Yes and no. I just signed up for a Symbian DevCert because I want to install some third-party stuff on my Nokia E61i, and the docs are confusing, but there are multiple classes of apps, and some don't require a signature.
However, if you want to use the full capabilities of the phone, then yes, you must have a signed app, or it won't install, even if you turn of the signature checks in the Application Manager. In my case, I want to install oggplay to be able to play my music, and since their own cert is out of date, I do need a cert to self-sign the package. Probably because the app requires ReadUserData privileges, which is AFAICT something that requires a signature.
I call bullshit. In order to install unsigned applications on Symbian Series 60 V3 all you need is a developer certificate and an install of the Symbian SDK (for the signing utilities). Then it is just a matter of signing the.sis package and copying to the phone, and it'll install.
Developer certs are free, and Symbian even started a program for freeware developers to get free certification so that their users don't have to install the SDK and go through the self-signing process.
But if I don't accept the GPL what gives me the right to use the software then? And in fact, if GPL doesn't affect the use, what gives me the right to use the software even if I accept the license?
The bare fact that you have acquired the software gives you that right. Copyright does not proscribe any rights that you have except the ones specifically mentioned in law (mostly to do with distribution). This is what the doctrine of First Sale means in U.S. copyright law. European law is slightly different because it is based on different premises (authors' rights instead of utilitarianism), but the current codification is for all intents and purposes the same.
If you have acquired the software in an illegal way, you and whoever distributed it to you are in legal trouble of course, but that still does not cover the use of the software. So there may be fines and damages to be paid, but you still get to use the software, unless of course the fine or damage is stipulated to be the impounding of the infringing copy.
This is confusing since our copyright laws states that I'm not supposed to even make a copy of a software to my local hard drive if I don't have license for that.
This attribute of software is explicitly covered in U.S. copyright law: the incidental copying necessary to use the software (copying to disk to install, copying to RAM to run) is exempt from the copy restrictions in copyright law.
Here's a tip for those on Debian-derived distributions: meta-packages are usually dummy packages, and can be safely removed after installation. They only exist to pull in other bits to get a complete installation of an entire suite (like a full desktop). Once you have decided that you don't need some parts of that particular suite, just remove the metapackage.
NAT uses non-routable address space which might protect from holes in your firewall.
Stop talking bullshit. NAT has nothing to do with non-routable address space. That NAT is commonly used with RFC1918 address blocks on one side is merely because of administrative and economic convenience, but that has no bearing whatsoever as to what Network Address Translation is.
Let's put it this way: the Microsoft executive in charge says that yes, Vista DRM will use up additional CPU resources. So who am I to believe, some random Slashdot poster, or Dave Marsh?
I suggest you actually walk over to the building where the content protection guys work and ask their opinion, instead of blithely spewing the Waggener-Edstrom party line.
Which is a bit of a pain if you are a Bruce Springsteen fan. I could try to hand over some money directly to the Boss by visiting a concert, if only it hadn't sold out in the first hours:(
If every city is blanketed in free WiFi / WiMAX, then 90% of the need for a mobile network operator disappears.
In the U.S. with its not-even-Third-World mobile coverage WiFi/WiMAX is perhaps a viable competitor. In Europe and Asia, with pervasive GSM/GPRS/UMTS coverage, the capital outlays to set up a WiFi/WiMAX infrastructure will require such a long period of time to become competitive that it will just plain not happen. Either because businesses won't want to do such a long-term investment, or because the existing operators will unleash a price war. Nokia will occasionally make some WiMAX-friendly remarks to keep the operators on their toes, but both they and the operators know that together they have the biggest markets for mobile telephony sewn up, and neither will rock the boat without good cause.
Your remarks on the 700Mhz spectrum falls in the same category: The U.S. is not the world.
If you're not watching DRM-encumbered media, none of the DRM functionality is being used.
Impossible. At the very least, the OS has to check whether or not the user is authorised to play the media. That this check comes up clean on unencumbered media is irrelevant, it still takes sytem resources. And given that an adequate DRM system has to make this check multiple times and not just for user authorisation, but for overall system integrity, that resource usage is going to add up.
And it is Microsofts own presentations on Palladium, Secure Audio Path and all related crap that continue to show cryptographic elements in the I/O stream. So why are you treating us as idiots, expecting us to believe your drivel?
To turn off the splash window, start up the OOo component with the --nologo option. On a Gnome desktop, open up the menu editor, look up the menu item, right-click, select properties, and add --nologo immediately after the command (with a space in between, of course). If you have dragged the menu item to the panel, like I did, then properties is immediately available on right click. If you can script a bit, doing a little sed magic on the.desktop files can automate this for all OOo components. How this works in KDE, someone else may have to explain.
The document you're talking about was the CIFS spec wrapped in a Windows help file.
No, I am talking about the self-extracting CAB file mentioned in this discussion. The spec you link to may be the same document, but it is undeniable that Microsoft did try to publish it under an EULA that essentially forbade using any of that information to implement the PAC for yourself.
The Samba guys were able to figure out how to sign the PAC from the doc MS provided
You mean the doc that came as a self-extracting archive that presented an EULA that looked suspiciously like an NDA? A license that was eventually dropped after much screaming from the rest of the computing world in the direction of Seattle?
Oh sod off. One cannot read a single scientific journal in a related field or a general one for a couple of months, without coming across a single Dawkins article. Then there is his blog. And I have read some of his books. The man is not shy of self-promotion. Your question is nothing more than an attempt to turn this into an ad-hominem mud-slinging match. Sorry, but I am not playing. If Dawkins does behave as I say, a simple lookup online of a few articles of his would be enough to prove or disprove my point, so how much I have actually read is irrelevant to his behaviour.
And sensitive? You call calling a spade a spade (Richard Dawkins is a jerk) being sensitive? The facts are there, the man even attacks fellow evolutionary biologists as helping creationists when they merely support a different mechanism of evolution instead of the gradualist mechanism he espouses. What's with this passive-aggressive bollocks of yours?
I can only wonder if the people who write things like this have ever heard Dawkins speak or read any of his work.
I've read quite a bit of Richard Dawkins' work, thank you very much.
I've rarely seen him really lose his temper or snap at people. I think that this perception stems from the fact that he has the gall to take religious ideas as ideas to be evaluated rather than simply something to be treated with total reverence.
This statement however makes me wonder if you actually have read any of his work. Dawkins does empathically not treat religious ideas as ideas to be evaluated. He dismisses them outright and refuses to debate them based on his a priori dismissal of religion as not worthy of serious debate.
Dawkins does not debate. He attacks.
And if you don't see what is wrong with Dawkins behaviour in the piece quoted by prof. Dutch, I suggest that you go back and take a closer look, this time without your rose-coloured glasses.
Imagine the scenario where the ID folks were saying "here's what we believe, and this is the logical basis behind it" while the evolution proponents were screaming "OMGWTFBBQ11!11! th3z3 guys r t3h suck". That's not likely, true, [...]
It's Richard Dawkins that is complaining. I have no problems accepting your scenario as true, as this is exactly the way Dawkins behaves.
Dawkins and his followers do more damage to scientific rationality than the Creationism/ID crowd, IMO. Their petulance tends to scare people off, and their total unwillingness to engage in debate with even rational believers is a sure sign of a fundamentalist mindset that is just as bad as the one they accuse their opponents of.
Professor Dutch, a professor of geology at the University of Wisconsin, and definitely not a lover of pseudoscience, puts it much better than I can.
Evolution may well have a few holes that we find someday;
This is an especially ironic statement given that it occurs in a discussion linked to Richard Dawkins' blog.
Remember, this is the man who attacks fellow evolutionary biologists as crypto-creationists when they cast doubt on the gradualistic theory of evolution.
This just goes to show that fundamentalist atheism is just as dogmatically religious as that which it purports to oppose.
if the USA had them, then maybe they would not have needed to nuke Japan
Don't be silly. The USA caused enough deaths by dropping incendiary munitions on the highly flammable Japanese inner cities.
This is what galls me most about the whole atomic-attack-on-Japan discussion. It is not whether or not the bombs were necessary militarily (that is debatable, with decent arguments on both sides), it is that the conflagration of thousands of civilians was somehow unique in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It wasn't. The firebombing of Tokyo was just as bad. The only thing unique was that it took only one bomb each for Hiroshima and Nagaski. As if that matters to those being burned alive.
Well, yeah, but all this still assumes a 100% probability of an incident. For any incident with a probability of 100% of it happening, only 2.5% victims is, indeed, a rather low rate. The example of odds of dying of injury is an invalid comparison, as the risk of an incident happening at all is part of that calculation. A fairer comparison would be the amount of accidents vs. fatalities in that same amount. The numbers are worse than 2.5% there, I'd wager.
And do remember that I am positing a hypothetical incident that would hit the entire area of New York City, so that 2.5% is a worst case scenario.
Even that is questionable. Let's take the U.S. numbers and use New York City as an example:
Population of New York City: 8 million.
Population of the United States: 300 million.
That would give me a probability of a random U.S. citizen dying of 8/300, or slightly more than 2.5%. It is likely, though I would not call it VERY likely, that Joe Random Citizen knows one of the victims if such a thing were too happen. Still not very shocking, by the numbers.
You're not likely to be on a hijacked plane, or near a suicide bomber on a bus, but you're VERY likely (in mathematical terms) to be killed by a thermonuclear explosion in downtown Manhattan.
So why don't you give us a breakdown of the actual risk? What's the percentage? You state so categorically that it is VERY likely, you must have some numbers, right?
It's not the 'Computer Nerds' that are the problem. If anything, the generation of 'Computer Nerds' that was responsible for Slashdot in the first place was a generation that had a lot of interest in things outside computers. The reason I stuck around when I first found Slashdot was because Rob Malda's scattershot of "things I and my friends are interested in" so closely mirrored my own view of the world.
These days however, the average poster seems to be a WoW-playing script kiddie, whose knowledge of computers does not reach further than knowing how to key in registry edits from magazines and websites to 'tune up' his PC. It is this crowd that responds with jeers whenever something even outside that mainstream is posted.
In Computer Nerd terms, they are the high school dropouts who took an ExamCram braindump to pass their MCSE and now fashion themselves System Administrators, all the while showing in their every utterance that they know exactly nothing about computers.
If these are the folks complaining about kdawson, I say to Rob Malda: please hire more kdawsons!
What myth? I didn't know about the game, but it appears to be based on the exploits of the Airborne Forces during Market Garden, which are pretty well documented.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no. I just signed up for a Symbian DevCert because I want to install some third-party stuff on my Nokia E61i, and the docs are confusing, but there are multiple classes of apps, and some don't require a signature.
However, if you want to use the full capabilities of the phone, then yes, you must have a signed app, or it won't install, even if you turn of the signature checks in the Application Manager. In my case, I want to install oggplay to be able to play my music, and since their own cert is out of date, I do need a cert to self-sign the package. Probably because the app requires ReadUserData privileges, which is AFAICT something that requires a signature.
MartI call bullshit. In order to install unsigned applications on Symbian Series 60 V3 all you need is a developer certificate and an install of the Symbian SDK (for the signing utilities). Then it is just a matter of signing the .sis package and copying to the phone, and it'll install.
Developer certs are free, and Symbian even started a program for freeware developers to get free certification so that their users don't have to install the SDK and go through the self-signing process.
MartThe bare fact that you have acquired the software gives you that right. Copyright does not proscribe any rights that you have except the ones specifically mentioned in law (mostly to do with distribution). This is what the doctrine of First Sale means in U.S. copyright law. European law is slightly different because it is based on different premises (authors' rights instead of utilitarianism), but the current codification is for all intents and purposes the same.
If you have acquired the software in an illegal way, you and whoever distributed it to you are in legal trouble of course, but that still does not cover the use of the software. So there may be fines and damages to be paid, but you still get to use the software, unless of course the fine or damage is stipulated to be the impounding of the infringing copy.
This attribute of software is explicitly covered in U.S. copyright law: the incidental copying necessary to use the software (copying to disk to install, copying to RAM to run) is exempt from the copy restrictions in copyright law.
MartHere's a tip for those on Debian-derived distributions: meta-packages are usually dummy packages, and can be safely removed after installation. They only exist to pull in other bits to get a complete installation of an entire suite (like a full desktop). Once you have decided that you don't need some parts of that particular suite, just remove the metapackage.
MartStop talking bullshit. NAT has nothing to do with non-routable address space. That NAT is commonly used with RFC1918 address blocks on one side is merely because of administrative and economic convenience, but that has no bearing whatsoever as to what Network Address Translation is.
MartLet's put it this way: the Microsoft executive in charge says that yes, Vista DRM will use up additional CPU resources. So who am I to believe, some random Slashdot poster, or Dave Marsh?
I suggest you actually walk over to the building where the content protection guys work and ask their opinion, instead of blithely spewing the Waggener-Edstrom party line.
MartWhich is a bit of a pain if you are a Bruce Springsteen fan. I could try to hand over some money directly to the Boss by visiting a concert, if only it hadn't sold out in the first hours :(
In the U.S. with its not-even-Third-World mobile coverage WiFi/WiMAX is perhaps a viable competitor. In Europe and Asia, with pervasive GSM/GPRS/UMTS coverage, the capital outlays to set up a WiFi/WiMAX infrastructure will require such a long period of time to become competitive that it will just plain not happen. Either because businesses won't want to do such a long-term investment, or because the existing operators will unleash a price war. Nokia will occasionally make some WiMAX-friendly remarks to keep the operators on their toes, but both they and the operators know that together they have the biggest markets for mobile telephony sewn up, and neither will rock the boat without good cause.
Your remarks on the 700Mhz spectrum falls in the same category: The U.S. is not the world.
MartThere. Fixed that for you.
MartImpossible. At the very least, the OS has to check whether or not the user is authorised to play the media. That this check comes up clean on unencumbered media is irrelevant, it still takes sytem resources. And given that an adequate DRM system has to make this check multiple times and not just for user authorisation, but for overall system integrity, that resource usage is going to add up.
And it is Microsofts own presentations on Palladium, Secure Audio Path and all related crap that continue to show cryptographic elements in the I/O stream. So why are you treating us as idiots, expecting us to believe your drivel?
MartBullshit.
dBase. Lotus-123. Wordperfect.
MartTo turn off the splash window, start up the OOo component with the --nologo option. On a Gnome desktop, open up the menu editor, look up the menu item, right-click, select properties, and add --nologo immediately after the command (with a space in between, of course). If you have dragged the menu item to the panel, like I did, then properties is immediately available on right click. If you can script a bit, doing a little sed magic on the .desktop files can automate this for all OOo components. How this works in KDE, someone else may have to explain.
MartNo, I am talking about the self-extracting CAB file mentioned in this discussion. The spec you link to may be the same document, but it is undeniable that Microsoft did try to publish it under an EULA that essentially forbade using any of that information to implement the PAC for yourself.
MartYou mean the doc that came as a self-extracting archive that presented an EULA that looked suspiciously like an NDA? A license that was eventually dropped after much screaming from the rest of the computing world in the direction of Seattle?
MartOh sod off. One cannot read a single scientific journal in a related field or a general one for a couple of months, without coming across a single Dawkins article. Then there is his blog. And I have read some of his books. The man is not shy of self-promotion. Your question is nothing more than an attempt to turn this into an ad-hominem mud-slinging match. Sorry, but I am not playing. If Dawkins does behave as I say, a simple lookup online of a few articles of his would be enough to prove or disprove my point, so how much I have actually read is irrelevant to his behaviour.
And sensitive? You call calling a spade a spade (Richard Dawkins is a jerk) being sensitive? The facts are there, the man even attacks fellow evolutionary biologists as helping creationists when they merely support a different mechanism of evolution instead of the gradualist mechanism he espouses. What's with this passive-aggressive bollocks of yours?
MartI've read quite a bit of Richard Dawkins' work, thank you very much.
This statement however makes me wonder if you actually have read any of his work. Dawkins does empathically not treat religious ideas as ideas to be evaluated. He dismisses them outright and refuses to debate them based on his a priori dismissal of religion as not worthy of serious debate.
Dawkins does not debate. He attacks.
And if you don't see what is wrong with Dawkins behaviour in the piece quoted by prof. Dutch, I suggest that you go back and take a closer look, this time without your rose-coloured glasses.
MartIt's Richard Dawkins that is complaining. I have no problems accepting your scenario as true, as this is exactly the way Dawkins behaves.
Dawkins and his followers do more damage to scientific rationality than the Creationism/ID crowd, IMO. Their petulance tends to scare people off, and their total unwillingness to engage in debate with even rational believers is a sure sign of a fundamentalist mindset that is just as bad as the one they accuse their opponents of.
Professor Dutch, a professor of geology at the University of Wisconsin, and definitely not a lover of pseudoscience, puts it much better than I can.
MartThis is an especially ironic statement given that it occurs in a discussion linked to Richard Dawkins' blog.
Remember, this is the man who attacks fellow evolutionary biologists as crypto-creationists when they cast doubt on the gradualistic theory of evolution.
This just goes to show that fundamentalist atheism is just as dogmatically religious as that which it purports to oppose.
MartDon't be silly. The USA caused enough deaths by dropping incendiary munitions on the highly flammable Japanese inner cities.
This is what galls me most about the whole atomic-attack-on-Japan discussion. It is not whether or not the bombs were necessary militarily (that is debatable, with decent arguments on both sides), it is that the conflagration of thousands of civilians was somehow unique in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It wasn't. The firebombing of Tokyo was just as bad. The only thing unique was that it took only one bomb each for Hiroshima and Nagaski. As if that matters to those being burned alive.
MartWell, yeah, but all this still assumes a 100% probability of an incident. For any incident with a probability of 100% of it happening, only 2.5% victims is, indeed, a rather low rate. The example of odds of dying of injury is an invalid comparison, as the risk of an incident happening at all is part of that calculation. A fairer comparison would be the amount of accidents vs. fatalities in that same amount. The numbers are worse than 2.5% there, I'd wager.
And do remember that I am positing a hypothetical incident that would hit the entire area of New York City, so that 2.5% is a worst case scenario.
MartEven that is questionable. Let's take the U.S. numbers and use New York City as an example:
That would give me a probability of a random U.S. citizen dying of 8/300, or slightly more than 2.5%. It is likely, though I would not call it VERY likely, that Joe Random Citizen knows one of the victims if such a thing were too happen. Still not very shocking, by the numbers.
MartSo why don't you give us a breakdown of the actual risk? What's the percentage? You state so categorically that it is VERY likely, you must have some numbers, right?
MartIt's not the 'Computer Nerds' that are the problem. If anything, the generation of 'Computer Nerds' that was responsible for Slashdot in the first place was a generation that had a lot of interest in things outside computers. The reason I stuck around when I first found Slashdot was because Rob Malda's scattershot of "things I and my friends are interested in" so closely mirrored my own view of the world.
These days however, the average poster seems to be a WoW-playing script kiddie, whose knowledge of computers does not reach further than knowing how to key in registry edits from magazines and websites to 'tune up' his PC. It is this crowd that responds with jeers whenever something even outside that mainstream is posted.
In Computer Nerd terms, they are the high school dropouts who took an ExamCram braindump to pass their MCSE and now fashion themselves System Administrators, all the while showing in their every utterance that they know exactly nothing about computers.
If these are the folks complaining about kdawson, I say to Rob Malda: please hire more kdawsons!
MartWhat myth? I didn't know about the game, but it appears to be based on the exploits of the Airborne Forces during Market Garden, which are pretty well documented.
Mart