Of course you hear it from their employees, they're desperately afraid. They were promised stock options that'd be atmospheric, now they're not usable for lining bird cages.
Every idiot they can convince that their company isn't a complete failure is someone who may buy stock, upping the price, and making their options worthwhile.
Face it, they have NOTHING. What part of "*ALL* their claims were thrown out." don't you understand? All this fraud thing means is that less of them will be going to jail when the company tanks.
There is something about RMBD having loyal fans that makes me warm and happy inside... Just think, the random investor and other stockholders dumped the stock when the company started to tank, other less-loyal fans dumped when the stock plumetted. But the loyal types, they're hanging on to their religious belief that their stock isn't worthless... The good thing about this is that they'll get NOTHING when the company finally folds. This... the fact that greedy assholes will lose BIG, comforts me.
To me, anyone who would buy RMBS stock, supporting the company that tried to steal money from the rightful inventors and implementors of these products can go to hell in a hand basket. Fuck, Rambus didn't even make a product. (Nor, for the reality impared, did they invent one.)
Actually, EULAs would be less binding on businesses because they tend to employ lawyers who would instruct them of this.
However, businesses tend to sign paper contracts that spell out everything in the EULA, as part of their bulk-purchase agreements. And in that fashion, being open and before-sale, it's perfectly legal and binding.
If you had to sign your name to an EULA when you bought software at a store, it's be more binding. Especially if you had to sign BEFORE purchase.
But if a business (or consumer) goes to the store, buys a package, takes it home, installs it, and clicks-through the EULA, they are NOT bound by it. Even if they knew it was there, they also knew that it is invalid. EULAs, no matter how you look at it, are not binding to ANYONE.
Thus the UCITA. I mean, if a business can't forbid people commenting on the quality of a product, writing reviews, distributing anything made with the software without royalties, and cripple it in the name of piracy provention... how do we expect them to make billions of dollars and oppress us?!? Support your local billionaire, buy him a politician.
Libertarianism is a form of socialism where people have money taken from them, in a way that you approve of. And where you don't.
If you want ANY laws, law enforcement, or judicial services, that's a government. For a government to maintain even a semblance of impartiality, it has to be publicly funded by all.
"Paid for by those who use them"... Here's a hint, they already partially are. It's called bribes. You expect a system completely funded this way to be unbiased? What court would EVER find against Microsoft on anything if Bill was paying their bills?
Any form of non-publicly funded laws basically ammount to a bunch of libertarians who hire a private army to enforce their rules.
It's a nice fantasy world you've got there...
Libertarianism is founded on the idea that ownership rights are absolute, and that you don't "initiate" violence. Well, yeah. YOUR ownership rights are absolute, and I should never initiate violence against you.
Should we respect the ownership rights of people whose ancestors stole land by killing the inhabitants? What if I'm a decendent of one of the original owners?
Libertarianism is a philosophy of contradiction, Apply harsh rules to them, and make them pay for the privelage, but don't take any money from me or it's government initiation of violence and I'll come out shooting.
Yawn...
Re:IRC can be fixed easily.
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Secure IRC?
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· Score: 2
The netsplit problem could be solved, imho, by using a robust form of message passing, something like usenet, with message IDs.
If one netlink dies, a server simply contacts another server and passes messages that way. It sends all messages it didn't receive ACKs for. If those messages did get through, they won't be duplicated because when a host recognizes duplicate message IDs, it junks them.
This would also allow a host that completely dropped out of the system to queue up message, so that a momentary outage didn't lose any data.
I'm interested in this too, but I can't IRC from behind my work firewall. Email me if you wish to talk about it, I'd be interested in talking to someone else with ideas about the system.
Instead, for a truly fair system, limit *all* political spending to a flat ammount provided to any candidate who meets the basic requirements. Provide free airfare and a certain ammount of free airtime. Prevent *any* political donations.
Political donations are bribes, plain and simple. Bribes subvert our political system and should be treated like treason, long jail time and revoking of your right to participate in the political system.
Spending caps are the only way to get any equity into the system. No third-party candidate can get a fair chance, the fact that the big two parties get almost all the funding means only the independantly rich can run for office.
Your great ideas for freedom will get you exactly the opposite.
EULAs aren't binding. Even if they were, you can't sign away your right to legal action, except as a result of some legal action (class action lawsuit preclude any other cases...)
Here's the pointform reasons why EULAs aren't binding.
1) Contracts require 'consideration' (Both parties must get something.) They get your agreement, you get nothing. (You've already bought the software and are entitled to use it, they can't take that away.) Thus the contract is voided.
2) Contracts must be voluntary. If I take something of yours (the software you've purchased) and won't give it to you till you sign the contract, the contract is void. Because they remove functionality until you 'agree', the contract isn't binding.
There are a few other reasons, and those can be fleshed out a bit, but without the UCITA, EULAs aren't binding. That's the whole reason they (MS, etc) are buying votes to get the UCITA passed.
So, if MS software formats your HD, or is so insecure it allows someone else to do so, you can sue MS. Of course, you'll *never* win, MS has proven time and again that they're willing to tell outright lies to the judge in order to win a lawsuit. But you're still entitled to sue and theoretically, you might win. If you find an honest judge (unlike Kaplan who was bought and paid for by the MPAA courtesy of Time Warner.)
Yes, this is true. Quote me on it. Bill Gates has committed perjury during the anti-trust trial. If he wasn't a billionarie, he'd have spent time in jail for it. As was, nothing. Gotta love America, the best justice system money can buy.
Re:Windows ported to Unix?
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Netscape 6.1
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· Score: 2
They didn't claim IE wouldn't work without windows, they claimed windows wouldn't work without IE...
I do think integrating an HTML renderer is a good idea. The bad idea is taking over all file extensions, putting the icons on the desktop, intentionally 'fixing' your OS so the competitors products don't work, and everything else MS did.
1) The bigger the system, the tidier it usually is. A small company can buy a few servers and network them easily. A thousand servers require a huge ammount of specialized equipment which is hard to misplace.
2) If you ever do anything requiring thousands of PCs, there's a 99.9% chance that you're doing something VERY wrong. Mainframes exist for a reason, that's because they're very much better at huge jobs. (Except for a few oddball tasks like google, or a render farm.)
There aren't a lot of really great remote-admin tools for Windows. This is because people doing HUGE jobs go buy mainframes. Only companies who failed the product-requirements phase use MS products on a large number of servers. (To a large degree, simply because PC hardware just doesn't cut it, and even 8-way XEONs are laughable compared to *real* computers.) If an admin has a thousand windows box either 1) they aren't mission-critical servers, or 2) the admin is clueless. (Or 3, the company needs to use its own products or nobody will respect it, at all.)
How many people make over 250k (to choose an arbitrary number) without exploiting others?
It's, IMHO, a fairly small number. For the rest of them, it might cut into their motivation, but it's motivation for them to do things I don't want them doing to begin with.
I think you've missused a few terms in your post.
You seem to have equated democracy with capitalism, and both of these as the opposites of communism...
1) The USA isn't a democracy. It's a representitive democratic republic. That means it's got a constitution which is mostly untouchable, and you don't get to vote, "representatives" do it for you.
2) Democracy and capitalism are NOT related. In fact, a true democracy would likely be very socialist, because the poor (who vastly outnumber the rich, in ANY system) would vote for more wealth sharing.
3) The USA is a socialism. All we're arguing is the degree to which it is. All those laws a libertarians wants, which keep the poor from taking the means of production away from the slaveholders^H^Howners are publicly funded. No system except an anarchy can exist without some degree of socialism, by definition. (Unless you think 99.9% of the people wouldn't mind the other 0.1% fencing off all the land and renting them the right to use it...)
Your analogy didn't convince me that anti-worms are bad, rather it convinced me that people who can't take care of themselves or pets should be taken care of in the most expedient fashion.
I will consider vigilante-spaying the next time one of my neighbors has a cat which is in heat and past it's first heat (which you're not supposed to spay a cat before). It'd be well worth the $40 to get a night of sleep, and I am a firm supporter of spaying/neutering all your pets anyways. Always pisses me off when people don't and contibute to the problem of unwanted animals.
Better the admin has to reinstall the OS (trust me, MS admins are GOOD at that!) after it becomes slow and boggy from too many patches, then after some kiddy r00ts it, DDoSes with it, and formats the drive, taking out any data they might have had on it.
After all, either way they've got to clean up, the easiest way to clean an MS system from an unknown problem is to reinstall and download all the updates. One way they do it because the machine is a bit slow or unstable, run of the mill for a windows server, the other way they do it after contributing to potentially millions of dollars of 'damages' (usually lost sales) at some target site.
Perhaps she'd have been a bit annoyed, but if he saw her leave, and she went far enough that he lost sight of her, it would also be enough time for a burglar to get in.
She might have to call to get someone with a spare key to come over, or at most, a locksmith whose price I'm sure Startled would have paid half of, but it's a small price to pay compared to having your stuff gone, or someone waiting inside when you come home...
And if she did want it that way, she need only tell him once and he'll never help her that way again.
It's never happened to me, but if I was in a parking lot and saw an unlocked car without an obvious alarm, I'd open the door, lock it, and close it. To avoid risk of a theft charge, I'd get a random passer-by to witness it, so that it was obvious I was only locking the door if the owner came back right then. But I would lock the door. I don't want anyone to have to pay out a large deductible and lose their CDs, etc. That sucks.
Well sure, if you're running unix, it's relatively easy. (Not 'trivial', but withing the skillset of any compotent admin.) That's like bragging about how fast you can cut wood when you use a chainsaw.
Imagine using only a leatherman, with an 8cm knife, to cut through a 20cm tree... Ugh. But if you could do it, that'd be worth bragging about.
Actually, windows can be setup to be in a diskless fashion, without actually using any MS tools to do it. I saw someone at Comdex selling a solution, which was some unix server which had a disk image and a bunch of ethernet cards with boot roms. It's easier (initially) to give them their own drive, but a lot slower in the long run.
Unfortunately, I do IT in an office, where people need(1) a computer with local storage, etc, so I have to do it the slow way. I'd love to admin at a net-cafe or a library where the machines aren't supposed to be user-changeable.
1) They don't actually NEED, I've mentioned to the boss that a lot of people could be using a stripped-down computer as an X-Terminal. For the low-end stuff most of them do (low-end as far as graphics go, if not CPU) our 100mbps switched ethernet would be fast enough that it'd appear almost instantly. And our programmers would even like it, if they got to run compiles on the server, which would be a quad-CPU machine with a few gigs of ram... The boss likes it, but says it'll never be approved by the higher-ups, mainly because we already have a full computer for each person.
I agree that 'stuff' is worth less than a life. However I don't think that's the end of the story.
Some people, to me, are of negative worth. These would be the rapists and murderers. I wouldn't assume someone was of negative worth, but I think the simple fact of finding them in my house without my permission, despite locks, would be fairly strong evidence for that.
Now, I don't necessarily think these people should be killed, but my adversion to killing is sufficiently lowered in those (hypothetical) circumstances, that I would be willing to shoot, if I thought it was warranted.
Now, what is warranted... Tough question. To me, seeing some kid trying to break into your garage isn't. Seeing someone walking *out* of your house with the TV, isn't. Heading the door be kicked down and seeing someone come in, is.
If I could clearly see them and tell they didn't have a weapon handy, I'd give them a warning to leave. If I couldn't, why would I want to risk my life and that of my family, by giving them a warning which they might use only as a chance to duck for cover before going for their weapon?
There's been a rash of home invasions in my area, which often lead to murder. I don't know about you, but my door has never been kicked down, I think I'd assume the worst, and in that case, be willing to defend myself. Any criminal intending only theft should either announce himself "Hey, I'm just here to steal the TV" or risk my assuming that since he broke the door down, he's probably got more sinister motives, given the rash of invasions/murders.
I think it's YOUR ethics that are broken. Anyone who has to be *schooled* in ethics has already lost the battle.
There are cases that it would be wrong to 'fix' someone's computer... If, for example, they ran a thriving business from it and you were being annoyed by a trojan that ran occasional port-scans, stopping their business by crashing their machine is unwarranted...
But, in the case mentioned, a worm could be written which would seamlessly upgrade the affected computers, and close the backdoors permanently. Consider that these backdoors allow (and very likely will be used) attackers to control the machine for a DDoS, port-scanning, continued spreading of the infection, and with some of the later bugs, full access to the machine which would potentially allow all sorts of electronic theft. In this case, you're almost guilty by your inaction.
The huge ammount of damage that can be caused by each infected machine, both to the owner, and to the rest of the internet completely outweighs the owners right to have their computer configured in a certain way.
In many jurisdictions, inaction can be a crime. If, for instance, you see someone in mortal danger and you could have warned them, but didn't, you can often be charged with murder. (House on fire, you know someone's inside, but don't bother trying to alert them or call for help.)
People like you really frighten me. You have a twisted sense of ethics and you want to force other people to be indoctrinated in them. Ugh.
It's funny that you're being such an ass towards someone you think is wrong, when it's really you who hasn't a clue...
His software was designed PURELY to do something LEGAL, in fact, REQUIRED by law.
Yes, it was designed to allow backups. Russian law requires that customers be able to create backups. There was no law being broken.
His talk didn't even break the DMCA, but Adobe's knee-jerk reaction made the FBI scramble to claim that it did.
(His software doesn't circumcent a legal and effective access control measure, because it's not legal to limit that access, where he wrote and sold the software.)
I use two configurations depending on which computer I'm at.
At work, I use Junkbuster, and Webwasher, though I really only need Webwasher. I use WebWasher because it stops popups, and is easy to turn off with a single click, if I need to access a site that depends on that stuff. Junkbuster is also used to do the plain regexp blocking on known sites, and also as a proxy for my other work computers which are on my own network instead of the main company network.
At home, Proximitron, because it does everything, and I'm never required to go to a site that uses crappy popups or anything so not having a one-button toggle isn't too big of a deal.
Actually, if you're running a large network, it's fairly easy.
Buy only standard parts, every 18 months, pick a new standard machine, with parts that won't change. I mean, not at all. Select some generic video card that you know will be available in over a year, even down to the ammount of RAM on it.
It's actually quite easy to do, many companies have a couple products that are guaranteed to be around for a long time. There's still a thriving market in 486s and VLB video cards, for people replacing broken hardware on otherwise perfectly functional POS terminals, etc.
Then do a full install, OS, Apps, configuration, of each standard setup.
Ghost this, using Norton's Ghost, it's a HD imaging program. Copy it onto each new PC you build, they'll be up in minutes.
One other really helpful thing, go to sysinternals.com and grab the util (whose name I forget) that puts all the system info onto a desktop image, so that when you turn the computer on the MAC, IP, Config data (RAM, HD, etc) are all easily visible. Do any DHCP IP assigning on the server now, then shut the machine down and take it to where you want it installed, you're done.
There are a bunch of products that restore the HD from a protected partition every time it's powered on, those are great for public terminals. If someone gets around the basic protection and trashes the system (it'll happen, unless you lock them in a full-screen browser) you just turn the computer off and back on, and it's working perfectly.
If these are assigned terminals (as in, a few people use specific ones) and you have to give them an email application, use Eudora, it's had holes in the past, but is MUCH better than Outlook. Otherwise, simply tell people to use hotmail or email.com to check their real account...
PCs aren't bad to administer, if you take a few shortcuts. If you've got an assistant to swap HDs and you use a bit of an assembly line, you can do more then 10 PCs in an hour, from empty to fully installed and configured.
Re:1-button mice suck, and other thoughts on Mac
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Mac Rants
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· Score: 2
Oh yeah! That's SO much more intuitive.
Um, so you click to get the regular action, and ctrl-click to get the other actions, except when you hit the apple key, or both, or double click, but only in these revisions of the OS...
I'm amazed that Mac users are proud of using a platform that was crippled for the slowest potential users.
I've *NEVER*, and I've done tech support, met anyone who was unable to learn the concept of the right button. You just tell them that if they click on something with it, they'll get a different set of actions.
They may view this as a bit magical, and not note the pattern of which icons give which options, and in which cases, but they'll know it's there and when they're looking around, they'll remember to use it. If you're looking for a teaching tool, use Minesweeper, most people have played it, and they'll understand how you left-click to open a square and right-click to mark a mine. Tell them that the right button performs other actions like that in various places around the OS.
Sure, they may not understand it from the beginning, but if you take someone who's never used a computer, it's the smallest of the issues.
Actually, many RAID systems use IDE drives, even ones that appear as a SCSI device to the host system.
SCSI is most important when you're dealing with a smaller number of drives that need to be very fast. When you're just dealing with mass storage with a 98% read/write ratio, a huge cluster of IDE drives with an appropriate RAID controller is often best.
I saw a decent system that uses four 15k SCSI drivers (just 9GB each) in a RAID 0+1, with a drive array (RAID 5, or a comparable proprietary standard) of two terrabytes in a few cabinets filled with 40GB drives. It was a quad CPU P3 (I think) with 8GB of RAM, I was told.
The caching was properly setup, and all the temporary tables, and index files, were on the fast drives, and very few (comparatively) requests had to go to the drive array.
Not that the array was slow though... maybe 60% of the speed of 10k drives (15k ones are too expensive for a huge array) and that like 1/3 or less price.
Well, technically, Warp 7 is 343 times light speed, warp 8 is 512, almost double. All else being equal, the fastest ship is better, especially in a commercial sense. Deliver your cargo twice as fast, you'll get almost all the jobs, unless your price is a lot higher.
But, in the spirit in which it was asked, lets deal with linear speed.. Assume a scale of 0 to 2, normalize to 10, gets W6.65 and W7. One is 95% of the other.
Not a huge difference, out of a month-long trip you'll get there two days faster. Not enough to really make a difference in non-emergency cargo prices.
But, factor in pirates, and treat the faster engines as insurance. They might make a negligible difference most of the time, but will make 100% of the difference some of the time.
Now, assume a bell-curve of top-speeds among the various races pirates belong to (because in Trek, whole species use the same ships). Obviously, every step away from the center of the distribution will offer diminishing returns, but if the returns are great enough.... If an upgrade will take you from middle-of-the-road, faster than 50% of pirates, to being faster than 80%, that's worth it.
However, you need to weigh a few factors... Slower pirates tend to be less technilogically advanced as well, and thus less dangerous. Replotting the speed distribution after removing all enemies you could defeat easily will yield different numbers.
Also, some enemies will never be beaten. Normally, just being faster than the rest of the targets is good enough... pirates will attack the straglers. However, if you annoy 'Q', you're toast, regardless of engines.
Then there's philosophy. You may feel that death happens, and shouldn't be worried about. In this case, buy slower engines and live it up, after all, being pirated isn't a financial setback, but a permanent end.
If you have investors, they may take this decision out of your hands, opting either for the quick payoff (ie, the cheapest ship that can do the job) or a stable investment (a fast, well-armed ship that'll still be doing the job years from now.)
I'm not to 100k, just over halfway if you only count my 9 to 5.
But I still still think that limiting income to a certain value isn't a bad thing.
If I actually thought the system stood a chance of working, I'd vote for it instantly. However, I'm not foolish enough to think that the rich wouldn't find ways around it. It'd just hit a few upper-middle class types who couldn't afford tax dodges. The incredibly-rich would still be incredibly rich, and would continue to get more so.
Simple. You expect that if you make over X dollars, your tax on that money is 100%.
How can someone propose this? Simple. In my eyes, nobody has every gotten mega rich (gates, rockafeller, dupont, etc) without massive abuses of the law, saved in many cases only because they were too rich to prosecute.
That precedent, when viewed along with the fact that nobody requires billions of dollars to live, makes it pretty simple to say that an upper limit on wealth wouldn't be a bad thing.
I don't have much to add, but I wanted to say you're not alone in thinking that.
It's getting big in the industry to protect something with another area of law, because it couldn't be protected with the first.
For example, fair use allows copies. So make any device to make copies illegal, but still allow copies to be made.
Also, Playstation games... The boot rom checks the first n-bytes of the CD, if it matches the boot rom, the disc is allowed to boot. If it differs in a single bit, it isn't allowed to boot. But this code isn't actually used to boot, it's simply checked to see if it's a "valid disk". If you use this boot code, you're copying Sony's copyrighted boot code. They can't sue you for reverse engineering playstation and making games for it, but now to do so, you have to violate a copyright, so it's illegal.
Ditto with other companies who, for instance, put their trademarked logo into binaries, and check for that. If you write code without their logo, it fails to work. If you copy their logo, it's trademark violation..
Similarly, patents can be used. Patent something, then 'open' an API. Catch? To use it, you have to use their software patent. Either license it or get sued.
IMHO any linking like that should render the trademark/copyright/patent either void, or freely usable in that context, by everyone. I'd vote for void, to punish companies that pulled that crap.
I didn't find it seamless at all. I took my old burner that I bought in 97 or so, and tried to get it working in 2k. Yuck, a real mess.
I didn't have ASPI installed, so I go searching for it. Turns out you get an ASPI driver with some products, like Adaptec's stuff. I eventually found a FAQ that linked to two versions of Adaptec's drivers, an old one that would install, and then a new one you could upgrade to. Without that, they look for an Adaptec product and exit if they don't find one.
If you don't get Adaptec's, you need to find AspiMe.exe, which I think was written by Steve Gibson, except it's violating some copyright and thus it's fairly hard to find. Not to mention it's a few years old.
Without ASPI, my CD burner was just a reader. Really useful.
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Of course you hear it from their employees, they're desperately afraid. They were promised stock options that'd be atmospheric, now they're not usable for lining bird cages.
Every idiot they can convince that their company isn't a complete failure is someone who may buy stock, upping the price, and making their options worthwhile.
Face it, they have NOTHING. What part of "*ALL* their claims were thrown out." don't you understand? All this fraud thing means is that less of them will be going to jail when the company tanks.
There is something about RMBD having loyal fans that makes me warm and happy inside... Just think, the random investor and other stockholders dumped the stock when the company started to tank, other less-loyal fans dumped when the stock plumetted. But the loyal types, they're hanging on to their religious belief that their stock isn't worthless... The good thing about this is that they'll get NOTHING when the company finally folds. This... the fact that greedy assholes will lose BIG, comforts me.
To me, anyone who would buy RMBS stock, supporting the company that tried to steal money from the rightful inventors and implementors of these products can go to hell in a hand basket. Fuck, Rambus didn't even make a product. (Nor, for the reality impared, did they invent one.)
Actually, EULAs would be less binding on businesses because they tend to employ lawyers who would instruct them of this.
However, businesses tend to sign paper contracts that spell out everything in the EULA, as part of their bulk-purchase agreements. And in that fashion, being open and before-sale, it's perfectly legal and binding.
If you had to sign your name to an EULA when you bought software at a store, it's be more binding. Especially if you had to sign BEFORE purchase.
But if a business (or consumer) goes to the store, buys a package, takes it home, installs it, and clicks-through the EULA, they are NOT bound by it. Even if they knew it was there, they also knew that it is invalid. EULAs, no matter how you look at it, are not binding to ANYONE.
Thus the UCITA. I mean, if a business can't forbid people commenting on the quality of a product, writing reviews, distributing anything made with the software without royalties, and cripple it in the name of piracy provention... how do we expect them to make billions of dollars and oppress us?!? Support your local billionaire, buy him a politician.
Libertarianism is a form of socialism where people have money taken from them, in a way that you approve of. And where you don't.
If you want ANY laws, law enforcement, or judicial services, that's a government. For a government to maintain even a semblance of impartiality, it has to be publicly funded by all.
"Paid for by those who use them"... Here's a hint, they already partially are. It's called bribes. You expect a system completely funded this way to be unbiased? What court would EVER find against Microsoft on anything if Bill was paying their bills?
Any form of non-publicly funded laws basically ammount to a bunch of libertarians who hire a private army to enforce their rules.
It's a nice fantasy world you've got there...
Libertarianism is founded on the idea that ownership rights are absolute, and that you don't "initiate" violence. Well, yeah. YOUR ownership rights are absolute, and I should never initiate violence against you.
Should we respect the ownership rights of people whose ancestors stole land by killing the inhabitants? What if I'm a decendent of one of the original owners?
Libertarianism is a philosophy of contradiction, Apply harsh rules to them, and make them pay for the privelage, but don't take any money from me or it's government initiation of violence and I'll come out shooting.
Yawn...
The netsplit problem could be solved, imho, by using a robust form of message passing, something like usenet, with message IDs.
If one netlink dies, a server simply contacts another server and passes messages that way. It sends all messages it didn't receive ACKs for. If those messages did get through, they won't be duplicated because when a host recognizes duplicate message IDs, it junks them.
This would also allow a host that completely dropped out of the system to queue up message, so that a momentary outage didn't lose any data.
I'm interested in this too, but I can't IRC from behind my work firewall. Email me if you wish to talk about it, I'd be interested in talking to someone else with ideas about the system.
Hah!
Instead, for a truly fair system, limit *all* political spending to a flat ammount provided to any candidate who meets the basic requirements. Provide free airfare and a certain ammount of free airtime. Prevent *any* political donations.
Political donations are bribes, plain and simple. Bribes subvert our political system and should be treated like treason, long jail time and revoking of your right to participate in the political system.
Spending caps are the only way to get any equity into the system. No third-party candidate can get a fair chance, the fact that the big two parties get almost all the funding means only the independantly rich can run for office.
Your great ideas for freedom will get you exactly the opposite.
EULAs aren't binding. Even if they were, you can't sign away your right to legal action, except as a result of some legal action (class action lawsuit preclude any other cases...)
Here's the pointform reasons why EULAs aren't binding.
1) Contracts require 'consideration' (Both parties must get something.) They get your agreement, you get nothing. (You've already bought the software and are entitled to use it, they can't take that away.) Thus the contract is voided.
2) Contracts must be voluntary. If I take something of yours (the software you've purchased) and won't give it to you till you sign the contract, the contract is void. Because they remove functionality until you 'agree', the contract isn't binding.
There are a few other reasons, and those can be fleshed out a bit, but without the UCITA, EULAs aren't binding. That's the whole reason they (MS, etc) are buying votes to get the UCITA passed.
So, if MS software formats your HD, or is so insecure it allows someone else to do so, you can sue MS. Of course, you'll *never* win, MS has proven time and again that they're willing to tell outright lies to the judge in order to win a lawsuit. But you're still entitled to sue and theoretically, you might win. If you find an honest judge (unlike Kaplan who was bought and paid for by the MPAA courtesy of Time Warner.)
Yes, this is true. Quote me on it. Bill Gates has committed perjury during the anti-trust trial. If he wasn't a billionarie, he'd have spent time in jail for it. As was, nothing. Gotta love America, the best justice system money can buy.
They didn't claim IE wouldn't work without windows, they claimed windows wouldn't work without IE...
I do think integrating an HTML renderer is a good idea. The bad idea is taking over all file extensions, putting the icons on the desktop, intentionally 'fixing' your OS so the competitors products don't work, and everything else MS did.
1) The bigger the system, the tidier it usually is. A small company can buy a few servers and network them easily. A thousand servers require a huge ammount of specialized equipment which is hard to misplace.
2) If you ever do anything requiring thousands of PCs, there's a 99.9% chance that you're doing something VERY wrong. Mainframes exist for a reason, that's because they're very much better at huge jobs. (Except for a few oddball tasks like google, or a render farm.)
There aren't a lot of really great remote-admin tools for Windows. This is because people doing HUGE jobs go buy mainframes. Only companies who failed the product-requirements phase use MS products on a large number of servers. (To a large degree, simply because PC hardware just doesn't cut it, and even 8-way XEONs are laughable compared to *real* computers.) If an admin has a thousand windows box either 1) they aren't mission-critical servers, or 2) the admin is clueless. (Or 3, the company needs to use its own products or nobody will respect it, at all.)
How many people make over 250k (to choose an arbitrary number) without exploiting others?
It's, IMHO, a fairly small number. For the rest of them, it might cut into their motivation, but it's motivation for them to do things I don't want them doing to begin with.
I think you've missused a few terms in your post.
You seem to have equated democracy with capitalism, and both of these as the opposites of communism...
1) The USA isn't a democracy. It's a representitive democratic republic. That means it's got a constitution which is mostly untouchable, and you don't get to vote, "representatives" do it for you.
2) Democracy and capitalism are NOT related. In fact, a true democracy would likely be very socialist, because the poor (who vastly outnumber the rich, in ANY system) would vote for more wealth sharing.
3) The USA is a socialism. All we're arguing is the degree to which it is. All those laws a libertarians wants, which keep the poor from taking the means of production away from the slaveholders^H^Howners are publicly funded. No system except an anarchy can exist without some degree of socialism, by definition. (Unless you think 99.9% of the people wouldn't mind the other 0.1% fencing off all the land and renting them the right to use it...)
Your analogy didn't convince me that anti-worms are bad, rather it convinced me that people who can't take care of themselves or pets should be taken care of in the most expedient fashion.
I will consider vigilante-spaying the next time one of my neighbors has a cat which is in heat and past it's first heat (which you're not supposed to spay a cat before). It'd be well worth the $40 to get a night of sleep, and I am a firm supporter of spaying/neutering all your pets anyways. Always pisses me off when people don't and contibute to the problem of unwanted animals.
Better the admin has to reinstall the OS (trust me, MS admins are GOOD at that!) after it becomes slow and boggy from too many patches, then after some kiddy r00ts it, DDoSes with it, and formats the drive, taking out any data they might have had on it.
After all, either way they've got to clean up, the easiest way to clean an MS system from an unknown problem is to reinstall and download all the updates. One way they do it because the machine is a bit slow or unstable, run of the mill for a windows server, the other way they do it after contributing to potentially millions of dollars of 'damages' (usually lost sales) at some target site.
Perhaps she'd have been a bit annoyed, but if he saw her leave, and she went far enough that he lost sight of her, it would also be enough time for a burglar to get in.
She might have to call to get someone with a spare key to come over, or at most, a locksmith whose price I'm sure Startled would have paid half of, but it's a small price to pay compared to having your stuff gone, or someone waiting inside when you come home...
And if she did want it that way, she need only tell him once and he'll never help her that way again.
It's never happened to me, but if I was in a parking lot and saw an unlocked car without an obvious alarm, I'd open the door, lock it, and close it. To avoid risk of a theft charge, I'd get a random passer-by to witness it, so that it was obvious I was only locking the door if the owner came back right then. But I would lock the door. I don't want anyone to have to pay out a large deductible and lose their CDs, etc. That sucks.
Well sure, if you're running unix, it's relatively easy. (Not 'trivial', but withing the skillset of any compotent admin.) That's like bragging about how fast you can cut wood when you use a chainsaw.
Imagine using only a leatherman, with an 8cm knife, to cut through a 20cm tree... Ugh. But if you could do it, that'd be worth bragging about.
Actually, windows can be setup to be in a diskless fashion, without actually using any MS tools to do it. I saw someone at Comdex selling a solution, which was some unix server which had a disk image and a bunch of ethernet cards with boot roms. It's easier (initially) to give them their own drive, but a lot slower in the long run.
Unfortunately, I do IT in an office, where people need(1) a computer with local storage, etc, so I have to do it the slow way. I'd love to admin at a net-cafe or a library where the machines aren't supposed to be user-changeable.
1) They don't actually NEED, I've mentioned to the boss that a lot of people could be using a stripped-down computer as an X-Terminal. For the low-end stuff most of them do (low-end as far as graphics go, if not CPU) our 100mbps switched ethernet would be fast enough that it'd appear almost instantly. And our programmers would even like it, if they got to run compiles on the server, which would be a quad-CPU machine with a few gigs of ram... The boss likes it, but says it'll never be approved by the higher-ups, mainly because we already have a full computer for each person.
I agree that 'stuff' is worth less than a life. However I don't think that's the end of the story.
Some people, to me, are of negative worth. These would be the rapists and murderers. I wouldn't assume someone was of negative worth, but I think the simple fact of finding them in my house without my permission, despite locks, would be fairly strong evidence for that.
Now, I don't necessarily think these people should be killed, but my adversion to killing is sufficiently lowered in those (hypothetical) circumstances, that I would be willing to shoot, if I thought it was warranted.
Now, what is warranted... Tough question. To me, seeing some kid trying to break into your garage isn't. Seeing someone walking *out* of your house with the TV, isn't. Heading the door be kicked down and seeing someone come in, is.
If I could clearly see them and tell they didn't have a weapon handy, I'd give them a warning to leave. If I couldn't, why would I want to risk my life and that of my family, by giving them a warning which they might use only as a chance to duck for cover before going for their weapon?
There's been a rash of home invasions in my area, which often lead to murder. I don't know about you, but my door has never been kicked down, I think I'd assume the worst, and in that case, be willing to defend myself. Any criminal intending only theft should either announce himself "Hey, I'm just here to steal the TV" or risk my assuming that since he broke the door down, he's probably got more sinister motives, given the rash of invasions/murders.
I think it's YOUR ethics that are broken. Anyone who has to be *schooled* in ethics has already lost the battle.
There are cases that it would be wrong to 'fix' someone's computer... If, for example, they ran a thriving business from it and you were being annoyed by a trojan that ran occasional port-scans, stopping their business by crashing their machine is unwarranted...
But, in the case mentioned, a worm could be written which would seamlessly upgrade the affected computers, and close the backdoors permanently. Consider that these backdoors allow (and very likely will be used) attackers to control the machine for a DDoS, port-scanning, continued spreading of the infection, and with some of the later bugs, full access to the machine which would potentially allow all sorts of electronic theft. In this case, you're almost guilty by your inaction.
The huge ammount of damage that can be caused by each infected machine, both to the owner, and to the rest of the internet completely outweighs the owners right to have their computer configured in a certain way.
In many jurisdictions, inaction can be a crime. If, for instance, you see someone in mortal danger and you could have warned them, but didn't, you can often be charged with murder. (House on fire, you know someone's inside, but don't bother trying to alert them or call for help.)
People like you really frighten me. You have a twisted sense of ethics and you want to force other people to be indoctrinated in them. Ugh.
It's funny that you're being such an ass towards someone you think is wrong, when it's really you who hasn't a clue...
His software was designed PURELY to do something LEGAL, in fact, REQUIRED by law.
Yes, it was designed to allow backups. Russian law requires that customers be able to create backups. There was no law being broken.
His talk didn't even break the DMCA, but Adobe's knee-jerk reaction made the FBI scramble to claim that it did.
(His software doesn't circumcent a legal and effective access control measure, because it's not legal to limit that access, where he wrote and sold the software.)
Don't bother replying, we both know you're wrong.
I use two configurations depending on which computer I'm at.
At work, I use Junkbuster, and Webwasher, though I really only need Webwasher. I use WebWasher because it stops popups, and is easy to turn off with a single click, if I need to access a site that depends on that stuff. Junkbuster is also used to do the plain regexp blocking on known sites, and also as a proxy for my other work computers which are on my own network instead of the main company network.
At home, Proximitron, because it does everything, and I'm never required to go to a site that uses crappy popups or anything so not having a one-button toggle isn't too big of a deal.
Actually, if you're running a large network, it's fairly easy.
Buy only standard parts, every 18 months, pick a new standard machine, with parts that won't change. I mean, not at all. Select some generic video card that you know will be available in over a year, even down to the ammount of RAM on it.
It's actually quite easy to do, many companies have a couple products that are guaranteed to be around for a long time. There's still a thriving market in 486s and VLB video cards, for people replacing broken hardware on otherwise perfectly functional POS terminals, etc.
Then do a full install, OS, Apps, configuration, of each standard setup.
Ghost this, using Norton's Ghost, it's a HD imaging program. Copy it onto each new PC you build, they'll be up in minutes.
One other really helpful thing, go to sysinternals.com and grab the util (whose name I forget) that puts all the system info onto a desktop image, so that when you turn the computer on the MAC, IP, Config data (RAM, HD, etc) are all easily visible. Do any DHCP IP assigning on the server now, then shut the machine down and take it to where you want it installed, you're done.
There are a bunch of products that restore the HD from a protected partition every time it's powered on, those are great for public terminals. If someone gets around the basic protection and trashes the system (it'll happen, unless you lock them in a full-screen browser) you just turn the computer off and back on, and it's working perfectly.
If these are assigned terminals (as in, a few people use specific ones) and you have to give them an email application, use Eudora, it's had holes in the past, but is MUCH better than Outlook. Otherwise, simply tell people to use hotmail or email.com to check their real account...
PCs aren't bad to administer, if you take a few shortcuts. If you've got an assistant to swap HDs and you use a bit of an assembly line, you can do more then 10 PCs in an hour, from empty to fully installed and configured.
Oh yeah! That's SO much more intuitive.
Um, so you click to get the regular action, and ctrl-click to get the other actions, except when you hit the apple key, or both, or double click, but only in these revisions of the OS...
I'm amazed that Mac users are proud of using a platform that was crippled for the slowest potential users.
I've *NEVER*, and I've done tech support, met anyone who was unable to learn the concept of the right button. You just tell them that if they click on something with it, they'll get a different set of actions.
They may view this as a bit magical, and not note the pattern of which icons give which options, and in which cases, but they'll know it's there and when they're looking around, they'll remember to use it. If you're looking for a teaching tool, use Minesweeper, most people have played it, and they'll understand how you left-click to open a square and right-click to mark a mine. Tell them that the right button performs other actions like that in various places around the OS.
Sure, they may not understand it from the beginning, but if you take someone who's never used a computer, it's the smallest of the issues.
Actually, many RAID systems use IDE drives, even ones that appear as a SCSI device to the host system.
SCSI is most important when you're dealing with a smaller number of drives that need to be very fast. When you're just dealing with mass storage with a 98% read/write ratio, a huge cluster of IDE drives with an appropriate RAID controller is often best.
I saw a decent system that uses four 15k SCSI drivers (just 9GB each) in a RAID 0+1, with a drive array (RAID 5, or a comparable proprietary standard) of two terrabytes in a few cabinets filled with 40GB drives. It was a quad CPU P3 (I think) with 8GB of RAM, I was told.
The caching was properly setup, and all the temporary tables, and index files, were on the fast drives, and very few (comparatively) requests had to go to the drive array.
Not that the array was slow though... maybe 60% of the speed of 10k drives (15k ones are too expensive for a huge array) and that like 1/3 or less price.
Well, technically, Warp 7 is 343 times light speed, warp 8 is 512, almost double. All else being equal, the fastest ship is better, especially in a commercial sense. Deliver your cargo twice as fast, you'll get almost all the jobs, unless your price is a lot higher.
But, in the spirit in which it was asked, lets deal with linear speed.. Assume a scale of 0 to 2, normalize to 10, gets W6.65 and W7. One is 95% of the other.
Not a huge difference, out of a month-long trip you'll get there two days faster. Not enough to really make a difference in non-emergency cargo prices.
But, factor in pirates, and treat the faster engines as insurance. They might make a negligible difference most of the time, but will make 100% of the difference some of the time.
Now, assume a bell-curve of top-speeds among the various races pirates belong to (because in Trek, whole species use the same ships). Obviously, every step away from the center of the distribution will offer diminishing returns, but if the returns are great enough.... If an upgrade will take you from middle-of-the-road, faster than 50% of pirates, to being faster than 80%, that's worth it.
However, you need to weigh a few factors... Slower pirates tend to be less technilogically advanced as well, and thus less dangerous. Replotting the speed distribution after removing all enemies you could defeat easily will yield different numbers.
Also, some enemies will never be beaten. Normally, just being faster than the rest of the targets is good enough... pirates will attack the straglers. However, if you annoy 'Q', you're toast, regardless of engines.
Then there's philosophy. You may feel that death happens, and shouldn't be worried about. In this case, buy slower engines and live it up, after all, being pirated isn't a financial setback, but a permanent end.
If you have investors, they may take this decision out of your hands, opting either for the quick payoff (ie, the cheapest ship that can do the job) or a stable investment (a fast, well-armed ship that'll still be doing the job years from now.)
I hope that helps.
I'm not to 100k, just over halfway if you only count my 9 to 5.
But I still still think that limiting income to a certain value isn't a bad thing.
If I actually thought the system stood a chance of working, I'd vote for it instantly. However, I'm not foolish enough to think that the rich wouldn't find ways around it. It'd just hit a few upper-middle class types who couldn't afford tax dodges. The incredibly-rich would still be incredibly rich, and would continue to get more so.
Simple. You expect that if you make over X dollars, your tax on that money is 100%.
How can someone propose this? Simple. In my eyes, nobody has every gotten mega rich (gates, rockafeller, dupont, etc) without massive abuses of the law, saved in many cases only because they were too rich to prosecute.
That precedent, when viewed along with the fact that nobody requires billions of dollars to live, makes it pretty simple to say that an upper limit on wealth wouldn't be a bad thing.
I don't have much to add, but I wanted to say you're not alone in thinking that.
It's getting big in the industry to protect something with another area of law, because it couldn't be protected with the first.
For example, fair use allows copies. So make any device to make copies illegal, but still allow copies to be made.
Also, Playstation games... The boot rom checks the first n-bytes of the CD, if it matches the boot rom, the disc is allowed to boot. If it differs in a single bit, it isn't allowed to boot. But this code isn't actually used to boot, it's simply checked to see if it's a "valid disk". If you use this boot code, you're copying Sony's copyrighted boot code. They can't sue you for reverse engineering playstation and making games for it, but now to do so, you have to violate a copyright, so it's illegal.
Ditto with other companies who, for instance, put their trademarked logo into binaries, and check for that. If you write code without their logo, it fails to work. If you copy their logo, it's trademark violation..
Similarly, patents can be used. Patent something, then 'open' an API. Catch? To use it, you have to use their software patent. Either license it or get sued.
IMHO any linking like that should render the trademark/copyright/patent either void, or freely usable in that context, by everyone. I'd vote for void, to punish companies that pulled that crap.
I didn't find it seamless at all. I took my old burner that I bought in 97 or so, and tried to get it working in 2k. Yuck, a real mess.
I didn't have ASPI installed, so I go searching for it. Turns out you get an ASPI driver with some products, like Adaptec's stuff. I eventually found a FAQ that linked to two versions of Adaptec's drivers, an old one that would install, and then a new one you could upgrade to. Without that, they look for an Adaptec product and exit if they don't find one.
If you don't get Adaptec's, you need to find AspiMe.exe, which I think was written by Steve Gibson, except it's violating some copyright and thus it's fairly hard to find. Not to mention it's a few years old.
Without ASPI, my CD burner was just a reader. Really useful.
I actually find Linux easier in this regard.