Watch those shoe straps -- they've got to stay reasonably clean to work (hard to do when you walk on them...), and when you're sitting down, your feet aren't on the ground firmly enough for them to work. We also use ground chains on the chairs, but that's effective only as a backup to wrist or ankle straps. That is, one winter day when the humidity (indoors) was low, my arm went near a metal object while getting up out of a grounded "anti-static" chair. Half-inch spark. I got out the static testing equipment, and the chair actually was grounding me as long as my weight was on it, but the trousers collected thousands of volts when separating from the chair. So keep the wrist strap hooked up until you are on your feet.
You can put the wrist strap on your ankle instead, if that's more convenient. (Under the socks, of course, and if you're too hairy it might take a dab of conductive lotion. But the strap tester will tell you that, anyway...)
All of this is beside the point in regards Palm's responsibility. We assemble circuit boards, we handle semiconductors, we've got to learn this stuff and buy the necessary equipment. So do electronic techs and anyone else who is going to get inside the electronics box. Palm's customers are mainly businessmen, not techies -- they never open the box and aren't going to learn ESD control. Palm should have designed to handle it -- it just takes a few cents worth of diodes and ferrite beads.
Darn, try that again...
Palm should be no more liable for this than every company which manufactures serial, parallel, USB, FireWire and really ANY external device. Most external devices (printers, modems, mice, video cameras) are hardly ever unplugged from the computer. Palm-tops are going to be in and out of their cradle all the time. They should have put static protection in the cradle.
Palm should be no more liable for this than every company which manufactures serial, parallel, USB, FireWire and really ANY external device. Most external devices (printers, modems, mice, video cameras) are hardly ever unplugged from the computer. Palm-tops are going to be in and out of their cradle all the time. They should have put static protection in the cradle.
The IRS has definite regulations for what constitutes a "church" for purposes of tax exemption. They should be on the IRS web site, if you think you can wade through the bureaucratese. I don't have time. I once read a translation of them into plain English, but since the source was biased, I'd like to see someone else's interpretation. According to this source, you've got to give up a lot of your freedoms to qualify, for instance the minister cannot preach against taxation...
I don't know how closely the courts follow the IRS in determining whether something is a "religion" for other purposes. Certainly they aren't going to allow just any religious practice. You can dance nude around the oak tree on your own fenced land, but not around the oak tree in the city park, except maybe in some California cities. Human sacrifice is out. You can't burn heretics at the stake. If the Hashashin cult were still around, they just might get an exemption for their marijuana concentrates, but not for assassinating enemies of the faith...
Any guesses what they were doing wrong with the "massive combat simulation study"? Just a guess, but since they obviously couldn't let the gunners use real bullets when Americans were flying the fighters, they didn't properly figure how much easier it is to get the tail turrets onto a plane flying along behind you (usually less than 50 mph difference in speed), as compared to using the nose turret to hit a plane oncoming at about 900 mph relative velocity. On the other hand, any fighter pilot could tell them that from the tail he could keep a bomber in his sights until it went down or he ran out of ammo, while from a nose attack you were lucky to put a dozen rounds on target. Not enough to do real damage unless you got really lucky (e.g., through the windshield and into the pilots.)
Or maybe they just failed to simulate desperate Japanese pilots using kamikaze tactics. From the tail, there was plenty of time to shoot an attacker down, from the nose it was probably too late by the time they locked on target. And a zero hitting head-on would either destroy the whole cockpit or shear a wing off if on target.
Of course, if liquor was what you're most interested in, too bad you weren't in the Soviet Air Force. According to the book by a Soviet pilot who defected with his MIG-25 (Belenko?), the hydraulics system of that plane was run open loop with pure alcohol. That is, when they fueled the plane, they'd also fill a large tank with alcohol, and it would pour out during the flight. The ground crews were usually drunk (and any officers and pilots with insufficient self-discipline, also), but mainly bottles of that alcohol became the "currency" to get your name moved to the top of the waiting list for an apartment, to get maintenance done once you had an apartment, or to buy things on the black market. Finally, an auditor wondered why the jet fuel and hydraulic fluid consumption didn't match -- so they dumped large quantities of kerosene out in the woods...
America in WWII temporarily became a mostly socialist system -- and liquor used for bribes is a good example of how things get done in socialism.
Article Six, Para 2 of the U.S. Constitution (from ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/ete xt90/const11.txt)
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Thanks, I didn't have time to run that down. It does NOT say that treaties can override the US Constitution, it says that federal law (including treaties) overrides state constitutions and laws. Then again, it doesn't establish any sort of heirarchy among the federal constitution, legislation, and treaties either... The writers of the Constitution mainly depended upon Congressmen and Senators respecting the Constitution and not voting for anything that violates the spirit of it -- and on the people retaining the willingness and power to end the career of a politician who didn't (possibly "with extreme prejudice", see Thomas Jefferson's writings.) That the Supreme Court could rule against President and Congress on Constitutional grounds and enforce it's decision came as a surprise. (Note that around 1830 Andrew Jackson got away with simply ignoring at least one Supreme Court decision, something about not stealing Indian lands that had been guaranteed to the Indians by treaty...)
IANAL, nor do I play one on/., but, if memory serves correct, treaty's supercede the constitution. Nor am I a lawyer, but I don't see how a treaty (ratified by a majority of one house of Congress) could supercede the Constitution (amendments to which take 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of the states). However, when judges get to balancing various Constitutional requirements, they are likely to be persuaded to tilt towards whichever interpretation agrees with international treaties. And so, corporate special interests like to get onto the groups negotiating these treaties. I do know of at least one case where the US's "negotiators" essentially rammed something down Europeans' throats, then came back with the signed treaty saying something like, "We might not like this regulation much, but those Euros insisted on it."
Of course, in this case you not only have to look at the claims, you also have to think about all the obvious prior art they've claimed and try to sort out which of them they'd actually try to take into court...
Patents like this one, they ought to take the costs of challenging them out of the salary for the idiot patent examiner who approved them. Unfortunately, he'd be in the hole for 10,000 years...
I mean, it's taken me since yesterday morning to skim less than half of the on-line documentation for D, but there were hundreds of posts within the first hour!
Overall, it looks like a pretty good job, if what you wanted is a language for large projects on modern desktop & server computers. It doesn't entirely take away C's capability of letting you screw up enormously, but it does make screwups a little less likely. For instance, C and C++ programmers tend to manipulate strings with pointers; this results in very efficient code, but combined with sloppy programming (always by management decree, I'm sure) it also results in hundreds of security exploits involving buffer overruns. D gives you dynamic arrays, which handle strings the way they ought to be handled, and I think makes a program that allows buffer overruns harder to write than one that doesn't.
On the other hand, I do some embedded programing with 8-bit CPU's. I rather suspect that over half the people who frequently code on-the-job are doing the same, although most of them are not "programmers" but rather are EE's, design engineers programming their own designs. Certainly you'll find a few dozen of those 8-bitters in the average american home, even though they own nothing they recognize as a computer.
D doesn't even define how to compile to a CPU with less than 32 address bits. That doesn't mean it's a bad language -- in fact, it make's it a better language for the 386 and up -- but it does mean that it's widening the gap between embedded programmers and the rest.
Likewise garbage collection is acceptable in an embedded system of any size only if you can control when it happens, and there is no mechanism in place for this. (The docs do mention that interrupt-handlers probably can't be written in D because of the garbage collection.
But for desktop and server applications, I like 99% of what I've seen and have just one complaint: operator overloading is _important_, it lets you write extensions to the language.
Forth is a very good language for small embedded systems -- it's portable, and the object code is sometimes more compact than assembly. But it's designed for easy and compact compiles, not for readability. I would not recommend doing a 100,000 line project with it.
It looks pretty good to me (I've read the parts on converting C and C++, plus "Contracts") -- mostly he's cleaned up the C features that look inconsistent in C++, and made the compiler smarter so the programmer doesn't have to work so hard. And since it's a compiler writer suggesting these changes, it isn't something that looks great but is either un-implementable (Algol, e.g.), or unacceptably slow (Java, anyone?). I'm waiting for the open-source compiler.
Contracts are a new idea to me, and it looks pretty good. It's a sort of super-assert statement (and assert is now built-in, not a library). Using contracts properly should help both in communicating with other programmers writing related code, and in catching bugs. I don't know about you, but I hate debugging and I'd much rather write bug-free to begin with; this is going to help a little.
One quibble: his square-root function example shows he's never programmed anything mathematical. The "out" contract specifies that squaring the result gives you back the input. In long integers. That is, x = 20, result = sqrt(x) = 4, result * result = 16, the program fails. In floating point, you can get pretty close, but it's never exact so you can't just assert result * result == x. You assert abs(result * result - x) 10.0E-6 * result, for example.
About the "4 sigma" claim. They're looking at a change of 1 in 100,000 over 12 billion years. There are very few things that can be measured that accurately, and the very feeble light they're collecting from a 12 billion year old quasar isn't one of them. That is, the noise must greatly exceed the signal. But by doing a whole lot of measurements and a little elementary statistics, you can figure the probability that the shift in the mean just happened by chance; if I remember right, 4 sigma = about 0.25%.
So it isn't just random noise affecting the measurements. But this says nothing about the chances that any one of a hundred things could have biased their measurements. Assuming they don't want to have all the other scientists laughing at them, they did their utmost to account for all such factors, but they have no way at all to estimate the probability that there's something else out there they didn't take into account...
You could read/.'s privacy policy for starters. (See the "privacy" link on the right. Also, under "faq" see the parts about cookies and logging.)
My interpretation of this: If you've got an account, there's the account data to be subpoenad. (Spelling?) I think the only thing you have to give that's _real_ when setting up the account is the e-mail address. There are ways of making that hard to trace, but the FBI has sometimes been able to force "anonymous" services into giving up their users. Or they could put a tracer into/. so that the next time you open it, it will record the IP address, etc. Cmdr Taco might not be overly cooperative with this, but maybe they've got a decent hacker on their side...
If you're an anonymous coward (and you can log out and become one anytime), then apparently the only thing identifying you is a cookie and a log that's erased every 48 hours or less. So if you want to make sure you remain anonymous, use an anonymizer, erase cookies afterwards, and try to keep it low-key enough that they won't react within 48 hours.
Of course, I'll give a scurrilous attack by someone unwilling to even put his screen name behind it the weight it deserves...
OK, this sounds like one case where "proving you could win" sounds like no problem at all. And it's not just a civil suit, revealing insider info is a criminal offense, right?
However, it is also a sort of case where giving the poster a chance to respond before outing him seems to be critical -- maybe what you think is insider info had already leaked out, or never was much of a secret. E.g., his response might be to cite pg 27 of the Wall Street Journal the day before he posted, or something like "I am not a corporate officer and do not have inside information about sales. My posts were based on the observed, public facts that sales have been falling for two years and the company still hasn't come up with a new product that will keep working throughout a sales demonstration, therefore sales are going to continue dropping."
For libel/slander, it's pretty simple. You got to show that (1) damaging statements were made, and (2) They were false. At that point, the judge will instruct the message board operator to turn over whatever clues there are to the identity. (I don't think/. Anonymous Cowards have anything to worry about, since/. doesn't keep any information that could backtrace you. But/. could be ordered to turn over registration info.)
This was, plain and simple, a partial victory over companies that want to harass you because you said something bad about them and it was true. They can't win a libel suit, and they certainly don't want newspapers covering a jury trial about those allegations -- but under some boneheaded court rulings in the past, they could find out who you were, then they'd drop the suit. And if you were an employee (who else really knows how a company is screwing it's customers?), they could fire you.
The other issue is trade secrets and copyrights. Anonymous posters sometimes quote from company manuals or instructions given to the help desk, on how to give customers the run-around instead of fixing defective products or services. Sometimes the company will then sue to find out who posted that, claiming that the manual was copyrighted or the work instructions were a "trade secret." Of course they don't _want_ to go to trial, that would get their dirty secrets on the front pages, but rather they just want to find out which employee posted it.
If they get a judge that's sufficiently a corporate stooge, in the muddled present condition of the law he might neglect to ask how a procedure that everyone knows a name for ("run-around") could be a trade secret, or to point out that quoting one page of a manual is fair use. This decision provides a precedent whereby a judge _ought_ to ask those questions.
Yeah, what I'd rather see is (1) a procedure by which the case can be defended anonymously and the identity revealed only if plaintiff wins, or (2) a requirement that the plaintiff post a large bond, to be paid to the defendant in the event that after finding his identity plaintiff fails to pursue the case or loses -- plus additional damages if there are concrete losses incident to having one's identity revealed, say 2 years pay if you get fired... But that takes legislation, and don't look for it from the best congress money can buy.
Do we want to strive to have a product that is acceptable, or a product that is superior?
On the other hand, "good enough" and FREE is a darned good deal. And if you've worked MS systems long enough, you'll find "good enough" and never crashes PRICELESS.
elefantstn, it is quite easy to order in boxen with NT and MS Office already installed. (Probably easier than getting boxen with no OS.) It generally isn't an optimal installation, but it's often good enough for secretaries.
Where the network admins get involved is usually when it comes to interfacing with the main databases. With 400 seats, you _need_ a database system that makes MS Access look like a toy. (And I speak as one who has attempted to take Access right up to the limits MS admits to...) So unless you've somehow managed to put your whole database onto a IExplorer-compatible website, you are going to have to install a database client on each machine. The front-end one I'm familiar with (for a Progress database running in Unix) is a one-floppy disk 5-minute install, which is a heck of a lot easier than installing Win or Linux.
IMHO, the best way to provide corporate desktop computers is to buy hundreds of identical boxes, find the optimal installation for Linux and required applications, and then clone that configuration. But if they won't give you the budget to buy computers and put them in the closet until needed, then you wind up ordering one at a time for new hires or to replace broken down machines; almost every !@#$% machine is different (at least from lowest-bidder sources), so in Linux you'll spend hours on each one downloading drivers, setting up the configuration, etc. Windows pretty much requires the same time if you install it yourself and bother doing it right, but when you buy pre-configured boxen, it certainly looks like you've saved all that labor -- except for the six times that box is going to crash or catch a virus and have to be re-installed, but that cost comes later, and management isn't going to add it up and realize that buying the alleged industry standard was really boneheaded...
In reinforcement of that: in American law, copyrights and patents were not established as a fundamental right of the creator, but rather as a right that the creator gets for a limited time in return for making the creation freely available after expiration, and allowing certain non-paid uses before expiration (fair use for copyright, free access to patent archives for patents). There is no entitlement to intellectual property, there is just that deal. "The best Congress money can buy" has already made a joke out of "limited time" in the case of copyright, by tacking on another 20 years or so everytime the first Mickey Mouse copyrights get close to expiring. If the DMCA sticks, they've overturned the original deal entirely: if the copyright ever expires you can legally copy the item, but no one can legally sell you the tools.
The Russian gov't ought to put out a warrant for the FBI agents involved -- and particularly the guy that's up for head of the Federal Bureau of Idiocy -- for kidnapping, and press the case before the World Court. Grounds (1) the questionable jurisdiction for arresting Skylarov (his program is quite definitely legal in Russia -- and copy protection that does not allow a backup copy is illegal -- and I haven't seen any evidence that Skylarov was in control of whether his program could be sold to Americans), (2) they apparently shuttled him around after the arrest so as to avoid a bail hearing for TWO WEEKS, blatantly in violation of the US Constitution. They ought to be indicted here for kidnapping & conspiracy to violate civil rights, but you aren't going to see a federal prosecutor going after other federal agents... If the FBI can arrest a foreigner for violating US law in another country, it should be possible to try them in another country for acts committed here that violate the laws of BOTH countries.
OK, you know more chemistry than I do, but what you said wasn't exactly what you meant. To me, "provide" implies the alloy contains the oxygen, not that it gets it by breaking down other substances in the vicinity.
Anyway, just what in heck will put out a magnesium fire, other than flooding the room with N2 (which is possible only if you made arrangements long before the fire started)? A CO2 fire extinguisher obviously is no good, and anything water-based is disastrous (relased H2 might cause secondary explosions). Would Halon work (I don't remember the chemical formula), or would the Mg extract chlorine or something from Halon and keep on burning? Someone suggested burying it in sand, which would put the problem out of sight and eventually seal the Mg in molten glass, but might leave it burning away by SiO2 + 2 Mg --> Si + 2 MgO.
Yeah, Magnesium alloys typically provide their own oxygen when they burn. Wrong. Metals (alloys or otherwise) do not contain oxygen. However magnesium has sufficient affinity for oxygen that when it's hot, it will rip H2O apart to get more oxygen. That is, spray water on burning magnesium, you supply it with oxygen AND it releases hydrogen gas, which will drift til it mixes with some non-oxygen depleted air, and then probably ignite...
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Watch those shoe straps -- they've got to stay reasonably clean to work (hard to do when you walk on them...), and when you're sitting down, your feet aren't on the ground firmly enough for them to work. We also use ground chains on the chairs, but that's effective only as a backup to wrist or ankle straps. That is, one winter day when the humidity (indoors) was low, my arm went near a metal object while getting up out of a grounded "anti-static" chair. Half-inch spark. I got out the static testing equipment, and the chair actually was grounding me as long as my weight was on it, but the trousers collected thousands of volts when separating from the chair. So keep the wrist strap hooked up until you are on your feet.
You can put the wrist strap on your ankle instead, if that's more convenient. (Under the socks, of course, and if you're too hairy it might take a dab of conductive lotion. But the strap tester will tell you that, anyway...)
All of this is beside the point in regards Palm's responsibility. We assemble circuit boards, we handle semiconductors, we've got to learn this stuff and buy the necessary equipment. So do electronic techs and anyone else who is going to get inside the electronics box. Palm's customers are mainly businessmen, not techies -- they never open the box and aren't going to learn ESD control. Palm should have designed to handle it -- it just takes a few cents worth of diodes and ferrite beads.
Darn, try that again...
Palm should be no more liable for this than every company which manufactures serial, parallel, USB, FireWire and really ANY external device. Most external devices (printers, modems, mice, video cameras) are hardly ever unplugged from the computer. Palm-tops are going to be in and out of their cradle all the time. They should have put static protection in the cradle.
Palm should be no more liable for this than every company which manufactures serial, parallel, USB, FireWire and really ANY external device. Most external devices (printers, modems, mice, video cameras) are hardly ever unplugged from the computer. Palm-tops are going to be in and out of their cradle all the time. They should have put static protection in the cradle.
I don't know how closely the courts follow the IRS in determining whether something is a "religion" for other purposes. Certainly they aren't going to allow just any religious practice. You can dance nude around the oak tree on your own fenced land, but not around the oak tree in the city park, except maybe in some California cities. Human sacrifice is out. You can't burn heretics at the stake. If the Hashashin cult were still around, they just might get an exemption for their marijuana concentrates, but not for assassinating enemies of the faith...
Or maybe they just failed to simulate desperate Japanese pilots using kamikaze tactics. From the tail, there was plenty of time to shoot an attacker down, from the nose it was probably too late by the time they locked on target. And a zero hitting head-on would either destroy the whole cockpit or shear a wing off if on target.
America in WWII temporarily became a mostly socialist system -- and liquor used for bribes is a good example of how things get done in socialism.
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Thanks, I didn't have time to run that down. It does NOT say that treaties can override the US Constitution, it says that federal law (including treaties) overrides state constitutions and laws. Then again, it doesn't establish any sort of heirarchy among the federal constitution, legislation, and treaties either... The writers of the Constitution mainly depended upon Congressmen and Senators respecting the Constitution and not voting for anything that violates the spirit of it -- and on the people retaining the willingness and power to end the career of a politician who didn't (possibly "with extreme prejudice", see Thomas Jefferson's writings.) That the Supreme Court could rule against President and Congress on Constitutional grounds and enforce it's decision came as a surprise. (Note that around 1830 Andrew Jackson got away with simply ignoring at least one Supreme Court decision, something about not stealing Indian lands that had been guaranteed to the Indians by treaty...)
IANAL, nor do I play one on /., but, if memory serves correct, treaty's supercede the constitution. Nor am I a lawyer, but I don't see how a treaty (ratified by a majority of one house of Congress) could supercede the Constitution (amendments to which take 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of the states). However, when judges get to balancing various Constitutional requirements, they are likely to be persuaded to tilt towards whichever interpretation agrees with international treaties. And so, corporate special interests like to get onto the groups negotiating these treaties. I do know of at least one case where the US's "negotiators" essentially rammed something down Europeans' throats, then came back with the signed treaty saying something like, "We might not like this regulation much, but those Euros insisted on it."
Patents like this one, they ought to take the costs of challenging them out of the salary for the idiot patent examiner who approved them. Unfortunately, he'd be in the hole for 10,000 years...
Overall, it looks like a pretty good job, if what you wanted is a language for large projects on modern desktop & server computers. It doesn't entirely take away C's capability of letting you screw up enormously, but it does make screwups a little less likely. For instance, C and C++ programmers tend to manipulate strings with pointers; this results in very efficient code, but combined with sloppy programming (always by management decree, I'm sure) it also results in hundreds of security exploits involving buffer overruns. D gives you dynamic arrays, which handle strings the way they ought to be handled, and I think makes a program that allows buffer overruns harder to write than one that doesn't.
On the other hand, I do some embedded programing with 8-bit CPU's. I rather suspect that over half the people who frequently code on-the-job are doing the same, although most of them are not "programmers" but rather are EE's, design engineers programming their own designs. Certainly you'll find a few dozen of those 8-bitters in the average american home, even though they own nothing they recognize as a computer.
D doesn't even define how to compile to a CPU with less than 32 address bits. That doesn't mean it's a bad language -- in fact, it make's it a better language for the 386 and up -- but it does mean that it's widening the gap between embedded programmers and the rest.
Likewise garbage collection is acceptable in an embedded system of any size only if you can control when it happens, and there is no mechanism in place for this. (The docs do mention that interrupt-handlers probably can't be written in D because of the garbage collection.
But for desktop and server applications, I like 99% of what I've seen and have just one complaint: operator overloading is _important_, it lets you write extensions to the language.
Forth is a very good language for small embedded systems -- it's portable, and the object code is sometimes more compact than assembly. But it's designed for easy and compact compiles, not for readability. I would not recommend doing a 100,000 line project with it.
Contracts are a new idea to me, and it looks pretty good. It's a sort of super-assert statement (and assert is now built-in, not a library). Using contracts properly should help both in communicating with other programmers writing related code, and in catching bugs. I don't know about you, but I hate debugging and I'd much rather write bug-free to begin with; this is going to help a little.
One quibble: his square-root function example shows he's never programmed anything mathematical. The "out" contract specifies that squaring the result gives you back the input. In long integers. That is, x = 20, result = sqrt(x) = 4, result * result = 16, the program fails. In floating point, you can get pretty close, but it's never exact so you can't just assert result * result == x. You assert abs(result * result - x) 10.0E-6 * result, for example.
The bad news is, I don't bother following New Scientist links because IMO for accuracy it ranks somewhere below National Enquirer...
So it isn't just random noise affecting the measurements. But this says nothing about the chances that any one of a hundred things could have biased their measurements. Assuming they don't want to have all the other scientists laughing at them, they did their utmost to account for all such factors, but they have no way at all to estimate the probability that there's something else out there they didn't take into account...
Just don't do it in the UK where they can throw you in jail for forgetting the decode key!
My interpretation of this: If you've got an account, there's the account data to be subpoenad. (Spelling?) I think the only thing you have to give that's _real_ when setting up the account is the e-mail address. There are ways of making that hard to trace, but the FBI has sometimes been able to force "anonymous" services into giving up their users. Or they could put a tracer into /. so that the next time you open it, it will record the IP address, etc. Cmdr Taco might not be overly cooperative with this, but maybe they've got a decent hacker on their side...
If you're an anonymous coward (and you can log out and become one anytime), then apparently the only thing identifying you is a cookie and a log that's erased every 48 hours or less. So if you want to make sure you remain anonymous, use an anonymizer, erase cookies afterwards, and try to keep it low-key enough that they won't react within 48 hours.
Of course, I'll give a scurrilous attack by someone unwilling to even put his screen name behind it the weight it deserves...
However, it is also a sort of case where giving the poster a chance to respond before outing him seems to be critical -- maybe what you think is insider info had already leaked out, or never was much of a secret. E.g., his response might be to cite pg 27 of the Wall Street Journal the day before he posted, or something like "I am not a corporate officer and do not have inside information about sales. My posts were based on the observed, public facts that sales have been falling for two years and the company still hasn't come up with a new product that will keep working throughout a sales demonstration, therefore sales are going to continue dropping."
Um, make that "Congress", otherwise the last sentence has a whole different meaning. ;-)
This was, plain and simple, a partial victory over companies that want to harass you because you said something bad about them and it was true. They can't win a libel suit, and they certainly don't want newspapers covering a jury trial about those allegations -- but under some boneheaded court rulings in the past, they could find out who you were, then they'd drop the suit. And if you were an employee (who else really knows how a company is screwing it's customers?), they could fire you.
The other issue is trade secrets and copyrights. Anonymous posters sometimes quote from company manuals or instructions given to the help desk, on how to give customers the run-around instead of fixing defective products or services. Sometimes the company will then sue to find out who posted that, claiming that the manual was copyrighted or the work instructions were a "trade secret." Of course they don't _want_ to go to trial, that would get their dirty secrets on the front pages, but rather they just want to find out which employee posted it.
If they get a judge that's sufficiently a corporate stooge, in the muddled present condition of the law he might neglect to ask how a procedure that everyone knows a name for ("run-around") could be a trade secret, or to point out that quoting one page of a manual is fair use. This decision provides a precedent whereby a judge _ought_ to ask those questions.
Yeah, what I'd rather see is (1) a procedure by which the case can be defended anonymously and the identity revealed only if plaintiff wins, or (2) a requirement that the plaintiff post a large bond, to be paid to the defendant in the event that after finding his identity plaintiff fails to pursue the case or loses -- plus additional damages if there are concrete losses incident to having one's identity revealed, say 2 years pay if you get fired... But that takes legislation, and don't look for it from the best congress money can buy.
On the other hand, "good enough" and FREE is a darned good deal. And if you've worked MS systems long enough, you'll find "good enough" and never crashes PRICELESS.
Where the network admins get involved is usually when it comes to interfacing with the main databases. With 400 seats, you _need_ a database system that makes MS Access look like a toy. (And I speak as one who has attempted to take Access right up to the limits MS admits to...) So unless you've somehow managed to put your whole database onto a IExplorer-compatible website, you are going to have to install a database client on each machine. The front-end one I'm familiar with (for a Progress database running in Unix) is a one-floppy disk 5-minute install, which is a heck of a lot easier than installing Win or Linux.
IMHO, the best way to provide corporate desktop computers is to buy hundreds of identical boxes, find the optimal installation for Linux and required applications, and then clone that configuration. But if they won't give you the budget to buy computers and put them in the closet until needed, then you wind up ordering one at a time for new hires or to replace broken down machines; almost every !@#$% machine is different (at least from lowest-bidder sources), so in Linux you'll spend hours on each one downloading drivers, setting up the configuration, etc. Windows pretty much requires the same time if you install it yourself and bother doing it right, but when you buy pre-configured boxen, it certainly looks like you've saved all that labor -- except for the six times that box is going to crash or catch a virus and have to be re-installed, but that cost comes later, and management isn't going to add it up and realize that buying the alleged industry standard was really boneheaded...
In reinforcement of that: in American law, copyrights and patents were not established as a fundamental right of the creator, but rather as a right that the creator gets for a limited time in return for making the creation freely available after expiration, and allowing certain non-paid uses before expiration (fair use for copyright, free access to patent archives for patents). There is no entitlement to intellectual property, there is just that deal. "The best Congress money can buy" has already made a joke out of "limited time" in the case of copyright, by tacking on another 20 years or so everytime the first Mickey Mouse copyrights get close to expiring. If the DMCA sticks, they've overturned the original deal entirely: if the copyright ever expires you can legally copy the item, but no one can legally sell you the tools.
The Russian gov't ought to put out a warrant for the FBI agents involved -- and particularly the guy that's up for head of the Federal Bureau of Idiocy -- for kidnapping, and press the case before the World Court. Grounds (1) the questionable jurisdiction for arresting Skylarov (his program is quite definitely legal in Russia -- and copy protection that does not allow a backup copy is illegal -- and I haven't seen any evidence that Skylarov was in control of whether his program could be sold to Americans), (2) they apparently shuttled him around after the arrest so as to avoid a bail hearing for TWO WEEKS, blatantly in violation of the US Constitution. They ought to be indicted here for kidnapping & conspiracy to violate civil rights, but you aren't going to see a federal prosecutor going after other federal agents... If the FBI can arrest a foreigner for violating US law in another country, it should be possible to try them in another country for acts committed here that violate the laws of BOTH countries.
Anyway, just what in heck will put out a magnesium fire, other than flooding the room with N2 (which is possible only if you made arrangements long before the fire started)? A CO2 fire extinguisher obviously is no good, and anything water-based is disastrous (relased H2 might cause secondary explosions). Would Halon work (I don't remember the chemical formula), or would the Mg extract chlorine or something from Halon and keep on burning? Someone suggested burying it in sand, which would put the problem out of sight and eventually seal the Mg in molten glass, but might leave it burning away by SiO2 + 2 Mg --> Si + 2 MgO.
Yeah, Magnesium alloys typically provide their own oxygen when they burn. Wrong. Metals (alloys or otherwise) do not contain oxygen. However magnesium has sufficient affinity for oxygen that when it's hot, it will rip H2O apart to get more oxygen. That is, spray water on burning magnesium, you supply it with oxygen AND it releases hydrogen gas, which will drift til it mixes with some non-oxygen depleted air, and then probably ignite...