all day, ubuntu makes me need to mess with the colors.
I thought the current color scheme was unattractive, but professional, the new color scheme is just painful. XP and windows 3.0 were not as bad, and those were the two ugliest schemes that I can recall,
The other place that Amazon really shines is for startups that are bootstrapping themselves, you don't have any sunk costs, and if nobody buys, you don't have a huge bill.
If you know what your storage needs are going to be in two years, you can probably beat Amazon pretty easily in price, but if the storage numbers for two years from now are pulled out of your ass because there is no data, just hopes and an untested business model, use Amazon.
He just brushed away the two very important issues of the Kubuntu Desktop and sound. Now, what he was doing there is is meeting a "your distro sucks" accusation with a "does not!" reply which is to some degree fair. However that doesn't change the apparently common opinion that the Kubuntu desktop is crap, and sound is just flat out broken. I like KDE because it has more features and looks better, but it's just too damn buggy so I had to switch back to gnome just so me and my wife could use the computer. And I have NEVER had sound work properly out of the Ubuntu box. It is downright embarassing. I don't know to what extent these problems are the fault of Ubuntu as opposed to KDE, or the fault of the Linux kernel using Pulse or what. I just know that the Kubuntu desktop is highly unpolished and the sound situation is dire. These things were addressed in the Q&A because they are important and the only answer we got is "It works fine for me".
The problem with using Kubuntu or Xubuntu is that they are not supported by Canonical nor Debian.
If you have a problem and report it to Canonical you will find that it is community supported, but the community support is Debian, and most Debian package maintainers do not support Ubuntu packages.
You can get yourself out of that position by installing Debian. A huge amount of Canonical's work does make it upstream to Debian, so the Debian of two years ago is not the Debian of today. The one problem that Debian is pretty much alone in is getting firefox to work on other than i386 or amd64, so iceweasel(firefox) is still at 3.5 because Debian just managed to get the bugs shaken out enough to get it to compile on mips in February.
Part, of Debian being behind is because of the buggy nature of the software that they are behind on. Non-buggy software that actually compiles and runs debian is generally very up to date on, with the slowness being from fixing bugs, and not going, works for me.
If you are using the same computer since 6.06, that might be an issue unto itself, in part. Off brand and "special deal" low end pre-built computers have all kinds of goofy cheap hardware with enough soft drivers to make one wonder how the computer even turns on. I can hardly imagine anyone wanting to hack together a soft driver for a crappy piece of hardware. It would be so much more work for that developer than to just buy better hardware. It is one thing to write a driver for something like audigy pro, or other real sound card, and another thing to write a driver for a wire, 2 magnets, and a plastic cone.
The problem that linux (and windows and freebsd) has with specific hardware is not the cheap nature of it, as the os can emulate it in software, the problem is that some low, and high end lie about what they can and cannot do so you have to know that if hardware id = X know that it lies about being able to perform Y.
Linux seems to do better about blacklisting devices do to it's larger number of bug testers. But one computer that windows was crashing on every five hours or so I installed linux on it and the boot screen showed lots of messages about hardware features being disabled because the hardware was known to perform out of spec, so linux was more stable than windows on that machine. I will leave others figure out who's fault it is that windows would not work reliably on the machine.
Inflation since then runs close to 1000-1500% (depending on initial year) than 60,000%, actually. Please check out this inflation calculator if you would like to see for yourself.
Inflation adjustment is not as simple as what the westegg calculator makes it out to be.
Look at the results at measuringworth.com. I would agree that I over estimated off the top of my head, as I over estimated inflation in the 1800's. Personally, I would say that the $70k number is probably the more relevant number as it puts the punishment about the twice the cost of hiring someone at minimum wage for the year.
Well the US has been privatizing almost everything for a long time. San Francisco even had a private police station in North Beach funded by the merchants for the merchants, for most of the city's history.
The huge awards in the US courts tend to be around the idea of disgorgement of profits from the illegal act.
The biggest problem with the US legal system is that the wealthy know that to successfully litigate a case of 25k in damages is probably going to run 80k plus, as the cost of a deposition is about 5-10k for each side and you probably need at least six depositions. He said, she said is just out of reach for the lower middle class and the poor.
Also factor into inflation, and the $500 per item fine in the 1800's when the law was passed was real money. I doubt that those numbers would have shown up if the fine was closer to $300,000 per item, which is probably what the original fine was in an inflation adjusted basis. Patents used to mean something, now they are for peanut butter sandwiches with the crust cut off.
I am pretty sure tomhudson wanted to link to accesselectronique.ca.
The reality of the artist scene is that Van Goughs works were used to patch leaky hay carts (or at least one hay cart) during his lifetime. The value of artistic works is extremely volatile and varies with the whims of fashion. Many successful artists have spent time below the poverty line, while practicing their trade.
Most artists suffer the same fate, until they become known in popular culture. It is possible, that if Disney were to use your work without compensation beyond credit, you would be in a financially better off in a year than if that did not happen. Someone with a hit is in much more demand than someone that is merely talented, due to most people's inability to judge artistic talent. There is always going to be anecdotes about how person X in situation Y did better under copyright law M. The question is what is the best compromise, and it pretty clear that a lot of people feel that the current copyright system is not in their best interests.
I don't see copyright, as it is currently implemented, helping the majority of people that try and survive off of their artistic endeavors. I suspect that a more limited copyright that is more in the spirit of academic papers, with attributing your sources, might work better for the general public and the majority of artists. Creative Commons licenses are popular for a reason, and maybe copyright should move in that direction.
What I am trying to say is that copyright does not address the sunk costs of production, which is the biggest issue for most artists I know.
While copyright does allow finished works that are fit for mass production to prosper, it does leave a lot of artists and writers below the poverty line in the U.S.
I just think that if we through out copyright, we should replace it with something that helps the unknowns, more than the successful artists. But, that is just my view
Possibly more true than one would think.
Do corporate decision makers have to pay for their crimes, or do they get to hide behind the corporate veil?
Management has a lot to do with the safety of a power plant, and if there is $40,000,000 in your bonus if you shave the safety margins 40% and have a 99% chance of getting away with it, you take the risk, at least most risk takers will take those odds.
I agree it's not enough. They should also eliminate the use of any Windows computer by all banks. Seriously, name just one large botnet that contains no infected Windows machines. I dare you.
iServices.A is a mac only botnet that is distributed with pirated copies of iwork.
I am not sure that the risks are mitigated by much.
The percentage of starving artists that can afford $80,000 to go to court with full legal representation is small enough that I cannot see the Disney's of the world being overly concerned, beyond offering a small sum for the rights to avoid litigation.
Copyright does increase the size of the jackpot if you get lucky, but that is not so much a reduction in risk as a decrease in the risk/reward ratio./p.
Let's break it down:
Take Slashdot hivemind favorite Neal Stephenson. Are you trying to tell me that I -- or better yet, some e-e-e-e-vil Hollywood studio -- should be able to make a movie today from his "Snowcrash" -- same title, characters, lift the dialogue, whole nine yards -- and not pay Stephenson a dime? Is that what you are proposing? Seriously?
After sixteen years, why not?
Maybe extend it to thirty two years. The current copyright law is not how things have worked for the majority of human history.
Note that Shakespeare managed to make a decent living without copyright, although he was not one of the richest people in the world, unlike J.K. Rowling.
I know a lot of struggling writers, and I really don't see how current copyright law helps them any more than lottery tickets do. Copyright does not pay you to write a book, it pays you if people like your book after all the costs and effort has been expended. Personally I favor copyright of Books, Maps, and Movies for sixteen years renewable by the aothor for a total of thirty-two, or maybe renewable twice for a total of forty-eight years.
Given that 800 new books are published *every day* - it is fair to say that copyright does entice people to produce.
The "there is not such thing as imaginary property" crowd haven't come anywhere near proving that a system without copyright would generate anywhere near this amount of new content (which, because of copyright, isn't just rehashes and remixes of existing copyrighted material).
Is dismantling a system that entices authors in English speaking countries to publish 800 new books *every day* worth risking so that less-than-original works based on existing concepts can exist?
A good question, but considering how infrequently it is made by advocates of copyright extension, I don't believe that much over 40 years is justifiable under any model.
I would also point out that a percentage of those 800 books are not based on original content but content that is old enough to be used without credit, compendiums of Shakespeare and Dickens and derivative works of those authors among others make up a large portion of our literature, so your case is over stated, but the question is do we have more new works, or do we have cultural stagnation as the 800 books a day are prone to build off of older works?
Should J.K Rowling have had to pay a royalty to the Egyptian consulate for using a Sphinx in Harry Potter?
Ironically, the people that suffer the most from cultural stagnation are the vary ones arguing for longer copyrights.
The fastest way to get as much into the Public Domain as soon as possible is to abandon copyright, therefore I cannot agree with your premise.
I believe that Copyright exists to provide a person with the legal right of control over works which they own (and recourse should their control be usurped) up to a reasonable point, when the ownership is transferred to the state. That "reasonable point" has been debated and extended over time, complicating our current system.
Abandonware, or orphaned works, don't have a legal entity beyond works which do not have an identifiable owner, however so long as we have a date for the work's creation the work is still subject to that "reasonable point", and any time an owner can be identified, the work is no longer abandoned or orphaned.
If your principle of abandonware were instituted, how would a work be declared as abandonware, and how would you deal with the situation when the owner of an abandoned work comes forward after-the-fact?
The theory is that if you have copyright protections, people will produce more, and therefore more will wind up in the public domain.
If this is not true, then why should the general populous allow copyright to exist? Being as we are not benefiting from copyright law, should we not scrap it?
Is there any effort to separate X from XDMCP to speed up local X server? X (local) just doesn't seem as snappy as Windows. Does OSX use X for windowing?
X is reasonably snappy on a 50mhz machine with 64 meg of ram and a four meg of video ram if you are running blackbox.
I don't know what crippled hardware you are running on that makes X seem slow, but I suggest you pull something faster out of a dumpster.
Yes, I know that the 3D code for a lot of video drivers are pretty slow and incomplete. But that is not an architecture problem, it is a beta/alpha quality code issue.
Let's see, who are the two groups of people who would make up lies about Windows 7, the best OS Microsoft has made? Hmmm, there's only two groups - can you think of them? Oh, right, Mac fanboys and Linux fanboys. Taking a guess and picking one of the two is NOT being off topic.
But hey, why use common sense when you can just troll anyone who doesn't blindly bash Windows.
People short MSFT would have a better reason to lie than the fan boys.
But do you have sound working? Can you plug in a usb drive on your client and see it on your desktop? Yes you can do all that, but you also need to manage it, and LTSP supports installations of as large as 30,000 desktop clients.
The point is to have a thin client work like a desktop.When it works it is a huge time saver for admins, as you have one server cluster to back up and maintain, and a bunch of diskless workstations that can be unplugged and replaced with no configuration or installation beyond maybe needing to put the mac address in dhcpd.conf
LTSP is probably more work than it's worth if you have less than five work stations, but more than five workstations, and the long term savings probably make it worth the initial time investment, as you need beefy servers and good redundancies, but after you have a high availability server cluster that people are logging into, management as become a lot easier.
Because
[_] some of us aren't cheap - we can buy a second hard disk and devote it to an entire OS;
[_] we don't want to look at that "other OS" more than once every 6 months,
[X] that "other OS" has legal restrictions on virtualization.
[_] What is this "other OS" you speak of? I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
[_] In Soviet Russia, other OS boots YOU!
[X] I don't run "that other OS", you insensitive clod!
I am pretty sure that there are know restrictions on installing windows XP, or Windows 7 in a VM
I have been trying virtual machines since about 2000 and the first usable VM for desktop use that I have used was KVM on linux with qemu. I keep windows 2k with IE6, xp with IE7 and win7 with IE8 as VM images that I use for testing websites, I tend to forget that I can run other windows programs on them, because IE is the only application I have to use that I need windows for. As an aside, I find that the startup time for win2k in a VM is not that much slower than IE6 on wine, and much more reliable for multimedia sites.
I always use a linux mint live cd for a week, telling them that it is a little slow because they are running off of a cd rom, but this way they can reboot and still get to windows if it doesn't work out.
After a week they should know if they can use Linux or not.
Not as much, but it still has quite a bit.
A big advantage of using debian over ubuntu is that a lot of the packages in ubuntu are unsupported recompiles of Debian packages, that the debian maintainer won't support because it is running on debian, and ubuntu won't support because it's a debian package that has been ported for your convenience but is really a debian package so go talk to the debian maintainer, who won't support the package because he only supports debian, not ubuntu ...
The core of ubuntu is a bit more polished than debian i386 and amd64 but if you step away from there you wind up in a place like chrome os where google wound up moving over to gentoo as it's base.
Another advantage of debian over ubuntu is that debian takes upgrades seriously, ubuntu is back to the windows world of reinstall to make sure the upgrade works.
Ubuntu does have a few advantages - you probably know someone else that uses ubuntu, it has a marketing budget, you can ask them to mail you a copy of ubuntu, and they will - free of charge, it includes firefox and firefox artwork, it comes on a bootable cd. I am sure there are other cool things about ubuntu, but despite those things the long term ease of use causes me to prefer debian.