Not trying to to be a jerk, just wanting
to inform people who need to use it
Not at all! Thank you for that link.
Although I personally have switched to 7z for
almost everything, having more tools available
for scripting never hurts. And as you mention,
in case of a corporate policy restricting people
to WZ, those command-line tools may seem like a
blessing (I know I would have loved them
at my previous job).
Download 7-zip instead. Totally free, no
fancy crap, and works great for all kinds
of archives.
I'll second this. Since I started using it,
7z has become my archival tool of choice.
Even for creating plain old.zip files, it
gets around 10% better compression than
anything else out there. And for it own.7z
format, you can easily get 33% better, and
I've seen more than 10 times better
(7z includes solid archive support, one of
the features people rave about in RARs (ick!),
which for packing a collection of similar
files in the same archive, means all of
them after the first compress to almost
nothing).
And, 7z exists as open source! Can't go wrong
with that (unless you work for SCO).
One complaint, though, its GUI really sucks
(or at least the last time I reinstalled it
did, I haven't checked for a new one in a
while). They need to make it behave more like
the standard Windows Explorer view (not that
I think the world of Windows Explorer, but
on a 'doze system, for the most part you can
count on "things having to do with files"
behaving like it, by default)... Just the
standard drag-n-drop behavior would make it
10x easier. But, I use it mostly from the
command line anyway (Try doing that
with WinZip), so the GUI doesn't bother me
all that much.
ISP's could probably swing a connection for
$20/mo with (oh I don't know) 50-75 gb of
transfer. Best to make it symetrical traffic
too. Then, when someones goes over it, charge
them per gb of traffic.
Not bad, but I would add one special situation...
Bandwidth within their own network aught to count
less (perhaps just apply a factor of 0.25 or something
like that), since it costs the ISP less (basically only
their own equipment maintenance, rather than actually
having to buy external bandwidth).
Together with a symmetric connection, this could
actually reduce the ISP's operating costs...
Let's say my ISP has 10k subscribers... Most likely,
one of them has anything I want (P2P seems like the
most obvious example, although I personally have
never really gotten into using P2P). So, if I have
a cap of 75GB, but by staying local I can effectively
grab 300GB per month, that provides me with quite a
lot of motivation to reduce my ISP's costs purely
for my own selfish benefit.
Unlike water, bandwidth is truly infinite.
However, it costs money to generate.
I agree with most of your points, except would
like an explanation of this one... Could you
(or anyone, really) explain this to me?
I have a sizeable home LAN (three segments, two
switches, networked printing, dedicated fileserver,
between 4 and 7 different OSs, and a masq/firewall
box to get to the internet). Aside from my internet
connection, the only cost I have comes from electricity.
Now, I realize that high-end routers cost a WHOLE
lot more than my paltry little FD 100BT toys, but they
also serve several orders of magnitude more people.
So, why exactly does bandwidth cost money? Or
rather, so much money? If I shuffle a
few hundred gigabytes per day around my LAN, it
costs me only a few cents more per year in electricity
than if my network sits idle all the time.
The hardware itself, over time, comes out to
(scribling on envelope) less than two bucks
each month per person in my house. So how
does my $30+/mo cablemodem bill not cover the
cost of truly unlimited service? I
only have two people to spread my costs
over - They have literally millions.
People need to get paid, equipment breaks and
needs upgrading, yadda yadda yadda. But how
on Earth does that end up costing, per end
user, more than a few bucks per year? Where
does all the money actually go?
Gimme a break! This guy has either trolled
rather effectively, or just begs for
a conviction for outright fraud.
Of course, in my late teens, many of my friends
worked for small local ISPs, and I have to admit
he may well tell the truth. Small ISPs make a
great front for a mob money-laundering
operation (I say this from personal knowledge,
though I never had any involvement whatsoever
with such dealings) - And even the ones really
running a more-or-less legit business make used
car salesmen look like saints.
The rest either server a very niche market,
or cease to exist within a few months.
"After the SAS [Security Attention Sequence]
is triggered in Windows NT, all user-mode
programs stop. No program can trap the SAS
sequence;
Yeah? Tell that to a misbehaving MSIE or
Media player that has decided to arbitrarily
start thrashing disk and doing something that
on a very old 'nix system I would call a fork()
bomb... Press the three-finger salute, and
it merely ignores you.
Of course, both of those, as MS programs, no
doubt have special exemptions to any sort of
rules keeping normal user-mode code in check.
So this doesn't really surprise me (or even
entirely mean MS lied about nothing
having the ability to trap it - They just
mean nothing they didn't write).
What is offensive here is the assupmtion
that people in other places are so damn stupid
that will allow to be exploited
I did not call such people "stupid". You read
that into my comment all by your lonesome.
What a company like Nike pays such people
does count as a fair wage in the
local region - The same way you could say
that Wallyworld pays its US employees a
fair wage (ie, just enough to keep them
desperate and 100% dependant on their employer,
but alive and capable of working).
However, the problem comes from the
typical pattern of single-industry areas
once a sweatshop moves in. With the entire
local economy based on a Nike plant, the
people have no choice but to subsistance
farm or work for Nike (and regarding your
mention of threats and force, I've read more
than a few accounts of sweatshop management all
but enslaving the local population against
their will). Then, if the locals get uppity,
the plant simply moves, leaving a ghosttown
(not unlike the US steel mills, except at
least those workers had *some* ability to
move away to find other work).
As for India, I would not consider it a 3rd-world
nation. The same ideas apply, however, where
you have mono-industry moving in and dominating
the local economy, to the point that people
have little choice but to work for them.
When that bubble bursts (most likely
from companies realizing they can outource
to China and undercut even Indian standard
pay rates), I don't look forward to the
horror stories we'll hear about.
More importantly, and this applies to India
as well as 3rd-world sweatshops, companies
move there not only for the pay benefits - They
also enjoy GREATLY relaxed labor laws and
environmental regulations compared to the US
and Western Europe. So we get places like
Bhopal, where a company (Union Carbide, now
Dow) not only exploited the local population,
but left the area literally a toxic wasteland.
otherwise you would have placed your example
not in the most stable democracy in the continent
but somewhere where dictatorship flourished
Democracy has nothing to do with this, although
I will admit I picked that particular country
out of thin air as "typical 3rd-world place that
most people have heard of". So that alone
will I apologize for, if I actually spoke incorrectly.
So substitute some other 3rd world country, and
try re-reading what I wrote.
But if it makes you feel better, go ahead and
call me a troll. I suppose the label even
fits what I said, though not in the normal
sense - What I say sounds pretty ugly, it
will keep coming back until you completely
eliminate it, and if you pretend it doesn't
exist, it will eventally destroy everything
around it.
The Palestinians don't want freedom from
Israel, if they did they would have taken the
offer of a state they got 3 years ago instead
of launching this latest jihad.
No, I suspect you have that correct - They
don't want "freedom from Israel"...
They want their damn land back! Why should
they accept a tiny strip of land, rather than
insisting on what they had before?
If I came to your house, kicked you out into
the dog-house, and then offered you a "peace
treaty" to let you keep the dog-house, would
you walk away smiling at your great success
at the negotiating table?
I suspect you'd see that situation as
a tad bit different.
We hear a very one-sided view of this
particular situation, because news outlets
(other than the GP's claim about the views
of the BBC) greatly fear the "anti-Jewish"
label. I used to fear similarly as well,
suffering a tad bit of cognitive dissonance
as a result, until I realized something VERY
important... "Israel" does not equal
"Jews" (although it has done its best to
blur that point, hoping our memory of WWII
will keep us from protesting their actions
that, performed by any other country, we
would consider as bad as Saddam treated the
Kurds). "Israel", though made up of a large
number of Jews, exists as a political entity,
with its own goals and means, entirely separate
from either the race or the religion.
You can observe that "Israel" commits
atrocities that make people wonder if they've
copied a few pages from Hitler's playbook,
without it meaning that you want to put Jews
back in camps. You can say "Sharon should
stand trial for his actions against the
Palestinians", and it doesn't mean you have
close-cropped hair and discuss the Final
Solution while goose-stepping around your
bunker.
See the difference? Try it a bit, and you
might feel a lot better. Israel can err.
It can commit crimes against humanity.
You can admit that, and it doesn't make
you a Jew-hater, because Israel has as much
to do with Judaism as a philosophy, as Stalin's
regime did with actual communism - Just a name.
This guy is just being a bastard with this
line, "I wonder how much it would cost them
if someone, say, automated searching for those
links on Google."
Perhaps you could explain to me what you think
he meant by that?
Search engines work best by providing an
impartial means of finding sites related to
the query. News outlets work best by providing
an impartial view of current events. When
paid promotion hits the scene, they both become
completely useless, at best - Suddenly, they
have a bottom line, rather than impartiality
or any sense of integrity in their field,
to worry about.
So, you would call him a bastard? I say
this sounds like a good way to discourage
people from buying keywords to things
they have no right monopolizing. Make it
impractical. Make it ineffective. Make
it expensive.
Where the hell do you live? Anywhere
that has housing that cheap, has no jobs.
Anywhere that has decent-paying jobs, try
more like $800 for a livable apartment, and
easily over $1200 in any densely populated
area (ie, the places with the most jobs).
$20 a month for phone serviceZ
The absolute cheapest I can get phone service
in my area comes to over $30 - And that assumes
I have no special services and never make any
LD calls.
$50 a year for bus service
WHAT??? Put down the crack pipe. First of
all, just HAVING bus service available goes back
to my first point, where you need to have a
fairly dense (tight suburban) population. So
stick the rent over $800. Second, a bus pass
costs more like $50 per month... In Boston,
you can get a fairly limited (destination-wise)
pass for $31/month. For a full unlimited pass,
try $79, and that still doesn't include
MA-wide commuter rail (required unless you want
to live right in the city and pay more like
$1800+ for rent).
Not even including other expenses (food, heat, clothes
TV, electricity, water, an a million-and-one little
things that all add up), that comes out to nearly
$16,000 to live in the Boston suburbs. Add in just
heat and electric, and you have another 3-5 grand
per year, easily.
I find it rather ironic that so many people in
America, the land of capitalism, hate outsourcing
so much. This is simple economics right out of
Adam Smith.
Some of us have a very good reason to disapprove
of outsourcing such as this, also straight out of
Adam Smith...
To have commerce based on producers and consumers,
you need to have both sides of that equasion.
You can't have just producers, and you can't have
just consumers.
Outsourcing to places with lower standard incomes
may sound like a dream to the production-side
of the equasion, all else held equal - Companies
can produce goods for a lower cost.
However, this seeming benefit comes at a hidden
cost - The "consumers" of these products can no
longer afford to buy them. Sure, the producer can
open up a market in the area of production, but
due to the drastically lower wages, they need to
charge far less than their original batch of
consumers could pay. In the long run, this pushes
down the price of the product, and introduces
serious disruptions to the economy as a whole.
Companies need to look beyond next quarter's
revenues, and realize that they have traded
temporarily higher profits for a long-term
loss.
Companies need consumers. Consumers need jobs.
End of story.
Wow, what an incredible article. Allow me to
summarize it, in an analogy:
I'd like to introduce you to Juan. A healthy,
though very lean, eight year old boy, the rigors
of his life have not yet beaten him down. His
bright eyes still have a glint of boyish
exuberance in them, and he still has all ten
of his fingers.
Juan works in a Nike factory in Costa Rica. He
has since turning four, and will most likely work
there for the rest of his life. He makes 22 cents
per week, not a great amount of money but decent
for the area in which he lives. With a small
supplemental farm, his family can feed itself
between Juan's, his parents', and his seven
remaining siblings' income from Nike. He spends
his spare time doing odd jobs, saving up to one
day buy a pair of the shoes he helps make.
Now, meet Joe. Joe lives in San Diego,
California. This annoyingly whiney middle
aged dead-beat dad used to work for Nike,
until his plant relocated to Costa Rica. Joe
spends his days begging for spare change, and
protesting at WTO conferences against the loss
of American jobs.
Juan does his job every bit as well as Joe
used to, except that he doesn't complain
constantly, doesn't demand unionization or
health benefits, and doesn't even go to the
bathroom during his 14-hour shifts.
So, dear readers, please see that Juan doesn't
hate you, and that globalization means good
things, for everybody.
This is news, but only in the sense that
Nomadix was the first to patent this idea
that will possibly become quite important
in the future.
Patents also theoretically require their
subject to count as non-obvious (the single
criterion the USPTO seems to conveniently
overlook most often, IMO)... Nomadix may
have done it first, and even filed for a
patent first, but that doesn't make this any
more "right". If truly an act of creation,
then doing it first and filing first matters;
In this case, they just beat the rush of
literally hundreds of people who "discovered" the
exact same solution to a particular problem,
all within a very small timeframe. That
strongly suggests this as an "obvious" solution,
thus invalidating it for a patent.
That doesn't mean the USPTO sees it that way,
however. The same USPTO that doesn't consider
"store a cookie with customer data in it" as
obvious. The same USPTO that, although
overturned just today, actually ISSUED
a patent that Lemelson deliberately stalled
in the pipeline for half-a-freakin'-century
to pop up recently and start extorting with.
So will this stand? It wouldn't surprise me.
But to actually call it "fair" or in any
way "non-obvious"? No way in hell. Using a
butterknife to tighten a screw may sound like
an admirable way to deal with the lack of a
screwdriver, but any moron with a knife, a
screw, and no screwdriver, will come up with
the same solution, even in isolation.
Its like having mcDonalds downgrade their
free toy from a fun windup to to just a damn
doll that doesn't do shit.
I prefer to think of it as getting a happymeal
toy that lets you record your own
messages, rather than just repeating "Can we go
to McDonalds", "I love Ronald", and "Big Macs
don't make you fat", over and over and over.
Realistically, you can do two things with one
of these (and no, I don't include "install
FreeDOS" as a viable option)... You can install
Linux on it, or you can install the version of
Windows you bought for your old machine (which,
assuming you remove it from your old machine,
you won't violate any likely-to-stand-in-court
aspects of the Windows EULA).
When people start doing illegal things such
as writing viruses to get back at SCO, on the
other hand, the Linux community loses much of
its innocence.
When we bend over for SCO by playing along at
the "US legal system" game/joke, we lose even
if they do as well.
This will cost SCO money, possibly inconvenience
them severely, and really has no impact whatsoever
on their pending lawsuits. Good! The courts
haven't done their job of spanking Darl for wasting
our time and money, about time someone did.
Some people define insanity as doing the same
thing over and over and expecting different
results. When you try to play fair over and
over, and keep losing yet expect not to... Well...
Take that as you will. But I for on will cheer
this worm on.
This isn't a virus that exploits any holes
in windows, it's a worm that exploits holes
in user's heads.
Except that, by making us want to run
it, perhaps this one gets the title of the
world's first memetic virus (and no, I
didn't mispell "mimetic")!
Somehow, considering the low chance of anyone
manually-but-accidentally running this one,
I'd have to say the author wrote it not so
much as a virus, but as a "plausible deniability
frontend" to a mostly-voluntary community-based
DDOS against SCO.
Given that the worm is spreading so quickly,
this means that people's stupidity once again
surpasses our wildest expectations.
Such naivete... Again, I'd consider it far
more likely, people run this one on purpose.
Now if they'd just add the RIAA and MPAA and
the BSA (and I could probably come up with a
few other (dis)interest-groups to add to it as
well), I'd consider it almost a required install
on any new system.;-)
Actually, Sun Microsystems for example makes
sure that your IP belongs to a well-known and
trusted subnet before it allows you to download
code that may infringe on export rules.
Which accomplishes... Nothing?
"Hi, Mom&Pop's Hometown ISP? I'd like to sign
up with you. Yup, great, can I pay for a year
in advance via direct deposit? Good. Okay, yeah,
I'll need a shell account, does that present a
problem? No? You'll have it active in fifteen
minutes? Great. Thanks, bye".
Poof, any amount of attempted IP-to-geography
mapping completely defeated. Saddam47@momnpop.com
now appears to come from Sandusky, Ohio, not
Tikrit, Iraq.
And that even goes so far as to assume someone
has to pay for such obfuscation of their
physical location... Personally, although I live
in the US and don't need to circumvent export
rules to do anything, I have a number of accounts
in various places to get around strange policies
I've encountered (such as "only from a.edu", or
"only from South Dakota"). And not a single one
of them have I ever needed to pay for (nor steal
them, which a "real" criminal probably would not
hesitate to do).
In most US states, as long as at least one
of the parties in a phone conversation knows
about the taping, the taping doesn't break the
law. This means you can tape any calls you make
or receive. Basically, the relevant laws only
affect an uninvolved 3rd party recording a
converation they listen in on without the
main parties of the call knowing about it.
However, I say "most states", not all, so
you might want to verify this for where you
live.
Do you have proof of this? It sounds like
complete bunk to me.
Wise default opinion... Even ignoring the
economics of the situation (how do they
sell a vehicle containing $100k worth of
platinum for FAR under $100k?), such
an assertion also ignores the requirements
of such a fuel cell as well.
First of all, most "platinum" catalysts
actually use palladium, still not cheap
but a tenth the cost of actual platinum.
Second, surface area means everything.
The most common way of maximizing surface
area of a catalyst involves using it as
a componant of the surface of a ceramic
material (such as in catalytic converters,
which on average use less than a quarter
of milligram of palladium). On a similar
catalyst-density to a catalytic converter,
even using real platinum rather than palladium,
you would need a ceramic cube over 250 feet
on a side to use up $100,000 worth of
platinum).
Finally, even if this particular use required
(for some strange reason) non-powdered metal,
presenting a solid metalic surface - Making it
into a foil bonded to some less expensive metal
(copper, for instance) would give you (at least)
125 square feet of surface area. A thick
electroplating could beat that by an order of
magnitude.
So no, you should not believe it, without some
totally irrefutable proof.
Real Linux hackers do not use man! They look
at the source and figure out how the program
works from the command line!
You may jest, but I've had to resort to this
more than a few times, for programs with badly
out-of-date man pages... Happily typing along,
look up feature "foo", try using the --foo=bar
switch, and then wondering why the hell I end
up with 206 pages of seemingly-random garbage.
Messy (and slow), but 100% effective in figuring
out just what "foo" does.
Apropos (no pun intended) of the actual FP,
many such inaccuracies in man pages seem to
involve the interaction of POSIX compliance
with the familiar classic UNIX-like tools.
So, with luck, this may actually mean the
man pages will become a tad more accurate in
the near future.
You have to demonstrate that the copy was
DIRECTLY DERIVED FROM your original. Did the
company access your database server to get
their copy of your information? If not, your
allegations of copyright violation won't get
very far.
Thanks to the music industry, we have a precedent
for the idea of "passive" infringement - If a
musician produces something that sounds like a
pre-existing song, the mere fact that they might
have heard the preexisting song counts as
sufficient proof that they copied it, if
subconsciously. Why would that not apply to this,
assuming I make my database available somehow
(such as putting it on a webpage)?
but does that mean I've violated Seuss'
copyright by typing that sentence?
A very reasonable chance exists that any
English-speaking person could come up with
that phrase without having read any Dr. Seuss.
Could you say the same for my social security
number? My favorite beer? My annual income
for the past decade? I think not.
You have to demonstrate that the copy was
DIRECTLY DERIVED FROM your original
As I mentioned to someone else in this thread,
every company that has "my" email address has
a different one, by which I can not only prove
it came from me - How do you "independantly" get
a bogus email address that contains a hash
(the exact nature of which I have never disclosed
to anyone) allowing me to relate it back to the
company in question?
For "real" facts, like 2+2=4, I would tend to
agree with you. Personal data, however, cannot
come from anywhere but me, originally.
Without me, it simply doesn't exist.
Actually already has your stats in a
database. Their lawyers will be contacting
you shortly:-)
Ah, but I've thoughtfully included tracer-data
(y'know, like they do on maps, where you have a
fake town appearing so they can prove someone
stole their work if that same place appears on
someone else's map)... Ask 27 different companies
my email address, and you'll get 27 different
answers. And if you get less than 27, I can
track which company(ies) not only infringed on
my own data, but sold it to someone else.;-)
I think people have missed a possible use
of this that benefits the public, and the very
reason why companies like AT&T oppose this
bill...
This would make it legal to copyright collections
of personal data. Copyright protections also
extend to derivative works of existing copyrighted
material (which in this case means subsets and/or
the addition of other information).
How does this benefit the average Joe? Simple.
Take every bit of personal information you can
think of, stick it into a database, and file
for a copyright on it. Poof, you've just made
every company out there trying to gather data
on you guilty of a copyright violation for which
you can sue them (and theoretically win, if the
courts don't consider this as yet another law
that only benefits corporations). And, as a
bonus, the courts take copyright violations
for monetary gain FAR more seriously than just
coincidental violations, so companies selling
your (copyrighted) personal information between
each other commit an even more serious offense.
Sweet. Consider this my notification to the world
that I have just compiled such a collection, and
consider it copyrighted.
except for those (like me) with Raynaud's
syndrome
A suggestion, that you won't find in most
"respectable" sources (ie, official medical
literature)...
My SO also suffers from Reynauds, and makes
use of a very ancient and well-known method
of encouraging peripheral vasodilation (ie,
increasing blood circulation in the hands):
Have a drink. A beer, a shot of rum, a glass
of wine, something like that. You don't need
a lot (not even enough to feel more than a
slight buzz), and obviously can't use this
all the time (ie, at work, while driving), but
when just sitting around at home, with your
hands white and painfully cold, it works
wonders.
Slashdot Mirror
Not trying to to be a jerk, just wanting to inform people who need to use it
Not at all! Thank you for that link.
Although I personally have switched to 7z for almost everything, having more tools available for scripting never hurts. And as you mention, in case of a corporate policy restricting people to WZ, those command-line tools may seem like a blessing (I know I would have loved them at my previous job).
Download 7-zip instead. Totally free, no fancy crap, and works great for all kinds of archives.
.zip files, it
gets around 10% better compression than
anything else out there. And for it own .7z
format, you can easily get 33% better, and
I've seen more than 10 times better
(7z includes solid archive support, one of
the features people rave about in RARs (ick!),
which for packing a collection of similar
files in the same archive, means all of
them after the first compress to almost
nothing).
I'll second this. Since I started using it, 7z has become my archival tool of choice. Even for creating plain old
And, 7z exists as open source! Can't go wrong with that (unless you work for SCO).
One complaint, though, its GUI really sucks (or at least the last time I reinstalled it did, I haven't checked for a new one in a while). They need to make it behave more like the standard Windows Explorer view (not that I think the world of Windows Explorer, but on a 'doze system, for the most part you can count on "things having to do with files" behaving like it, by default)... Just the standard drag-n-drop behavior would make it 10x easier. But, I use it mostly from the command line anyway (Try doing that with WinZip), so the GUI doesn't bother me all that much.
ISP's could probably swing a connection for $20/mo with (oh I don't know) 50-75 gb of transfer. Best to make it symetrical traffic too. Then, when someones goes over it, charge them per gb of traffic.
Not bad, but I would add one special situation...
Bandwidth within their own network aught to count less (perhaps just apply a factor of 0.25 or something like that), since it costs the ISP less (basically only their own equipment maintenance, rather than actually having to buy external bandwidth).
Together with a symmetric connection, this could actually reduce the ISP's operating costs... Let's say my ISP has 10k subscribers... Most likely, one of them has anything I want (P2P seems like the most obvious example, although I personally have never really gotten into using P2P). So, if I have a cap of 75GB, but by staying local I can effectively grab 300GB per month, that provides me with quite a lot of motivation to reduce my ISP's costs purely for my own selfish benefit.
Unlike water, bandwidth is truly infinite. However, it costs money to generate.
I agree with most of your points, except would like an explanation of this one... Could you (or anyone, really) explain this to me?
I have a sizeable home LAN (three segments, two switches, networked printing, dedicated fileserver, between 4 and 7 different OSs, and a masq/firewall box to get to the internet). Aside from my internet connection, the only cost I have comes from electricity. Now, I realize that high-end routers cost a WHOLE lot more than my paltry little FD 100BT toys, but they also serve several orders of magnitude more people.
So, why exactly does bandwidth cost money? Or rather, so much money? If I shuffle a few hundred gigabytes per day around my LAN, it costs me only a few cents more per year in electricity than if my network sits idle all the time. The hardware itself, over time, comes out to (scribling on envelope) less than two bucks each month per person in my house. So how does my $30+/mo cablemodem bill not cover the cost of truly unlimited service? I only have two people to spread my costs over - They have literally millions.
People need to get paid, equipment breaks and needs upgrading, yadda yadda yadda. But how on Earth does that end up costing, per end user, more than a few bucks per year? Where does all the money actually go?
"Insightful"?
Gimme a break! This guy has either trolled rather effectively, or just begs for a conviction for outright fraud.
Of course, in my late teens, many of my friends worked for small local ISPs, and I have to admit he may well tell the truth. Small ISPs make a great front for a mob money-laundering operation (I say this from personal knowledge, though I never had any involvement whatsoever with such dealings) - And even the ones really running a more-or-less legit business make used car salesmen look like saints.
The rest either server a very niche market, or cease to exist within a few months.
"After the SAS [Security Attention Sequence] is triggered in Windows NT, all user-mode programs stop. No program can trap the SAS sequence;
Yeah? Tell that to a misbehaving MSIE or Media player that has decided to arbitrarily start thrashing disk and doing something that on a very old 'nix system I would call a fork() bomb... Press the three-finger salute, and it merely ignores you.
Of course, both of those, as MS programs, no doubt have special exemptions to any sort of rules keeping normal user-mode code in check. So this doesn't really surprise me (or even entirely mean MS lied about nothing having the ability to trap it - They just mean nothing they didn't write).
What is offensive here is the assupmtion that people in other places are so damn stupid that will allow to be exploited
I did not call such people "stupid". You read that into my comment all by your lonesome.
What a company like Nike pays such people does count as a fair wage in the local region - The same way you could say that Wallyworld pays its US employees a fair wage (ie, just enough to keep them desperate and 100% dependant on their employer, but alive and capable of working). However, the problem comes from the typical pattern of single-industry areas once a sweatshop moves in. With the entire local economy based on a Nike plant, the people have no choice but to subsistance farm or work for Nike (and regarding your mention of threats and force, I've read more than a few accounts of sweatshop management all but enslaving the local population against their will). Then, if the locals get uppity, the plant simply moves, leaving a ghosttown (not unlike the US steel mills, except at least those workers had *some* ability to move away to find other work).
As for India, I would not consider it a 3rd-world nation. The same ideas apply, however, where you have mono-industry moving in and dominating the local economy, to the point that people have little choice but to work for them. When that bubble bursts (most likely from companies realizing they can outource to China and undercut even Indian standard pay rates), I don't look forward to the horror stories we'll hear about.
More importantly, and this applies to India as well as 3rd-world sweatshops, companies move there not only for the pay benefits - They also enjoy GREATLY relaxed labor laws and environmental regulations compared to the US and Western Europe. So we get places like Bhopal, where a company (Union Carbide, now Dow) not only exploited the local population, but left the area literally a toxic wasteland.
otherwise you would have placed your example not in the most stable democracy in the continent but somewhere where dictatorship flourished
Democracy has nothing to do with this, although I will admit I picked that particular country out of thin air as "typical 3rd-world place that most people have heard of". So that alone will I apologize for, if I actually spoke incorrectly. So substitute some other 3rd world country, and try re-reading what I wrote.
But if it makes you feel better, go ahead and call me a troll. I suppose the label even fits what I said, though not in the normal sense - What I say sounds pretty ugly, it will keep coming back until you completely eliminate it, and if you pretend it doesn't exist, it will eventally destroy everything around it.
The Palestinians don't want freedom from Israel, if they did they would have taken the offer of a state they got 3 years ago instead of launching this latest jihad.
No, I suspect you have that correct - They don't want "freedom from Israel"... They want their damn land back! Why should they accept a tiny strip of land, rather than insisting on what they had before?
If I came to your house, kicked you out into the dog-house, and then offered you a "peace treaty" to let you keep the dog-house, would you walk away smiling at your great success at the negotiating table?
I suspect you'd see that situation as a tad bit different.
We hear a very one-sided view of this particular situation, because news outlets (other than the GP's claim about the views of the BBC) greatly fear the "anti-Jewish" label. I used to fear similarly as well, suffering a tad bit of cognitive dissonance as a result, until I realized something VERY important... "Israel" does not equal "Jews" (although it has done its best to blur that point, hoping our memory of WWII will keep us from protesting their actions that, performed by any other country, we would consider as bad as Saddam treated the Kurds). "Israel", though made up of a large number of Jews, exists as a political entity, with its own goals and means, entirely separate from either the race or the religion.
You can observe that "Israel" commits atrocities that make people wonder if they've copied a few pages from Hitler's playbook, without it meaning that you want to put Jews back in camps. You can say "Sharon should stand trial for his actions against the Palestinians", and it doesn't mean you have close-cropped hair and discuss the Final Solution while goose-stepping around your bunker.
See the difference? Try it a bit, and you might feel a lot better. Israel can err. It can commit crimes against humanity. You can admit that, and it doesn't make you a Jew-hater, because Israel has as much to do with Judaism as a philosophy, as Stalin's regime did with actual communism - Just a name.
This guy is just being a bastard with this line, "I wonder how much it would cost them if someone, say, automated searching for those links on Google."
Perhaps you could explain to me what you think he meant by that?
Search engines work best by providing an impartial means of finding sites related to the query. News outlets work best by providing an impartial view of current events. When paid promotion hits the scene, they both become completely useless, at best - Suddenly, they have a bottom line, rather than impartiality or any sense of integrity in their field, to worry about.
So, you would call him a bastard? I say this sounds like a good way to discourage people from buying keywords to things they have no right monopolizing. Make it impractical. Make it ineffective. Make it expensive.
Unless of course you plan on driving that Viper off a cliff in the middle of drug binge. Good way to go out, actually.
In that case, keep whatever it takes to buy the drugs, donate the rest to the SCO defense fund, and wreck a Viper while taking it for a test drive.
Heh... Actually buy it, just to wreck it in a fatal crash? How absurd!
$500 a month to rent a room
Where the hell do you live? Anywhere that has housing that cheap, has no jobs. Anywhere that has decent-paying jobs, try more like $800 for a livable apartment, and easily over $1200 in any densely populated area (ie, the places with the most jobs).
$20 a month for phone serviceZ
The absolute cheapest I can get phone service in my area comes to over $30 - And that assumes I have no special services and never make any LD calls.
$50 a year for bus service
WHAT??? Put down the crack pipe. First of all, just HAVING bus service available goes back to my first point, where you need to have a fairly dense (tight suburban) population. So stick the rent over $800. Second, a bus pass costs more like $50 per month... In Boston, you can get a fairly limited (destination-wise) pass for $31/month. For a full unlimited pass, try $79, and that still doesn't include MA-wide commuter rail (required unless you want to live right in the city and pay more like $1800+ for rent).
Not even including other expenses (food, heat, clothes TV, electricity, water, an a million-and-one little things that all add up), that comes out to nearly $16,000 to live in the Boston suburbs. Add in just heat and electric, and you have another 3-5 grand per year, easily.
I find it rather ironic that so many people in America, the land of capitalism, hate outsourcing so much. This is simple economics right out of Adam Smith.
Some of us have a very good reason to disapprove of outsourcing such as this, also straight out of Adam Smith...
To have commerce based on producers and consumers, you need to have both sides of that equasion. You can't have just producers, and you can't have just consumers.
Outsourcing to places with lower standard incomes may sound like a dream to the production-side of the equasion, all else held equal - Companies can produce goods for a lower cost.
However, this seeming benefit comes at a hidden cost - The "consumers" of these products can no longer afford to buy them. Sure, the producer can open up a market in the area of production, but due to the drastically lower wages, they need to charge far less than their original batch of consumers could pay. In the long run, this pushes down the price of the product, and introduces serious disruptions to the economy as a whole.
Companies need to look beyond next quarter's revenues, and realize that they have traded temporarily higher profits for a long-term loss.
Companies need consumers. Consumers need jobs. End of story.
Wow, what an incredible article. Allow me to summarize it, in an analogy:
I'd like to introduce you to Juan. A healthy, though very lean, eight year old boy, the rigors of his life have not yet beaten him down. His bright eyes still have a glint of boyish exuberance in them, and he still has all ten of his fingers.
Juan works in a Nike factory in Costa Rica. He has since turning four, and will most likely work there for the rest of his life. He makes 22 cents per week, not a great amount of money but decent for the area in which he lives. With a small supplemental farm, his family can feed itself between Juan's, his parents', and his seven remaining siblings' income from Nike. He spends his spare time doing odd jobs, saving up to one day buy a pair of the shoes he helps make.
Now, meet Joe. Joe lives in San Diego, California. This annoyingly whiney middle aged dead-beat dad used to work for Nike, until his plant relocated to Costa Rica. Joe spends his days begging for spare change, and protesting at WTO conferences against the loss of American jobs.
Juan does his job every bit as well as Joe used to, except that he doesn't complain constantly, doesn't demand unionization or health benefits, and doesn't even go to the bathroom during his 14-hour shifts.
So, dear readers, please see that Juan doesn't hate you, and that globalization means good things, for everybody.
This is news, but only in the sense that Nomadix was the first to patent this idea that will possibly become quite important in the future.
Patents also theoretically require their subject to count as non-obvious (the single criterion the USPTO seems to conveniently overlook most often, IMO)... Nomadix may have done it first, and even filed for a patent first, but that doesn't make this any more "right". If truly an act of creation, then doing it first and filing first matters; In this case, they just beat the rush of literally hundreds of people who "discovered" the exact same solution to a particular problem, all within a very small timeframe. That strongly suggests this as an "obvious" solution, thus invalidating it for a patent.
That doesn't mean the USPTO sees it that way, however. The same USPTO that doesn't consider "store a cookie with customer data in it" as obvious. The same USPTO that, although overturned just today, actually ISSUED a patent that Lemelson deliberately stalled in the pipeline for half-a-freakin'-century to pop up recently and start extorting with.
So will this stand? It wouldn't surprise me. But to actually call it "fair" or in any way "non-obvious"? No way in hell. Using a butterknife to tighten a screw may sound like an admirable way to deal with the lack of a screwdriver, but any moron with a knife, a screw, and no screwdriver, will come up with the same solution, even in isolation.
Its like having mcDonalds downgrade their free toy from a fun windup to to just a damn doll that doesn't do shit.
I prefer to think of it as getting a happymeal toy that lets you record your own messages, rather than just repeating "Can we go to McDonalds", "I love Ronald", and "Big Macs don't make you fat", over and over and over.
Realistically, you can do two things with one of these (and no, I don't include "install FreeDOS" as a viable option)... You can install Linux on it, or you can install the version of Windows you bought for your old machine (which, assuming you remove it from your old machine, you won't violate any likely-to-stand-in-court aspects of the Windows EULA).
When people start doing illegal things such as writing viruses to get back at SCO, on the other hand, the Linux community loses much of its innocence.
When we bend over for SCO by playing along at the "US legal system" game/joke, we lose even if they do as well.
This will cost SCO money, possibly inconvenience them severely, and really has no impact whatsoever on their pending lawsuits. Good! The courts haven't done their job of spanking Darl for wasting our time and money, about time someone did.
Some people define insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. When you try to play fair over and over, and keep losing yet expect not to... Well... Take that as you will. But I for on will cheer this worm on.
This isn't a virus that exploits any holes in windows, it's a worm that exploits holes in user's heads.
;-)
Except that, by making us want to run it, perhaps this one gets the title of the world's first memetic virus (and no, I didn't mispell "mimetic")!
Somehow, considering the low chance of anyone manually-but-accidentally running this one, I'd have to say the author wrote it not so much as a virus, but as a "plausible deniability frontend" to a mostly-voluntary community-based DDOS against SCO.
Given that the worm is spreading so quickly, this means that people's stupidity once again surpasses our wildest expectations.
Such naivete... Again, I'd consider it far more likely, people run this one on purpose.
Now if they'd just add the RIAA and MPAA and the BSA (and I could probably come up with a few other (dis)interest-groups to add to it as well), I'd consider it almost a required install on any new system.
Actually, Sun Microsystems for example makes sure that your IP belongs to a well-known and trusted subnet before it allows you to download code that may infringe on export rules.
.edu", or
"only from South Dakota"). And not a single one
of them have I ever needed to pay for (nor steal
them, which a "real" criminal probably would not
hesitate to do).
Which accomplishes... Nothing?
"Hi, Mom&Pop's Hometown ISP? I'd like to sign up with you. Yup, great, can I pay for a year in advance via direct deposit? Good. Okay, yeah, I'll need a shell account, does that present a problem? No? You'll have it active in fifteen minutes? Great. Thanks, bye".
Poof, any amount of attempted IP-to-geography mapping completely defeated. Saddam47@momnpop.com now appears to come from Sandusky, Ohio, not Tikrit, Iraq.
And that even goes so far as to assume someone has to pay for such obfuscation of their physical location... Personally, although I live in the US and don't need to circumvent export rules to do anything, I have a number of accounts in various places to get around strange policies I've encountered (such as "only from a
[1] With explicit permission given.
In most US states, as long as at least one of the parties in a phone conversation knows about the taping, the taping doesn't break the law. This means you can tape any calls you make or receive. Basically, the relevant laws only affect an uninvolved 3rd party recording a converation they listen in on without the main parties of the call knowing about it.
However, I say "most states", not all, so you might want to verify this for where you live.
Do you have proof of this? It sounds like complete bunk to me.
Wise default opinion... Even ignoring the economics of the situation (how do they sell a vehicle containing $100k worth of platinum for FAR under $100k?), such an assertion also ignores the requirements of such a fuel cell as well.
First of all, most "platinum" catalysts actually use palladium, still not cheap but a tenth the cost of actual platinum. Second, surface area means everything. The most common way of maximizing surface area of a catalyst involves using it as a componant of the surface of a ceramic material (such as in catalytic converters, which on average use less than a quarter of milligram of palladium). On a similar catalyst-density to a catalytic converter, even using real platinum rather than palladium, you would need a ceramic cube over 250 feet on a side to use up $100,000 worth of platinum).
Finally, even if this particular use required (for some strange reason) non-powdered metal, presenting a solid metalic surface - Making it into a foil bonded to some less expensive metal (copper, for instance) would give you (at least) 125 square feet of surface area. A thick electroplating could beat that by an order of magnitude.
So no, you should not believe it, without some totally irrefutable proof.
Real Linux hackers do not use man! They look at the source and figure out how the program works from the command line!
You may jest, but I've had to resort to this more than a few times, for programs with badly out-of-date man pages... Happily typing along, look up feature "foo", try using the --foo=bar switch, and then wondering why the hell I end up with 206 pages of seemingly-random garbage. Messy (and slow), but 100% effective in figuring out just what "foo" does.
Apropos (no pun intended) of the actual FP, many such inaccuracies in man pages seem to involve the interaction of POSIX compliance with the familiar classic UNIX-like tools. So, with luck, this may actually mean the man pages will become a tad more accurate in the near future.
You have to demonstrate that the copy was DIRECTLY DERIVED FROM your original. Did the company access your database server to get their copy of your information? If not, your allegations of copyright violation won't get very far.
Thanks to the music industry, we have a precedent for the idea of "passive" infringement - If a musician produces something that sounds like a pre-existing song, the mere fact that they might have heard the preexisting song counts as sufficient proof that they copied it, if subconsciously. Why would that not apply to this, assuming I make my database available somehow (such as putting it on a webpage)?
but does that mean I've violated Seuss' copyright by typing that sentence?
A very reasonable chance exists that any English-speaking person could come up with that phrase without having read any Dr. Seuss. Could you say the same for my social security number? My favorite beer? My annual income for the past decade? I think not.
You have to demonstrate that the copy was DIRECTLY DERIVED FROM your original
As I mentioned to someone else in this thread, every company that has "my" email address has a different one, by which I can not only prove it came from me - How do you "independantly" get a bogus email address that contains a hash (the exact nature of which I have never disclosed to anyone) allowing me to relate it back to the company in question?
For "real" facts, like 2+2=4, I would tend to agree with you. Personal data, however, cannot come from anywhere but me, originally. Without me, it simply doesn't exist.
Actually already has your stats in a database. Their lawyers will be contacting you shortly :-)
;-)
Ah, but I've thoughtfully included tracer-data (y'know, like they do on maps, where you have a fake town appearing so they can prove someone stole their work if that same place appears on someone else's map)... Ask 27 different companies my email address, and you'll get 27 different answers. And if you get less than 27, I can track which company(ies) not only infringed on my own data, but sold it to someone else.
I think people have missed a possible use of this that benefits the public, and the very reason why companies like AT&T oppose this bill...
This would make it legal to copyright collections of personal data. Copyright protections also extend to derivative works of existing copyrighted material (which in this case means subsets and/or the addition of other information).
How does this benefit the average Joe? Simple. Take every bit of personal information you can think of, stick it into a database, and file for a copyright on it. Poof, you've just made every company out there trying to gather data on you guilty of a copyright violation for which you can sue them (and theoretically win, if the courts don't consider this as yet another law that only benefits corporations). And, as a bonus, the courts take copyright violations for monetary gain FAR more seriously than just coincidental violations, so companies selling your (copyrighted) personal information between each other commit an even more serious offense.
Sweet. Consider this my notification to the world that I have just compiled such a collection, and consider it copyrighted.
except for those (like me) with Raynaud's syndrome
A suggestion, that you won't find in most "respectable" sources (ie, official medical literature)...
My SO also suffers from Reynauds, and makes use of a very ancient and well-known method of encouraging peripheral vasodilation (ie, increasing blood circulation in the hands): Have a drink. A beer, a shot of rum, a glass of wine, something like that. You don't need a lot (not even enough to feel more than a slight buzz), and obviously can't use this all the time (ie, at work, while driving), but when just sitting around at home, with your hands white and painfully cold, it works wonders.