Indeed. We already knew that Microsoft ran a few Linux PCs, as they made a lot of noise about purchaseing licenses from SCO.
In the past, MS has also sold (or given away, free-as-in-beer) some software for Linux. There used to be an SDK that let sites running Apache on Linux use MS Passport for authentication, but I think that went away with the demise of the whole Passport plan.
This isn't a new "exploit". You can get round Word's password protection by opening a document in any program that understands the.doc format, including Microsoft's own WordPad (bundled with Windows).
There's a nice application out there called Playfair (aka Hymn), which removes all the DRM from itunes files. You can search Google for it. It's illegal, of course, at least in the US. (But maybe not in the UK?)
Americans often seem to have a stronger sense of family than other cultures *because* they live so far apart. Holidays like Thanksgiving are the only chance may people get to see their families, so people need to pack a whole year's worth of family time into a weekend.
But if you lived in a country where people could spend time with their families every day, spending time with your family wouldn't seem like that big a deal. You don't miss them till they're gone.
You've got it backwards: The electoral college is much more likely to turn on a few votes than the popular votes. So if you don't want recounts, you should support its abolition.
No recount would have found half a million extra votes for Bush in 2000, or 3 million extra votes for Kerry in 2004. But when the whole election depends on just one state and that state is close, everyone will (rightly) demand that the votes be counted and recounted until they get an accurate number.
You have to understand how conservatives think on this issue: it's *wrong* for a candidate to deliberately undermine the election process just to get himself elected.
Does this mean that conservatives are opposed to Jeb Bush's systematic disenfranchising of minority voters in Florida? And to the "challengers" the GOP paid to prevent Ohio residents from voting if they looked like they were likely to vote Democrat? And to Kenneth Blackwell making sure that heavily Democratic areas of Ohio don't have enough voting machines? And to the Nevada Republicans shredding Democratic voter registration forms?
If conservatives really are opposed to liars and cheats who will do anything to win, they should probably find a different party...
This is why Lexmark tried to invoke the DMCA: The printer uses a cryptographic signature to identify Lexmark cartridges, and won't work if it finds one made by a third party.
To get around this, Lexmark's competitors reverse-engineered the authentication algorithm, so that the cartridges could fool the printer into thinking they were made by Lexmark. Lexmark responded by suing them under the DMCA. Happily, it lost.
The theory is that both provisional and spoiled ballots are overwhelmingly for Kerry. You can read more about the precise numbers in this article by Greg Palast, the BBC reporter who uncovered the disenfranchisement in Florida. The recount will test whether his theory is true.
Provisional ballots are cast when there is some doubt over whether a voter is legally allowed to vote. In Ohio, the GOP hired people to "challenge" likely Kerry (ie. black) voters, which probably resulted in some being unable to vote at all and others being given provisional ballots. These are currently being counted, and (like absentee ballots) were excluded from the totals given on election night.
Spoiled ballots tend to be much more common in poorer areas, because these use older, less reliable voting and counting machines. (I mean less reliable compared to newer machines with a paper trail, not the black boxes.) These are what Cobb and Badnarik are aiming to count. Unlike Florida, Ohio has clear rules on hanging chads, etc., so a count of spoiled ballots shouldn't result in legal challenges.
This isn't about Diebold or black box voting: Nearly all the voting machines in Ohio do keep a voter-verifiable paper trail (which is why a recount is possible), and none of them are made by Diebold.
We live in the world of SCO, the BSA, the RIAA and the MPAA. You are never safe from lawsuits.
The government does plan to crack down on "frivolous lawsuits". Unfortunately, by this it means people suing corporations that have injured them. Corporations will still be able to sue individuals for any imagined harm, and only the very rich will be able to defend themselves.
Yes, he can, but the fact that he's chosen to do so tells us seomething about Bush's attitude to the rest of the world. Of course, it's something that anyone who has live through the past four years should already know.
Supporting Ogg Vorbis is completely free: vendors don't have to sign any onerous license or hand over any money. Most people don't really care about formats, but they do want a player that can play everything they load on to it.
I expect Apple will add Ogg support at some time in the near future, but they won't make a big thing about it (because they'd rather you'd use the DRM-crippled iTunes format). It'll just work.
XP Home does support multiple users. I haven't tried whatever built-in security it might have, but it definitely supports several different user accounts each with their own desktop, My Cocuments, etc.
This isn't even new. Windows 98 did the same thing, though it didn't make any distinction between different users' levels of access.
The original prisoners' dilemma is really about honor among thieves: Criminals do better in a cooprating group like the Mafia than as individuals who will sell each other out at the first opportunity.
But when applied to evolutionary theory, it's talking about genes, which on their own don't have any ethics (or other motivation). It shows that organisms which follow a "tit-for-tat" rule are more likley to survive and reproduce than those that follow some other strategy.
Eventually, you get a population where nearly every organism is folowing "tit-for-tat." Add consciousness and empathy, and you get the Golden Rule.
But defecting isn't the optimal choice. The whole point of the prisoners' dilemma is that the optimal action is for both particpants to cooperate, but each is idividually tempted to defect. That's why it's called a dilemma.
Defecting may seem to be a better strategy, but keep in mind that whatever factors (genes, environmenmt or in this case, programming) influence your decision to defect are also likely to be influencing the other player.
There is the "one day I'll be at the top" hope, which is usually wrong. But there are also sound practical reasons why people work at extremely low wages. In particular, they know they're likely to get fired if they complain.
Everyone could get together and demand higher wages (ie. a union), but cooperation among many participants is much harder to organize than among two
This is really interesting, but you're repeating that "flip-flopper" BS about Kerry.
Kerry isn't perfect, but he really hasn't "flip flopped" much. Different versions of the same bill come up in congress, and most congresscritters (including Kerry) vote for some and against others. For example, Kerry voted for a bill giving the US military $87 billion for Iraq, but against a version of the same bill that also included a provision that enlarged the deficit to give millionaires an even bigger tax cut.
There are some areas where Kerry has actually changed his mind, like fighting in 'Nam and then protesting the war. But changing your beliefs when new evidence emerges is not something to be ashamed of. It's just rational.
All action is necessarily rational (because all actors, in order to act, have to presume causality and understand it).
This is the central fallacy of economics. But even though the Universe itself might be (and I believe, is) rational, obeying perfectly deterministic laws of physics, human behavior is clearly irrational.
Sounds contradictory? It isn't really. Humans are guided by emotions, which evolved to maximize genetic survival in the prehistoric environment. Our emotions no longer maximize genetic survival very well, because the modern world is different from the prehistoric one and evolution takes a while to catch up. But they still play havok with any attempt at rational decision-making.
It's generally the right that is more sold out to corporate interests. But in the UK, the only parties that voted against software patents were the smaller ones: the Greens (left) and the UK Independence Party (right).
Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats all support software patents. (By European standards, I suppose all three are fairly right-wing.) Fortunately, elections to the European Parliament are fought under a proportional system, so votes for Green or UKIP aren't wasted.
Don't forget the sixth option: It's fake and someone did it for money, fame or TV ratings.
Also, keep in mind that immediately after the program was broadcast, the White House released memos of its own admitting that Bush failed to meet National Guard Standards. They previously denied that any more memos existed, so we have to wonder what else they're hiding?
But this begs a question: Which station would actually air F-911? Is there any network that would dare to put it on at all, let alone during an election campaign? And which corporate advertisers would want to underwrite it?
I can just about see C-SPAN or PBS broadcasting it, but probably not for about twenty years. Moore's request for it to be shown on TV is just a way of generating publicity for the DVD release. (Moore is a good movie maker, but the thing he really excels at is PR. Even McCain's speech at the Republican convention helped to promote his movie!)
Technically, SBVT is funded by oil executives who are very close to Bush. The guy who started it is John O'Neill, a longtime opponent of Kerry from the Nixon days.
This doesn't change your point, of course, but the Kerry / O'Neill story is interesting. C-SPAN has a debate between the two from 1971, which gets to the SBVTs' real motivation for lying. None of them served with him, so they have no idea how he performed in combat. But they do hate him for protesting the war.
Unfortunately, the mainstream media doesn't care about facts. They give equal time to the accusations as to the denials, even when the simplest fact-checking can reveal the accusations to be bullshit.
If a GOP front group said the Earth was flat, CNN wouldn't bother to look at a globe and consider the veracity of the claims. They'd report the flat Earth theory as just one side of a controversy. We see this over and over again, on every issue from voting machines to global warming.
The system could still be (and, I believe, is) messed up --- even if every candidate agrees with it. It's not as if the candidates have much choice: They have to accept the rules when they when they run for President.
Democracy isn't a game with arbitrary rules. The rules should be designed to give every citizen equal representation in government. The current system clearly fails in this respect.
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Indeed. We already knew that Microsoft ran a few Linux PCs, as they made a lot of noise about purchaseing licenses from SCO.
In the past, MS has also sold (or given away, free-as-in-beer) some software for Linux. There used to be an SDK that let sites running Apache on Linux use MS Passport for authentication, but I think that went away with the demise of the whole Passport plan.
This isn't a new "exploit". You can get round Word's password protection by opening a document in any program that understands the .doc format, including Microsoft's own WordPad (bundled with Windows).
There's a nice application out there called Playfair (aka Hymn), which removes all the DRM from itunes files. You can search Google for it. It's illegal, of course, at least in the US. (But maybe not in the UK?)
Americans often seem to have a stronger sense of family than other cultures *because* they live so far apart. Holidays like Thanksgiving are the only chance may people get to see their families, so people need to pack a whole year's worth of family time into a weekend.
But if you lived in a country where people could spend time with their families every day, spending time with your family wouldn't seem like that big a deal. You don't miss them till they're gone.
You've got it backwards: The electoral college is much more likely to turn on a few votes than the popular votes. So if you don't want recounts, you should support its abolition.
No recount would have found half a million extra votes for Bush in 2000, or 3 million extra votes for Kerry in 2004. But when the whole election depends on just one state and that state is close, everyone will (rightly) demand that the votes be counted and recounted until they get an accurate number.
You have to understand how conservatives think on this issue: it's *wrong*
for a candidate to deliberately undermine the election process just to get
himself elected.
Does this mean that conservatives are opposed to Jeb Bush's systematic disenfranchising of minority voters in Florida? And to the "challengers" the GOP paid to prevent Ohio residents from voting if they looked like they were likely to vote Democrat? And to Kenneth Blackwell making sure that heavily Democratic areas of Ohio don't have enough voting machines? And to the Nevada Republicans shredding Democratic voter registration forms?
If conservatives really are opposed to liars and cheats who will do anything to win, they should probably find a different party...
This is why Lexmark tried to invoke the DMCA: The printer uses a cryptographic signature to identify Lexmark cartridges, and won't work if it finds one made by a third party.
To get around this, Lexmark's competitors reverse-engineered the authentication algorithm, so that the cartridges could fool the printer into thinking they were made by Lexmark. Lexmark responded by suing them under the DMCA. Happily, it lost.
The theory is that both provisional and spoiled ballots are overwhelmingly for Kerry. You can read more about the precise numbers in this article by Greg Palast, the BBC reporter who uncovered the disenfranchisement in Florida. The recount will test whether his theory is true.
Provisional ballots are cast when there is some doubt over whether a voter is legally allowed to vote. In Ohio, the GOP hired people to "challenge" likely Kerry (ie. black) voters, which probably resulted in some being unable to vote at all and others being given provisional ballots. These are currently being counted, and (like absentee ballots) were excluded from the totals given on election night.
Spoiled ballots tend to be much more common in poorer areas, because these use older, less reliable voting and counting machines. (I mean less reliable compared to newer machines with a paper trail, not the black boxes.) These are what Cobb and Badnarik are aiming to count. Unlike Florida, Ohio has clear rules on hanging chads, etc., so a count of spoiled ballots shouldn't result in legal challenges.
This isn't about Diebold or black box voting: Nearly all the voting machines in Ohio do keep a voter-verifiable paper trail (which is why a recount is possible), and none of them are made by Diebold.
We live in the world of SCO, the BSA, the RIAA and the MPAA. You are never safe from lawsuits.
The government does plan to crack down on "frivolous lawsuits". Unfortunately, by this it means people suing corporations that have injured them. Corporations will still be able to sue individuals for any imagined harm, and only the very rich will be able to defend themselves.
Remember the debate where he talked about "rumors on the Internets" when asked the draft?
I guess there are lots of other Internets that only Bush can access, and they may have rumors. But us reality-based people only get one, and the talk of the draft isn't a rumor. If Bush gets in, there's a good chance that everyone aged 18-34 will be sent to kill and die.
Yes, he can, but the fact that he's chosen to do so tells us seomething about Bush's attitude to the rest of the world. Of course, it's something that anyone who has live through the past four years should already know.
Supporting Ogg Vorbis is completely free: vendors don't have to sign any onerous license or hand over any money. Most people don't really care about formats, but they do want a player that can play everything they load on to it.
I expect Apple will add Ogg support at some time in the near future, but they won't make a big thing about it (because they'd rather you'd use the DRM-crippled iTunes format). It'll just work.
XP Home does support multiple users. I haven't tried whatever built-in security it might have, but it definitely supports several different user accounts each with their own desktop, My Cocuments, etc.
This isn't even new. Windows 98 did the same thing, though it didn't make any distinction between different users' levels of access.
The original prisoners' dilemma is really about honor among thieves: Criminals do better in a cooprating group like the Mafia than as individuals who will sell each other out at the first opportunity.
But when applied to evolutionary theory, it's talking about genes, which on their own don't have any ethics (or other motivation). It shows that organisms which follow a "tit-for-tat" rule are more likley to survive and reproduce than those that follow some other strategy.
Eventually, you get a population where nearly every organism is folowing "tit-for-tat." Add consciousness and empathy, and you get the Golden Rule.
But defecting isn't the optimal choice. The whole point of the prisoners' dilemma is that the optimal action is for both particpants to cooperate, but each is idividually tempted to defect. That's why it's called a dilemma.
Defecting may seem to be a better strategy, but keep in mind that whatever factors (genes, environmenmt or in this case, programming) influence your decision to defect are also likely to be influencing the other player.
There is the "one day I'll be at the top" hope, which is usually wrong. But there are also sound practical reasons why people work at extremely low wages. In particular, they know they're likely to get fired if they complain.
Everyone could get together and demand higher wages (ie. a union), but cooperation among many participants is much harder to organize than among two
Not just organized crime. Sounds like the way most companies work.
This is really interesting, but you're repeating that "flip-flopper" BS about Kerry.
Kerry isn't perfect, but he really hasn't "flip flopped" much. Different versions of the same bill come up in congress, and most congresscritters (including Kerry) vote for some and against others. For example, Kerry voted for a bill giving the US military $87 billion for Iraq, but against a version of the same bill that also included a provision that enlarged the deficit to give millionaires an even bigger tax cut.
There are some areas where Kerry has actually changed his mind, like fighting in 'Nam and then protesting the war. But changing your beliefs when new evidence emerges is not something to be ashamed of. It's just rational.
All action is necessarily rational (because all actors, in order to act, have to presume causality and understand it).
This is the central fallacy of economics. But even though the Universe itself might be (and I believe, is) rational, obeying perfectly deterministic laws of physics, human behavior is clearly irrational.
Sounds contradictory? It isn't really. Humans are guided by emotions, which evolved to maximize genetic survival in the prehistoric environment.
Our emotions no longer maximize genetic survival very well, because the modern world is different from the prehistoric one and evolution takes a while to catch up. But they still play havok with any attempt at rational decision-making.
It's generally the right that is more sold out to corporate interests. But in the UK, the only parties that voted against software patents were the smaller ones: the Greens (left) and the UK Independence Party (right).
Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats all support software patents. (By European standards, I suppose all three are fairly right-wing.) Fortunately, elections to the European Parliament are fought under a proportional system, so votes for Green or UKIP aren't wasted.
Don't forget the sixth option: It's fake and someone did it for money, fame or TV ratings.
Also, keep in mind that immediately after the program was broadcast, the White House released memos of its own admitting that Bush failed to meet National Guard Standards. They previously denied that any more memos existed, so we have to wonder what else they're hiding?
But this begs a question: Which station would actually air F-911? Is there any network that would dare to put it on at all, let alone during an election campaign? And which corporate advertisers would want to underwrite it?
I can just about see C-SPAN or PBS broadcasting it, but probably not for about twenty years. Moore's request for it to be shown on TV is just a way of generating publicity for the DVD release. (Moore is a good movie maker, but the thing he really excels at is PR. Even McCain's speech at the Republican convention helped to promote his movie!)
Technically, SBVT is funded by oil executives who are very close to Bush. The guy who started it is John O'Neill, a longtime opponent of Kerry from the Nixon days.
This doesn't change your point, of course, but the Kerry / O'Neill story is interesting. C-SPAN has a debate between the two from 1971, which gets to the SBVTs' real motivation for lying. None of them served with him, so they have no idea how he performed in combat. But they do hate him for protesting the war.
Unfortunately, the mainstream media doesn't care about facts. They give equal time to the accusations as to the denials, even when the simplest fact-checking can reveal the accusations to be bullshit.
If a GOP front group said the Earth was flat, CNN wouldn't bother to look at a globe and consider the veracity of the claims. They'd report the flat Earth theory as just one side of a controversy. We see this over and over again, on every issue from voting machines to global warming.
The system could still be (and, I believe, is) messed up --- even if every candidate agrees with it. It's not as if the candidates have much choice: They have to accept the rules when they when they run for President.
Democracy isn't a game with arbitrary rules. The rules should be designed to give every citizen equal representation in government. The current system clearly fails in this respect.