According to the Torah there was quite a bit of smiting that went on in which the people who were living there before Moses saw the view from Nebo.
It does not matter who was where first. What matters is whose rights are being respected and who is inciting the violence.
Bin Laden, the Taleban and the rest will be no loss to the world in the unlikely event that it turns out that some other party was actually behind the attacks. Bin Laden made a video of himself declaring war on the US five years ago with Al Zawari, the leader of Egytian Al Jihad who is inaccurately referred to by CNN as 'Bin Laden's number 2'. Al Jihad has been in the terrorism business for 20 years, long before Bin Laden became a fanatic.
Bin Laden declared war, the Taleban supported him. The US has every right to drop munitions on both.
Don't forget in all this however that what happened in NYC is much less than what the Taleban have been doing in their own country. They have murdered tens of thousands a year to stay in power directly and hundreds of thousands indirectly through the famine and disease their policies have caused. They are the Afghan Khmer Rouge.
Back to Israel, Sharon's behavior has been unforgivable. Asked to support the US in its time of need he has stabbed it in the back. Sharon and the Israeli right have been doing their best to disrupt the peace process ever since Sharon sparked the latest unrest by forcing his way into the Al Aquar mosque with a bunch of thugs. It was a totaly unecessary action that was intended to provoke a reaction and so 'justify' counter-reaction by the Israeli army.
Sharon's gambit succeeded, he provoked the Intifada which brought down the Israeli government and brought Sharon to power. It was an entirely cynical power grab. That does not excuse the kids throwing rocks or the loonies blowing themselves up. But whenever Sharon makes his complaints about the violence it has to be remembered that he deliberately set the match to the tinder.
These actions have not escaped the UK foreign office - Jack Straw recently called Sharon 'a cancer', nor the Bush administration. Anyone who thinks that a UK foreign secretary makes such statements by mistake or without US approval at a time such as this is a fool. Straw was acting on instructions to sent Sharon a warning. US pressure on Sharon to cease building of further 'settlements' is going to become unrelenting.
The other dimension the US media only touches on is the extent to which this whole mess is driven by drugs. Afghanistan might have had a decent government long ago but for the profits from the drug trade. Bin Laden's fortune would not finance an army for long without his share from the heroin trade.
One solution (politically unacceptable) would be to legalize hard drugs. The west would see a few tens of thousands of bodies of people who chose to kill themselves with the stuff clogging up its morgues, but the narcocracies would fall as the profits from the drugs trade dried up with increased supply and the total deaths would be much fewer.
Another would be for those heroin junkies who are running arround waving the stars and stripes pretending to be patriotic to give up heroin instead. Nobody who is funding the terrorists who murdered 7000 in New York should have the right to carry their flag.
The assertion that the UK doesn't recognize Sealand as a state is unfounded. The UK has, de facto, done so by refusing to intervene during the period when Sealand held a German national prisoner after an attempted takeover of the platform
Untrue. At the time of the incident the platform was outside UK waters. Now it is inside.
The point you attempt to make about 'international law' is utterly bogus. No country recognises Sealand. Under UK law any ship that is not registered with what UK law determines to be a national government may be considered a pirate vessel.
The failure to close down Sealand does not mean that the UK government recognises it. That will not stop the Libbertarian Taleban from arguing the theology of the case at inordinate length.
If as alleged Sealand was a sovereign teritory then the UK government could under accepted international law serve it a notice insisting that it cease aiding and abetting criminals. If Sealand declined it could under international law issue an ultimatum and commence hostilities.
Given the measures likely to be agreed by the UN security council in the comming weeks the chances are that the UK would even be able to state it was operating under a UN mandate.
Bruce is CTO at counterpane. Whit is a Fellow at Sun. Sure they might be on an advisory board, but that type of work is not exactly onerous. ZeroKnowledge has several well known names but they are only 4 or 5 out of the top 100.
It is not unusual for well financed startup companies to crash and burn despite top people. There have been several that have crashed and burned because they had too many. Its the same in crypto, DigiCash and Cybercash both went under, PGP burned through cash so fast it had to be rescued even before the dotcom bubble burst. Baltimore and Entrust are both looking wobbly.
I posted a story to slashdot predicting this would happen a couple of weeks ago.
The whole cryptographic anonymity area was likely to take a massive hit in the wake of the WTC attack.
Even if ZeroKnowledge had kept going the increased scrutiny and surveillance would render the scheme pointless. Having a FreedomNet account or connecting to the server would get you put on a watch list the minute the NSA found out - and find out they would.
I suspect that the number of hosting facilities willing to run the service servers declined substantially after the WTC attack.
I would not give the Sealand folk much chance of lasting very much longer. For all the riddiculous libberprattle the platform is now inside UK territorial waters and the UK government does not recognise sealand as a state. Since the sealand employees are mainly from the US that would make them illegal workers subject to arrest when they set foot on the mainland.
I can't even tell you how many ADMINS I have met in corporate who say things like, "But all the upper-lower case, numbers, &$% stuff is hard to remember."
The use of a single upper case or symbol character in a password does not increase the randomness of the password by very much in practice. Most users simply add a number at the beginning or end of a word. The cost of a dictionary attack goes up a bit, but it still ain't very secure.
The only way to make passwords secure is to severly limit the scope of brute force attack. Partitioning the password verification database into two parts such that both have to be compromised before the attacker can start a brute force attack.
No, but I have never lost. I hesitate to call it a win when the verdict is in your favor but you have a $2 million plus legal bill.
It is not a matter of fighting the system, we know that if we ever pay off one of the patent trolls we will be hit by a flood of spurious claims. The troll lawyers are like confidence tricksters, they share information on marks that have paid up in the past. And no, I don't thing the lying theives can be trusted to keep a confidentiality clause.
Yes I know what you meant and sorry for the bad choice of words. The video editor in this case has multiple camera feeds. He doesn't get to pause or rewind the feed.
Tapeless systems have been arround for ten years, long before the patent issued.
Yes you do get to pause the feed. The fact that the device does much much more is irrelevant. It provides that function and does so in the manner specified in the patent.
A video editor has the luxury of a pre-recorded tape(s) at his disposal. If he were to attempt to edit a live broadcast, his equipment couldn't do it. In fact Tivo can't do it either. The two functions are disparate and unique.
I said live video editing because that is what I meant. They have existed for live action replay of sports events for twenty odd years. Disk based rigs have existed for at least ten.
In 1990 that type of rig cost hundreds of thousands. Quantel(?) used to make them for the likes of the BBC and NBC. They were the systems used to show the viewers Balisteros the shot made a few minutes ago while the station was showing Faldo.
The fact that Motorola decided to pay the licensing fees should give you some indication as to how "non-infringing" such a system is.
The standard ploy of a patent troll is to sell an early license cheap for the sole purpose of making fools like yourself think 'well if Motorola paid $500 for a license they must have spent $20,000 checking its validity.
Or maybe you are a patent troll trying to smurf the worthless patent?
I have fought patent lawsuits in the past and I am involved in one now. I know how patent trolls operate. Selling credibility licenses for free is a standard ploy.
Tivo will have obtained a non-infringement opinion because by doing so they avoid the triple damages for willful infringement. Before filling a lawsuit Pause will have sent out a letter putting Tivo on notice of their patent claims so they can claim triple damages.
Remember, digital VCRs didn't exist back then. Video capture cards were hideously expensive and reserved for professional video editors.
Not true. There were enough low end ones arround for quite a bit of material captured with a frame grabber to appear on alt.binaries.pictures.erotica
Real time video editing rigs may have been expensive but that does not stop them being prior art. The idea of making professional gear cheaper and selling it to consumers is not patentable.
The fact that Tivo is giving the patent troll the finger is by far the most significant indication of what they think of the patent. They will have done due dilligence and probably obtained a non-infringement opinion.
The fact that Motorola bought a license is irrelevant. The terms on which they bought the license are unknown. They probably got a license sold to them cheap so pause tv could claim some credibility when they went after Tivo. My policy (which is currently my company's policy) is we don't pay off patent trolls under any circumstances, even if they offer us a permanent royalty free license. As a result we spend several millions on fighting lawsuits that should never be filled. However we don't just walk away after we win, we then go on to file vexatious litigation suits against the plaintifs and if appropriate civil perjury suits against the original inventors.
However, the fact that Motorola licensed the technology indicates there may actually be some merit to this patent debate.
Bzztt. Wrong
The usual strategy adopted by the patent trolls is to sell an early license to a big company for practically nothing. They do this precisely because it lends credibility.
Motorola probably got an equity stake in the patent troll's company in return.
The idea of pausing live TV goes back several decades. The BBC was doing it on match of the day in the 1970s.
The suit has probably been filed now because Tivo is in deep do do and the patent claim may cloud any possible takeover.
You can find out what congressman are being paid by industry at http://www.opensecrets.org
Yes and much good it will do there. The only people going to the site already know how corrupt US politicians are.
What we need is for the broader alternative media to keep on their case. Make sure that every time some slimeball has taken $500,000 plus to shill for some commercial interest that his name and the sum of money get bracketed together, for example Robert "1.2 million from ADM" Dole.
First off, the bill ain't going to pass this session. That is in nobody's interest, or at least in no senators inerest. Before they allow a bill like that to pass or be defeated they want to squeeze the industries concerned to see how much in the way of campaign contribution bribes they can extort from each side.
I recomend that slashdot have a counter going showing the amount of the bribes accepted by various senators from the media industry. And yes, they are bribes pure and simple.
Second point is that the IT industry can't comply with the bill if it wanted to. There are many working groups that have been developing DRM standards - MPEG, IETF-DRM, XACML and others. Lack of interest has not been the problem, the difficulty of converging the technology is very high.
In particular the incompetence of the USPTO which has granted thousands of spurious patent claims in the area prevents a workable agreement being reached. There are too many overlapping rights to build a workable system without a serious risk of being sued. This despite the fact that there is prior art for paractically all the technologies.
Legislative fiat will not speed up the technology efforts, in fact they will retard the process. The manufacturers know that if they call the studios bluff and refuse to agree that they can play out the end game in the law courts for decades.
The best way to derail the effort is by reminding congress of the lies they were fed to pass the DMCA. Even Orin Hatch has realized he was had. In particular the clause introduced by the recording industry that tried to grab the returned rights of recording artists was so eggergious that Congress repealled it without demanding fresh bribes.
Also the comparison should be continually to the demands made when recording technology first became mass market. The publishers fought to prevent cassette tape and the VCR from being sold - and lost conclusively.
At the end of the day the recording industry has nowhere near the influence of the computer industry. Quite a few computer companies have revenues greater than those of all the recording companies and film studios combined.
Congress is not about to severely damage its most successful industry by far in order to protect an industry that is far from struggling.
I think that icann should stop bullying people around and let some of the rouge TLD's in. But I do see people using the new TLD's as a good step.
The only people I have seen bullying anyone have been the rogue TLDs.
There are plenty of name squatters who have bought up new.net swampland who would like their real estate to be connected up to the interstate. So they yammer on with squeals of complaint.
Anthrax isn't deliverable by water. Your worst fear should be clouds of anthrax delivered via air, since anthrax:
*is easy to produce
Hogwash. The UK did trials of Anthrax durring WWII. They concluded that as a weapon it was no use. 'Anthrax island' is still contaminated with the stuff, but it is still inhabited by the local wildlife. There is a serious environmental contamination, but it is at the level of severe asbestos contamination rather than the 'step foot on the island and die instantly clutching your throat' variety.
The gang of loonies who let of Sarin gas in the Tokyo subway only managed to kill 6 people with a nerve agent allegedly far more toxic. They made 5000 odd people unwell but even in the confined space of the subway they simply could not get the stuff distributed evenly enough to kill the thousands they planned.
The basic problem with poisons is that though they may kill in what appears to be a minute quantity it takes an awfully large amount of stuff to add even one part per billion to a large public space. Thats about a teaspoonfull in a small swimming pool. Think of the amount of stuff you need to poison a reservoir or gas people sitting in the open air.
In trench warfare the caualties were high because the quantities of poison thrown arround were vast, tonnes and tonnes.
The tokyo loonies built a small chemical factory, they could have killed many more people if they had put the same effort into making explosives. If they had got their hands on some automatic weapons instead they could have killed many more.
This 'poor mans nuclear bomb' stuff is great copy but the threat is greatly overstated.
HP is sending a clear signal that it is ending the PA-RISC and HP/UX line. The reason for this should be obvious to anyone looking at industry trends, the gross margins on high end hardware are shrinking and the sales simply don't support the R&D required to support bespoke software development.
SGI got squeezed out because it tried to protect its margins by going further and further upmarket as workstations became commodity products. In the process the volume shrank to the point where they simply didn't sell enough stuff to cover their R&D costs. Once they had to cut back on R&D they were not upmarket much longer.
The high end server market was once dominated by performance concerns. Now it is dominated by reliability concerns. The profit to be gained in squeezing the last ounce of power out of the Itanium is negligible.
If the ASP outsourced hosting model takes off the demand for high reliability transaction systems will be very different. Instead of a large number of medium to high performance systems there will be a much smaller number of ultra-high performance systems sold. The performance won't come from putting 64 processors into a high end box however, it will come from putting a few thousand loosely coupled processors in a large rack and feeding it a couple of terrabytes of RAID disk.
HP's merger with Compaq is about building a dominant position in the volume PC market, printers, desktop PCs, home PCs, handheld devices. For the same amount of effort required to build a O/S kernel on a new processor HP can develop three or four mass market products that are much more likely to generate profits.
If the Compaq merger completes HP will have two high quality UNIX builds to choose from. Porting of the Mach kernel based Digital Unix is likely to be easier since it has been ported several times already.
The only surprising thing about the announcement is that the engineers are being laid off rather than re-assigned. That would indicate to me that HP is retreating on the whole UNIX front and not just on HP/UX.
My company uses Gartner to produce PR material, oops completely impartial and unbiased explanations of why our products are good and our competition is rubbish.
I am amazed that people give Gartner, Giga and the rest any credibility at all. We don't hire them to make impartial analyses of the market. We hire them to push our product. If they concluded that the competition was better then they would never get another gig from us in the future.
What is amazing however is that the same people who purchase PR fluff then go and read other people's PR fluff and believe it.
People who really know about technology don't spend their time writing PR fluff for Gartner etc.
The idea that companies using IIS can switch to something else simply because security maintenance is lower cost is pretty idiotic. If you have an IIS site you are almost certainly doing so because you have a reason and will probably have a non-negligible switching cost. If you have developed ASP scripts you can't just switch to Apache overnight.
cato.org, huh? Same guys that tried to suggest Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in the operating systems market?
I think you are thinking of the "Independent Institute". It is an easy mistake to make however because the whole rack of 15 or so right wing crank-tanks are funded by a group of about six billionaires.
Cato was founded to provide a right wing alternative to the Brookings institute. It is not a 'research' institute in the conventional sense since like the Taleban they already know the truth.
The purpose of Cato being to prop up GOP propaganda the 'research' is about as reliable as the politicians they work for.
If people arn't queing up to buy.info then I'll bet that very few people are buying the new.net domains.
The premise of new.net seems to be get enough people pointing their DNS systems to hit your server and you don't need to be in the ICANN root. Problem is that the domains only have a 5% probability of working for a given net user.
I wouldn't give a @#$^^ for new.net except for their paid flacks popping up arroung the net to shill for them. The scam seems to be they get a bunch of tasty names then shill endlessly in an attempt to get the new.net root incorporated into the ICANN one so their tasty names suddenly become worth squillions of dollars.
Re:They talked about this on the "O'Reilly Factor"
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A New Kind of War
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· Score: 2
I agree with that, however, the current environment has made it impossible to infiltrate groups like the militant Islamic groups.
If the CIA believe that they should all be fired. There are over a million arab americans living in the US. There are a million moslems living in the UK. There are a quarter of a billion of them in the neighbouring states to afghanisan.
Given the fractious nature of Islamic politics it should not be beyond the ability of a moderately competent inteligence agency to recruit people to infiltrate.
Turning insiders is also an option, however turned agents are very different from moles. If you don't have the ability to infiltrate a group you are most unlikely to be able to turn someone inside it.
Guerilla war is not new. The name comes from the Spanish resistance to the French during the Napoleonic wars. The key issue however is the degree of local support. The French were considered invaders by the vast majority of the inhabitants, as were the Russians in Afghanistan.
Terrain is only one factor in a war, and guerilla wars have been successful in practically every type of terrain. The fact that the Soviets and the British were defeated in Afghanistan does not indicate that the terrain is intrinsically impossible to invade, after all the Taleban managed to do so successfully.
There is considerable evidence that the vast bulk of the Afgahn people do not support the Taleban but are prepared to tolerate them as a better alternative to instability. In fact the Taleban are almost exclusively from a single ethnic group that comprises only 35% of the population, there is considerable evidence of widespread attrocities by the Taleban against the other ethnic groups.
The key difference between this war and previous wars is that in all previous guerilla wars the objective of the invading power has been to hold the population centers and territory against the guerillas. In this case however the objective is quite different, the US could care less about controlling Kabul, what it wants to do is to deny Taleban control.
The other point is that most guerilla campaigns fail without the support of a major power that is at least comparable in power to the opponent. In the Spanish peninsular war the Guerillas were supported by the British (and vice versa), but the Guerillas could never have succeeded alone, the Spanish simply could not train troops to meet Napoleon in open battles. Equally the Vietnamese could not have beaten the US without Chineese support.
I find it strange that while the USA jumped to calling this latest terrorism a war, the UK spent 25 years denying that terrorism inflicted upon them by the IRA was a war.
The differences are of scale and the fact that the IRA did not represent a state or anything close to one. The IRA has consistently failed to gain more than 5% of the vote in elections either side of the border. Bin Laden and his accomplices are in effect sponored by the Taleban which is the effective power in Afghanistan.
The other reason is that such subtle issues are lost on dubyah. The US has declared war on drugs, cancer, why not terrorism? Other unfortunate statements from dubyah were his speech in NYC which began 'America is on its knees (long pause)'. Unfortunately dubyah is not Ronald Reagan. Reagan could make a speech that written on paper was complete nonsense but get across exactly the right message. dubyah does the opposite.
Disgustingly, 12 prisoners were allowed to die from hunger strike (among them, an elected member of parlement, Bobby Sands) because the IRA prisoners wanted to be considered prisoners of war.
Why should the British government give in to a bunch of terrorists just because they threaten to starve themselves? They were all convicted of murder or assisting murder. If they want to cease being a cost to the British taxpayer they should be allowed to do so.
Re:They talked about this on the "O'Reilly Factor"
on
A New Kind of War
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· Score: 2
Senator Torticelli is the one blamed with this rule, but it doesn't really mean that you can't papy informants that have comminted "human rights violations". It just means that the field officer has to ask permission of the CIA director (all the way up !) to do so.
The reason for the rule is that many in Congress were fed up with the CIA paying the likes of Noriega, Suharto, Saddam etc and supporting regimes that murdered large number of their citizens.
The underlying problem is that the US has for years cried 'wolf' on terrorism. The term was used to provide blanket justification for any policy the government of the day was into. So Cuba and other countries the US happened to have a policy difference with were labelled 'state sponsors of terrorism'. Meanwhile the CIA was funding drug running terrorists such as the Nicaraguan Contras.
A large part of the responsibility for the attack must rest on successive Presidents who abused the CIA and FBI for their own political purposes and not for national defence. The assasination of the democratically elected Lumumba in the Congo and imposition of Mugabwe cost millions of lives. The action was not done to defend democracy but to try to impose a dictator who would be on 'our side'.
In particular Nixon's actions were uniquely corrosive to US democratic institutions. The Reagan/Bush Iran-Contra abuses compounded the problem. Selling arms to the Iranian taleban types and using the proceeds to instigate a proxy war in Nicaragua.
The much maligned ban on assasination was only introduced because the US realised that having engineered the assasination of eight other world leaders it was quite likely that other countries were plotting to assasinate the US president in what they considered to be self defence.
The people running arround complaining that the CIA was handcuffed are by and large the same people whose schemes made the restrictions necessary.
What is the deal with the "liberal media" anyway? Where did this concept come from?
It comes from two sources. For the ideological right it comes from the inbuilt belief that anyone that does not believe as they do must be part of an evil conspiracy. During the 1970s when ideologues were ascendent in the left the common complaint was the inbuilt bias of the establisment media
The more cynical right wing hacks use the claim in an attempt to intimidate news organizations into biasing news coverage in their direction. It is highly effective. Witness the treatment that Bush's lies over his DUI conviction were treated in comparison to Gore's mistaken reference to the director of FEMA rather than the deputy director.
Fact is that most journalists are not racists, homophobic bigots etc. and thus reject the social agenda that the likes of Falwell and Robertson promote. So to that extent there is a 'bias'. However most TV pundits are also paid very large salaries and their coverage tends to favor the interests of very rich people like themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the Torah there was quite a bit of smiting that went on in which the people who were living there before Moses saw the view from Nebo.
It does not matter who was where first. What matters is whose rights are being respected and who is inciting the violence.
Bin Laden, the Taleban and the rest will be no loss to the world in the unlikely event that it turns out that some other party was actually behind the attacks. Bin Laden made a video of himself declaring war on the US five years ago with Al Zawari, the leader of Egytian Al Jihad who is inaccurately referred to by CNN as 'Bin Laden's number 2'. Al Jihad has been in the terrorism business for 20 years, long before Bin Laden became a fanatic.
Bin Laden declared war, the Taleban supported him. The US has every right to drop munitions on both.
Don't forget in all this however that what happened in NYC is much less than what the Taleban have been doing in their own country. They have murdered tens of thousands a year to stay in power directly and hundreds of thousands indirectly through the famine and disease their policies have caused. They are the Afghan Khmer Rouge.
Back to Israel, Sharon's behavior has been unforgivable. Asked to support the US in its time of need he has stabbed it in the back. Sharon and the Israeli right have been doing their best to disrupt the peace process ever since Sharon sparked the latest unrest by forcing his way into the Al Aquar mosque with a bunch of thugs. It was a totaly unecessary action that was intended to provoke a reaction and so 'justify' counter-reaction by the Israeli army.
Sharon's gambit succeeded, he provoked the Intifada which brought down the Israeli government and brought Sharon to power. It was an entirely cynical power grab. That does not excuse the kids throwing rocks or the loonies blowing themselves up. But whenever Sharon makes his complaints about the violence it has to be remembered that he deliberately set the match to the tinder.
These actions have not escaped the UK foreign office - Jack Straw recently called Sharon 'a cancer', nor the Bush administration. Anyone who thinks that a UK foreign secretary makes such statements by mistake or without US approval at a time such as this is a fool. Straw was acting on instructions to sent Sharon a warning. US pressure on Sharon to cease building of further 'settlements' is going to become unrelenting.
The other dimension the US media only touches on is the extent to which this whole mess is driven by drugs. Afghanistan might have had a decent government long ago but for the profits from the drug trade. Bin Laden's fortune would not finance an army for long without his share from the heroin trade.
One solution (politically unacceptable) would be to legalize hard drugs. The west would see a few tens of thousands of bodies of people who chose to kill themselves with the stuff clogging up its morgues, but the narcocracies would fall as the profits from the drugs trade dried up with increased supply and the total deaths would be much fewer.
Another would be for those heroin junkies who are running arround waving the stars and stripes pretending to be patriotic to give up heroin instead. Nobody who is funding the terrorists who murdered 7000 in New York should have the right to carry their flag.
Untrue. At the time of the incident the platform was outside UK waters. Now it is inside.
The point you attempt to make about 'international law' is utterly bogus. No country recognises Sealand. Under UK law any ship that is not registered with what UK law determines to be a national government may be considered a pirate vessel.
The failure to close down Sealand does not mean that the UK government recognises it. That will not stop the Libbertarian Taleban from arguing the theology of the case at inordinate length.
If as alleged Sealand was a sovereign teritory then the UK government could under accepted international law serve it a notice insisting that it cease aiding and abetting criminals. If Sealand declined it could under international law issue an ultimatum and commence hostilities.
Given the measures likely to be agreed by the UN security council in the comming weeks the chances are that the UK would even be able to state it was operating under a UN mandate.
It is not unusual for well financed startup companies to crash and burn despite top people. There have been several that have crashed and burned because they had too many. Its the same in crypto, DigiCash and Cybercash both went under, PGP burned through cash so fast it had to be rescued even before the dotcom bubble burst. Baltimore and Entrust are both looking wobbly.
The whole cryptographic anonymity area was likely to take a massive hit in the wake of the WTC attack.
Even if ZeroKnowledge had kept going the increased scrutiny and surveillance would render the scheme pointless. Having a FreedomNet account or connecting to the server would get you put on a watch list the minute the NSA found out - and find out they would.
I suspect that the number of hosting facilities willing to run the service servers declined substantially after the WTC attack.
I would not give the Sealand folk much chance of lasting very much longer. For all the riddiculous libberprattle the platform is now inside UK territorial waters and the UK government does not recognise sealand as a state. Since the sealand employees are mainly from the US that would make them illegal workers subject to arrest when they set foot on the mainland.
The use of a single upper case or symbol character in a password does not increase the randomness of the password by very much in practice. Most users simply add a number at the beginning or end of a word. The cost of a dictionary attack goes up a bit, but it still ain't very secure.
The only way to make passwords secure is to severly limit the scope of brute force attack. Partitioning the password verification database into two parts such that both have to be compromised before the attacker can start a brute force attack.
No, but I have never lost. I hesitate to call it a win when the verdict is in your favor but you have a $2 million plus legal bill.
It is not a matter of fighting the system, we know that if we ever pay off one of the patent trolls we will be hit by a flood of spurious claims. The troll lawyers are like confidence tricksters, they share information on marks that have paid up in the past. And no, I don't thing the lying theives can be trusted to keep a confidentiality clause.
It is an extortion racket pure and simple.
Tapeless systems have been arround for ten years, long before the patent issued.
Yes you do get to pause the feed. The fact that the device does much much more is irrelevant. It provides that function and does so in the manner specified in the patent.
I said live video editing because that is what I meant. They have existed for live action replay of sports events for twenty odd years. Disk based rigs have existed for at least ten.
In 1990 that type of rig cost hundreds of thousands. Quantel(?) used to make them for the likes of the BBC and NBC. They were the systems used to show the viewers Balisteros the shot made a few minutes ago while the station was showing Faldo.
The standard ploy of a patent troll is to sell an early license cheap for the sole purpose of making fools like yourself think 'well if Motorola paid $500 for a license they must have spent $20,000 checking its validity.
Or maybe you are a patent troll trying to smurf the worthless patent?
I have fought patent lawsuits in the past and I am involved in one now. I know how patent trolls operate. Selling credibility licenses for free is a standard ploy.
Tivo will have obtained a non-infringement opinion because by doing so they avoid the triple damages for willful infringement. Before filling a lawsuit Pause will have sent out a letter putting Tivo on notice of their patent claims so they can claim triple damages.
Not true. There were enough low end ones arround for quite a bit of material captured with a frame grabber to appear on alt.binaries.pictures.erotica
Real time video editing rigs may have been expensive but that does not stop them being prior art. The idea of making professional gear cheaper and selling it to consumers is not patentable.
The fact that Tivo is giving the patent troll the finger is by far the most significant indication of what they think of the patent. They will have done due dilligence and probably obtained a non-infringement opinion.
The fact that Motorola bought a license is irrelevant. The terms on which they bought the license are unknown. They probably got a license sold to them cheap so pause tv could claim some credibility when they went after Tivo. My policy (which is currently my company's policy) is we don't pay off patent trolls under any circumstances, even if they offer us a permanent royalty free license. As a result we spend several millions on fighting lawsuits that should never be filled. However we don't just walk away after we win, we then go on to file vexatious litigation suits against the plaintifs and if appropriate civil perjury suits against the original inventors.
Bzztt. Wrong
The usual strategy adopted by the patent trolls is to sell an early license to a big company for practically nothing. They do this precisely because it lends credibility.
Motorola probably got an equity stake in the patent troll's company in return.
The idea of pausing live TV goes back several decades. The BBC was doing it on match of the day in the 1970s.
The suit has probably been filed now because Tivo is in deep do do and the patent claim may cloud any possible takeover.
Yes and much good it will do there. The only people going to the site already know how corrupt US politicians are.
What we need is for the broader alternative media to keep on their case. Make sure that every time some slimeball has taken $500,000 plus to shill for some commercial interest that his name and the sum of money get bracketed together, for example Robert "1.2 million from ADM" Dole.
I recomend that slashdot have a counter going showing the amount of the bribes accepted by various senators from the media industry. And yes, they are bribes pure and simple.
Second point is that the IT industry can't comply with the bill if it wanted to. There are many working groups that have been developing DRM standards - MPEG, IETF-DRM, XACML and others. Lack of interest has not been the problem, the difficulty of converging the technology is very high.
In particular the incompetence of the USPTO which has granted thousands of spurious patent claims in the area prevents a workable agreement being reached. There are too many overlapping rights to build a workable system without a serious risk of being sued. This despite the fact that there is prior art for paractically all the technologies.
Legislative fiat will not speed up the technology efforts, in fact they will retard the process. The manufacturers know that if they call the studios bluff and refuse to agree that they can play out the end game in the law courts for decades.
The best way to derail the effort is by reminding congress of the lies they were fed to pass the DMCA. Even Orin Hatch has realized he was had. In particular the clause introduced by the recording industry that tried to grab the returned rights of recording artists was so eggergious that Congress repealled it without demanding fresh bribes.
Also the comparison should be continually to the demands made when recording technology first became mass market. The publishers fought to prevent cassette tape and the VCR from being sold - and lost conclusively.
At the end of the day the recording industry has nowhere near the influence of the computer industry. Quite a few computer companies have revenues greater than those of all the recording companies and film studios combined.
Congress is not about to severely damage its most successful industry by far in order to protect an industry that is far from struggling.
The only people I have seen bullying anyone have been the rogue TLDs.
There are plenty of name squatters who have bought up new.net swampland who would like their real estate to be connected up to the interstate. So they yammer on with squeals of complaint.
Hogwash. The UK did trials of Anthrax durring WWII. They concluded that as a weapon it was no use. 'Anthrax island' is still contaminated with the stuff, but it is still inhabited by the local wildlife. There is a serious environmental contamination, but it is at the level of severe asbestos contamination rather than the 'step foot on the island and die instantly clutching your throat' variety.
The gang of loonies who let of Sarin gas in the Tokyo subway only managed to kill 6 people with a nerve agent allegedly far more toxic. They made 5000 odd people unwell but even in the confined space of the subway they simply could not get the stuff distributed evenly enough to kill the thousands they planned.
The basic problem with poisons is that though they may kill in what appears to be a minute quantity it takes an awfully large amount of stuff to add even one part per billion to a large public space. Thats about a teaspoonfull in a small swimming pool. Think of the amount of stuff you need to poison a reservoir or gas people sitting in the open air.
In trench warfare the caualties were high because the quantities of poison thrown arround were vast, tonnes and tonnes.
The tokyo loonies built a small chemical factory, they could have killed many more people if they had put the same effort into making explosives. If they had got their hands on some automatic weapons instead they could have killed many more.
This 'poor mans nuclear bomb' stuff is great copy but the threat is greatly overstated.
SGI got squeezed out because it tried to protect its margins by going further and further upmarket as workstations became commodity products. In the process the volume shrank to the point where they simply didn't sell enough stuff to cover their R&D costs. Once they had to cut back on R&D they were not upmarket much longer.
The high end server market was once dominated by performance concerns. Now it is dominated by reliability concerns. The profit to be gained in squeezing the last ounce of power out of the Itanium is negligible.
If the ASP outsourced hosting model takes off the demand for high reliability transaction systems will be very different. Instead of a large number of medium to high performance systems there will be a much smaller number of ultra-high performance systems sold. The performance won't come from putting 64 processors into a high end box however, it will come from putting a few thousand loosely coupled processors in a large rack and feeding it a couple of terrabytes of RAID disk.
HP's merger with Compaq is about building a dominant position in the volume PC market, printers, desktop PCs, home PCs, handheld devices. For the same amount of effort required to build a O/S kernel on a new processor HP can develop three or four mass market products that are much more likely to generate profits.
If the Compaq merger completes HP will have two high quality UNIX builds to choose from. Porting of the Mach kernel based Digital Unix is likely to be easier since it has been ported several times already.
The only surprising thing about the announcement is that the engineers are being laid off rather than re-assigned. That would indicate to me that HP is retreating on the whole UNIX front and not just on HP/UX.
I don't see how fixing the standard windows CDROMS driver so it plays CDs can be a DMCA violation.
I am amazed that people give Gartner, Giga and the rest any credibility at all. We don't hire them to make impartial analyses of the market. We hire them to push our product. If they concluded that the competition was better then they would never get another gig from us in the future.
What is amazing however is that the same people who purchase PR fluff then go and read other people's PR fluff and believe it.
People who really know about technology don't spend their time writing PR fluff for Gartner etc.
The idea that companies using IIS can switch to something else simply because security maintenance is lower cost is pretty idiotic. If you have an IIS site you are almost certainly doing so because you have a reason and will probably have a non-negligible switching cost. If you have developed ASP scripts you can't just switch to Apache overnight.
I think you are thinking of the "Independent Institute". It is an easy mistake to make however because the whole rack of 15 or so right wing crank-tanks are funded by a group of about six billionaires.
Cato was founded to provide a right wing alternative to the Brookings institute. It is not a 'research' institute in the conventional sense since like the Taleban they already know the truth.
The purpose of Cato being to prop up GOP propaganda the 'research' is about as reliable as the politicians they work for.
The premise of new.net seems to be get enough people pointing their DNS systems to hit your server and you don't need to be in the ICANN root. Problem is that the domains only have a 5% probability of working for a given net user.
I wouldn't give a @#$^^ for new.net except for their paid flacks popping up arroung the net to shill for them. The scam seems to be they get a bunch of tasty names then shill endlessly in an attempt to get the new.net root incorporated into the ICANN one so their tasty names suddenly become worth squillions of dollars.
If the CIA believe that they should all be fired. There are over a million arab americans living in the US. There are a million moslems living in the UK. There are a quarter of a billion of them in the neighbouring states to afghanisan.
Given the fractious nature of Islamic politics it should not be beyond the ability of a moderately competent inteligence agency to recruit people to infiltrate.
Turning insiders is also an option, however turned agents are very different from moles. If you don't have the ability to infiltrate a group you are most unlikely to be able to turn someone inside it.
Terrain is only one factor in a war, and guerilla wars have been successful in practically every type of terrain. The fact that the Soviets and the British were defeated in Afghanistan does not indicate that the terrain is intrinsically impossible to invade, after all the Taleban managed to do so successfully.
There is considerable evidence that the vast bulk of the Afgahn people do not support the Taleban but are prepared to tolerate them as a better alternative to instability. In fact the Taleban are almost exclusively from a single ethnic group that comprises only 35% of the population, there is considerable evidence of widespread attrocities by the Taleban against the other ethnic groups.
The key difference between this war and previous wars is that in all previous guerilla wars the objective of the invading power has been to hold the population centers and territory against the guerillas. In this case however the objective is quite different, the US could care less about controlling Kabul, what it wants to do is to deny Taleban control.
The other point is that most guerilla campaigns fail without the support of a major power that is at least comparable in power to the opponent. In the Spanish peninsular war the Guerillas were supported by the British (and vice versa), but the Guerillas could never have succeeded alone, the Spanish simply could not train troops to meet Napoleon in open battles. Equally the Vietnamese could not have beaten the US without Chineese support.
The differences are of scale and the fact that the IRA did not represent a state or anything close to one. The IRA has consistently failed to gain more than 5% of the vote in elections either side of the border. Bin Laden and his accomplices are in effect sponored by the Taleban which is the effective power in Afghanistan.
The other reason is that such subtle issues are lost on dubyah. The US has declared war on drugs, cancer, why not terrorism? Other unfortunate statements from dubyah were his speech in NYC which began 'America is on its knees (long pause)'. Unfortunately dubyah is not Ronald Reagan. Reagan could make a speech that written on paper was complete nonsense but get across exactly the right message. dubyah does the opposite.
Disgustingly, 12 prisoners were allowed to die from hunger strike (among them, an elected member of parlement, Bobby Sands) because the IRA prisoners wanted to be considered prisoners of war.
Why should the British government give in to a bunch of terrorists just because they threaten to starve themselves? They were all convicted of murder or assisting murder. If they want to cease being a cost to the British taxpayer they should be allowed to do so.
The reason for the rule is that many in Congress were fed up with the CIA paying the likes of Noriega, Suharto, Saddam etc and supporting regimes that murdered large number of their citizens.
The underlying problem is that the US has for years cried 'wolf' on terrorism. The term was used to provide blanket justification for any policy the government of the day was into. So Cuba and other countries the US happened to have a policy difference with were labelled 'state sponsors of terrorism'. Meanwhile the CIA was funding drug running terrorists such as the Nicaraguan Contras.
A large part of the responsibility for the attack must rest on successive Presidents who abused the CIA and FBI for their own political purposes and not for national defence. The assasination of the democratically elected Lumumba in the Congo and imposition of Mugabwe cost millions of lives. The action was not done to defend democracy but to try to impose a dictator who would be on 'our side'.
In particular Nixon's actions were uniquely corrosive to US democratic institutions. The Reagan/Bush Iran-Contra abuses compounded the problem. Selling arms to the Iranian taleban types and using the proceeds to instigate a proxy war in Nicaragua.
The much maligned ban on assasination was only introduced because the US realised that having engineered the assasination of eight other world leaders it was quite likely that other countries were plotting to assasinate the US president in what they considered to be self defence.
The people running arround complaining that the CIA was handcuffed are by and large the same people whose schemes made the restrictions necessary.
It comes from two sources. For the ideological right it comes from the inbuilt belief that anyone that does not believe as they do must be part of an evil conspiracy. During the 1970s when ideologues were ascendent in the left the common complaint was the inbuilt bias of the establisment media
The more cynical right wing hacks use the claim in an attempt to intimidate news organizations into biasing news coverage in their direction. It is highly effective. Witness the treatment that Bush's lies over his DUI conviction were treated in comparison to Gore's mistaken reference to the director of FEMA rather than the deputy director.
Fact is that most journalists are not racists, homophobic bigots etc. and thus reject the social agenda that the likes of Falwell and Robertson promote. So to that extent there is a 'bias'. However most TV pundits are also paid very large salaries and their coverage tends to favor the interests of very rich people like themselves.
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