What makes you say that genetic differences exist between races? Although I'll agree that there are differences between sexes, there's little agreement on what even defines a race,...
One of my favorite explanations of the bogosity of the concept of race is that here in the US, lists of races usually include "Hispanic". You don't need to know much (if anything) about genetics to understand that there can't be any genetic basis to any such "race".
The other main counterexample in the US is that most "African-American" folks have more European than African ancestry. This is in great part due to the widespread rape of slaves by their owners, though some of it was voluntary. But any valid classification of such people would be as hybrids, not as members of one race. And then you get into the fun of what's called "hybrid vigor", though that phrase isn't usually applied to humans for fairly obvious reasons.
What it comes down to is this: I was unknowingly placed by Verizon into a contract I never agreed to, and then was charged an early termination fee quitting it! That is the definition of unethical,...
And it used to be illegal. Time was when contract law required a valid signature by both parties to be valid.
But welcome to the New! Improved! world of American corporate law, where you can find yourself liable for the terms of a contract that you've never seen and never signed. Big corporations can just create the contract in their database, put your name on it, and fine you if you violate it. And they can change the terms of the contract without notifying you.
Of course, one of the facts of life that enables this behavior is that you would probably win if you challenged them in court. But it would cost you thousands of dollars to do that, not to mention all the time you'd have to take off from work. And a decade or so later, after you won, all you'd actually have is a court order, which the corporation can simply ignore. If you want it enforced, you'll have to file a second case to enforce the first decision. This is recursive, of course, and eventually you'll die without collecting anything. So they don't care; they don't have to (as Lily Tomlin so elegantly put it).
But it could be worse. American contracts end at death, and aren't inherited by offspring. Consider the situation in India, where there are some millions of people in "debt slavery", owing money they can never earn enough to pay off on a debt inherited from an ancestor. So it could be worse. Maybe in another few decades, it will be.
Are they trying to kill their own servers or what?
Doesn't matter. On the Big Day, it's guaranteed that someone will announce it here, and within minutes we'll slashdot the server.
Someone else suggested getting the current beta version, because it seems to work just fine. This won't help their server, though, because on the Big Day, your beta version will check, find that there's an upgrade, ask if you want to download it - and you'll join in the slashdotting.
They should just put the server on a slow net connection. That way, the bottleneck would be upstream of them, and we'd just get "no connection" messages asking if we'd like to try again. Only N of us would be able to get through at any given time, keeping their server up, and frustrating their rabid fans.
Or maybe they're just expecting that the can handle the onslaught. Whatever happens, you'll read about it here.
He's talking about submitting a form to a new tab.
Exactly. I carefully used the term "button" several times, and contrasted it with "[plain-]text links" as clearly as I knew how. You'd think it would have been impossible for someone to understand that I was talking about buttons, not text links. I also stated fairly clearly that I knew about middle-click or CMD-click on text links, to show redundantly that I wasn't asking how to do that.
But, of course, the only answer told me how it works with text links, and totally missed all my (perhaps overly-subtle?;-) clues that I was asking about buttons.
If a form uses an input button, clicking on text links doesn't quite do the job; you have to click on the button to trigger the form that delivers the page. And apparently nobody here knows how to do that so that the new page opens in a new tab.
Actually, I'd guess that it is possible. But it isn't documented anywhere that I've stumbled across. One thing that seems equally poor in all the browsers is the documentation on how to configure anything but the default setup. You just have to stumble around, poke at things, and try to figure out how they work. It's as if it's all so obvious that nobody needs an explanation.
Opera is actually a bit better here, but that's not high praise. Their documentation is just the slightly best of a bad lot. A lot of opera's behavior is as inexplicable as the others', and not documented anywhere that I've been able to find (and understand).
I'd been thinking similar thoughts about my OLPC, but with very different terminology. I'd been wondering whether, with appropriate software installed, it would make a good "net admin" tool.
Specific example: One of my other toys is a Mac Powerbook, which talks to the Airport that's attached to our local LAN (with a linux firewall/router). Yesterday was a very nice day, and I did as I've often done on other nice days: I carried the Mac out to the patio and tried to work from there. Without much success.
While I've done this a lot over the past few years, this time the wifi went into its "fluctuating access" mode. The wifi signal strength, according to the Mac's little wifi icon, changed on a time scale of seconds from near full strength to various intermediate valued, to no access at all. I grabbed my OLPC, carried it out to the patio, and it reported a constant near-max signal level from the Airport. But I can hardly do any work on the OLPC, because of the crippled Sugar GUI. The two laptops have nearly the same pixel count on their screens, but the Mac lets me have 3 or 4 non-overlapping Terminal windows open at the same time, while the OLPC only allows one.
Anyway, since the OLPC seemed to have no problems with the wifi, I'm wondering if I could use it somehow to diagnose the problem. The few times I've asked about such things on a Mac forum, the responses could be summarized as variants of the "It Just Works" mantra. I shouldn't worry my little head about things like this that are beyond my ken; I should just accept what's given to me. No clues about how I might diagnose such problems. Either that, or I should just pay for new hardware, which might not have the same problems.
Now, I'm quite aware that to the media, the very fact that I'd consider installing software to analyze local wifi transmissions immediately puts me into the "hacker" category. I try not to tell them that I've been known (and paid) to write such software. ("What sort of shady corporations would pay a hacker like you to do their dirty work?" Dirty as in diagnose and fix problems.;-)
But it does occur to me that people here might be a bit more sympathetic. And it seems to me that if the poor kids in remote places can learn to use their OLPCs to "hack" the network around them, they could be a real service to their communities. The commercial folks aren't supplying their communities with service, and probably never will. Here in the US, the comm companies can't be bothered to supply decent service to remote areas, and never will unless those evil government regulators force them to.
So maybe we need an open project to take tools like the OLPC, the EeePC, and others like them, and turn them into good "hacking" platforms. That way, people in poor and rural areas can support their own comm system.
To me, this article just tells me how the media will spin it, to make such self-help efforts look criminal and subversive. But I can't even find decent diagnostic help for a wifi problem here in a Boston suburb from the makers of the equipment. Maybe it's time we get serious about finding ways to fix such problems ourselves.
With luck, the recent court decision will make it legal to resell your windows license. On the other hand, that is likely to let everyone know just what those are worth (probably in the $10 and change range).
Actually, we had a story here a week or two back in which Microsoft answered that. It seems that they're planning to sell the OLPC SO machine with Windows, and charge $3 for the license.
I wonder what the resale market for those machines will be like?
If it's got Linux installed on it, you know that the hardware it's got is supported by Linux.
This is the point that I keep bringing up. And inevitably, the response is "Hey, dummy; just get a list of the hardware, and verify that linux can use everything." But this turns out to be very difficult or impossible to actually do.
I've found that, when I can even get a detailed list of the hardware, the terminology seems to be poorly related to what I find on various "supported by [some] release of linux" web sites. I often can't tell at all whether the hardware info I'm looking at is the same as the hardware in the "supported" list. The model numbers always disagree in at least one character.
Then there's the problem that many (most?) vendors have several different kinds of cards that they'll install for a specific task, probably depending on what the purchasing department found cheapest to bulk-order that day. I've had a number of friends find that some card (graphics, sound, ethernet, whatever) was totally different than what was in the spec that they'd ordered, and that card wasn't supported by the linux they were installing.
So is there an efficient way to discover 1) exactly what hardware will be inside a machine if you order it, and 2) which releases/distros of linux/FreeBSD/whatever can handle exactly that pile of hardware?
So far, I haven't found a successful way to answer either of those questions that doesn't take days or weeks of my time (and usually fails even then).
OTOH, if it's sold with a given OS pre-installed, that's a pretty good reassurance that that software will support that hardware.
Opera, historically, has had crappy usability. It's better now, but it still has a much worse interface than both IE and Firefox, and is generally more annoying to use.
Oh, I dunno about that. On both my linux and OSX machines, I keep stumbling across a common situation where I've discovered that the simple solution is to copy the URL to opera and continue from there. The situation? There are a lot of web sites that like to use buttons rather than text links to navigate. Within a single site, I often want to open new pages in a new tab, so I can switch among several pages easily. Opera uses middle-click (linux) or CMD-click (OSX) to "open in new tab". With most other browsers, if you use middle-click or CMD-click on a button, the new page opens in the same tab.
I've looked around in various browsers' Help stuff, but as far as I can tell, the only other browser that makes "open in new tab" easy with buttons is Safari, but that doesn't run on my linux box. I have a dozen browsers on the Mac (because I do lots of web-page testing), and Opera and Safari are the only ones where I can do "open in new tab" easily.
You'd think that firefox and seamonkey would also have picked up on this, but if they have the capability at all, they've hidden it too well for my feeble brain to find. So, although I like them for a lot of things, extended work with a single site usually means that I switch to Opera.
Of course, slashdot is an exception here, because it seems to do most everything with plain links. So I'm typing this into a seamonkey window which has 7 tabs open right now.
You could say wealth & resources are available to anyone who works hard enough
You could say that, but you'd be wrong.
But the amount of wealth available to someone who works hard in the Congo is quite different from the wealth available to someone who works hard in the UK.
In the UK, as in most countries, the amount of wealth a person has is generally inversely proportional to how hard they've worked for it. The richest people are mostly the ones who inherited it and didn't work for it at all.
Intellectual "property" is rapidly reaching the same state. Consider the notorious copyright on the century-old "Happy Birthday" song. It is currently owned by Warner Chappell, and you'd be hard pressed to show that the officers of that corporation have ever done anything that qualifies as "work" to realize the several million dollars in royalties that it brings them each year. OTOH, the Hill sisters that wrote the song never received any income from it at all, but as elementary-school teachers, they worked rather hard their whole lives (and produced the song as part of their job).
This is typical of how Intellectual Property actually works. The actual creators rarely realize any significant income from their creators; the income generally goes to the owners of corporations that control the mass-production and distribution channels. This control generally comes not from any sort of hard work, but rather from financial and political power that makes it possible for them to exclude competition.
Why were they allowed take a well-defined technical term and re-purpose it as meaningless marketing drivel?
The main reason is called the First Amendment.;-) It permits anyone to misuse any term they like for any reason.
In this case, they're just Doing What Marketing Does. They use whatever words are effective in selling what they're selling. They figured out that to the public that has no clue about such technical terms, "broadband" just means "faster". So they adopted it as a marketing term.
It's nothing at all unique to Internet marketing. The same approach is used everywhere that it works. People have been complaining about marketers' misuse of words since marketing came into existence back in prehistory. There's no way we're going to change this, short of educating the public about the actual definition of the terms. And considering the general public contempt for geeky stuff that requires education, that's not going to happen any time soon.
(This misuse isn't nearly as agregious as the use of "quantum" to mean "large", when the technical definition is more like "the smallest difference possible". I'm sure others here have their favorite misuses of technical terms.;-)
Frankly, I would be a little suspicious of any person who wanted to take custody of this information at all if test data can be used instead. I would never take on that kind of liability if I didn't absolutely have to.
Well, I can understand why you'd say this, and I usually want to do the major part of debugging with test data. But eventually, you need to do debug runs with real data. The reason is simple.
Experience from a hundred or so jobs over several decades tells me that software always fails on its first real data. This is because the test data was generated by a program that follows the published spec. But the real data is never, ever correctly formatted. It's always generated by a flock of programs written by different people at different points in the revision process, and is rarely rewritten to match changes in the spec. Or it's types by human hands, and is in all sorts of bizarre non-standard forms. And lots of jobs don't even have published specs for the data formats.
So you can get close with test data. But then you need samples of real data, from many sources, so you can learn about all the weird things that are in the data that you'd never have guessed from reading the spec.
And it's always a good idea to repeatedly insist that you need some real data. Change the spelling of names; randomize things like SSNs, maybe. But don't change anything else. Because your software will stumble on the its first "real" input data, and you really want to know about such problems before the official release happens.
I've even had a few cases where my bosses told me explicitly to not implement parts of a published data spec, because those parts "won't be used". The test data didn't use those parts, but in every case, the first real data used the parts that I'd been ordered to ignore and not implement. In my experience, this is what you should expect.
Using only test data is a serious mistake, and you'll take the blame for your poor software if you haven't openly demanded "real" data throughout the development process.
In a perfect world, I would start by finding a new consultant - one who wouldn't even consider RECEIVING such data through email. I suppose in a PERFECT world, there wouldn't BE such consultants.
And such comments from a manager would be good grounds for not accepting a job. There are no security problems in email that aren't present in every other kind of file transfer. Email is in fact nothing but another kind of file transfer, so the security problems are exactly the same as with any other file transfer package. If your management thinks differently, you have some serious security problems in your management.
There are reasonable objections to sending data via email. One is that a lot of email software only correctly transfers 7-bit ASCII data. And it's common to have line-length restrictions, typically 80 bytes (aka "punch-card mentality"), with newlines inserted in longer lines. Tabs can turn into spaces and vice-versa (totally destroying your code written in the Whitespace language;-). So to transfer arbitrary data via email without damage, you have to encode it with a tool like base64 or quoted-printable encoding. But none of these problems are security issues; they just increase the byte count and require more human time to ensure correct delivery via crappy email software. OTOH, the added email headers can be useful for documentation ("CYA") purposes.
The real objection to email is that there are packages such as sftp that do encryption and file transfer as a single operation (from the user's viewpoint), saving a lot of human time and hassle. This minimizes the chances for a screwup by failure to encrypt the data properly.
I've worked in groups that had to resort to email when the net admins imposed rules that made it too difficult to get the required data delivered. We grumbled because of the hassle, but it worked, and didn't add any new security problems.
It's not all that hard to encrypt an email message. Yes, there are different encryption packages, some better than others. But that's orthogonal to the file-transfer protocol used. And email is just one of many ways to get the bits delivered, clumsy perhaps, but usable when simpler tools fail.
not a kext, Webkit. When they update safari they also update webkit. Lots of system apps use the webkit engine. Dashboard is the one i think of right away.
Which reminds me: Does anyone know of a way to turn Dashboard off? After experimenting with it a bit and being rather disappointed, I decided I'd just rather use the memory for things that I actually use. But attempts to get rid of it have failed, and questions in various Mac-related fora have come up empty. Is it really a mandatory part of OSX, or is there some config thingy somewhere that'll tell the startup stuff no not start it any more?
It's especially annoying when I overreach a bit to type a char in the digits row, hit a function key, the screen fades, and Dashboard takes over. Then I have to stumble around trying to get rid of it again, losing my train of thought in the process.
There are many things in this vaunted GUI that get to be really annoying as you get familiar with them...
Child porn downloading needs to be made illegal to increase the cost of making and distributing it.
You might want to be careful about such suggestions. And make sure that no browser that you use has javascript, Active-X, or any other "scripting" enabled. If you allow these things to run, you could be guilty of downloading child porn without knowing it.
I learned this years ago, when I got curious about what might be in my browser cache. I found the cache, and looked around. I found a number of images that I didn't recall ever seeing, some of them quite pornographic.
So I did a bit more research, and found the javascript code for "preloading". This is a useful tool in a page that's an "entry" to a web site that uses a lot of common images. While you're looking at the page, the code is quietly downloading the images in the background, so they'll be in your cache when you visit other pages. This can materially speed up access to the site. This isn't just a feature of javascript; most browsers have several ways to do it. Active-X is the other well-known tool, and there are others, including many extensions and plugins.
But it's obvious to a web programmer what can be done with this. While reading this page, all sorts of other files could have been downloaded to your browser cache. You'll never see them, unless you visit the site's pages that use them (or you look though your browser cache yourself).
If it's made illegal do download anything, then nobody who uses a browser with scripting enabled is safe. Visiting any web page can trigger background downloading of any other URL, putting it into your cache for forensic investigation to discover.
(Yes, I usually do have scripting disabled, one way or another. NoScript is especially useful if you're running firefox.)
The posters may not be tarrists, but there is a connection in that they know someone who knows someone who knows someone who is the tarrist who filmed the video. Investigating them is a matter of unpeeling the onion skin.
Almost certainly true. For anyone, including you and me. Whaddaya wanna bet that you're within four "knows someone" links to a terrorist?
I live in the Boston area. Back in Sept/Oct 2001, after the names of the perps in the World Trade Center attack became known, a bunch of us did a bit of quiet inquiry. We found that several of us were two "knows someone" links from one or more of them. So the rest of us were at most 3 links away.
When I was at the U of Wisconsin back in the 1970s, the central campus Computer Center had a Univac system. An EE prof (or his students;-) got circuit diagrams and did some analysis. He announced that there was a bug: If a particular (unlikely) sequence of instructions was executed, they would fry a transistor in the CPU. Rather than thanks, he got ridiculed and insulted by the Univac CS people (and a lot of people on campus). So he announced that he'd run a test. He submitted a job that included a chunk of assembly language with the sequence. The machine promptly halted and couldn't be rebooted. The CS engineers looked into it, and found that a transistor had been fried.
These days, though, I suppose that he'd probably be charged with something. The smart thing to do if you learn of such bugs is probably to not notify anyone, especially not the vendor or your employer. Instead, you quietly offer the information (for a price of course) to various "interested parties" for whatever use they'd like to make of it.
Another time, some students figured out a bug in Univac's tape drives. They found code that sent commands to spool forward and rewind with timing such that the drive did both - which snapped the tape. They were also not believed, so they demoed it. They submitted a job that asked for a scratch tape, wrote a few KB of data, and snapped the tape. Then it asked for another scratch tape. It didn't take too many tapes before the operators figured out that they should call in the CS people.
I'll bet that others here have a bunch of similar stories. And nonetheless, a future story will be the patenting of using such bugs for "PDOS" attacks. Probably by our favorite whipping boy, Microsoft, who will patent such attacks as a way of enforcing licensing restrictions or DRM.
Maybe the fellow the story is about can get the patent first...
Just because of the USAF has planes and bombs and constantly practices using them, and spends money researching new ones, does not mean they are playing [sic] to use them on Americans.
Well, maybe they're not planning on it, but it's what will happen if such a botnet is deployed. All sorts of projects have tried and failed to accurately determine where in the world an IP address is. Determining who owns the machine at a given IP address isn't even remotely feasible. And botnet-forming malware is inevitably distributed via a scattershot approach, firing it off at every IP that you can reach, and using whatever machines that it infects.
Consider that there are right now a large number of Americans in China who weren't there a month or two back, and there will be a lot more over there in a few months. Most of them have their laptops along, and a lot have "smart phones" that are really just handheld computers. Any botnet software wandering around China is constantly probing all of them for vulnerabilities. That software can't reliably distinguish Chinese-owned machines from American-owned machines (especially since most of the Americans' machines were built in China;-).
In the world as a whole, this situation is permanent. At any given time, there are several million Americans outside the country. Any AF botnet is going to be attacking their machines routinely, and will have no way of determining the citizenship of each machine's owner. And no matter where such software is released, within a handful of hops it will be all over the US, too.
Anyway, the citizenship of a victim is hardly relevant in any sane moral calculation. It's only relevant in legal calculations. If this sort of "botnet" software is foisted on the public, the US government can expect lots of lawsuits, from citizens and non-citizens, in US and non-US courts. It can ignore some of them, but not all of them. And the PR hit will be significant.
They'd be better off distributing it openly, as a "patriotic" package that people will install voluntarily. There are a number of distributed-computing projects doing this quite successfully. An open "loan your computer's spare cycles to the war on terror" screen-saver package would probably get lots of takers.
Next, in what is truly the most inventive part of this concept, Lt. Chris Tollinger of the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency envisions continually capturing the thousands of computers the Air Force would normally discard every year for technology refresh, removing the power-hungry and heat-inducing hard drives, replacing them with low-power flash drives, then installing them in any available space every Air Force base can find. Even though those computers may no longer be sufficiently powerful to work for our people, individual machines need not be cutting-edge because the network as a whole can create massive power."
Hey, it's an actual relevant opportunity to the popular/. meme:
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these things.
What you described was pretty much how the beowulf project got going. They collected lots of "obsolete", cast-off computers, and used them to develop the clustering software.
And if this is what the Air Force is talking about, calling it a "botnet" is ridiculous, misleading propaganda. That term refers to forming a cluster of machines that the cluster operators don't own by taking them over via malware. If the machines are owned by the Air Force, all they need to do is install a minimal linux on them, hook them together with some sort of comm hardware, and install beowulf or some other clustering package. It's not at all difficult, and we have lots of people here who could help them do it, openly and honestly.
So is the Air Force really talking about a botnet, i.e., are they planning to install parts of it on machines whose owners haven't given them permission to do so? Or are they just building a large, distributed cluster?
Sometimes the words you use to describe something are important. The wrong word can be rather misleading.
I liked the example that Snopes gave as an illustration of the fallacy: Imagine a claim that Americans (or maybe Brits or Aussies) wouldn't buy a dinette set with the brand name Notable, because they thought that the set had "no table". The claim that Nova = "no va" is just about as silly.
Actually, a counter-argument I've seen to this myth is the obvious fact that Spanish-speaking people tend to know a fair amount of Latin (partly because most of them are Catholics), and they would generally understand "nova" as the Latin word for "new", obviously cognate to Spanish "nueva".
Anyway, the best debunking comes from GM, who have shot down the claim that the Nova didn't sell well in Spanish-speaking countries by merely mentioning the actual sales figures. In fact, it was a fairly successful model in those countries.
But such stories don't have to be true for people to believe them.
Hey, I'm in awe of a comment that's so ambiguous that I can't tell whether it's commenting on my comment, or commenting on the arguments that I was commenting on.
Humor of all kinds (satire included) needs to have an element of truth in it to be funny. In other words, in order to find his "joke" funny, you would have to believe (on some level) that the US military really DOES go out and commit atrocities on a regular basis.
Nah; it wouldn't have to be regular. If there were "renegade" US soldiers committing atrocities on an irregular basis, and their superiors were mostly just sorta looking the other way and rarely investigating, it would be just as good a basis for humor. And you'd have trouble convincing most of the world that this isn't pretty much what the US (and every other) military is like.
Anyone who has been paying attention has read of what happened in places like Fallujah and Abu Graib, and knows what the phrase "extraordinary rendition" is a euphemism for.
Pretending your soldiers are angels isn't really a good propaganda ploy. It only works with your own True Patriots; the rest of the world just snickers.
What I'm saying is, I tire of religious rhetoric impacting the lives of those who do not follow a religious association. If to you this has ethical implications along religious principles, fine. To me it does not, to many others it does not. I have no desire to see science and the future of humanities advancement marginalized because somethings make people feel icky.
Ah, but don'cha know that the whole point of having religious beliefs is so that I can use them as an excuse to impose my beliefs on you. Or, if you refuse to follow my beliefs, I can have you jailed or killed for your recalcitrance.
If I can't use my religious beliefs as others have done so often in the past, why would I bother to have them?
There have been a number of surveys showing that, while religious people may hate others who follow a different religion, they usually reserve their most fervent hatred for those who follow no religion at all. Thus, in American political surveys, it usually turns out that most religious people would with some reluctance vote for a politician who is a member of a different religious group, but they would never vote for an atheist.
Most people can differentiate between the potential for life (semen and eggs) and actual life itself (autonomous life including self-replicating cells that may or may not have certain dependencies for life; don't we all?).
Nope. It is pretty well understood in scientific circles that the issue of "when life begins" was settled a couple of centuries ago. The answer: It doesn't, at least not on our planet at this time. Life only continues from previous life; it doesn't arise spontaneously from non-living material.
Sperm and ova are living, breating, metabolizing single-cell creatures. They aren't dead. They aren't half-alive. They're alive.
The really curious thing is that I've yet to hear anything from our moral guardians calling for protection of the lives of living ova (or sperm) cells. The fact that they don't pretty much shows that they don't really have a clue about what "life" means.
If it's "murder" to prevent a fertilized ovum from implanting and growing, then it's equally "murder" to prevent that ovum from being fertilized. Actually, both are equally absurd.
(There's also the fun fact that nature provides millions of living sperm cells for every living ovum. The morality of that is yet to be discussed, except by the Monty Python crew.)
(I wonder if anyone's ever considered investigating these companies for racketeering - wouldn't surprise me even remotely if they were colluding on these things)
Nah; they probably haven't been "colluding" in any legal sense. They can probably show in court that they haven't gotten together to arrange prices.
The term you're looking for is "gentlemen's agreement", which has a long history in the business world, and is the standard way of getting around any such government regulation. Now with the Internet, it's easier than ever for companies to align policies and prices without doing any direct communication. Each company just keeps track of its competitors' policies and prices, and makes sure that their own are roughly the same. They're also careful to maintain slight variations, as "proof" that there's no collusion.
This can be broken in two ways. One is for a company to suddenly introduce a much better deal with customers. This doesn't happen often, because there are usually strong barriers to entry. This means that the change would have to be done by one of the existing companies, and their management has the sense to not do that. This has happened in the past, when a large outside company with sufficient funds was able to break into a market. A major example recently was the entry of Japanese auto companies into the American market back in the 1960s and 1970s.
The other way to break a gentlemen's agreement is via government action. We had a major telecom example of this in the US in the 1970s, when the government invalidated the companies' contract terms forbidding "foreign attachments". Suddenly things like modems and phones with new features became possible, and we had an explosion of new products that the phone companies had managed to block for the previous century.
But it's rather rare for government regulators to make such enabling changes. This is the current situation with cell phones, where there appears to be regulation and competition, but the regulative agencies are pretty much ruled by the companies. So gentlemen's agreements are the way things are organized, and the companies can all say "Sign our contract or go without entirely". They know that their competitors' contracts differ only trivially, the regulators are mostly there to prevent entry of new competitors, and there's no way for mere customers to do anything about it.
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What makes you say that genetic differences exist between races? Although I'll agree that there are differences between sexes, there's little agreement on what even defines a race, ...
One of my favorite explanations of the bogosity of the concept of race is that here in the US, lists of races usually include "Hispanic". You don't need to know much (if anything) about genetics to understand that there can't be any genetic basis to any such "race".
The other main counterexample in the US is that most "African-American" folks have more European than African ancestry. This is in great part due to the widespread rape of slaves by their owners, though some of it was voluntary. But any valid classification of such people would be as hybrids, not as members of one race. And then you get into the fun of what's called "hybrid vigor", though that phrase isn't usually applied to humans for fairly obvious reasons.
What it comes down to is this: I was unknowingly placed by Verizon into a contract I never agreed to, and then was charged an early termination fee quitting it! That is the definition of unethical, ...
And it used to be illegal. Time was when contract law required a valid signature by both parties to be valid.
But welcome to the New! Improved! world of American corporate law, where you can find yourself liable for the terms of a contract that you've never seen and never signed. Big corporations can just create the contract in their database, put your name on it, and fine you if you violate it. And they can change the terms of the contract without notifying you.
Of course, one of the facts of life that enables this behavior is that you would probably win if you challenged them in court. But it would cost you thousands of dollars to do that, not to mention all the time you'd have to take off from work. And a decade or so later, after you won, all you'd actually have is a court order, which the corporation can simply ignore. If you want it enforced, you'll have to file a second case to enforce the first decision. This is recursive, of course, and eventually you'll die without collecting anything. So they don't care; they don't have to (as Lily Tomlin so elegantly put it).
But it could be worse. American contracts end at death, and aren't inherited by offspring. Consider the situation in India, where there are some millions of people in "debt slavery", owing money they can never earn enough to pay off on a debt inherited from an ancestor. So it could be worse. Maybe in another few decades, it will be.
Are they trying to kill their own servers or what?
Doesn't matter. On the Big Day, it's guaranteed that someone will announce it here, and within minutes we'll slashdot the server.
Someone else suggested getting the current beta version, because it seems to work just fine. This won't help their server, though, because on the Big Day, your beta version will check, find that there's an upgrade, ask if you want to download it - and you'll join in the slashdotting.
They should just put the server on a slow net connection. That way, the bottleneck would be upstream of them, and we'd just get "no connection" messages asking if we'd like to try again. Only N of us would be able to get through at any given time, keeping their server up, and frustrating their rabid fans.
Or maybe they're just expecting that the can handle the onslaught. Whatever happens, you'll read about it here.
He's talking about submitting a form to a new tab.
;-) clues that I was asking about buttons.
Exactly. I carefully used the term "button" several times, and contrasted it with "[plain-]text links" as clearly as I knew how. You'd think it would have been impossible for someone to understand that I was talking about buttons, not text links. I also stated fairly clearly that I knew about middle-click or CMD-click on text links, to show redundantly that I wasn't asking how to do that.
But, of course, the only answer told me how it works with text links, and totally missed all my (perhaps overly-subtle?
If a form uses an input button, clicking on text links doesn't quite do the job; you have to click on the button to trigger the form that delivers the page. And apparently nobody here knows how to do that so that the new page opens in a new tab.
Actually, I'd guess that it is possible. But it isn't documented anywhere that I've stumbled across. One thing that seems equally poor in all the browsers is the documentation on how to configure anything but the default setup. You just have to stumble around, poke at things, and try to figure out how they work. It's as if it's all so obvious that nobody needs an explanation.
Opera is actually a bit better here, but that's not high praise. Their documentation is just the slightly best of a bad lot. A lot of opera's behavior is as inexplicable as the others', and not documented anywhere that I've been able to find (and understand).
I'd been thinking similar thoughts about my OLPC, but with very different terminology. I'd been wondering whether, with appropriate software installed, it would make a good "net admin" tool.
;-)
Specific example: One of my other toys is a Mac Powerbook, which talks to the Airport that's attached to our local LAN (with a linux firewall/router). Yesterday was a very nice day, and I did as I've often done on other nice days: I carried the Mac out to the patio and tried to work from there. Without much success.
While I've done this a lot over the past few years, this time the wifi went into its "fluctuating access" mode. The wifi signal strength, according to the Mac's little wifi icon, changed on a time scale of seconds from near full strength to various intermediate valued, to no access at all. I grabbed my OLPC, carried it out to the patio, and it reported a constant near-max signal level from the Airport. But I can hardly do any work on the OLPC, because of the crippled Sugar GUI. The two laptops have nearly the same pixel count on their screens, but the Mac lets me have 3 or 4 non-overlapping Terminal windows open at the same time, while the OLPC only allows one.
Anyway, since the OLPC seemed to have no problems with the wifi, I'm wondering if I could use it somehow to diagnose the problem. The few times I've asked about such things on a Mac forum, the responses could be summarized as variants of the "It Just Works" mantra. I shouldn't worry my little head about things like this that are beyond my ken; I should just accept what's given to me. No clues about how I might diagnose such problems. Either that, or I should just pay for new hardware, which might not have the same problems.
Now, I'm quite aware that to the media, the very fact that I'd consider installing software to analyze local wifi transmissions immediately puts me into the "hacker" category. I try not to tell them that I've been known (and paid) to write such software. ("What sort of shady corporations would pay a hacker like you to do their dirty work?" Dirty as in diagnose and fix problems.
But it does occur to me that people here might be a bit more sympathetic. And it seems to me that if the poor kids in remote places can learn to use their OLPCs to "hack" the network around them, they could be a real service to their communities. The commercial folks aren't supplying their communities with service, and probably never will. Here in the US, the comm companies can't be bothered to supply decent service to remote areas, and never will unless those evil government regulators force them to.
So maybe we need an open project to take tools like the OLPC, the EeePC, and others like them, and turn them into good "hacking" platforms. That way, people in poor and rural areas can support their own comm system.
To me, this article just tells me how the media will spin it, to make such self-help efforts look criminal and subversive. But I can't even find decent diagnostic help for a wifi problem here in a Boston suburb from the makers of the equipment. Maybe it's time we get serious about finding ways to fix such problems ourselves.
With luck, the recent court decision will make it legal to resell your windows license. On the other hand, that is likely to let everyone know just what those are worth (probably in the $10 and change range).
Actually, we had a story here a week or two back in which Microsoft answered that. It seems that they're planning to sell the OLPC SO machine with Windows, and charge $3 for the license.
I wonder what the resale market for those machines will be like?
If it's got Linux installed on it, you know that the hardware it's got is supported by Linux.
This is the point that I keep bringing up. And inevitably, the response is "Hey, dummy; just get a list of the hardware, and verify that linux can use everything." But this turns out to be very difficult or impossible to actually do.
I've found that, when I can even get a detailed list of the hardware, the terminology seems to be poorly related to what I find on various "supported by [some] release of linux" web sites. I often can't tell at all whether the hardware info I'm looking at is the same as the hardware in the "supported" list. The model numbers always disagree in at least one character.
Then there's the problem that many (most?) vendors have several different kinds of cards that they'll install for a specific task, probably depending on what the purchasing department found cheapest to bulk-order that day. I've had a number of friends find that some card (graphics, sound, ethernet, whatever) was totally different than what was in the spec that they'd ordered, and that card wasn't supported by the linux they were installing.
So is there an efficient way to discover 1) exactly what hardware will be inside a machine if you order it, and 2) which releases/distros of linux/FreeBSD/whatever can handle exactly that pile of hardware?
So far, I haven't found a successful way to answer either of those questions that doesn't take days or weeks of my time (and usually fails even then).
OTOH, if it's sold with a given OS pre-installed, that's a pretty good reassurance that that software will support that hardware.
Opera, historically, has had crappy usability. It's better now, but it still has a much worse interface than both IE and Firefox, and is generally more annoying to use.
Oh, I dunno about that. On both my linux and OSX machines, I keep stumbling across a common situation where I've discovered that the simple solution is to copy the URL to opera and continue from there. The situation? There are a lot of web sites that like to use buttons rather than text links to navigate. Within a single site, I often want to open new pages in a new tab, so I can switch among several pages easily. Opera uses middle-click (linux) or CMD-click (OSX) to "open in new tab". With most other browsers, if you use middle-click or CMD-click on a button, the new page opens in the same tab.
I've looked around in various browsers' Help stuff, but as far as I can tell, the only other browser that makes "open in new tab" easy with buttons is Safari, but that doesn't run on my linux box. I have a dozen browsers on the Mac (because I do lots of web-page testing), and Opera and Safari are the only ones where I can do "open in new tab" easily.
You'd think that firefox and seamonkey would also have picked up on this, but if they have the capability at all, they've hidden it too well for my feeble brain to find. So, although I like them for a lot of things, extended work with a single site usually means that I switch to Opera.
Of course, slashdot is an exception here, because it seems to do most everything with plain links. So I'm typing this into a seamonkey window which has 7 tabs open right now.
You could say wealth & resources are available to anyone who works hard enough
You could say that, but you'd be wrong.
But the amount of wealth available to someone who works hard in the Congo is quite different from the wealth available to someone who works hard in the UK.
In the UK, as in most countries, the amount of wealth a person has is generally inversely proportional to how hard they've worked for it. The richest people are mostly the ones who inherited it and didn't work for it at all.
Intellectual "property" is rapidly reaching the same state. Consider the notorious copyright on the century-old "Happy Birthday" song. It is currently owned by Warner Chappell, and you'd be hard pressed to show that the officers of that corporation have ever done anything that qualifies as "work" to realize the several million dollars in royalties that it brings them each year. OTOH, the Hill sisters that wrote the song never received any income from it at all, but as elementary-school teachers, they worked rather hard their whole lives (and produced the song as part of their job).
This is typical of how Intellectual Property actually works. The actual creators rarely realize any significant income from their creators; the income generally goes to the owners of corporations that control the mass-production and distribution channels. This control generally comes not from any sort of hard work, but rather from financial and political power that makes it possible for them to exclude competition.
Why were they allowed take a well-defined technical term and re-purpose it as meaningless marketing drivel?
;-) It permits anyone to misuse any term they like for any reason.
;-)
The main reason is called the First Amendment.
In this case, they're just Doing What Marketing Does. They use whatever words are effective in selling what they're selling. They figured out that to the public that has no clue about such technical terms, "broadband" just means "faster". So they adopted it as a marketing term.
It's nothing at all unique to Internet marketing. The same approach is used everywhere that it works. People have been complaining about marketers' misuse of words since marketing came into existence back in prehistory. There's no way we're going to change this, short of educating the public about the actual definition of the terms. And considering the general public contempt for geeky stuff that requires education, that's not going to happen any time soon.
(This misuse isn't nearly as agregious as the use of "quantum" to mean "large", when the technical definition is more like "the smallest difference possible". I'm sure others here have their favorite misuses of technical terms.
Frankly, I would be a little suspicious of any person who wanted to take custody of this information at all if test data can be used instead. I would never take on that kind of liability if I didn't absolutely have to.
Well, I can understand why you'd say this, and I usually want to do the major part of debugging with test data. But eventually, you need to do debug runs with real data. The reason is simple.
Experience from a hundred or so jobs over several decades tells me that software always fails on its first real data. This is because the test data was generated by a program that follows the published spec. But the real data is never, ever correctly formatted. It's always generated by a flock of programs written by different people at different points in the revision process, and is rarely rewritten to match changes in the spec. Or it's types by human hands, and is in all sorts of bizarre non-standard forms. And lots of jobs don't even have published specs for the data formats.
So you can get close with test data. But then you need samples of real data, from many sources, so you can learn about all the weird things that are in the data that you'd never have guessed from reading the spec.
And it's always a good idea to repeatedly insist that you need some real data. Change the spelling of names; randomize things like SSNs, maybe. But don't change anything else. Because your software will stumble on the its first "real" input data, and you really want to know about such problems before the official release happens.
I've even had a few cases where my bosses told me explicitly to not implement parts of a published data spec, because those parts "won't be used". The test data didn't use those parts, but in every case, the first real data used the parts that I'd been ordered to ignore and not implement. In my experience, this is what you should expect.
Using only test data is a serious mistake, and you'll take the blame for your poor software if you haven't openly demanded "real" data throughout the development process.
In a perfect world, I would start by finding a new consultant - one who wouldn't even consider RECEIVING such data through email. I suppose in a PERFECT world, there wouldn't BE such consultants.
;-). So to transfer arbitrary data via email without damage, you have to encode it with a tool like base64 or quoted-printable encoding. But none of these problems are security issues; they just increase the byte count and require more human time to ensure correct delivery via crappy email software. OTOH, the added email headers can be useful for documentation ("CYA") purposes.
And such comments from a manager would be good grounds for not accepting a job. There are no security problems in email that aren't present in every other kind of file transfer. Email is in fact nothing but another kind of file transfer, so the security problems are exactly the same as with any other file transfer package. If your management thinks differently, you have some serious security problems in your management.
There are reasonable objections to sending data via email. One is that a lot of email software only correctly transfers 7-bit ASCII data. And it's common to have line-length restrictions, typically 80 bytes (aka "punch-card mentality"), with newlines inserted in longer lines. Tabs can turn into spaces and vice-versa (totally destroying your code written in the Whitespace language
The real objection to email is that there are packages such as sftp that do encryption and file transfer as a single operation (from the user's viewpoint), saving a lot of human time and hassle. This minimizes the chances for a screwup by failure to encrypt the data properly.
I've worked in groups that had to resort to email when the net admins imposed rules that made it too difficult to get the required data delivered. We grumbled because of the hassle, but it worked, and didn't add any new security problems.
It's not all that hard to encrypt an email message. Yes, there are different encryption packages, some better than others. But that's orthogonal to the file-transfer protocol used. And email is just one of many ways to get the bits delivered, clumsy perhaps, but usable when simpler tools fail.
not a kext, Webkit. When they update safari they also update webkit. Lots of system apps use the webkit engine. Dashboard is the one i think of right away.
...
Which reminds me: Does anyone know of a way to turn Dashboard off? After experimenting with it a bit and being rather disappointed, I decided I'd just rather use the memory for things that I actually use. But attempts to get rid of it have failed, and questions in various Mac-related fora have come up empty. Is it really a mandatory part of OSX, or is there some config thingy somewhere that'll tell the startup stuff no not start it any more?
It's especially annoying when I overreach a bit to type a char in the digits row, hit a function key, the screen fades, and Dashboard takes over. Then I have to stumble around trying to get rid of it again, losing my train of thought in the process.
There are many things in this vaunted GUI that get to be really annoying as you get familiar with them
Child porn downloading needs to be made illegal to increase the cost of making and distributing it.
You might want to be careful about such suggestions. And make sure that no browser that you use has javascript, Active-X, or any other "scripting" enabled. If you allow these things to run, you could be guilty of downloading child porn without knowing it.
I learned this years ago, when I got curious about what might be in my browser cache. I found the cache, and looked around. I found a number of images that I didn't recall ever seeing, some of them quite pornographic.
So I did a bit more research, and found the javascript code for "preloading". This is a useful tool in a page that's an "entry" to a web site that uses a lot of common images. While you're looking at the page, the code is quietly downloading the images in the background, so they'll be in your cache when you visit other pages. This can materially speed up access to the site. This isn't just a feature of javascript; most browsers have several ways to do it. Active-X is the other well-known tool, and there are others, including many extensions and plugins.
But it's obvious to a web programmer what can be done with this. While reading this page, all sorts of other files could have been downloaded to your browser cache. You'll never see them, unless you visit the site's pages that use them (or you look though your browser cache yourself).
If it's made illegal do download anything, then nobody who uses a browser with scripting enabled is safe. Visiting any web page can trigger background downloading of any other URL, putting it into your cache for forensic investigation to discover.
(Yes, I usually do have scripting disabled, one way or another. NoScript is especially useful if you're running firefox.)
The posters may not be tarrists, but there is a connection in that they know someone who knows someone who knows someone who is the tarrist who filmed the video. Investigating them is a matter of unpeeling the onion skin.
Almost certainly true. For anyone, including you and me. Whaddaya wanna bet that you're within four "knows someone" links to a terrorist?
I live in the Boston area. Back in Sept/Oct 2001, after the names of the perps in the World Trade Center attack became known, a bunch of us did a bit of quiet inquiry. We found that several of us were two "knows someone" links from one or more of them. So the rest of us were at most 3 links away.
When I was at the U of Wisconsin back in the 1970s, the central campus Computer Center had a Univac system. An EE prof (or his students ;-) got circuit diagrams and did some analysis. He announced that there was a bug: If a particular (unlikely) sequence of instructions was executed, they would fry a transistor in the CPU. Rather than thanks, he got ridiculed and insulted by the Univac CS people (and a lot of people on campus). So he announced that he'd run a test. He submitted a job that included a chunk of assembly language with the sequence. The machine promptly halted and couldn't be rebooted. The CS engineers looked into it, and found that a transistor had been fried.
...
These days, though, I suppose that he'd probably be charged with something. The smart thing to do if you learn of such bugs is probably to not notify anyone, especially not the vendor or your employer. Instead, you quietly offer the information (for a price of course) to various "interested parties" for whatever use they'd like to make of it.
Another time, some students figured out a bug in Univac's tape drives. They found code that sent commands to spool forward and rewind with timing such that the drive did both - which snapped the tape. They were also not believed, so they demoed it. They submitted a job that asked for a scratch tape, wrote a few KB of data, and snapped the tape. Then it asked for another scratch tape. It didn't take too many tapes before the operators figured out that they should call in the CS people.
I'll bet that others here have a bunch of similar stories. And nonetheless, a future story will be the patenting of using such bugs for "PDOS" attacks. Probably by our favorite whipping boy, Microsoft, who will patent such attacks as a way of enforcing licensing restrictions or DRM.
Maybe the fellow the story is about can get the patent first
Just because of the USAF has planes and bombs and constantly practices using them, and spends money researching new ones, does not mean they are playing [sic] to use them on Americans.
;-).
Well, maybe they're not planning on it, but it's what will happen if such a botnet is deployed. All sorts of projects have tried and failed to accurately determine where in the world an IP address is. Determining who owns the machine at a given IP address isn't even remotely feasible. And botnet-forming malware is inevitably distributed via a scattershot approach, firing it off at every IP that you can reach, and using whatever machines that it infects.
Consider that there are right now a large number of Americans in China who weren't there a month or two back, and there will be a lot more over there in a few months. Most of them have their laptops along, and a lot have "smart phones" that are really just handheld computers. Any botnet software wandering around China is constantly probing all of them for vulnerabilities. That software can't reliably distinguish Chinese-owned machines from American-owned machines (especially since most of the Americans' machines were built in China
In the world as a whole, this situation is permanent. At any given time, there are several million Americans outside the country. Any AF botnet is going to be attacking their machines routinely, and will have no way of determining the citizenship of each machine's owner. And no matter where such software is released, within a handful of hops it will be all over the US, too.
Anyway, the citizenship of a victim is hardly relevant in any sane moral calculation. It's only relevant in legal calculations. If this sort of "botnet" software is foisted on the public, the US government can expect lots of lawsuits, from citizens and non-citizens, in US and non-US courts. It can ignore some of them, but not all of them. And the PR hit will be significant.
They'd be better off distributing it openly, as a "patriotic" package that people will install voluntarily. There are a number of distributed-computing projects doing this quite successfully. An open "loan your computer's spare cycles to the war on terror" screen-saver package would probably get lots of takers.
Next, in what is truly the most inventive part of this concept, Lt. Chris Tollinger of the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency envisions continually capturing the thousands of computers the Air Force would normally discard every year for technology refresh, removing the power-hungry and heat-inducing hard drives, replacing them with low-power flash drives, then installing them in any available space every Air Force base can find. Even though those computers may no longer be sufficiently powerful to work for our people, individual machines need not be cutting-edge because the network as a whole can create massive power."
/. meme:
Hey, it's an actual relevant opportunity to the popular
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these things.
What you described was pretty much how the beowulf project got going. They collected lots of "obsolete", cast-off computers, and used them to develop the clustering software.
And if this is what the Air Force is talking about, calling it a "botnet" is ridiculous, misleading propaganda. That term refers to forming a cluster of machines that the cluster operators don't own by taking them over via malware. If the machines are owned by the Air Force, all they need to do is install a minimal linux on them, hook them together with some sort of comm hardware, and install beowulf or some other clustering package. It's not at all difficult, and we have lots of people here who could help them do it, openly and honestly.
So is the Air Force really talking about a botnet, i.e., are they planning to install parts of it on machines whose owners haven't given them permission to do so? Or are they just building a large, distributed cluster?
Sometimes the words you use to describe something are important. The wrong word can be rather misleading.
I liked the example that Snopes gave as an illustration of the fallacy: Imagine a claim that Americans (or maybe Brits or Aussies) wouldn't buy a dinette set with the brand name Notable, because they thought that the set had "no table". The claim that Nova = "no va" is just about as silly.
Actually, a counter-argument I've seen to this myth is the obvious fact that Spanish-speaking people tend to know a fair amount of Latin (partly because most of them are Catholics), and they would generally understand "nova" as the Latin word for "new", obviously cognate to Spanish "nueva".
Anyway, the best debunking comes from GM, who have shot down the claim that the Nova didn't sell well in Spanish-speaking countries by merely mentioning the actual sales figures. In fact, it was a fairly successful model in those countries.
But such stories don't have to be true for people to believe them.
Hey, I'm in awe of a comment that's so ambiguous that I can't tell whether it's commenting on my comment, or commenting on the arguments that I was commenting on.
;-)
So, well played, I guess.
Humor of all kinds (satire included) needs to have an element of truth in it to be funny. In other words, in order to find his "joke" funny, you would have to believe (on some level) that the US military really DOES go out and commit atrocities on a regular basis.
Nah; it wouldn't have to be regular. If there were "renegade" US soldiers committing atrocities on an irregular basis, and their superiors were mostly just sorta looking the other way and rarely investigating, it would be just as good a basis for humor. And you'd have trouble convincing most of the world that this isn't pretty much what the US (and every other) military is like.
Anyone who has been paying attention has read of what happened in places like Fallujah and Abu Graib, and knows what the phrase "extraordinary rendition" is a euphemism for.
Pretending your soldiers are angels isn't really a good propaganda ploy. It only works with your own True Patriots; the rest of the world just snickers.
What I'm saying is, I tire of religious rhetoric impacting the lives of those who do not follow a religious association. If to you this has ethical implications along religious principles, fine. To me it does not, to many others it does not. I have no desire to see science and the future of humanities advancement marginalized because somethings make people feel icky.
Ah, but don'cha know that the whole point of having religious beliefs is so that I can use them as an excuse to impose my beliefs on you. Or, if you refuse to follow my beliefs, I can have you jailed or killed for your recalcitrance.
If I can't use my religious beliefs as others have done so often in the past, why would I bother to have them?
There have been a number of surveys showing that, while religious people may hate others who follow a different religion, they usually reserve their most fervent hatred for those who follow no religion at all. Thus, in American political surveys, it usually turns out that most religious people would with some reluctance vote for a politician who is a member of a different religious group, but they would never vote for an atheist.
Most people can differentiate between the potential for life (semen and eggs) and actual life itself (autonomous life including self-replicating cells that may or may not have certain dependencies for life; don't we all?).
Nope. It is pretty well understood in scientific circles that the issue of "when life begins" was settled a couple of centuries ago. The answer: It doesn't, at least not on our planet at this time. Life only continues from previous life; it doesn't arise spontaneously from non-living material.
Sperm and ova are living, breating, metabolizing single-cell creatures. They aren't dead. They aren't half-alive. They're alive.
The really curious thing is that I've yet to hear anything from our moral guardians calling for protection of the lives of living ova (or sperm) cells. The fact that they don't pretty much shows that they don't really have a clue about what "life" means.
If it's "murder" to prevent a fertilized ovum from implanting and growing, then it's equally "murder" to prevent that ovum from being fertilized. Actually, both are equally absurd.
(There's also the fun fact that nature provides millions of living sperm cells for every living ovum. The morality of that is yet to be discussed, except by the Monty Python crew.)
Number 8: Fluorescent green eyes. Much better than that fake red-eye stuff that cameras produce but can't be duplicated in Real Life.
(I wonder if anyone's ever considered investigating these companies for racketeering - wouldn't surprise me even remotely if they were colluding on these things)
Nah; they probably haven't been "colluding" in any legal sense. They can probably show in court that they haven't gotten together to arrange prices.
The term you're looking for is "gentlemen's agreement", which has a long history in the business world, and is the standard way of getting around any such government regulation. Now with the Internet, it's easier than ever for companies to align policies and prices without doing any direct communication. Each company just keeps track of its competitors' policies and prices, and makes sure that their own are roughly the same. They're also careful to maintain slight variations, as "proof" that there's no collusion.
This can be broken in two ways. One is for a company to suddenly introduce a much better deal with customers. This doesn't happen often, because there are usually strong barriers to entry. This means that the change would have to be done by one of the existing companies, and their management has the sense to not do that. This has happened in the past, when a large outside company with sufficient funds was able to break into a market. A major example recently was the entry of Japanese auto companies into the American market back in the 1960s and 1970s.
The other way to break a gentlemen's agreement is via government action. We had a major telecom example of this in the US in the 1970s, when the government invalidated the companies' contract terms forbidding "foreign attachments". Suddenly things like modems and phones with new features became possible, and we had an explosion of new products that the phone companies had managed to block for the previous century.
But it's rather rare for government regulators to make such enabling changes. This is the current situation with cell phones, where there appears to be regulation and competition, but the regulative agencies are pretty much ruled by the companies. So gentlemen's agreements are the way things are organized, and the companies can all say "Sign our contract or go without entirely". They know that their competitors' contracts differ only trivially, the regulators are mostly there to prevent entry of new competitors, and there's no way for mere customers to do anything about it.