Pirate stuff. Yeah, some people will whine about ohhhhh, you're breaking the law; but when chances of being caught are very low and the media cartels are aggressively ceding the moral high ground to the pirates, who gives a crap?
We might add that people are missing a significant part by being ignorant of the history of this issue. For more than a century, ever since sound recordings became possible, the recording industry has a very consistent history of crying "Piracy!" for every new technology. They try mightily to stop every invention and new product, out of fear that it will kill their business that's based on the current technology. Then, a few years later when the "pirates" have become successful, the industry buys them out and proudly proclaims that the new technology was their invention all along. The companies that don't switch to the new technology go out of business, and sometimes newcomers make it big. And then, a new kind of recording gadget comes along, and the cry of "Piracy!" is heard again.
In another decade, we can expect to look back at the same thing. This newfangled "intarweb" thingy will be the established distribution system, and the recording industry will be claiming that they invented it and magnanimously delivered it to the masses. But some new technology will be appearing that will be a threat to the way they do business over the Internet, and they'll be hollering "Piracy!" all over again.
[I]f it doesn't take special smarts, then why does OUR government use Windows in so many applications, including (in some cases) military and security?
Good point. What would you think is the explanation?;-)
If you see large amounts of data being sent out from your network, and you're a gov't official (smart enough to consider switching to linux), would that not throw up some red flags?
Indeed. And that's not a hypothetical scenario. Back in the early 1990s, soon after Microsoft first started supplying Internet connectivity, there were numerous reports of people noticing that the modem lights were flickering when the system was supposedly idle. Some people who noticed this had line monitors, which they plugged in between the computer and the modem. They reported that the traffic consisted of lists of the contents of the disk, and the destination address was owned by Microsoft. The reason for this was left to the reader's imagination.
Nowadays this isn't reported as much, but it's mostly because people have gotten accustomed to the idea that the modem's lights flicker at random times, even when "nothing should be happening". Also, investigating such activity is a bit more difficult these days, because the packets' contents are often encoded or encrypted, and you don't see the plain text scrolling by on the monitor's screen.
That "Notable" dinette set is a good illustration. In the case of the old myth about "nova" meaning "no va" in Spanish, there's a more direct way of debunking it. Most native speakers of Spanish are Catholics, and even if they aren't, any minimally-educated Spanish speaker will know enough basic Latin to understand that "nova" is Latin for "nueva". So even if they see the "nova/no va" pun (and most would), it would hardly be worth even a grin.
Another variant of the myth would be to claim that English-speaking people didn't buy Chevy Novas because they were afraid it would explode.
That is to say, that's one of the smarter things I have heard about a government lately.
But it doesn't really require any special smarts to understand that if you buy a "black box" computer whose innards are all binary blobs that your people can't take apart and study, the computer can do anything at all with your data, and you have no defense. In particular, if you plug it into a network, it can be sending all your data off to anywhere in the world.
If someone doesn't understand this, the reason isn't usually stupidity. It's because they have some ulterior motive to not understand it. In the case of politicians, the reason is generally because they're "on the take", known in the US as "campaign contributions". This is likely to be the case with non-governmental organizations, too. After all, it has become common for organizations to let vendors know that they're looking at linux and other "free" software. The response from Microsoft and other vendors is to (publicly) offer their software at a much lower price, and (privately) offer kickback to the administrators.
You don't need to attribute great intelligence to someone who understands this. It's the way that much of the world has always worked. We can expect to read of some vaguely-specified special agreements between Microsoft and the Cuban government, and we'll know what has gone on behind the scenes.
Newspapers aren't expected to cite their sources because traditionally, they take responsibility internally for fact-checking everything and backing up whatever they print with their institutional reputation.
Except that few newspapers have ever done that. The claims that they do are mostly PR that originates from the newspapers themselves. Some of the PR also comes from Hollywood, of course, with their flocks of "intrepid reporters" exposing the bad guys.
Most newspapers have never done any significant amount of fact checking. The more honest ones inform their readers of this in a subtle manner, by not reporting facts but rather what various people said about the facts. And even then, quotes tend to be "edited for clarity", sometimes to the point of saying something very different than what a person actually said. And, of course, there's the traditional technique of "lies of omission".
News organizations have traditionally relied on the fact that their readers generally don't have any way to do fact checking themselves. So they can talk about how much fact checking their journalists and editors do, knowing full well that hardly anyone could fact-check this claim.
And over the past decade, most newspapers have cut back radically on staff. The cutbacks have especially hit their reporting and editing staff. So now, if you want fact checking, you're generally more likely to find it online, not in newsrooms.
An opinion piece in a newspaper isn't worth much, but an interview, with direct quotes for example, is.
You should be careful of supposed direct quotes, too. It's all too common for news organizations to "edit" quotes, and sometimes the result says something rather different than what the person originally said. Publications with reputations as good as the New York Times have been documented publishing manufactured quotes inside quote marks. So it's still best to dig for the primary source (a recording - which could also be edited) rather than relying on what a news publication says a person said.
Newspapers are used all the time as sources for University level historical research.
And note that some newspapers are "publications of record", i.e., they're the primary sources of certain kinds of information. The best known are marriages, deaths, and court decisions. These are documented in official archives, of course, but a newspaper "of record" is usually much more easily available from many libraries. You just have to be a bit careful to quote only the things for which the newspaper really is an official publication of record.
Der Spiegel is not a scholarly journal, either. It also cannot be taken as a primary source of information.
We might add that this should be obvious to anyone with a smidgin of German (or access to a German-English dictionary, which google will find for you in a fraction of a second). The name "Der Spiegel" means "The Mirror". So they state right there at the top, in their masthead, that they are only mirroring what other people say or write. It's hard to think of a more blatant way of saying "We are not a primary source."
Of course, we wouldn't expect many Americans to understand such things. There's an old joke:
Q: If someone who speaks two languages is bilingual, and someone who speaks three languages is trilingual, what do you call someone who speaks only one language?
Regarding the low rate of Linux adoption, I don't get what you mean. It is used everywhere, and the world would literally grind to a halt if a small percentage of devices running GNU/Linux were shut down.
Actually, the business world's (and Microsoft's) problem is that linux only has a low rate of sales That's what people are measuring when they say that linux is under 1% of the market. But if you measure installed systems, linux's adoption is much higher than that. How much higher is difficult to determine, because business data is mostly based on sales figures. The difference is that the overwhelming majority of linux installations are on machines that didn't come with linux installed. Most of the linux installations are tallied as Windows machines, because that's what they were sold with. Thus they get tallied as sales of Microsoft products, when that's not what the computers are actually running.
I wonder if there are any reliable figures measuring the actual installations? I've seen some figures, but I'm not convinced that any of them are reliable. I have three computers running in this room right now. One is a Mac, running OS X. The other two are Intel systems. One was bought several years ago with Windows XP, but it became inadequate for its job due to the software bloat, so a bigger Windows box was bought, and the old machine became a linux server. The other was bought recently with linux installed, but the vendor mostly sells Windows boxes, and this one was likely reported to Microsoft as a Windows sale. So I have either one or two linux systems that are counted in the sales statistics as Microsoft Windows systems. One did run Windows for a while; the other has only run linux.
So my personal experience says that sales and installation figures for MS Windows and linux are highly likely to be wrong. I'm not aware of anyone trying to collect the data in a way that would convince a curious but rational skeptic that the figures are correct.
*Have* you *really* been running Linux?;) Half-baked things happen here all the time, that's one of the platform's strengths.
Heh; ya got me there. You're completely right.
And, of course, sometimes half-baked things turn out better than when fully baked. My theory on how brownies originated is an example: Someone was trying to make a chocolate cake, but they didn't bake it long enough, so they got a thick lump instead. They tried it, and thought "Hey, this stuff is pretty good."
And another example: A few years ago, I used the konqueror browser a lot, because it didn't do flash, so it didn't get bogged down by pages full of flash ads like the more "advanced" browsers did. When I hit a page with flash that I actually wanted to see, it was easy enough to copy the URL over to mozilla or firefox. Then konqueror got flash. Since then, I haven't used it much. OTOH, firefox got flashblock and NoScript, so now it has the advantage that konqueror used to have. Except that it took a LOT more programming to make it possible to ignore such such misfeatures, once they had to be backwards compatible with the earlier version that ran every flash ad.
Very often, the half-baked state is superior to the final dish.
Although new Macs are in fact x86 machines, Apple does not offer OS X for sale other than pre-installed on a new Apple computer. They COULD easily expand it to other x86 machines but for whatever reason they choose not to.
Well, on this Mac I've made heavy use of what may be one of the reasons they don't try this.
One OS X tool that I use fairly often is the Keyboard Viewer. This pops up a little window that shows a picture of the keyboard, including a glyph for each key. It's "active", so for instance if you press the Shift key, all the glyphs change to the "upper case" character. Pressing the Option key gets you a different set of keys that includes all sorts of accent marks, etc that are applied to the next letter that you type. So you can quickly learn to type in French, German, Swedish, Czech, whatever. The fun part is that my list of available keyboards includes Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and a few other alphabets. When I select them, the Keyboard Viewer window shows the keys with glyphs in that alphabet. (I'm still trying to find the documentation for the Chinese and Japanese keyboards.;-)
Anyway, I've asked about doing something similar with linux. But a major problem is that linux is expected to run on any sort of PC hardware, and this includes any available keyboard. To do a linux Keyboard Viewer, you'd have to get samples of all commercial keyboards (including some that haven't been sold yet), and figure out how to identify their layout. The manufacturers can't be bothered to cooperate with this. So you can't do the first step, which is to draw a picture of the keyboard in a little window. There's no known way to discover the layout of any keyboard that has every been manufactured and that can be plugged into a PC.
Apple doesn't have this problem, because they control the hardware that OSX runs on. If you plug in a weird keyboard, the Keyboard Viewer simply won't correspond to what's on the keyboard, and it's Not Apple's Problem. With linux, you could do this, and the failure to handle it would be yet another example of why linux Isn't Ready For The Desktop.
Actually, if someone knows a good way to correctly identify every keyboard's layout, I and a lot of other people might be very interested. But note that every qualifier. This includes keyboards being manufactured in small plants that you've never heard of, for languages that you've never heard of, by people who don't follow standards because they only deal with Microsoft and its OEMs.
If this is possible, does anyone know where it's documented?;-)
Sorry, your analogy falls down. When you install an operating system ON YOUR COMPUTER, your friends are still allowed to borrow it and check their e-mail. You can even make user accounts for them if you so desire.
Hmmm... If you were around in the 1980s, you might know that there were a lot of systems that were sold with builtin limits to the number of accounts and/or simultaneous logins allowed. This was true of the Sys/V unix systems, for example. The OEMs would charge you a significant fee for an "unlimited logins" version of the system, and one of the things that got a lot of us really annoyed was that what you got for this extra charge was a change in a single byte somewhere in some system file. In a few releases, the position and value of this byte was published, so one could write a program to change its value. It was sorta like the reports from the 70s about features in IBM hardware that were enabled by cutting a jumper on a circuit board, but it could cost you a lot of money to hire a CS guy to come in and cut that jumper.
Anyway, this sort of silly programmed-in "Pay us to change the byte that enables this feature" limitation was likely one of the things that killed off Sys/V and several other systems. The *BSD and linux systems never did this to you.
It's possible that I may have contributed in a minor way to ending this practice in the unix/linux world. Due to problems with diagnosing login problems (typically caused by the insanity of modems and other comm hardware), I wrote a program that functioned like the getty(1) program, but it had lots and lots of debug features. Its purpose was to document in detail what happened during a login attempt, so that I could diagnose and (usually) fix the problems. It was a drop-in replacement for getty, and I got lots of nice email from people who downloaded it. In several mailing-list discussions of the topic, I explained that I hadn't implemented the usual login limits for the simple reason that I didn't know where the limit was stored. I commented that if the folks at AT&T and various OEMs didn't like the fact that my getty clone defeated their login limit, they should just reply to this message and tell me where the limit was stored. I'd then add it to a feature to my program.
For some reason, they never replied to my invitation. Perhaps they figured out that if they did that, then everyone (on the list at least) would know how to defeat the login limit. And, of course, I'd implement it as I did other features, via an explicit command-line or config-file option, which users could change as they liked.
Anyway, eventually this "feature" was dropped from Sys/V, and it seems to have also disappeared from MS Windows (or maybe I just haven't heard about it biting anyone lately). Something convinced the proprietary guys that this was a bad idea.
But back then, it was entirely likely that you couldn't give your friends logins to your system, or if you did, they might not be able to log in until you first logged out. I had this problem in a lot of situtations, where I was trying to diagnose a remote system's problems, but I couldn't log in because the system had hit its login limit. So we had to have someone at the remote site walk over and try to log someone out, or if that didn't work, they could reboot it. But if they did a reboot, the problem would go away, killing our attempts to diagnose it and fix it.
There's a long history of vendors doing things that make life difficult for their customers, all in an attempt to get customers to pay more for permission to use the computer for what they'd bought it for. Blocking multi-user access is just one of the more annoying such things.
One of the more spectacular takeovers of American production happened back in the 1970's and 80's, in the solid-state electronics field. First the Japanese, then the Koreans and a few others, discussed openly how they were going to do it. Their argument was based on an uncomfortable fact: At the time, developing a solid-state manufacturing facility cost on the order of $1 billion US dollars, and required about a decade of building, training and testing to get it to the point of producing working products. They observed that American management was no longer capable of making decade-long investments. Managers were judged on this quarter's results, and "long term" mean looking at most a year into the future. Americans could no longer build electronics plants, because managers of such investments would be fired within a year due to their zero profitability. So, the Asians argued, anyone who was willing to invest in 10 years of development time could take the entire business away from the Americans who had already done the basic research.
They were right, of course, and this argument still works. American firms invest in short-term marketing research, and make small tweaks to their products that can be profitable right away. Any manager that pushes for longer-term, more expensive research or development will be out of a job before the investment pays off.
There was also a good Help Desk cartoon yesterday about how US industry works these days.
This is like taking a photo of a car and claiming you can now manufacture them.
Good start at an auto analogy, but we can do better.
It's more like taking photos of passing cars, and showing the world that you can capture information such as the license number, the make and model, the colors of various parts of the car, and so on. In your press interview, you point out that this would enable various people to build an auto that looks exactly like yours, including a fake license plate. You'd probably admit that you didn't capture any vehicle ID numbers, but since those are visible through the windshield, you could get that info if you could walk up to the car with your camera. All this would enable someone with a good auto shop to buy a car from a dealer and doctor it so that it would pass as your car in any inspection. This dup car could then, for example, be left at a crime scene to implicate you in the crime.
This is purely hypothetical, of course...;-)
It is sorta funny that people get so excited about someone showing that they can capture information from a device that was designed to broadcast the information. I sorta wonder what sort of world they live in, that they'd be surprised that such a thing was possible. How will they react when they learn that their government has been installing such broadcast equipment in things like passports and other such ID gadgetry? And that the interception hardware is being installed in retail stores all over? This is just going to shake a lot of people's world views.
It reminds me of a cartoon I saw recently, in which one person described his equipment that intercepts TV shows out of the air and displays them on a screen, without paying any cable subscription. Another character opined that this was "piracy" and was illegal.
Earlier today, while I was driving my car, I listened to some music that was similarly captured out of the air without me paying anything at all. The music was decrypted, and broadcast through speakers in the car. This was all done by some electronics that were installed by the auto dealer. I can hardly wait to hear what the RIAA will say when they hear that such equipment is sold openly in this country. And I can imagine the flame war that'll follow my admission that I know how to get and install such music-pirating hardware.
During the demonstration he picked up the details of two US passport cards. Using the data gleaned it would be relatively simple to make cloned passport cards he said.
Anyone with even minimal English fluency would understand this as saying that he collected the data but didn't do anything with it.
We don't even need an automotive analogy, since the data was collected from one car by reading passport RFIDs in other passing cars.
Hotmail is/was powered by a mixture of FreeBSD and Solaris. NOT Linux.
Hmmm... I decided to check. A few probes of hotmail.com turned up only headers like:
HTTP/1.1 302 Redirected Connection: close Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2009 14:10:32 GMT Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 Location: http://lc2.bay0.hotmail.passport.com/cgi-bin/login HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2009 14:10:33 GMT Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 P3P: CP="BUS CUR CONo FIN IVDo ONL OUR PHY SAMo TELo" xxn:28 MSNSERVER: H: BAY124-W28 V: 13.2.260.1209 D: 2008-12-09T21:13:20...
So where are the signs of any *BSD or Solaris system here? It looks very much like a typical Windows server running IIS.
This isn't to say that they aren't also running Solaris or FreeBSD servers. But my probes didn't turn up any evidence of such systems during this brief time window.
No, lots of other things can be free. I have several gigabytes of free space on this machine's disk. That doesn't mean that you can use it. And my saying that you can't use it doesn't mean that it isn't "free" in the sense that anyone would have understood when they read my second sentence.
As someone said a few messages higher on my screen, "As though 'Free' didn't have enough definitions already." The English language has some serious bugs, and one of them that keeps biting us is that the word "free" has several radically different meanings. Those meanings have a small common core, true, but it can take a bit of etymological digging to extract that core meaning.
The word "free" is routinely applied to physical objects. Ask your local marketing people about how they use the word. They like to advertise things as "free" when you have to pay money to get them.
So no, you don't have the right (or even the ability) to restrict the meaning an English word to a single meaning that you like. Nobody else will honor your restricted definition. They'll just continue to (mis)use the word in all the different senses that they've learned. Yes, this does cause (mis)communication problems. That's what happens when you use a human-generated language. They're all sloppy, inconsistent, and self-contradictory. There's not much you or I can do about it (except maybe to rant a bit). Lots of people have suggested that we replace one meaning of "free" with a word like "gratis", as other languages have done. So far, such suggestions have failed totally.
[Microsoft] think they have a right to re-configure the software you use, for their own convenience and profit. That they can install things and you should have no say in the matter.
They do. Read the EULA.
Yup; I've read a few Microsoft EULAs, and they did say that by running their softweare, you give them the right to write anywhere on the disk. Even on partitions that contain other OSs or no OS at all. I learned about this years ago, when I had a PC with Windows, and installed linux on a second partition. When I booted Windows, I discovered that the linux partition was no longer marked bootable. I eventually found the paragraph in the docs where it was stated that Windows did this. I reformatted the Windows partition as another linux filesystem.
However, we should note that things stated in the EULA are not necessarily legally binding. As with contracts, licenses can't override laws. Most places have laws about such things, and in much of the world, this would qualify as sabotage of the customer's equipment. It shows that Microsoft knows their software does such things, and the behavior is intentional. It's likely that wherever you live, EULA text like this would be treated by a court as admission of guilt, malice aforethought, or whatever your local legal terminology is. If it worries you that Microsoft is modifying your installation of non-MS software, perhaps you should talk to a local lawyer about it. You just might be able to get a settlement for it. Even better, see if you can start a class-action lawsuit, which could help persuade Microsoft's management that their code should include code to check your locality before it does such things to your computer.
If nobody challenges them, they'll take this as acceptance, and they'll continue to do it. Actually, considering that automatic, behind-the-scenes updates have existed in MS Windows since at least XP, it may take a lot of time to teach them any useful lesson. But it's worth doing, at least if you want (or need) to run MS software for some reason.
Ask the researchers if they'd be willing to be connected to the lie detectors...
The scientists would be fools to do this. The machines would be operated by people trained by the company, and whose jobs depend on maintaining the belief that the machines are actually measuring truthfulness. And nobody but those operators would be qualified to judge the validity of the outcome.
This pretty much guarantees that the outcome would be against the victims, uh, I mean the scientists.
It doesn't take a genius to understand this. All it takes is someone with the sense to understand what it means to be judged by someone who feels that you are threatening them.
To use the canonical auto analogy: Agreeing to being judged by the operators of this machine would be much like taking your car to an auto dealer and asking them to decide whether you need a new car.
Different masses require different speeds to keep the same orbit.
Uh, no they don't - that would be a violation of the Strong Equivalence Principal (SEP), which holds exactly in General Relativity, and has been tested via the Nordtvedt effect in Lunar Laser Ranging to better than a part per thousand.
Actually, various physicists and mathematicians have point out that there's a far simpler way to debunk that idea, related to the old idea that heavy objects should fall faster than lighter objects (when air resistance is insignificant, of course).
The idea is to point out that an object can be treated as the combination of two smaller objects. If a heavier object falls (or orbits) faster than a light object, then any object should fall (or orbit) faster than any of its component pieces. But this is clearly contrary to fact; an object made of combined pieces must fall (or orbit) at exactly the same speed as its pieces.
I once read a variant of it as measuring the falling (or orbital) speed of two objects. Now take a thread whose mass is insignificant compared to the objects. Use the thread to connect the two objects (perhaps with two small dabs of glue if there are no places to tie the thread to the objects). Adding the connecting thread obviously combines the two objects into a single object. So would you expect that object to suddenly start falling (or orbiting) faster the instant the thread made the connection?
This line of reasoning works with any quantity that's dependent on an additive property such as mass. If the speed were dependent on some non-additive property (e.g., surface area or age or cuteness), the reasoning fails. But falling (and orbital) speed are dependent on mass, which is additive. So these speeds can't depend on the objects' masses.
Of course, this doesn't detract from the more sophisticated tests like the lunar lasers. It's always useful to have independent lines of reasoning and independent tests. But it's of historical interest that some people reasoned correctly about the way that objects fall long before we had corner reflectors on the moon, and before we had General Relativity.
If it shares the Earth's orbit, shouldn't its speed, relative to the Earth, be zero?
On average, but not necessarily at any given time.
Various astronomers have pointed out that the Earth and Luna are effectively two small planets sharing an orbit. On average, they have the same orbital speed, but because of their masses, they can't maintain a constant distance apart. For a while, they are accelerating toward each other, slowing down the one that's leading and speeding up the one that's trailing. This makes the leading one drop toward the sun slightly, while the trailing one moves out slightly, and they pass. Then they've changed roles, and the process repeats. From either one of them, it looks like the other is a satellite. And while they both have the same average orbital speed around the sun, at any given time both have an instantaneous speed that's slightly different from that average.
There's a similar pair of moons in the Saturn system, that share an orbit and are repeatedly swapping the leading/trailing positions. Actually, this effectively happens with any planet-moon pair, but in cases like Mars or Jupiter, where the satellites are many orders of magnitude smaller than the planet, the effect on the planet can't be detected because the planet's changes of orbital speed are too small to be measured by our instruments.
This new object could be compared to the Earth's moon, but it's a lot smaller and is in a much wider orbit. Or all three could be considered objects with nearly-identical orbits around the sun, constantly swapping leading/trailing roles.
Similarly, I once read a description of the solar system as the sun and Jupiter plus a few billion insignificant pieces of smaller junk sharing a common orbit around the galactic center. What made them a "solar system" was that they were close enough together to be gravitationally bound, so they appeared to local observers to be orbiting each other.
Are NEOs abundant enough to do that? How many NEOs are even candidates for mining?
Well, to start close to home, there are a few thousand of them orbiting the Earth. There are lots of dead satellites out there, and most are stuffed full of electronics gadgetry. Granted, the chips might not be worth salvaging. But you can always use resistors and capacitors, and there's gotta be a few thousand km of wires that could be collected and added to the parts closets in your orbiting labs. This should be a lot cheaper than manufacturing replacements and lifting them from Earth. It would also help with the slowly growing problem of dodging all that orbiting shrapnel, before we end up with visible Saturn-like rings around our planet.
Also, if we can develop a reasonably cheap way to intercept incoming NEOs, over time we would clear out most of the population that intercepts our orbit, slowly making life on Earth more secure.
And eventually we're going to find it useful to be able to get our minerals delivered in space without the expense of lifting them up from Earth.
The planet has a good enough population of impact craters of all sizes, that we should take seriously any ideas for collecting the NEOs and putting them to better use.
But the best argument for going after a 10m object is that it would be a good start in learning to handle the 100m and 1000m objects that are also out there somewhere, heading our way.
Slashdot Mirror
Could He have been in on the scam?
Pirate stuff. Yeah, some people will whine about ohhhhh, you're breaking the law; but when chances of being caught are very low and the media cartels are aggressively ceding the moral high ground to the pirates, who gives a crap?
We might add that people are missing a significant part by being ignorant of the history of this issue. For more than a century, ever since sound recordings became possible, the recording industry has a very consistent history of crying "Piracy!" for every new technology. They try mightily to stop every invention and new product, out of fear that it will kill their business that's based on the current technology. Then, a few years later when the "pirates" have become successful, the industry buys them out and proudly proclaims that the new technology was their invention all along. The companies that don't switch to the new technology go out of business, and sometimes newcomers make it big. And then, a new kind of recording gadget comes along, and the cry of "Piracy!" is heard again.
In another decade, we can expect to look back at the same thing. This newfangled "intarweb" thingy will be the established distribution system, and the recording industry will be claiming that they invented it and magnanimously delivered it to the masses. But some new technology will be appearing that will be a threat to the way they do business over the Internet, and they'll be hollering "Piracy!" all over again.
I wonder if it can specifically identify legal content, too.
So why would the likes of the RIAA and MPAA want to do that?
They're interested in finding criminals, not showing that people are innocent.
[I]f it doesn't take special smarts, then why does OUR government use Windows in so many applications, including (in some cases) military and security?
Good point. What would you think is the explanation? ;-)
If you see large amounts of data being sent out from your network, and you're a gov't official (smart enough to consider switching to linux), would that not throw up some red flags?
Indeed. And that's not a hypothetical scenario. Back in the early 1990s, soon after Microsoft first started supplying Internet connectivity, there were numerous reports of people noticing that the modem lights were flickering when the system was supposedly idle. Some people who noticed this had line monitors, which they plugged in between the computer and the modem. They reported that the traffic consisted of lists of the contents of the disk, and the destination address was owned by Microsoft. The reason for this was left to the reader's imagination.
Nowadays this isn't reported as much, but it's mostly because people have gotten accustomed to the idea that the modem's lights flicker at random times, even when "nothing should be happening". Also, investigating such activity is a bit more difficult these days, because the packets' contents are often encoded or encrypted, and you don't see the plain text scrolling by on the monitor's screen.
That "Notable" dinette set is a good illustration. In the case of the old myth about "nova" meaning "no va" in Spanish, there's a more direct way of debunking it. Most native speakers of Spanish are Catholics, and even if they aren't, any minimally-educated Spanish speaker will know enough basic Latin to understand that "nova" is Latin for "nueva". So even if they see the "nova/no va" pun (and most would), it would hardly be worth even a grin.
Another variant of the myth would be to claim that English-speaking people didn't buy Chevy Novas because they were afraid it would explode.
Castrate Linux
Nah; too unsubtle. It should be Castrix. That provides the requisite word-play, and hides the true meaning.
That is to say, that's one of the smarter things I have heard about a government lately.
But it doesn't really require any special smarts to understand that if you buy a "black box" computer whose innards are all binary blobs that your people can't take apart and study, the computer can do anything at all with your data, and you have no defense. In particular, if you plug it into a network, it can be sending all your data off to anywhere in the world.
If someone doesn't understand this, the reason isn't usually stupidity. It's because they have some ulterior motive to not understand it. In the case of politicians, the reason is generally because they're "on the take", known in the US as "campaign contributions". This is likely to be the case with non-governmental organizations, too. After all, it has become common for organizations to let vendors know that they're looking at linux and other "free" software. The response from Microsoft and other vendors is to (publicly) offer their software at a much lower price, and (privately) offer kickback to the administrators.
You don't need to attribute great intelligence to someone who understands this. It's the way that much of the world has always worked. We can expect to read of some vaguely-specified special agreements between Microsoft and the Cuban government, and we'll know what has gone on behind the scenes.
Newspapers aren't expected to cite their sources because traditionally, they take responsibility internally for fact-checking everything and backing up whatever they print with their institutional reputation.
Except that few newspapers have ever done that. The claims that they do are mostly PR that originates from the newspapers themselves. Some of the PR also comes from Hollywood, of course, with their flocks of "intrepid reporters" exposing the bad guys.
Most newspapers have never done any significant amount of fact checking. The more honest ones inform their readers of this in a subtle manner, by not reporting facts but rather what various people said about the facts. And even then, quotes tend to be "edited for clarity", sometimes to the point of saying something very different than what a person actually said. And, of course, there's the traditional technique of "lies of omission".
News organizations have traditionally relied on the fact that their readers generally don't have any way to do fact checking themselves. So they can talk about how much fact checking their journalists and editors do, knowing full well that hardly anyone could fact-check this claim.
And over the past decade, most newspapers have cut back radically on staff. The cutbacks have especially hit their reporting and editing staff. So now, if you want fact checking, you're generally more likely to find it online, not in newsrooms.
An opinion piece in a newspaper isn't worth much, but an interview, with direct quotes for example, is.
You should be careful of supposed direct quotes, too. It's all too common for news organizations to "edit" quotes, and sometimes the result says something rather different than what the person originally said. Publications with reputations as good as the New York Times have been documented publishing manufactured quotes inside quote marks. So it's still best to dig for the primary source (a recording - which could also be edited) rather than relying on what a news publication says a person said.
Newspapers are used all the time as sources for University level historical research.
And note that some newspapers are "publications of record", i.e., they're the primary sources of certain kinds of information. The best known are marriages, deaths, and court decisions. These are documented in official archives, of course, but a newspaper "of record" is usually much more easily available from many libraries. You just have to be a bit careful to quote only the things for which the newspaper really is an official publication of record.
Der Spiegel is not a scholarly journal, either. It also cannot be taken as a primary source of information.
We might add that this should be obvious to anyone with a smidgin of German (or access to a German-English dictionary, which google will find for you in a fraction of a second). The name "Der Spiegel" means "The Mirror". So they state right there at the top, in their masthead, that they are only mirroring what other people say or write. It's hard to think of a more blatant way of saying "We are not a primary source."
Of course, we wouldn't expect many Americans to understand such things. There's an old joke:
Q: If someone who speaks two languages is bilingual, and someone who speaks three languages is trilingual, what do you call someone who speaks only one language?
A: American.
Regarding the low rate of Linux adoption, I don't get what you mean. It is used everywhere, and the world would literally grind to a halt if a small percentage of devices running GNU/Linux were shut down.
Actually, the business world's (and Microsoft's) problem is that linux only has a low rate of sales That's what people are measuring when they say that linux is under 1% of the market. But if you measure installed systems, linux's adoption is much higher than that. How much higher is difficult to determine, because business data is mostly based on sales figures. The difference is that the overwhelming majority of linux installations are on machines that didn't come with linux installed. Most of the linux installations are tallied as Windows machines, because that's what they were sold with. Thus they get tallied as sales of Microsoft products, when that's not what the computers are actually running.
I wonder if there are any reliable figures measuring the actual installations? I've seen some figures, but I'm not convinced that any of them are reliable. I have three computers running in this room right now. One is a Mac, running OS X. The other two are Intel systems. One was bought several years ago with Windows XP, but it became inadequate for its job due to the software bloat, so a bigger Windows box was bought, and the old machine became a linux server. The other was bought recently with linux installed, but the vendor mostly sells Windows boxes, and this one was likely reported to Microsoft as a Windows sale. So I have either one or two linux systems that are counted in the sales statistics as Microsoft Windows systems. One did run Windows for a while; the other has only run linux.
So my personal experience says that sales and installation figures for MS Windows and linux are highly likely to be wrong. I'm not aware of anyone trying to collect the data in a way that would convince a curious but rational skeptic that the figures are correct.
*Have* you *really* been running Linux? ;) Half-baked things happen here all the time, that's one of the platform's strengths.
Heh; ya got me there. You're completely right.
And, of course, sometimes half-baked things turn out better than when fully baked. My theory on how brownies originated is an example: Someone was trying to make a chocolate cake, but they didn't bake it long enough, so they got a thick lump instead. They tried it, and thought "Hey, this stuff is pretty good."
And another example: A few years ago, I used the konqueror browser a lot, because it didn't do flash, so it didn't get bogged down by pages full of flash ads like the more "advanced" browsers did. When I hit a page with flash that I actually wanted to see, it was easy enough to copy the URL over to mozilla or firefox. Then konqueror got flash. Since then, I haven't used it much. OTOH, firefox got flashblock and NoScript, so now it has the advantage that konqueror used to have. Except that it took a LOT more programming to make it possible to ignore such such misfeatures, once they had to be backwards compatible with the earlier version that ran every flash ad.
Very often, the half-baked state is superior to the final dish.
Although new Macs are in fact x86 machines, Apple does not offer OS X for sale other than pre-installed on a new Apple computer. They COULD easily expand it to other x86 machines but for whatever reason they choose not to.
Well, on this Mac I've made heavy use of what may be one of the reasons they don't try this.
One OS X tool that I use fairly often is the Keyboard Viewer. This pops up a little window that shows a picture of the keyboard, including a glyph for each key. It's "active", so for instance if you press the Shift key, all the glyphs change to the "upper case" character. Pressing the Option key gets you a different set of keys that includes all sorts of accent marks, etc that are applied to the next letter that you type. So you can quickly learn to type in French, German, Swedish, Czech, whatever. The fun part is that my list of available keyboards includes Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and a few other alphabets. When I select them, the Keyboard Viewer window shows the keys with glyphs in that alphabet. (I'm still trying to find the documentation for the Chinese and Japanese keyboards. ;-)
Anyway, I've asked about doing something similar with linux. But a major problem is that linux is expected to run on any sort of PC hardware, and this includes any available keyboard. To do a linux Keyboard Viewer, you'd have to get samples of all commercial keyboards (including some that haven't been sold yet), and figure out how to identify their layout. The manufacturers can't be bothered to cooperate with this. So you can't do the first step, which is to draw a picture of the keyboard in a little window. There's no known way to discover the layout of any keyboard that has every been manufactured and that can be plugged into a PC.
Apple doesn't have this problem, because they control the hardware that OSX runs on. If you plug in a weird keyboard, the Keyboard Viewer simply won't correspond to what's on the keyboard, and it's Not Apple's Problem. With linux, you could do this, and the failure to handle it would be yet another example of why linux Isn't Ready For The Desktop.
Actually, if someone knows a good way to correctly identify every keyboard's layout, I and a lot of other people might be very interested. But note that every qualifier. This includes keyboards being manufactured in small plants that you've never heard of, for languages that you've never heard of, by people who don't follow standards because they only deal with Microsoft and its OEMs.
If this is possible, does anyone know where it's documented? ;-)
Sorry, your analogy falls down. When you install an operating system ON YOUR COMPUTER, your friends are still allowed to borrow it and check their e-mail. You can even make user accounts for them if you so desire.
Hmmm ... If you were around in the 1980s, you might know that there were a lot of systems that were sold with builtin limits to the number of accounts and/or simultaneous logins allowed. This was true of the Sys/V unix systems, for example. The OEMs would charge you a significant fee for an "unlimited logins" version of the system, and one of the things that got a lot of us really annoyed was that what you got for this extra charge was a change in a single byte somewhere in some system file. In a few releases, the position and value of this byte was published, so one could write a program to change its value. It was sorta like the reports from the 70s about features in IBM hardware that were enabled by cutting a jumper on a circuit board, but it could cost you a lot of money to hire a CS guy to come in and cut that jumper.
Anyway, this sort of silly programmed-in "Pay us to change the byte that enables this feature" limitation was likely one of the things that killed off Sys/V and several other systems. The *BSD and linux systems never did this to you.
It's possible that I may have contributed in a minor way to ending this practice in the unix/linux world. Due to problems with diagnosing login problems (typically caused by the insanity of modems and other comm hardware), I wrote a program that functioned like the getty(1) program, but it had lots and lots of debug features. Its purpose was to document in detail what happened during a login attempt, so that I could diagnose and (usually) fix the problems. It was a drop-in replacement for getty, and I got lots of nice email from people who downloaded it. In several mailing-list discussions of the topic, I explained that I hadn't implemented the usual login limits for the simple reason that I didn't know where the limit was stored. I commented that if the folks at AT&T and various OEMs didn't like the fact that my getty clone defeated their login limit, they should just reply to this message and tell me where the limit was stored. I'd then add it to a feature to my program.
For some reason, they never replied to my invitation. Perhaps they figured out that if they did that, then everyone (on the list at least) would know how to defeat the login limit. And, of course, I'd implement it as I did other features, via an explicit command-line or config-file option, which users could change as they liked.
Anyway, eventually this "feature" was dropped from Sys/V, and it seems to have also disappeared from MS Windows (or maybe I just haven't heard about it biting anyone lately). Something convinced the proprietary guys that this was a bad idea.
But back then, it was entirely likely that you couldn't give your friends logins to your system, or if you did, they might not be able to log in until you first logged out. I had this problem in a lot of situtations, where I was trying to diagnose a remote system's problems, but I couldn't log in because the system had hit its login limit. So we had to have someone at the remote site walk over and try to log someone out, or if that didn't work, they could reboot it. But if they did a reboot, the problem would go away, killing our attempts to diagnose it and fix it.
There's a long history of vendors doing things that make life difficult for their customers, all in an attempt to get customers to pay more for permission to use the computer for what they'd bought it for. Blocking multi-user access is just one of the more annoying such things.
One of the more spectacular takeovers of American production happened back in the 1970's and 80's, in the solid-state electronics field. First the Japanese, then the Koreans and a few others, discussed openly how they were going to do it. Their argument was based on an uncomfortable fact: At the time, developing a solid-state manufacturing facility cost on the order of $1 billion US dollars, and required about a decade of building, training and testing to get it to the point of producing working products. They observed that American management was no longer capable of making decade-long investments. Managers were judged on this quarter's results, and "long term" mean looking at most a year into the future. Americans could no longer build electronics plants, because managers of such investments would be fired within a year due to their zero profitability. So, the Asians argued, anyone who was willing to invest in 10 years of development time could take the entire business away from the Americans who had already done the basic research.
They were right, of course, and this argument still works. American firms invest in short-term marketing research, and make small tweaks to their products that can be profitable right away. Any manager that pushes for longer-term, more expensive research or development will be out of a job before the investment pays off.
There was also a good Help Desk cartoon yesterday about how US industry works these days.
This is like taking a photo of a car and claiming you can now manufacture them.
Good start at an auto analogy, but we can do better.
It's more like taking photos of passing cars, and showing the world that you can capture information such as the license number, the make and model, the colors of various parts of the car, and so on. In your press interview, you point out that this would enable various people to build an auto that looks exactly like yours, including a fake license plate. You'd probably admit that you didn't capture any vehicle ID numbers, but since those are visible through the windshield, you could get that info if you could walk up to the car with your camera. All this would enable someone with a good auto shop to buy a car from a dealer and doctor it so that it would pass as your car in any inspection. This dup car could then, for example, be left at a crime scene to implicate you in the crime.
This is purely hypothetical, of course ... ;-)
It is sorta funny that people get so excited about someone showing that they can capture information from a device that was designed to broadcast the information. I sorta wonder what sort of world they live in, that they'd be surprised that such a thing was possible. How will they react when they learn that their government has been installing such broadcast equipment in things like passports and other such ID gadgetry? And that the interception hardware is being installed in retail stores all over? This is just going to shake a lot of people's world views.
It reminds me of a cartoon I saw recently, in which one person described his equipment that intercepts TV shows out of the air and displays them on a screen, without paying any cable subscription. Another character opined that this was "piracy" and was illegal.
Earlier today, while I was driving my car, I listened to some music that was similarly captured out of the air without me paying anything at all. The music was decrypted, and broadcast through speakers in the car. This was all done by some electronics that were installed by the auto dealer. I can hardly wait to hear what the RIAA will say when they hear that such equipment is sold openly in this country. And I can imagine the flame war that'll follow my admission that I know how to get and install such music-pirating hardware.
The summary clearly says:
During the demonstration he picked up the details of two US passport cards. Using the data gleaned it would be relatively simple to make cloned passport cards he said.
Anyone with even minimal English fluency would understand this as saying that he collected the data but didn't do anything with it.
We don't even need an automotive analogy, since the data was collected from one car by reading passport RFIDs in other passing cars.
Hotmail is/was powered by a mixture of FreeBSD and Solaris. NOT Linux.
Hmmm ... I decided to check. A few probes of hotmail.com turned up only headers like:
So where are the signs of any *BSD or Solaris system here? It looks very much like a typical Windows server running IIS.
This isn't to say that they aren't also running Solaris or FreeBSD servers. But my probes didn't turn up any evidence of such systems during this brief time window.
No. Code cannot be free. Only people can be free.
No, lots of other things can be free. I have several gigabytes of free space on this machine's disk. That doesn't mean that you can use it. And my saying that you can't use it doesn't mean that it isn't "free" in the sense that anyone would have understood when they read my second sentence.
As someone said a few messages higher on my screen, "As though 'Free' didn't have enough definitions already." The English language has some serious bugs, and one of them that keeps biting us is that the word "free" has several radically different meanings. Those meanings have a small common core, true, but it can take a bit of etymological digging to extract that core meaning.
The word "free" is routinely applied to physical objects. Ask your local marketing people about how they use the word. They like to advertise things as "free" when you have to pay money to get them.
So no, you don't have the right (or even the ability) to restrict the meaning an English word to a single meaning that you like. Nobody else will honor your restricted definition. They'll just continue to (mis)use the word in all the different senses that they've learned. Yes, this does cause (mis)communication problems. That's what happens when you use a human-generated language. They're all sloppy, inconsistent, and self-contradictory. There's not much you or I can do about it (except maybe to rant a bit). Lots of people have suggested that we replace one meaning of "free" with a word like "gratis", as other languages have done. So far, such suggestions have failed totally.
Yup; I've read a few Microsoft EULAs, and they did say that by running their softweare, you give them the right to write anywhere on the disk. Even on partitions that contain other OSs or no OS at all. I learned about this years ago, when I had a PC with Windows, and installed linux on a second partition. When I booted Windows, I discovered that the linux partition was no longer marked bootable. I eventually found the paragraph in the docs where it was stated that Windows did this. I reformatted the Windows partition as another linux filesystem.
However, we should note that things stated in the EULA are not necessarily legally binding. As with contracts, licenses can't override laws. Most places have laws about such things, and in much of the world, this would qualify as sabotage of the customer's equipment. It shows that Microsoft knows their software does such things, and the behavior is intentional. It's likely that wherever you live, EULA text like this would be treated by a court as admission of guilt, malice aforethought, or whatever your local legal terminology is. If it worries you that Microsoft is modifying your installation of non-MS software, perhaps you should talk to a local lawyer about it. You just might be able to get a settlement for it. Even better, see if you can start a class-action lawsuit, which could help persuade Microsoft's management that their code should include code to check your locality before it does such things to your computer.
If nobody challenges them, they'll take this as acceptance, and they'll continue to do it. Actually, considering that automatic, behind-the-scenes updates have existed in MS Windows since at least XP, it may take a lot of time to teach them any useful lesson. But it's worth doing, at least if you want (or need) to run MS software for some reason.
Ask the researchers if they'd be willing to be connected to the lie detectors ...
The scientists would be fools to do this. The machines would be operated by people trained by the company, and whose jobs depend on maintaining the belief that the machines are actually measuring truthfulness. And nobody but those operators would be qualified to judge the validity of the outcome.
This pretty much guarantees that the outcome would be against the victims, uh, I mean the scientists.
It doesn't take a genius to understand this. All it takes is someone with the sense to understand what it means to be judged by someone who feels that you are threatening them.
To use the canonical auto analogy: Agreeing to being judged by the operators of this machine would be much like taking your car to an auto dealer and asking them to decide whether you need a new car.
Actually, various physicists and mathematicians have point out that there's a far simpler way to debunk that idea, related to the old idea that heavy objects should fall faster than lighter objects (when air resistance is insignificant, of course).
The idea is to point out that an object can be treated as the combination of two smaller objects. If a heavier object falls (or orbits) faster than a light object, then any object should fall (or orbit) faster than any of its component pieces. But this is clearly contrary to fact; an object made of combined pieces must fall (or orbit) at exactly the same speed as its pieces.
I once read a variant of it as measuring the falling (or orbital) speed of two objects. Now take a thread whose mass is insignificant compared to the objects. Use the thread to connect the two objects (perhaps with two small dabs of glue if there are no places to tie the thread to the objects). Adding the connecting thread obviously combines the two objects into a single object. So would you expect that object to suddenly start falling (or orbiting) faster the instant the thread made the connection?
This line of reasoning works with any quantity that's dependent on an additive property such as mass. If the speed were dependent on some non-additive property (e.g., surface area or age or cuteness), the reasoning fails. But falling (and orbital) speed are dependent on mass, which is additive. So these speeds can't depend on the objects' masses.
Of course, this doesn't detract from the more sophisticated tests like the lunar lasers. It's always useful to have independent lines of reasoning and independent tests. But it's of historical interest that some people reasoned correctly about the way that objects fall long before we had corner reflectors on the moon, and before we had General Relativity.
If it shares the Earth's orbit, shouldn't its speed, relative to the Earth, be zero?
On average, but not necessarily at any given time.
Various astronomers have pointed out that the Earth and Luna are effectively two small planets sharing an orbit. On average, they have the same orbital speed, but because of their masses, they can't maintain a constant distance apart. For a while, they are accelerating toward each other, slowing down the one that's leading and speeding up the one that's trailing. This makes the leading one drop toward the sun slightly, while the trailing one moves out slightly, and they pass. Then they've changed roles, and the process repeats. From either one of them, it looks like the other is a satellite. And while they both have the same average orbital speed around the sun, at any given time both have an instantaneous speed that's slightly different from that average.
There's a similar pair of moons in the Saturn system, that share an orbit and are repeatedly swapping the leading/trailing positions. Actually, this effectively happens with any planet-moon pair, but in cases like Mars or Jupiter, where the satellites are many orders of magnitude smaller than the planet, the effect on the planet can't be detected because the planet's changes of orbital speed are too small to be measured by our instruments.
This new object could be compared to the Earth's moon, but it's a lot smaller and is in a much wider orbit. Or all three could be considered objects with nearly-identical orbits around the sun, constantly swapping leading/trailing roles.
Similarly, I once read a description of the solar system as the sun and Jupiter plus a few billion insignificant pieces of smaller junk sharing a common orbit around the galactic center. What made them a "solar system" was that they were close enough together to be gravitationally bound, so they appeared to local observers to be orbiting each other.
Are NEOs abundant enough to do that? How many NEOs are even candidates for mining?
Well, to start close to home, there are a few thousand of them orbiting the Earth. There are lots of dead satellites out there, and most are stuffed full of electronics gadgetry. Granted, the chips might not be worth salvaging. But you can always use resistors and capacitors, and there's gotta be a few thousand km of wires that could be collected and added to the parts closets in your orbiting labs. This should be a lot cheaper than manufacturing replacements and lifting them from Earth. It would also help with the slowly growing problem of dodging all that orbiting shrapnel, before we end up with visible Saturn-like rings around our planet.
Also, if we can develop a reasonably cheap way to intercept incoming NEOs, over time we would clear out most of the population that intercepts our orbit, slowly making life on Earth more secure.
And eventually we're going to find it useful to be able to get our minerals delivered in space without the expense of lifting them up from Earth.
The planet has a good enough population of impact craters of all sizes, that we should take seriously any ideas for collecting the NEOs and putting them to better use.
But the best argument for going after a 10m object is that it would be a good start in learning to handle the 100m and 1000m objects that are also out there somewhere, heading our way.