people who are actually buying the crap is very small like 0.001%
Not according to Forrester Research it's not. At first glance, Forrester's figures seem impossibly high, but it did make me think about what the figures we hear about spam actually mean. Basically, that "0.001%" figure is the number of spams that generate a response, but if each respondant to one spam in a thousand, then 1% of spam recipients are buying from spam. Think about how many spams are being sent, and all of a sudden Forrester's figures, while high, don't seem too far beyond the realms of plausibility.
I pretty much have all of China (and a few other countries) blacklisted, in the case of China this is both at the.cn ccTLD domain and their IP allocations from APNIC. Yes, it's draconian, but I can (and do) permit specific IPs if need be and it keeps the spam *way* down. If enough people were to do this, especially at ISP level, then that's going to start having an impact of the ability of Chinese companies to trade with the rest of the world. Should that happen, how long do you think it would take for the Chinese government to take notice, and subsequently some action?
Of course, that's when the payback happens, because it's going to take more than a promise to be good to convince many admins to remove a blacklist entry, null route, or whatever. It basically boils down to a choice between quick money from dodgy spammers now, or long-term money from serious business investments further down the road. At the moment, it sure looks like the Japanese are the only ones that have really grasped the concept of long term business plans being better than cash now; tomorrow's problems belong to someone else.
I have, from personal experience, found out that IE is the most CSS compliant of all browsers available.
Provided that you only use those bits of CSS that IE actually does right, which is a fair amount to be fair, then it probably is. The same holds true for all the other rendering engines of course, each has their own quirks and issues, but at least they are getting stomped on with each successive release. Unless Microsoft changes its plans again (very possible) we're not likely to see much improvement in IE's rendering issues before the release of Longhorn, whenever that finally turns out to be.
As to my specific site development, I did check with W3C - frequently since I don't do this for a living - and I started developing the page templates exactly as you suggested but using Firefox in place of Opera, doing spot checks in other browsers here and there, and using a CSS validator. I was hitting IE anomalies almost from the start, and putting all the fixes and hacks from A List Apart etc. into CSS under development was making things much harder to keep track of, so I decided, for better or worse, to fix IE at the end, via a dedicated CSS if need be.
Even so, that still doesn't explain how a page design that validates 100% compliant, displays OK in recent versions of Firefox, Konqi, Opera, Safari *and* Netscape doesn't work in IE if it's as CSS compliant as you suggest. It *especially* doesn't explain why it doesn't work in IE in completely different ways depending on what version of IE you are using, or if you compare the renderings from the same version on a PC and a Mac for that matter. MS might have learned to submit ideas for approval before implementing them, but they also appear to need the most work on fixing what has been approved already.
CSS was supposed to make web design easier, and once I decided to temporarily shelve IE support from my site design then it was, but until *all* browsers are in agreement with the W3C about what the specifications mean, that's going to be largely a pipe dream I fear. CSS nirvana currently isn't likely to happen until Longhorn's IE at least, assuming that all the other rendering engines iron out their kinks by then too, and ignoring legacy browser support issues. That all adds up to an awful lot of headaches for professional web developers in the interim.
...it will be very interesting to see what will happen in 2005
OK, I'm bored and have a spreadsheet to hand, so I've dropped the data into a spreadsheet, generated a graph and added an exponential trendline to Mozilla. It tracks the recorded data quite nicely from January 2002 through to July 2004 at which point the recorded data actually starts to climb increasingly *above* the curve. Assuming that the current momentum is maintained, the trend line shows Mozilla passing 50% of total browser share around July 2006, but taking the post-1.0 surge into account it could be as soon as September 2005!
Good fscking riddence if it is given the appalling implementation of CSS in IE that MS claims is "standards compliant". I've just put together a CSS based website using Firefox to do my initial development. OK, I'm a little on the cutting edge with the design, but Opera, Safari and Konqi all manage at least a passable stab at rendering it - nothing that you'd know was a problem unless you knew to look for it. IE, on the otherhand, is just so far out there you wouldn't believe with radically different renderings between platforms, IE versions, even Service Pack levels, and don't even get me started on "Quirks" and "Standards" modes...
Total time to develop website - 1 week. Total time to hack the CSS/HTML about to get it working in at least a reasonable number of IE varients - five weeks and counting... Seeing Firefox stomp on IE's marketshare - priceless! To develop a standards compliant website, there's open source, for anything else there's Microsoft...
But by a similarly exaggerated amount I downloaded one copy and deployed it onto 8 million PCs, so it probably balances out. 10m downloads is all very impressive, but I don't see any way of converting that into the actual userbase that would be any more reliable than taking a guess. In addition to the above cases you've also got people that have since removed it (wait till the next IE exploit, fools!), installs onto multiuser systems, those that have installed from magazine cover disks, third party package archives or distro updates.
Even so, I'd say it's pretty certain that the total number of people using Firefox v1.0 on a regular basis is *much* higher than 10m, and still growing...
Actually, this could be a win-win scenario. Sure there will be people working on the same problems in different teams - but that also means more people in employment. Yes, there are going to be winners and losers, but even the "losers" might hit it big and come up with some new technology with a widespread, but more down-to-earth use with a much bigger pay-off.
Plus, if there are a lot of prizes then there will likely be a win-some lose-some attitude, not so much by the teams as the backers. Paul Allen was the big backer behind the successful Ansari X-Prize entry from Scaled Composites; I can see similar speculators in NASA's version as well. It's not all that different to speculating on the stock market really, but the potential satisfaction of backing a winner is going to be astronomical (sorry) by comparison.
I guess it depends on how much significance you attach to that "up to" and how NASA handles determining just how much a given "prize" should be. Suppose NASA has a requirement for 10 satellites and its own staff estimate an R&D cost of $250m and further production cost of $50m per unit - $750m total. I don't see a problem with NASA offering an "X-Prize" for designing a $50m/unit satellite of $300m plus a minimum contract of 10 units, or $800m in total. Assuming the contestant meets the budgets then the "profit" value of the prize is $50m plus any savings made in R&D and production costs. Meanwhile, NASA gets what it wants while effectively capping budget overruns at $50m - and we all know how those NASA budgets like to overrun...
According to Groklaw SCO has more documents under court seal than IBM (eighteen vs seventeen) all of which would presumably have to be made public is Maureen O'Gara gets her way. Presumably that would mean SCO has something to lose by the records going public as well, otherwise why wouldn't have bothered putting them under seal in the first place would they? This seems a rather odd position for Maureen O'Gara to take if there is any truth in the allegations that she is little more than a paid for SCO shill.
On the otherhand, SCO *does* have a very good track record at stalling their various court cases and launching off on tangents that ultimately lead nowhere but consume yet more time. So, suppose the have Maureen ask for the records, what's likely to happen next? Presumably the judge will have to consult with SCO and IBM's lawyers, time will pass, but they quite likely are going to end up giving her the response "no". So, unless things are very definite, Maureen can now ask for just some of the records to be disclosed. The judge then (she hopes) goes back to the lawyers and lengthy arguments ensue about which documents each side should, or should not, disclose.
Also, I wonder if there is anything more that coincidence behind the fact that this should come to light so soon after SCO received a setback in its legal proceedings. Funnily enough, SCO just had its motion to stay the Daimler-Chrysler case until after the conclusion of the IBM case denied... I find it very interesting that this should be announced just one day after SCO lost the ability to use the IBM cases as a brake in another of its lawsuits.
Both Amazon UK and Amazon US have it down for release December 10th, 2004 so it is indeed out in time for Christmas. You don't get the statues or the "bonus" DVDs that come with the second and third parts though.
Perhaps, but the mental image you are looking for is one of hyenas circling a carcass waiting for all of the serious predators to leave. Hopefully there will be a little gristle left for them when the lions are done....
Agreed, were this situation for real, the solution provider involved would certainly have a relationship with either directly with a major distro provider like Red Hat/Novell, and/or with a hardware provider with Linux expertise like HP/IBM. Extremely competent help would be just a phone call away, exactly as with the situation with EDS and Microsoft.
The problem is, that's not how Microsoft PR is likely to want to try and spin things, is it? I think it far more likely that they would paint a picture where the solution provider had simply downloaded a community driven distro from the 'Net and installed that. You and I know that there is still sufficient help available, even in that scenario, to get things fixed, but that's not the point. The big question is, will the PHBs that authorise these contracts see through the FUD, or will they just stick with the Devil they know?
Frankly, I'd be very suprised if EDS gets much more than a slap on the wrist for this. A few of their senior execs will get grilled by the House of Commons, then it's all sins forgiven and their stranglehold over UK Government IT contracts continues apace. Microsoft on the otherhand must be thinking that Christmas has arrived a month early this year; it's going to be one hell of a Thanksgiving Weekend in Redmond this year.
Reading between the lines I think EDS was trying to install a Windows XP patch onto a small testbed of PCs actually running XP (which is hardly what was implied by the Slashdot story). Instead, they managed to deploy the patch the the general pool of 60,000 PCs still running Windows 2K, essentially trashing the install and preventing the systems from booting. It could have been as simple as someone at EDS choosing the wrong deployment target from their network management tool (Tivoli, IIRC).
The question about all of this that I am left with is, how did the patch even install? Microsoft has had sanity checking on their patches for ages, checking not only the Windows version, but even service pack levels and any other prerequisites. Ever tried installing a patch intended for IE6-SP1 over plain IE6 for example? I'm assuming that this is some custom patch rolled by EDS, rather than an official Microsoft one downloadable by all and sundry. Still, the story appears to have made it onto UK prime time news, so no doubt more details will emerge...
Actually, I tend to see this as potentially an opportunity for Microsoft to gain some excellent, and totally undeserved, *good* PR. The root cause of the problem seems to be that EDS erroneously pushed a Windows XP update out to Windows 2K desktops - hardly Microsoft's fault. Having got completely out of their depth (which isn't especially far out of the shallows given EDS' track record to date) EDS decided that it couldn't fix the problem and called in Microsoft.
Now, assume Microsoft bails EDS out, and there is no reason why not, because you can bet they'll send a bunch of temps to every DWP office at EDS' expense if they have too. In a nutshell, Microsoft gets a PR coup: "We've just bailed out out a leading *cough* solution provider! Now imagine that had been, say, a Linux deployment... Who could EDS have called then?" Given the excellent grasp of PR, spin and FUD Microsoft has, I don't think this is going to help break the Microsoft stranglehold at all.
Well there has already been speculation that some of the plastics used for cable insulation and component construction may not be UV proof. I gather the effect was that long term exposure to UV lighting used in case mods caused the plastic to breakdown leading to the possibility of shorts and component failure, although precise timescales were unclear. If the UV is potent enough to break down plastic over time, then it's got to be having an effect on your skin, right?
Then again, if you are sitting by your PC for 16 hours a day, then that's a lot of UV from sunlight you are missing - it *might* balance out... Just make sure that you move around enough to get an even tan.:)
Oh I think our governments are starting to see what's going on alright. Poland just this week removed its support for the EU patent directive which means it no longer has enough support to pass. France and the UK have stated that FOSS is a viable alternative for government deployment and should be considered alongside commerical alternatives, Germany is already using it in Munich of course. Given Steve Ballmer's recent comments in Malaysia about "use Linux and get sued", do you really think these governments are going to to pass legislation to enable themselves to be sued?
Kinda ironic that Microsoft should provide the anti-IP patent lobby with one of their strongest arguments to date, but it just goes to show that Microsoft doesn't understand *NIX. Certainly not the parts about *NIX making it really easy to shoot yourself in the foot at any rate...:)
* umm, and how do you get all the connections on a torrent without seeding some of it yourself?*
Download the Torrent file
Set all files except things like "WarezGroup.nfo" to "Do not download"
Wait for all the Warez IPs to come rolling in
???^H^H^HContact BSA
Profit!!!
Sure, you'll be seeding with a handful of text files and the like, but not the actual binaries, data files or anything else that matters. Also, because you have nothing much of interest, possibly helped with a little code tuning, your turnover of peers should be quite high, so you should see a *lot* more of the IPs in the Torrent than a typical BitTorrent session. Not that I've been playing around with Azureus's config or anything...
All in all, BitTorrent is a great P2P tool, but it sure as hell isn't a great Warez distribution system if you want to remain anonymous. The MPAA doesn't seem to have found any problems finding people to sue, and I'm pretty sure members of the BSA won't either once they put their minds to it.
You know, I've been thinking about this kind of thing too. Just as we currently have Tax Havens, how much longer before we have the "Patent Haven"? It works like this: a small country rejects the Berne convention etc. so that all patents, copyrights and trademarks become null and void within its borders. For a smallish fee (gathered through taxes perhaps) a business can set up shop on the island, produce pretty much any product it wants and sell directly over the Internet to the global market.
There are a few problems of course. Certain companies in the US and EU will kick up a stink and political/economic pressure will no doubt be bought and applied. So it will need to be a fairly wealthy and largely self sufficient country, or have some other bargaining chip. Laws might get passed banning "gray imports", but that's not a problem for the seller if they have a disclaimer stating that it is up to the buyer to check import regulations before ordering and they do not accept liability for goods seized by customs. It's even easier if the product is a software program of course, there are already plenty of websites offering software for download upon recipit of credit card details, both legit and otherwise.
This whole "patent company" idea looks more like a great way for a country to hand over more control to lawyers and its industry overseas to me. And how will the overpaid lawyers get their nice shiny cars, watches and other luxury goods when their own laws prevent them from importing them?
There's a *much* better picture on CNN's article - not so much a smart black suit as a natty orange one. Better get used to those threads Bubba, or is that your new best friend's name? I forget...:)
A little bit more specific please! Do you mean, the disk is suffering from the so called "Click of Death", or just that you can't get it to mount? If it's the former, then your best bet is to something like dd or SpinRite to try and pull as much data off the disk as possible.
However, if it's the latter then you may just have a scrambled partition table which I found was prone to corruption when moving back and forth between Windows and Linux. For some reason Iomega uses partition table entry #4, which I suspect was the root cause of the problem. There also seemed to be a change in geometry between some disks, maybe caused by a reformat or something, I never did figure that one out. Anyway, I eventually came up with the following commands to restore a 250MB ZIP disk to full functionality (change/dev/hd* to suit):
To recreate a valid partition table (you might want to check these values against a known good disk first):
To avoid some funky issues on Windows which doesn't seem to accept garbage in the first sector of a drive you will probably need to follow that with:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdd4 bs=512 count=1
And finally, you can create a pristine new file system with the command:
mkfs -t msdos/dev/hdd4
Obviously if you run the last one then you are not going to have any filenames or pointers left, but the actual data will still be there. In any case, you would certainly want to make a backup image of the raw disk with dd first if at all possible.
You seem to have missed the fact that I used the theft of the painting merely to draw a comparison about proprotionality. It's a crime that involves an item that could have a nominal value of ~$10m (for a round number) and often negligable violence/physical damage with a typical ballpark sentence to that given. You could just as easily substitute suitably large examples of fraud, smuggling and so on - whatever gets your hackles up.
I do agree with your idea about the punishment though, assuming no other crimes are involved, then a spammer is hardly a threat to society, why not make them serve that society? It could make up for some of the mental anguish people suffer when they see spam in their inbox if the right kind of social service is required. Things like removing litter/dog crap/gum from the streets, tending parks and other such community areas. Assuming the didn't just do a runner of course, entirely possible if they managed to hide some funds away offshore, so some kind of tagging system might be in order.
Exactly my view! I'm a big fan of punishments for a crime being proportional to ammount the damage inflicted; let the punishment fit the crime, but not in a strict interpretation of an "eye for an eye". No one would bat an eye if someone got ten years for stealing a painting valued at $10m, so why should there be such a fuss when a spammer gets the same kind of sentence? If we assume the spammer sent a billion spams (a conservative estimate), that's a total cost of just $0.01 per spam. That's $0.01 to cover CPU time, network bandwith costs, the loss of time taken to hit delete, plus a fraction of any one-off costs for anti-spam solutions, cleaning up any after any exploits that might be hitching a ride in those nice clickable URLs etc.
And let's not forget that there is a pretty fair chance that the owner of the painting (or whatever) stands a reasonable chance of recovering their property. With spam, any costs incurred are pretty much a write off, so it's not so much "theft of assets" as "destruction of assets", which is an entirely different, and more serious, class of crime.
I just don't get this one either. What is the context of this "five million lost jobs" anyway? Are we talking about five million jobs will be lost when all is said and done, or five million jobs will be lost, but millions will be created in Kyoto compliant versions of the same industries?
If it's the latter, then what's the *net* job situation? If the US loses five million jobs relating to the burning of fossil fuels due to implementing Kyoto (keeping things vastly simplified), then that's a disaster. But if it *then* gains four million in replacements using clean energy and another million job in the construction industry to build the necessary infrastructure then there's no problem with jobs, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently not "Sollog", which kind of lends credence to his detractor's arguments that he can't predict jack, does it not?
Not according to Forrester Research it's not. At first glance, Forrester's figures seem impossibly high, but it did make me think about what the figures we hear about spam actually mean. Basically, that "0.001%" figure is the number of spams that generate a response, but if each respondant to one spam in a thousand, then 1% of spam recipients are buying from spam. Think about how many spams are being sent, and all of a sudden Forrester's figures, while high, don't seem too far beyond the realms of plausibility.
Of course, that's when the payback happens, because it's going to take more than a promise to be good to convince many admins to remove a blacklist entry, null route, or whatever. It basically boils down to a choice between quick money from dodgy spammers now, or long-term money from serious business investments further down the road. At the moment, it sure looks like the Japanese are the only ones that have really grasped the concept of long term business plans being better than cash now; tomorrow's problems belong to someone else.
Provided that you only use those bits of CSS that IE actually does right, which is a fair amount to be fair, then it probably is. The same holds true for all the other rendering engines of course, each has their own quirks and issues, but at least they are getting stomped on with each successive release. Unless Microsoft changes its plans again (very possible) we're not likely to see much improvement in IE's rendering issues before the release of Longhorn, whenever that finally turns out to be.
As to my specific site development, I did check with W3C - frequently since I don't do this for a living - and I started developing the page templates exactly as you suggested but using Firefox in place of Opera, doing spot checks in other browsers here and there, and using a CSS validator. I was hitting IE anomalies almost from the start, and putting all the fixes and hacks from A List Apart etc. into CSS under development was making things much harder to keep track of, so I decided, for better or worse, to fix IE at the end, via a dedicated CSS if need be.
Even so, that still doesn't explain how a page design that validates 100% compliant, displays OK in recent versions of Firefox, Konqi, Opera, Safari *and* Netscape doesn't work in IE if it's as CSS compliant as you suggest. It *especially* doesn't explain why it doesn't work in IE in completely different ways depending on what version of IE you are using, or if you compare the renderings from the same version on a PC and a Mac for that matter. MS might have learned to submit ideas for approval before implementing them, but they also appear to need the most work on fixing what has been approved already.
CSS was supposed to make web design easier, and once I decided to temporarily shelve IE support from my site design then it was, but until *all* browsers are in agreement with the W3C about what the specifications mean, that's going to be largely a pipe dream I fear. CSS nirvana currently isn't likely to happen until Longhorn's IE at least, assuming that all the other rendering engines iron out their kinks by then too, and ignoring legacy browser support issues. That all adds up to an awful lot of headaches for professional web developers in the interim.
OK, I'm bored and have a spreadsheet to hand, so I've dropped the data into a spreadsheet, generated a graph and added an exponential trendline to Mozilla. It tracks the recorded data quite nicely from January 2002 through to July 2004 at which point the recorded data actually starts to climb increasingly *above* the curve. Assuming that the current momentum is maintained, the trend line shows Mozilla passing 50% of total browser share around July 2006, but taking the post-1.0 surge into account it could be as soon as September 2005!
Total time to develop website - 1 week. Total time to hack the CSS/HTML about to get it working in at least a reasonable number of IE varients - five weeks and counting... Seeing Firefox stomp on IE's marketshare - priceless! To develop a standards compliant website, there's open source, for anything else there's Microsoft...
Even so, I'd say it's pretty certain that the total number of people using Firefox v1.0 on a regular basis is *much* higher than 10m, and still growing...
Well modern F1 cars do use a lot of fibre in their construction, but I always thought it came from carbon filaments and not wheat products. Who knew?
Plus, if there are a lot of prizes then there will likely be a win-some lose-some attitude, not so much by the teams as the backers. Paul Allen was the big backer behind the successful Ansari X-Prize entry from Scaled Composites; I can see similar speculators in NASA's version as well. It's not all that different to speculating on the stock market really, but the potential satisfaction of backing a winner is going to be astronomical (sorry) by comparison.
I guess it depends on how much significance you attach to that "up to" and how NASA handles determining just how much a given "prize" should be. Suppose NASA has a requirement for 10 satellites and its own staff estimate an R&D cost of $250m and further production cost of $50m per unit - $750m total. I don't see a problem with NASA offering an "X-Prize" for designing a $50m/unit satellite of $300m plus a minimum contract of 10 units, or $800m in total. Assuming the contestant meets the budgets then the "profit" value of the prize is $50m plus any savings made in R&D and production costs. Meanwhile, NASA gets what it wants while effectively capping budget overruns at $50m - and we all know how those NASA budgets like to overrun...
On the otherhand, SCO *does* have a very good track record at stalling their various court cases and launching off on tangents that ultimately lead nowhere but consume yet more time. So, suppose the have Maureen ask for the records, what's likely to happen next? Presumably the judge will have to consult with SCO and IBM's lawyers, time will pass, but they quite likely are going to end up giving her the response "no". So, unless things are very definite, Maureen can now ask for just some of the records to be disclosed. The judge then (she hopes) goes back to the lawyers and lengthy arguments ensue about which documents each side should, or should not, disclose.
Also, I wonder if there is anything more that coincidence behind the fact that this should come to light so soon after SCO received a setback in its legal proceedings. Funnily enough, SCO just had its motion to stay the Daimler-Chrysler case until after the conclusion of the IBM case denied... I find it very interesting that this should be announced just one day after SCO lost the ability to use the IBM cases as a brake in another of its lawsuits.
Both Amazon UK and Amazon US have it down for release December 10th, 2004 so it is indeed out in time for Christmas. You don't get the statues or the "bonus" DVDs that come with the second and third parts though.
Perhaps, but the mental image you are looking for is one of hyenas circling a carcass waiting for all of the serious predators to leave. Hopefully there will be a little gristle left for them when the lions are done....
Agreed, were this situation for real, the solution provider involved would certainly have a relationship with either directly with a major distro provider like Red Hat/Novell, and/or with a hardware provider with Linux expertise like HP/IBM. Extremely competent help would be just a phone call away, exactly as with the situation with EDS and Microsoft.
The problem is, that's not how Microsoft PR is likely to want to try and spin things, is it? I think it far more likely that they would paint a picture where the solution provider had simply downloaded a community driven distro from the 'Net and installed that. You and I know that there is still sufficient help available, even in that scenario, to get things fixed, but that's not the point. The big question is, will the PHBs that authorise these contracts see through the FUD, or will they just stick with the Devil they know?
Frankly, I'd be very suprised if EDS gets much more than a slap on the wrist for this. A few of their senior execs will get grilled by the House of Commons, then it's all sins forgiven and their stranglehold over UK Government IT contracts continues apace. Microsoft on the otherhand must be thinking that Christmas has arrived a month early this year; it's going to be one hell of a Thanksgiving Weekend in Redmond this year.
The question about all of this that I am left with is, how did the patch even install? Microsoft has had sanity checking on their patches for ages, checking not only the Windows version, but even service pack levels and any other prerequisites. Ever tried installing a patch intended for IE6-SP1 over plain IE6 for example? I'm assuming that this is some custom patch rolled by EDS, rather than an official Microsoft one downloadable by all and sundry. Still, the story appears to have made it onto UK prime time news, so no doubt more details will emerge...
Now, assume Microsoft bails EDS out, and there is no reason why not, because you can bet they'll send a bunch of temps to every DWP office at EDS' expense if they have too. In a nutshell, Microsoft gets a PR coup: "We've just bailed out out a leading *cough* solution provider! Now imagine that had been, say, a Linux deployment... Who could EDS have called then?" Given the excellent grasp of PR, spin and FUD Microsoft has, I don't think this is going to help break the Microsoft stranglehold at all.
Then again, if you are sitting by your PC for 16 hours a day, then that's a lot of UV from sunlight you are missing - it *might* balance out... Just make sure that you move around enough to get an even tan. :)
Kinda ironic that Microsoft should provide the anti-IP patent lobby with one of their strongest arguments to date, but it just goes to show that Microsoft doesn't understand *NIX. Certainly not the parts about *NIX making it really easy to shoot yourself in the foot at any rate... :)
- Download the Torrent file
- Set all files except things like "WarezGroup.nfo" to "Do not download"
- Wait for all the Warez IPs to come rolling in
- ???^H^H^HContact BSA
- Profit!!!
Sure, you'll be seeding with a handful of text files and the like, but not the actual binaries, data files or anything else that matters. Also, because you have nothing much of interest, possibly helped with a little code tuning, your turnover of peers should be quite high, so you should see a *lot* more of the IPs in the Torrent than a typical BitTorrent session. Not that I've been playing around with Azureus's config or anything...All in all, BitTorrent is a great P2P tool, but it sure as hell isn't a great Warez distribution system if you want to remain anonymous. The MPAA doesn't seem to have found any problems finding people to sue, and I'm pretty sure members of the BSA won't either once they put their minds to it.
There are a few problems of course. Certain companies in the US and EU will kick up a stink and political/economic pressure will no doubt be bought and applied. So it will need to be a fairly wealthy and largely self sufficient country, or have some other bargaining chip. Laws might get passed banning "gray imports", but that's not a problem for the seller if they have a disclaimer stating that it is up to the buyer to check import regulations before ordering and they do not accept liability for goods seized by customs. It's even easier if the product is a software program of course, there are already plenty of websites offering software for download upon recipit of credit card details, both legit and otherwise.
This whole "patent company" idea looks more like a great way for a country to hand over more control to lawyers and its industry overseas to me. And how will the overpaid lawyers get their nice shiny cars, watches and other luxury goods when their own laws prevent them from importing them?
There's a *much* better picture on CNN's article - not so much a smart black suit as a natty orange one. Better get used to those threads Bubba, or is that your new best friend's name? I forget... :)
However, if it's the latter then you may just have a scrambled partition table which I found was prone to corruption when moving back and forth between Windows and Linux. For some reason Iomega uses partition table entry #4, which I suspect was the root cause of the problem. There also seemed to be a change in geometry between some disks, maybe caused by a reformat or something, I never did figure that one out. Anyway, I eventually came up with the following commands to restore a 250MB ZIP disk to full functionality (change /dev/hd* to suit):
To recreate a valid partition table (you might want to check these values against a known good disk first):
sfdisk -f -q -uS -C239 -H64 -S96 /dev/hdd << EOF
0 0
0 0
0 0
32 489440 6 *
EOF
To avoid some funky issues on Windows which doesn't seem to accept garbage in the first sector of a drive you will probably need to follow that with:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdd4 bs=512 count=1
And finally, you can create a pristine new file system with the command:
mkfs -t msdos /dev/hdd4
Obviously if you run the last one then you are not going to have any filenames or pointers left, but the actual data will still be there. In any case, you would certainly want to make a backup image of the raw disk with dd first if at all possible.
I do agree with your idea about the punishment though, assuming no other crimes are involved, then a spammer is hardly a threat to society, why not make them serve that society? It could make up for some of the mental anguish people suffer when they see spam in their inbox if the right kind of social service is required. Things like removing litter/dog crap/gum from the streets, tending parks and other such community areas. Assuming the didn't just do a runner of course, entirely possible if they managed to hide some funds away offshore, so some kind of tagging system might be in order.
And let's not forget that there is a pretty fair chance that the owner of the painting (or whatever) stands a reasonable chance of recovering their property. With spam, any costs incurred are pretty much a write off, so it's not so much "theft of assets" as "destruction of assets", which is an entirely different, and more serious, class of crime.
If it's the latter, then what's the *net* job situation? If the US loses five million jobs relating to the burning of fossil fuels due to implementing Kyoto (keeping things vastly simplified), then that's a disaster. But if it *then* gains four million in replacements using clean energy and another million job in the construction industry to build the necessary infrastructure then there's no problem with jobs, right?