Acid rain is a myth that has been debunked for years.
By who, the Iraqi Information Minister? I used to live in the house my father grew up in, which is downwind from a paper mill. When he was growing up, the rain would literally peel away the paint on my grandparents' house and car over a few months, and the grass and trees were always sickly. In the wake of clean air legislation, I've never had to see acid rain, and my yard was always green. I don't even smell the stink that used to occasionally come from the plant when I was a kid anymore.
Eh. I see. Okay, so EFI makes grafting DRM onto itself easier than with current BIOSes, but I don't think that the fact that it's currently hard to do DRM in the BIOS due to BIOS being a limited, outdated technology as a strong reason to avoid EFI.
So what does EFI have to do with TCPA? EFI could have DRM grafted onto it, but it's not a part of the default standard. This is a total non-issue unless vendors start adopting DRM, which puts us at where we are today only now with drivers that don't have to share a 128k window, don't have to be hardwired to certain interrupt lines, and can be flashed into cards and peripherals as interpretable byte-code that runs on multiple platforms.
You aren't even talking about the same technology here.
Someone above has posted a link from Kernel Traffic which explains quite nicely the fact that Linux already has early support for EFI as part of the IA-64 port (which has been backported to IA-32) and has a nice lenghty explanation from Intel about why they made certain design decisions that they did.
It all ends with a statement by an Intel person that none of what they're pushing as a standard is patented so that it can be as openly and widely adopted as possible. I'm pretty sure that no vendor lock-in will happen here.
Well, it's not quite what you're looking for, but I have written a shell script to remove all offending SCO IP from Linux based on the evidence presented so far:
It was aliens. We know they don't want us poking around their planet and are shooting down our probes. Time to take a hint. I think the Venusians are less hostile anyway.
Think again! Every probe we've ever sent to the surface of Venus has been melted and crushed within about two hours or less! Obviously, the Venusians are turning their hideous death rays on our craft each time.
I got a backpack with cheap straps, wheels, an extendable luggage-rack handle, and the company logo on it. It must've cost the company a grand total of $20-30 when bought in bulk, and if I hadn't have responded to the email to come up and get it quickly enough, I would've gotten nothing for Christmas from my company except time off.
I really, really dislike musicals and scenes in movies where the plot stops to let a character break into song. I appreciate that 90% of the movies made there have musicals, just like 90% of Hong Kong's movie industry has strong action components, but I'd love to see some of the work without it. I would very much appreciate if you could give me any of those artistic movie titles, especially ones which can be found with English subtitles.
Could anyone recommend a good Bollywood movie that doesn't contain a huge music/dance number or is that like asking for a modern Disney movie without a fart joke in it?
Well, I know that COFF & ECOFF are pretty well known by now, COFF having been created for SVR3 to extend and replace a.out and support shared libraries but also having been used and extended by Microsoft since NT. According to this message, the format can be found in the programmer's reference manuals for SVR3. The a.out format debuted with UNIX V7.
Both are extremely well known formats, and SCO's claim pretty much has to be direct copying, because there's no way that a reimplementation could be a violation to two well-known, publicly published formats. Humorously enough, Caldera/SCO itself publishes the definitions of both COFF and ELF.
While I'm pretty sure you can copyright an interface like this, I'm positive that implementing code based on a published description (and not published source code) is not in and of itself a copyright violation, especially due to the importance that recent copyright laws have given to interoperability. Like I said, it's safe to bet that either SCO is either claiming direct copying (which could be shown to be false if it is) or they're once again invoking Chewbacca defense-like logic in defending their case like they have been in their claims about the GPL being against US copyright law.
How do I know? My son, the "ace" trumpeter in HS and UT, has major hearing loss.
He doesn't blast like that because he's deaf -- he's just a trumpet player! Hey, I'm reminded of a few jokes:
Q: How do you know that a trumpet player's knocking at your door? A: He only wants to knock at the highest part of the door, and he keeps speeding up.
Q: What do trumpet players use for birth control? A: Their personalities.
Q: How many trumpet players does it take to change a light bulb? A1: One. He holds it up and lets the world revolve around him. A2: Just one, but he'll do it too loudly. A3: Five. One to handle the bulb and four to tell him how much better they could have done it. A4: Five. One to change the bulb and four to contemplate how Louie Armstrong would have done it.
Q: What's the difference between trumpet players and government bonds? A: Government bonds eventually mature and earn money.
Q: How to trumpet players traditionally greet each other? A: "Hi. Nice to meet you. I'm better than you."
Q: Why can't a gorilla play trumpet? A: He's too sensitive.
Q: What did little Johnny's mother tell him when he said "I want to be a trumpet player when I grow up?" A: "But Johnny, you can't do both."
-----
Hey, while I'm taking cheap shots at other band members....
Q: What the difference between a saxophone and a chain saw? A: Vibrato, though you can minimize this difference by holding the chain saw very still.
Q: What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians? A: A drummer.
-----
Seriously, though, I played tuba in high school, and I can at least verify from having stood under the quads (drums) at every pep rally that hearing damage from being in band is very real. Unfortunately, to protect oneself from his requires dampening your hearing to the point where it's hard to play in tune properly (and to play anything softly, but we don't want to confuse your trumpeter son with any confusing, alien concepts like that -- not that I'm bitter). I still don't hear as well as I used to, but I'm fortunate not to have had the serious damage that your son seems to have had, and all jokes aside, you have my condolensces. Is this problem widespread in your son's HS or college band program? If so, you might want to talk to the director about this. It's one thing to play your heart out; it's entirely another thing to hurt yourself and others around you.
Does anyone know where the V7 source is available online to compare against? Even better would be something more modern. It seems a little meaningless to dig through the Linux kernel sources without something good to compare it against.
The gist of it seems to be numerous copies of 'errno.h', 'signal.h', and 'ioctl*.h' in the various platform-specific ASM source files, 'bsderrno.h' and 'solerrno.h' in the sparc/sparc64 ASM sources, as well as the following files:
I need to do some code-reading myself, but as far as I'm aware all of those are part of the POSIX standard. I could be wrong, and even if they are in the POSIX standard, the files could be copies, but we'll have to wait and see from an official response from the kernel developers to see where these files come from.
ABIs? Well thanks to our very nemesis the DMCA, reverse engineering an ABI is explicity allowed. See US Code Title 17, Section 1201(f)(3-4):
(3) The information acquired through the acts permitted under paragraph (1), and the means permitted under paragraph (2), may be made available to others if the person referred to in paragraph (1) or (2), as the case may be, provides such information or means solely for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title or violate applicable law other than this section.
(4) For purposes of this subsection, the term ''interoperability'' means the ability of computer programs to exchange information, and of such programs mutually to use the information which has been exchanged.
Unless they can conclusively show that the ABI code in question is not part of a published standard and that the code is not a reimplementation but a true, blue copy, then by the DMCA, they have no case. Code that merely mimics the functionality of their copyrighted ABIs is not in violation. Based on the code segments that they claimed in the earlier PowerPoint presentation (code from the V7 release and code written for BSD), I doubt they have much of a case here.
You and the other 10 art majors of the world can hate the movie. It looks like the rest of us that watch movies for enjoyment really liked the movies.
Guess who gives out the Oscars? People should just hold out for the MTV awards instead if you just want the most popular films to win instead of the ones that had the most artistic merit.
Okay, then, the argument still stands. Why didn't Gandalf slap Frodo on the back of one of the eagles and have him drop the ring into the volcano? It would've been a better move than hooking him up with some ex-noble who went off to live in the woods and have him slowly drag his rear through the most dangerous terrain in all of Middle Earth.
The answer, of course, is that LotR is an epic -- a story. The most tactically wise move wasn't the most appropriate move to the tale of growth and struggle against adversity that Tolkein wanted to tell. (Of course, neither's rescuing the heroes with a bunch feathered deus ex machinas but that's another argument for another time).
Re:doing our homework before we post...
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Oh, actually I wasn't making a mistake there. I was well aware that others had pointed out that you didn't read the article in the body of their messages, that it didn't hijack your radio signals, and that it would just pick up your oddball station.
No, I was being a bastard about the fact that you had a +5 moderation on a post where neither you nor the moderators had bothered to read even the top blurb, so I posted my comment to sum up the reasons why you didn't deserve a +5 mod and to complain about the moderators who boosted you and titled my message to grab moderators' attentions in the hopes of getting the post modded back down which seems to have happened.
That was really the unnecessarily nasty part, and I apologize for that. To be honest, I deserve a few "-1, Offtopic" mods myself.
The best counter-argument to that is that there would be no ham radio operators if they couldn't use their equipment except for when the power's out. I mean, would you invest large amounts of time and money into getting equipment and certification for a hobby that you couldn't ever practice? Guess what -- no one else would either.
Re:doing our homework before we post...
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· Score: 1
Sorry to have been nasty about it. I get way too upset about that sort of thing.
The movie had little to do with the book except the alien invasion and some of the political lectures about your duty to society and community service being required for citizenship.
Actually, the political aspect of the book was deliberately gotten wrong. Verhoeven admits in interviews that he portrayed the society in the book in a light that was meant as a commetary on American politics of the day. He has also admitted that he did not actually read the book before he started on the movie to avoid letting the book taint his vision of the story he wanted to tell. Those two fact combine present a pretty damning light on the satirical way he treated the society that Heinlein presented. He didn't care for what Heinlein had to say about it -- he wanted to poison the intellectual well on the issue with a campy, brutal, Nazi-like portrayal of a society where citizenship required a willingness to sacrifice yourself for others. No one was intended to learn anything positive about the politics of the society from the movie. It done as a warning against facism and militarism instead of a warning against societies where decisions are made by people who aren't willing to sacrifice and who don't understand honor and discipline.
Yeah, we have a term and laws for that hear too, it's called Treason. There is only one punishment for it under US law, death.
Ah, yes. I suppose that any disloyalty to the government and any attempt to replace it with something better should be met with death. Maybe we should've put the men who wrote that into law to the gallows for having rebelled against their government. Then again, I suppose you're saying that the law of any local government justifies any actions it takes against its populace as long as it acts within its own frame of law. Genocide, torture, and rape for political dissent and rebellion is all okay as long as that government says it is, right?
I was talking about his popularity rating, not the voting booth. Saddam [...] was EXTREMELY popular among his own people because he was reclaiming ancient land the lose of which had been a thorn to his people a very very long time.
Oh, so was Romania's Ceausescu to all outside observers until a few days before his deposition when a critical flashpoint event made his people finally snap. A man who was loudly and repeatedly praised everywhere he went was in the end executed by his own people after a quick day-and-a-half search for him. (Shades of Mussolini anyone?)
Successful dictators build cults of personality that make their people worship them no matter how awful they are to their populace. Stalin did it. Kim and his son did it. Franco did it, Hilter did it, and Saddam tried to do it too. There's a difference in how much the people actually believe in their leader in Iraq vs. these other countries. In in North Korea, it seems to be universal by all visitors' accounts. Saddam failed to engender love in his people, only fear of reprisal. In Iraq, support for him doesn't seem to be universal at all given just how many people sided with outside forces (like the aforementioned Kurds, Marsh Arabs, and Shiites) and given how many people are currently cheering his arrest there (though some feelings are mixed about the arrest).
Yes, the people mostly seem to have support the taking of Kuwait at the time from what we know from the outside, but it's really hard to gauge what the popular sentiment really was at the time based on the abrupt flipping of support now that repression isn't forcing people to pretend to love him and since Iraq's economy has severely soured in the wake of a decade of sanctions stemming from that action. If you can find me some supporting evidence that they liked it, I'd appreciate it, but I doubt that you can.
Killing and torturing traitors is a long time pastime in most nations these days.
Oh, well then -- I guess that means it's quite all right, then. Saddam's not a bad guy because other people use torture too. Well, what DO you consider a bad guy to be if you don't consider Saddam and his sons to be bad guys for torturing their people? Don't tell me that you're one of these types who actually believes that there is no such thing as right and wrong. If you didn't you wouldn't be protesting the war on Iraq so loudly, so tell us what it would take to be an evil person.
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Acid rain is a myth that has been debunked for years.
By who, the Iraqi Information Minister? I used to live in the house my father grew up in, which is downwind from a paper mill. When he was growing up, the rain would literally peel away the paint on my grandparents' house and car over a few months, and the grass and trees were always sickly. In the wake of clean air legislation, I've never had to see acid rain, and my yard was always green. I don't even smell the stink that used to occasionally come from the plant when I was a kid anymore.
Eh. I see. Okay, so EFI makes grafting DRM onto itself easier than with current BIOSes, but I don't think that the fact that it's currently hard to do DRM in the BIOS due to BIOS being a limited, outdated technology as a strong reason to avoid EFI.
So what does EFI have to do with TCPA? EFI could have DRM grafted onto it, but it's not a part of the default standard. This is a total non-issue unless vendors start adopting DRM, which puts us at where we are today only now with drivers that don't have to share a 128k window, don't have to be hardwired to certain interrupt lines, and can be flashed into cards and peripherals as interpretable byte-code that runs on multiple platforms.
You aren't even talking about the same technology here.
Someone above has posted a link from Kernel Traffic which explains quite nicely the fact that Linux already has early support for EFI as part of the IA-64 port (which has been backported to IA-32) and has a nice lenghty explanation from Intel about why they made certain design decisions that they did.
It all ends with a statement by an Intel person that none of what they're pushing as a standard is patented so that it can be as openly and widely adopted as possible. I'm pretty sure that no vendor lock-in will happen here.
Well, it's not quite what you're looking for, but I have written a shell script to remove all offending SCO IP from Linux based on the evidence presented so far:
I hope everyone finds this helpful.
It was aliens. We know they don't want us poking around their planet and are shooting down our probes. Time to take a hint. I think the Venusians are less hostile anyway.
Think again! Every probe we've ever sent to the surface of Venus has been melted and crushed within about two hours or less! Obviously, the Venusians are turning their hideous death rays on our craft each time.
That would actually make me happy.
I got a backpack with cheap straps, wheels, an extendable luggage-rack handle, and the company logo on it. It must've cost the company a grand total of $20-30 when bought in bulk, and if I hadn't have responded to the email to come up and get it quickly enough, I would've gotten nothing for Christmas from my company except time off.
Oh, I am so getting this. Thanks for the recommendation; that's the sort of thing that's right up my alley.
I really, really dislike musicals and scenes in movies where the plot stops to let a character break into song. I appreciate that 90% of the movies made there have musicals, just like 90% of Hong Kong's movie industry has strong action components, but I'd love to see some of the work without it. I would very much appreciate if you could give me any of those artistic movie titles, especially ones which can be found with English subtitles.
Could anyone recommend a good Bollywood movie that doesn't contain a huge music/dance number or is that like asking for a modern Disney movie without a fart joke in it?
I'm sorry, but I was distracted from reading the rest of your excellent post temporarily by a very shiny thing:
I have a hand-xerox'd copy of The Big U...
For the Love of Mike, could you please, please scan and OCR that and post it somewhere!? Heck, I'd do the OCR on it if I could just get scans of it.
Well, I know that COFF & ECOFF are pretty well known by now, COFF having been created for SVR3 to extend and replace a.out and support shared libraries but also having been used and extended by Microsoft since NT. According to this message, the format can be found in the programmer's reference manuals for SVR3. The a.out format debuted with UNIX V7.
Both are extremely well known formats, and SCO's claim pretty much has to be direct copying, because there's no way that a reimplementation could be a violation to two well-known, publicly published formats. Humorously enough, Caldera/SCO itself publishes the definitions of both COFF and ELF.
While I'm pretty sure you can copyright an interface like this, I'm positive that implementing code based on a published description (and not published source code) is not in and of itself a copyright violation, especially due to the importance that recent copyright laws have given to interoperability. Like I said, it's safe to bet that either SCO is either claiming direct copying (which could be shown to be false if it is) or they're once again invoking Chewbacca defense-like logic in defending their case like they have been in their claims about the GPL being against US copyright law.
How do I know? My son, the "ace" trumpeter in HS and UT, has major hearing loss.
He doesn't blast like that because he's deaf -- he's just a trumpet player!
Hey, I'm reminded of a few jokes:
Q: How do you know that a trumpet player's knocking at your door?
A: He only wants to knock at the highest part of the door, and he keeps speeding up.
Q: What do trumpet players use for birth control?
A: Their personalities.
Q: How many trumpet players does it take to change a light bulb?
A1: One. He holds it up and lets the world revolve around him.
A2: Just one, but he'll do it too loudly.
A3: Five. One to handle the bulb and four to tell him how much better they could have done it.
A4: Five. One to change the bulb and four to contemplate how Louie Armstrong would have done it.
Q: What's the difference between trumpet players and government bonds?
A: Government bonds eventually mature and earn money.
Q: How to trumpet players traditionally greet each other?
A: "Hi. Nice to meet you. I'm better than you."
Q: Why can't a gorilla play trumpet?
A: He's too sensitive.
Q: What did little Johnny's mother tell him when he said "I want to be a trumpet player when I grow up?"
A: "But Johnny, you can't do both."
-----
Hey, while I'm taking cheap shots at other band members....
Q: What the difference between a saxophone and a chain saw?
A: Vibrato, though you can minimize this difference by holding the chain saw very still.
Q: What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians?
A: A drummer.
-----
Seriously, though, I played tuba in high school, and I can at least verify from having stood under the quads (drums) at every pep rally that hearing damage from being in band is very real. Unfortunately, to protect oneself from his requires dampening your hearing to the point where it's hard to play in tune properly (and to play anything softly, but we don't want to confuse your trumpeter son with any confusing, alien concepts like that -- not that I'm bitter). I still don't hear as well as I used to, but I'm fortunate not to have had the serious damage that your son seems to have had, and all jokes aside, you have my condolensces. Is this problem widespread in your son's HS or college band program? If so, you might want to talk to the director about this. It's one thing to play your heart out; it's entirely another thing to hurt yourself and others around you.
Does anyone know where the V7 source is available online to compare against? Even better would be something more modern. It seems a little meaningless to dig through the Linux kernel sources without something good to compare it against.
You can find it here.
u de/asm-sparc/a.out.h/ mips/boot/ecoff.hl inux/ctype.h
The gist of it seems to be numerous copies of 'errno.h', 'signal.h', and 'ioctl*.h' in the various platform-specific ASM source files, 'bsderrno.h' and 'solerrno.h' in the sparc/sparc64 ASM sources, as well as the following files:
include/linux/ipc.h
include/linux/acct.h
incl
include/linux/a.out.h
arch
include/linux/stat.h
include/
lib/ctype.c
I need to do some code-reading myself, but as far as I'm aware all of those are part of the POSIX standard. I could be wrong, and even if they are in the POSIX standard, the files could be copies, but we'll have to wait and see from an official response from the kernel developers to see where these files come from.
ABIs? Well thanks to our very nemesis the DMCA, reverse engineering an ABI is explicity allowed. See US Code Title 17, Section 1201(f)(3-4):
Unless they can conclusively show that the ABI code in question is not part of a published standard and that the code is not a reimplementation but a true, blue copy, then by the DMCA, they have no case. Code that merely mimics the functionality of their copyrighted ABIs is not in violation. Based on the code segments that they claimed in the earlier PowerPoint presentation (code from the V7 release and code written for BSD), I doubt they have much of a case here.
Pros: Crashes less. Supports cooler hardware.
Cons: Harder to use than DOS. Kernel doesn't come with Solitare.
If that were the case, then how did the eagles get there to save Frodo and Sam? It's inconsistent.
You and the other 10 art majors of the world can hate the movie. It looks like the rest of us that watch movies for enjoyment really liked the movies.
Guess who gives out the Oscars? People should just hold out for the MTV awards instead if you just want the most popular films to win instead of the ones that had the most artistic merit.
Okay, then, the argument still stands. Why didn't Gandalf slap Frodo on the back of one of the eagles and have him drop the ring into the volcano? It would've been a better move than hooking him up with some ex-noble who went off to live in the woods and have him slowly drag his rear through the most dangerous terrain in all of Middle Earth.
The answer, of course, is that LotR is an epic -- a story. The most tactically wise move wasn't the most appropriate move to the tale of growth and struggle against adversity that Tolkein wanted to tell. (Of course, neither's rescuing the heroes with a bunch feathered deus ex machinas but that's another argument for another time).
Oh, actually I wasn't making a mistake there. I was well aware that others had pointed out that you didn't read the article in the body of their messages, that it didn't hijack your radio signals, and that it would just pick up your oddball station.
No, I was being a bastard about the fact that you had a +5 moderation on a post where neither you nor the moderators had bothered to read even the top blurb, so I posted my comment to sum up the reasons why you didn't deserve a +5 mod and to complain about the moderators who boosted you and titled my message to grab moderators' attentions in the hopes of getting the post modded back down which seems to have happened.
That was really the unnecessarily nasty part, and I apologize for that. To be honest, I deserve a few "-1, Offtopic" mods myself.
The best counter-argument to that is that there would be no ham radio operators if they couldn't use their equipment except for when the power's out. I mean, would you invest large amounts of time and money into getting equipment and certification for a hobby that you couldn't ever practice? Guess what -- no one else would either.
Sorry to have been nasty about it.
I get way too upset about that sort of thing.
The movie had little to do with the book except the alien invasion and some of the political lectures about your duty to society and community service being required for citizenship.
Actually, the political aspect of the book was deliberately gotten wrong. Verhoeven admits in interviews that he portrayed the society in the book in a light that was meant as a commetary on American politics of the day. He has also admitted that he did not actually read the book before he started on the movie to avoid letting the book taint his vision of the story he wanted to tell. Those two fact combine present a pretty damning light on the satirical way he treated the society that Heinlein presented. He didn't care for what Heinlein had to say about it -- he wanted to poison the intellectual well on the issue with a campy, brutal, Nazi-like portrayal of a society where citizenship required a willingness to sacrifice yourself for others. No one was intended to learn anything positive about the politics of the society from the movie. It done as a warning against facism and militarism instead of a warning against societies where decisions are made by people who aren't willing to sacrifice and who don't understand honor and discipline.
Yeah, we have a term and laws for that hear too, it's called Treason. There is only one punishment for it under US law, death.
Ah, yes. I suppose that any disloyalty to the government and any attempt to replace it with something better should be met with death. Maybe we should've put the men who wrote that into law to the gallows for having rebelled against their government. Then again, I suppose you're saying that the law of any local government justifies any actions it takes against its populace as long as it acts within its own frame of law. Genocide, torture, and rape for political dissent and rebellion is all okay as long as that government says it is, right?
I was talking about his popularity rating, not the voting booth. Saddam [...] was EXTREMELY popular among his own people because he was reclaiming ancient land the lose of which had been a thorn to his people a very very long time.
Oh, so was Romania's Ceausescu to all outside observers until a few days before his deposition when a critical flashpoint event made his people finally snap. A man who was loudly and repeatedly praised everywhere he went was in the end executed by his own people after a quick day-and-a-half search for him. (Shades of Mussolini anyone?)
Successful dictators build cults of personality that make their people worship them no matter how awful they are to their populace. Stalin did it. Kim and his son did it. Franco did it, Hilter did it, and Saddam tried to do it too. There's a difference in how much the people actually believe in their leader in Iraq vs. these other countries. In in North Korea, it seems to be universal by all visitors' accounts. Saddam failed to engender love in his people, only fear of reprisal. In Iraq, support for him doesn't seem to be universal at all given just how many people sided with outside forces (like the aforementioned Kurds, Marsh Arabs, and Shiites) and given how many people are currently cheering his arrest there (though some feelings are mixed about the arrest).
Yes, the people mostly seem to have support the taking of Kuwait at the time from what we know from the outside, but it's really hard to gauge what the popular sentiment really was at the time based on the abrupt flipping of support now that repression isn't forcing people to pretend to love him and since Iraq's economy has severely soured in the wake of a decade of sanctions stemming from that action. If you can find me some supporting evidence that they liked it, I'd appreciate it, but I doubt that you can.
Killing and torturing traitors is a long time pastime in most nations these days.
Oh, well then -- I guess that means it's quite all right, then. Saddam's not a bad guy because other people use torture too. Well, what DO you consider a bad guy to be if you don't consider Saddam and his sons to be bad guys for torturing their people? Don't tell me that you're one of these types who actually believes that there is no such thing as right and wrong. If you didn't you wouldn't be protesting the war on Iraq so loudly, so tell us what it would take to be an evil person.