The US could threaten trade sanctions against any other country that doesn't pass similar laws.
And then all personnal Web hosting will move to countries that are already embargoed, such as Irak, thus making it the last stronghold of free speech. I just can't wait to see that.:)
Furthermore, POS terminals are a market that MS would like to own.
Actually, I discovered they/do/ have a foot in the cash register system market already. At a big gardening shop in my county, I was surprised to notice that the cash register terminal was running Windows. So I go, "Oh, nice screen!" to the cashier girl, who looks at me warily and nods. "Does it work well?" I add, with a big nice enticing smile with "Don't worry, I know what you feel" written all over it. And then the girl leans toward me and blurts, "Oh crap no! Keeps crashing!"
One word: Debian.
Put security.debian.org in your sources.list conf file, and then the standard 'apt-get dist-upgrade' procedure will simply, automagically plug those naaaaasty holes. Debian might not be the best distro for everything, but it's great security-wise for a reason.
Interesting!
However, if the CD's back layer is really 100% reflective, how come when I bring one to my eye I can see it's semi-transparent? Are you sure that all CDs work the way you said?
1) Put a link such as: mailto:dedicatedaddress@wherever.com?Subject= [Question] About your site (or whatever)
2) Trash any email sent to dedicatedaddress that doesn't have the [Question] tag in the subject.
Actually, NVidia does worse than just keeping its drivers closed as hell. Reportedly, when they bought up 3DFX, they had the XFree developpers give them back all the stuff 3DFX had given them to play with and develop a driver.
As a result, the XFree guys had to stop developping for the Voodoo series, and I find myself with a card that won't ever be totally supported, nor will the current driver ever be debuggued. Only way I can get a stable X server now, without my current weekly or so weird crash, is by buying a new card. Needless to say, it will not be an NVidia, trust me on that one.
Wow. They must really have received a deluge of email -- that's the exact same answer I received, while my question wasn't even about Xenu.net. I was just voicing my concerns about some 'entities' astroturfing Google, without even naming Xenu or the CoS at all.
At least they relisted Project Clambake... It's what counts, I guess.
Okay, so basically, it makes sense -- sort of. I imagine they just don't want people to use software off a Windows XP box without forking the mandatory bucks Redmond's way. Which does make sense, the way they've long been imagining LANs: one Windows client per end user, connecting to the central Windows servers. They just don't want it to be legally possible to 'cheat' and use the server software without paying for the client licenses as well. You may or may not agree with their idea of a network, but hey, whatever works for them.
However, that part of the license is really strangely worded. It can be read much more broadly than that, effectively forbidding, say, SSH clients connecting to an SSH server on the XP server box and running things there, or any other form of non-MS-client based networking. I wonder if they have something in mind. Do.NET programs, and more precisely, Web services, count as "other executable software"?
This is the EXACT REASON why I continuously plead, beg, cajole, threaten, etc. all those in the tech community to get involved politically and legally.
You know, I think you're very, very right. I would actually want to do just that. I'm willing to drop everything and start a new career in, well, political tech counselling, or whatever you'll call it? Or whatever would be more efficient?
However, one question stands:
How?
There seems to be a common misconception that it's the French government that wants Yahoo down. This seems to be wrong.
The plaintiff seems to be an org call the "Jewish Community of France". I've not managed to check if they even have the French nationality at all. Most French people I know do not agree at all with the lawsuit.
Same experience here. MPlayer is by far the best player I know, no matter the platform. Apreche, I'd seriously advise giving it a try -- it works great and it's very well documented. I've never had a problem with it, and I even think it's one of the most underrated open source programs. And if for whatever reason you can't seem to make it compile right, toss an email my way (balin[]rne.eu.org with [ares@ie] in gap) and I'll see if I can help.:)
IANAL, but my studies as a CS engineer (whee, doesn't that sound grand *g*) included law courses. We did talk about patents.
Over here, in Some Random Euro Country, software is patentable, but ONLY as part of a bigger system that requires that piece of software in order to work. Ie, I guess, you could patent a computer + its OS, should it qualify for patenting at all (no prior art, non-obvious invention, etc), but you can't patent the OS alone. (I know it's not a good example, but I hope you get the idea.)
Outside that, well, no, ideas are NOT patentable (first line in my course actually), and while software implementation is protected by copyright laws, the idea of it isn't patentable. And it's good that way.
Eole was destroyed, but its immediate successor is displayed in full view in the CNAM museum in Paris. A heck of an impressive sight, I can tell you.:)
The blurb seems to say Eole was built between 1882 and 1889 and first flew in 1890, so if true that puts it slightly ahead of the Wright brothers' Kitty Hawk Flyer, but it's not like it matters much, for what we care.:)
So, you want to give poor people crappy healthcare?
Nope, that's not the way it works (and I don't think that's what the post you're answering to said either). Actually, poor people are the ones you see most often in French hospitals, I hear (it's free, so they run to the hospital whenever there's anything wrong). I'll trust my source about it, my SO works in an hospital in France, so I get to hear a lot about how it works.
Many things suck in France, but the healthcare system isn't one of them. I mean, check it out or ask around (I'm sure we have a few French people on/.), pal, instead of displaying that kind of insecure reaction.:)
Just one (well, two) minor caveats, if you don't mind.:)
To start with, Trillian doesn't support the Jabber protocol. That is annoying (Jabber rocks, dontcha know).
Second problem, Trillian knows nothing of \n carriage returns. It means that, if a friend using, say, licq or some Jabber implementation on Linux/*BSD/whatever sends you a message, the carriage returns won't be displayed properly. That's pretty annoying -- such messages will generally become very hard to read. I notified the dev team about this bug, but they never deemed necessary to answer my email. Oh well, I guess I'll stick with Jabber.:)
Wow. So Amelie, a foreign movie (not bad at all, BTW, saw it tonight myself and I think it deserves it's place on the IMDB's 'best movies ever' list), is nominated a fair number of times, and not just as best foreign movie. I never realized the Oscars nominated the best 'whatever' worldwide. And yet, a huge majority of nominated movies are American. Hmm.:) (Oh wait, what did the 'A' in MPAA stand for already...)
Thanks for the insight! From the way the article was written, it really looked like Howard Schmidt was in charge of security matters in Microsoft products above everything else. Things are kinda clearer that way.
I think security is recognized as the number-one priority across the company. That goes not only to operational security and securing our assets, but also to product development. (emphasis mine)
Anyone else find his priorities in terms of security, shall I say, interesting?
I was thinking... You know, since companies drop support (and thus, money making opportunity) of old software, what if that software was made a public domain thing? That way, competent people could very well found a small company providing support for that software, which would be a win-win-win situation: business can either get support from Smallcompany or upgrade the software; Smallcompany lives an honnest business life, adding competition and diversity to the marketplace; Bigcorp can stop worrying about supporting the old software. Of course, there are always certain corps who see sunset clauses as a way to squeeze always more money from you, and/they/ wouldn't be too fond of a system such as that one, but heck. Free markets are good only when they ARE free.
I know that is not going to happen, but eh, one can dream...
Hmm, I think I have to clarify something here. As long as there's a key or 'shared secret' involved, decryption is an NP problem. Go check the definition: an NP problem is a yes/no question such as if the answer is 'yes', then it can be proven in polynomial time (O(n^t)). That's the case here: "Is there a key to decipher this?" can be rapidly given a positive answer once you actually do have the key. It's also most probably NP-complete, but the margin is too small for me to demonstrate it here.:) (You demonstrate that by proving a given problem is polynomially equivalent to a typical NP-complete problem such as SAT).
Also, don't forget that IBM was on the receiving end of a long and painful trial over anticompetitive practices. And THEY got punished over it. My, my, could it be what made them a friendlier company now?:)
For quite a while, RMS earned a living by developping and selling a 'little' tool you might have heard of, Emacs. All irony aside, yes, RMS actually sold Emacs. GPL'ed, with the source and everything, but he sold it.
Slashdot Mirror
The US could threaten trade sanctions against any other country that doesn't pass similar laws.
:)
And then all personnal Web hosting will move to countries that are already embargoed, such as Irak, thus making it the last stronghold of free speech. I just can't wait to see that.
Furthermore, POS terminals are a market that MS would like to own.
/do/ have a foot in the cash register system market already. At a big gardening shop in my county, I was surprised to notice that the cash register terminal was running Windows. So I go, "Oh, nice screen!" to the cashier girl, who looks at me warily and nods. "Does it work well?" I add, with a big nice enticing smile with "Don't worry, I know what you feel" written all over it. And then the girl leans toward me and blurts, "Oh crap no! Keeps crashing!"
Actually, I discovered they
Still, see, MS has a foot in that market.
One word: Debian.
Put security.debian.org in your sources.list conf file, and then the standard 'apt-get dist-upgrade' procedure will simply, automagically plug those naaaaasty holes. Debian might not be the best distro for everything, but it's great security-wise for a reason.
Interesting!
However, if the CD's back layer is really 100% reflective, how come when I bring one to my eye I can see it's semi-transparent? Are you sure that all CDs work the way you said?
1) Put a link such as: mailto:dedicatedaddress@wherever.com?Subject= [Question] About your site (or whatever)
2) Trash any email sent to dedicatedaddress that doesn't have the [Question] tag in the subject.
Hope this helps.
Actually, NVidia does worse than just keeping its drivers closed as hell. Reportedly, when they bought up 3DFX, they had the XFree developpers give them back all the stuff 3DFX had given them to play with and develop a driver.
As a result, the XFree guys had to stop developping for the Voodoo series, and I find myself with a card that won't ever be totally supported, nor will the current driver ever be debuggued. Only way I can get a stable X server now, without my current weekly or so weird crash, is by buying a new card. Needless to say, it will not be an NVidia, trust me on that one.
Well... Snakes DO have two penises... =)
Wow. They must really have received a deluge of email -- that's the exact same answer I received, while my question wasn't even about Xenu.net. I was just voicing my concerns about some 'entities' astroturfing Google, without even naming Xenu or the CoS at all.
At least they relisted Project Clambake... It's what counts, I guess.
Okay, so basically, it makes sense -- sort of. I imagine they just don't want people to use software off a Windows XP box without forking the mandatory bucks Redmond's way. Which does make sense, the way they've long been imagining LANs: one Windows client per end user, connecting to the central Windows servers. They just don't want it to be legally possible to 'cheat' and use the server software without paying for the client licenses as well. You may or may not agree with their idea of a network, but hey, whatever works for them.
.NET programs, and more precisely, Web services, count as "other executable software"?
However, that part of the license is really strangely worded. It can be read much more broadly than that, effectively forbidding, say, SSH clients connecting to an SSH server on the XP server box and running things there, or any other form of non-MS-client based networking. I wonder if they have something in mind. Do
This is the EXACT REASON why I continuously plead, beg, cajole, threaten, etc. all those in the tech community to get involved politically and legally.
You know, I think you're very, very right. I would actually want to do just that. I'm willing to drop everything and start a new career in, well, political tech counselling, or whatever you'll call it? Or whatever would be more efficient?
However, one question stands:
How?
Your insight would be much appreciated. Thanks.
There seems to be a common misconception that it's the French government that wants Yahoo down. This seems to be wrong.
The plaintiff seems to be an org call the "Jewish Community of France". I've not managed to check if they even have the French nationality at all. Most French people I know do not agree at all with the lawsuit.
Same experience here. MPlayer is by far the best player I know, no matter the platform. Apreche, I'd seriously advise giving it a try -- it works great and it's very well documented. I've never had a problem with it, and I even think it's one of the most underrated open source programs. And if for whatever reason you can't seem to make it compile right, toss an email my way (balin[]rne.eu.org with [ares@ie] in gap) and I'll see if I can help. :)
Anyone who is in Europe now have some insight?
IANAL, but my studies as a CS engineer (whee, doesn't that sound grand *g*) included law courses. We did talk about patents.
Over here, in Some Random Euro Country, software is patentable, but ONLY as part of a bigger system that requires that piece of software in order to work. Ie, I guess, you could patent a computer + its OS, should it qualify for patenting at all (no prior art, non-obvious invention, etc), but you can't patent the OS alone. (I know it's not a good example, but I hope you get the idea.)
Outside that, well, no, ideas are NOT patentable (first line in my course actually), and while software implementation is protected by copyright laws, the idea of it isn't patentable. And it's good that way.
Hope this helps...
Eole was destroyed, but its immediate successor is displayed in full view in the CNAM museum in Paris. A heck of an impressive sight, I can tell you. :)
:)
The blurb seems to say Eole was built between 1882 and 1889 and first flew in 1890, so if true that puts it slightly ahead of the Wright brothers' Kitty Hawk Flyer, but it's not like it matters much, for what we care.
So, you want to give poor people crappy healthcare?
/.), pal, instead of displaying that kind of insecure reaction. :)
Nope, that's not the way it works (and I don't think that's what the post you're answering to said either). Actually, poor people are the ones you see most often in French hospitals, I hear (it's free, so they run to the hospital whenever there's anything wrong). I'll trust my source about it, my SO works in an hospital in France, so I get to hear a lot about how it works.
Many things suck in France, but the healthcare system isn't one of them. I mean, check it out or ask around (I'm sure we have a few French people on
Just one (well, two) minor caveats, if you don't mind. :) :)
To start with, Trillian doesn't support the Jabber protocol. That is annoying (Jabber rocks, dontcha know).
Second problem, Trillian knows nothing of \n carriage returns. It means that, if a friend using, say, licq or some Jabber implementation on Linux/*BSD/whatever sends you a message, the carriage returns won't be displayed properly. That's pretty annoying -- such messages will generally become very hard to read. I notified the dev team about this bug, but they never deemed necessary to answer my email. Oh well, I guess I'll stick with Jabber.
Ah ah. Many people seem to agree with you, too: Amelie is number 13 on the IMDB's list of top movies ever. Interesting, isn't it? :)
Wow. So Amelie, a foreign movie (not bad at all, BTW, saw it tonight myself and I think it deserves it's place on the IMDB's 'best movies ever' list), is nominated a fair number of times, and not just as best foreign movie. I never realized the Oscars nominated the best 'whatever' worldwide. And yet, a huge majority of nominated movies are American. Hmm. :)
(Oh wait, what did the 'A' in MPAA stand for already...)
Yep. Maybe you have overlooked it, but I'll bet it was posted that way on purpose, to help reduce the load on kernel.org.
Thanks for the insight! From the way the article was written, it really looked like Howard Schmidt was in charge of security matters in Microsoft products above everything else. Things are kinda clearer that way.
I think security is recognized as the number-one priority across the company. That goes not only to operational security and securing our assets, but also to product development. (emphasis mine)
Anyone else find his priorities in terms of security, shall I say, interesting?
Excellent point!
/they/ wouldn't be too fond of a system such as that one, but heck. Free markets are good only when they ARE free.
I was thinking... You know, since companies drop support (and thus, money making opportunity) of old software, what if that software was made a public domain thing? That way, competent people could very well found a small company providing support for that software, which would be a win-win-win situation: business can either get support from Smallcompany or upgrade the software; Smallcompany lives an honnest business life, adding competition and diversity to the marketplace; Bigcorp can stop worrying about supporting the old software. Of course, there are always certain corps who see sunset clauses as a way to squeeze always more money from you, and
I know that is not going to happen, but eh, one can dream...
Hmm, I think I have to clarify something here. As long as there's a key or 'shared secret' involved, decryption is an NP problem. Go check the definition: an NP problem is a yes/no question such as if the answer is 'yes', then it can be proven in polynomial time (O(n^t)). That's the case here: "Is there a key to decipher this?" can be rapidly given a positive answer once you actually do have the key. It's also most probably NP-complete, but the margin is too small for me to demonstrate it here. :) (You demonstrate that by proving a given problem is polynomially equivalent to a typical NP-complete problem such as SAT).
Also, don't forget that IBM was on the receiving end of a long and painful trial over anticompetitive practices. And THEY got punished over it. My, my, could it be what made them a friendlier company now? :)
Hmm. Sorry, I beg to differ.
For quite a while, RMS earned a living by developping and selling a 'little' tool you might have heard of, Emacs. All irony aside, yes, RMS actually sold Emacs. GPL'ed, with the source and everything, but he sold it.
Interesting, isn't it?