I would be willing to hear the argument that the gain of running the engine at peak efficiency would be offset by the losses in the motor-generator pair. (If so, why has it been the standard technology in railway traction for over fifty years?)
I could hazard some guesses about why we don't currently see electrical transmissions in cars:
Weight: It seems to me that a motor/generator pair would probably weigh more than a mechanical transmission, which is just a few gears and/or hollow turbines. This isn't an issue on a locomotive, where heavier is better for creating traction (IIRC, some of the biggest steam locomotives weighed as much as a 747).
Power: A lot of people are used to having 300hp on tap. That's almost 1/4 of a megawatt. You'd need to have some serious power control circuits to handle that much juice. A locomotive is powerful, but pulling a train is really more about torque than raw horsepower. Electric drives do have excellent torque capabilities (and it's just about the only technology besides steam pistons with enough torque to start a freight train), but people in cars want neck-snapping acceleration. That would require a lot of copper and power controls.
CVT: Continuously variable mechanical transmissions have already been on the market for a few years. I would imagine that they can keep the engine running at a fairly constant rate. I think that they are somewhat more efficient than standard transmissions, but not by a huge factor. What makes hybrids special is that the engine produces almost constant power, not just speed, because it uses the batteries for power storage when it is generating a surplus. This allows for much more efficient operation than just a CVT. It's interesting that some of the hybrids use a mechanical transmission in addition to the electrical boost. I gather that that's because the mechanical drive was more cost-effective for transmitting that portion of the total power.
Place any lamp on top of one of those hyper-hot undervented Apple G3 Cubes, and in no-time it melts into lava.
That might not be a bad idea for a casemod on some of the latest P4s. Run a heat pipe from the CPU over to a lava lamp.
However, IIRC a lava lamp works with just a 40W bulb. With some of the latest CPUs throwing off >200W of heat, you might need a whole row of lava lamps on top of the machine. Maybe the entire side of the case could be filled with gloop and made into a wall of lava.
You gave an example of OS/2's 512MB per process limitation and then you claimed OS/2 beats the latest Microsoft OS every way technically. Seems to me you are contradicting yourself.
Yes, Microsoft Office 1997 was truly a technology leader, blowing away all other personal productivity apps by requesting memory addresses above 512MB in the process address space. This was especially ahead of its time, given that most computers back then only had 64MB or less physical memory.
With the vast address space utilized by Office97, it was the first software that enabled the masses to write truly enterprise-class memos, emails and status reports. Only recently have competitors like KDE and Gnome piled enough bloat into their code to even approach address space utilization at this world-class scale.
Windows95 + Office97: Slinging those addresses with bit 29 set high and proud. No wonder they left all the other OSes and office suites in the dust.
With 64-bit Windows and the next version of Office just around the corner, who knows what heights of memory space allocation we'll be able to reach with Microsoft in the near future!
The impression I was given by the Word grammar checker was that it must have been written by my old Business Writing professor. We were instructed by her that in business correspondence, our sentences should never be written in a passive voice. The exception to this would be if the text were being written because some kind of blame needed to be deflected.
The grammar checker seemed to have been very picky about that point, and every single sentence where passive verb tense was used seemed to have been flagged by the checker. This may have been because it was targeted by Microsoft as a tool for use in business writing. Sometimes, however, it was thought by me that a little too much zeal may have been used by the grammar checker.
I do believe that nuclear power is a safer and less environmentally-detrimental alternative to fossil fuels, because it scales up
Given the available uranium resources, the only way that it would scale up significantly past it's current ~5% contribution to our total energy usage would be to switch to all breeder reactors. That would make handling weaponizable plutonium a universal day-to-day activity around the world, probably involving hundreds of reprocessing sites and tens or hundreds of thousands of employees under dozens of governments. The security and proliferation problems would be far worse than the current unacceptable situation.
The number of people killed by nuclear power rate in the dozens (most at Chernobyl). The number of people killed by coal plants rate in the hundreds of thousands.
The problem is security and proliferation. Many countries have used nuclear power plants primarilly as a cover and enabler to develop nuclear weapons. This activity continues even today in Iran and North Korea. Measures are supposedly in place to monitor for legitimate use of nuclear technology, but the world has shown little will to enforce them.
One day, nuclear power may help kill hundreds of thousands. If events spiral out of control after that day, it could help kill hundreds of millions.
On NT? Select TCP/IP from a GUI, type in the IP address. Not painful at all.
You forgot manually typing in the NIC's interrupt and I/O port addresses that are automatically scanned on modern OSes.
These were mainly imposed by the BIOSes of the day.
Needing to boot off the first primary partition? Having the "more advanced" OS not understanding the latest version of the old FS, and the "less advanced" OS never understanding the new FS? The one FS understood by all having a painfully small max size and then only with unreasonably huge cluster sizes? Unconditionally wiping the boot loader on each install? These came from BIOS?
Uh, wouldn't this be a problem with your VMWare setup? The drivers for the real hardware were there.
I had a good deal real hardware back then that had no NT drivers available. You had to carefully review the supported hardware lists before you made a purchase. I haven't done a scientific survey, but the proportion of popular unsupported hardware on the market in the early NT days certainly seemed larger than for Linux today.
Going all the way back to Windows 3.1, even my worst Windows installs always end up with more things functioning than with the best Linux installs.
You may be suffering from selective memory. I recently bought a copy of VMWare, so to play around with it I dug copies of Win3.1, NT3.51 and NT4 out of the basement.
When I installed them, all of my suppressed memories of configuration hell came flooding back. Arbitrary restrictions on partition sizes and filesystem types. Dismal driver support for the early NT versions (I was basically stuck in 640x480x4bit video modes). Painful networking setup. All sorts of other miscellaneous gotchas that I had long forgotten. (Back in the day, it would have been worse than that because I would have had to be pulling out adapter cards and moving jumpers around to get everything working right.) And after all that effort, I was faced with a stark ghetto of an OS that had zero useful apps or utilities preinstalled.
It's funny how these desktop OSes were able to generate billions of dollars of revenue in their day, but now people think that OSes which are lightyears beyond that level still aren't "ready for the desktop".
There are 28 categories of events ranging from gymnastics to sailing (you know that sport with boats.)
So it's 28 glorified track meets.
There are over 202 nations sending 10,500 athletes to compete.
Average of 375 athletes per glorified track meet. No bigger deal than a lot of high school state finals.
The event is televised world-wide whereas most high-school track meets only make a blurb in the local paper.
The networks make their own money selling ads. It doesn't cost the Olympics anything to do the broadcasting.
Your nation's prestige doesn't revolve around whether State Finals come off without a hitch.
So what? The vast majority of state finals go off without either a hitch or hundreds of $millions of corporate funding.
Bottom line: It's just some games. The majority of the events use equipment you could find in many high schools. It doesn't need to be so bloated. The only reason it is so bloated is because people expect it to be bloated. It's a self-perpetuating hype machine.
And the freeddom to use the code in closed commercial applications makes it *even more free* than restricting it to only other open source projets.
That's why the GPL'd Unix clone is currently getting more attention than the BSD-licensed versions. The most free doesn't necessarily imply the most popular.
This is especially true of the big corporate code contributers. They are using the OS to sell hardware and support services. They just aren't going to release their improvements to the OS in a totally free manner that lets a competitor fork their code in secret to gain a competitive advantage.
Sometimes it's annoying that there's a lot of GPL'd code out there that would be nice to use in an incompatible fashion. However, that's just life. You don't get something for nothing all the time.
E.g. Global warming not caused by so-called greenhouse gases, but by waste heat generated by inefficient energy (esp. electricity) utilization..
Every day or two, the earth receives as much thermal energy from the sun as humans have harnessed in all of history. Any conceivable waste heat generated by humans would be an insignificant drop in the bucket.
Where we do have a measurable affect on the earth's temperature is changing the reflectivity of the ground so that the earth absorbs more of the massive solar influx, adding pollution to the atmosphere to change its transparency and cloud cover, and adding greenhouse gasses which slow the radiation of solar energy back to outer space. All of these effects work by throttling the balance between the unimaginably large amounts of solar energy that arrive and depart from the planet each day. Our puny addition of waste heat is lost in the noise.
Just put the power plants on useless land, ie, deserts.
Without a plentiful source of water, there wouldn't be a good way to cool a power plant in the desert. That's why so many of them are built on prime real estate on lake shores or rivers.
First off the only damage that would be hundreds of thousands of dollars would only be the case in hitting a Lambrogini (sorry about spelling) or some other exotic car OR if you ran into a real expensive building.
Technically, it would be easy for them to download their rate calculation code into the black box as an applet, have it compute the customer's rate for the month, and upload nothing but the final dollar amount.
However, for some reason it seems highly unlikely that they would ever do it this way.
When people want to buy a lot of it, they should be celebrating and happily vending, not looking for ways to get their customers not to buy so much.
Except when the demand is highest, it costs them far more to generate or buy incremental power than at normal times. They may have peaking plants that are basically locomotive engines in sheds that generate the last few megawatts, but they are hugely expensive to run. Since they charge residential customers at a flat rate no matter what the demand, they're losing money vending additional power at those times.
If they were to propose non-flat rates to discourage peak demands, there would be a lynch mob at their headquarters. "Won't somebody please think of the fixed-income senior citizens!"
It basically makes more economic sense to cut the absolute maximum peak demand than to build a bunch of extra peaking power plants, which would raise everyone's electric rates. The overall cost savings are shared with the people willing to risk a few stretches of heat. In my case, they haven't used it in many years, and they say that they'll rotate the cutoffs so nobody is shut off for long stretches. If they start using it more than very occasionally, I'll unsubscribe from the program.
So how long until everything in the home has its own IP address and script kiddies decide to get their kicks messing with your air conditioning during a heat wave?
My house came with a wireless gizmo that allows the power company to cut out my air conditioning during a peak power crisis. In return, I save a couple of bucks a month on my bill. (They claim that they haven't had to activate this system in many years. We'll see.)
I wouldn't be surprised if these things were found to be totally insecure. However, I'm not too worried because it's basically a case of "Security through would anyone actually bother?". If it worked via the Internet, it might be different though. At least with the radio, would-be hackers would have to emerge from their parents' basements to set up an antenna, which will probably thwart most of them.
Right. Like speeding tickets effectively eliminate speeding.
OK, it probably wouldn't wipe it out totally. However, file sharing enforcement could be more thorough than speeding enforcement because of automated scanning.
Then, again, meybe you live in some country where people don't speed, like Germany. Here in the States it's all hypocrisy at its finest.
Well, they're supposed to actually know how to drive over there before they qualify to get a license. If I had my druthers, we would also screen for better drivers and remove speed limits here where appropriate.
Likewise, not-for-profit duplication of copyrighted works should have been allowed starting from 1790. IP-based businesses would have evolved taking that into account, and we wouldn't have this huge enforcement issue today.
However, neither one is likely to happen here any time soon, so I was proposing a more palatable solution at least for file sharing.
I would change copyright law to model punishment for not-for-profit file sharing violations on traffic speeding.
For speeding, (which is arguably a more serious offense than file sharing because lives are put at risk) we have a system where people are caught and given a ~$100 fine on the spot. They can choose to drag it out in court later, but most don't.
Some items:
Cars have license plates. Likewise, IP addresses shouldn't necessarily be deep secrets. Put in place a system for instant subpoena of a suspected offending IP to obtain the user account.
Only cops hand out traffic tickets. Likewise, a copyright holder would have to work through law enforcement authorities to initiate any action against suspected violators. Remove all civil liability for small-time file sharing; make it purely a petty misdemeanor. An enforcement officer would verify that the copyrighted files in question were indeed available on the IP address in the complaint.
To prevent abuse of the above system, the suspected account owner would need to be notified in real time whenever such a subpoena is issued. This would detail who was requesting the IP address info and what for. This would be similar to the speeding system, where you usually can plainly see the police car with the radar on the side of the road once you get close enough.
If the suspected activity is confirmed, law enforcement authorities would mail out a ticket for ~$100. The fine would provide the funds to pay for this system. If the suspected infringer voluntarily pays the fine, it's the end of the story.
If the suspected infringer goes to court to defend himself and is found to have been falsely accused, they would be eligible for compensation of ~$5000 from the accuser. This would prevent excessive abuse from the **AA.
I think that this kind of system would essentially halt illegal file sharing (at least within the borders of a single country) without causing undue stress on anyone or violating too many civil rights. To me it makes a lot more sense than trying to make examples by handing out harsh punishments to a small handful of unlucky suspects.
Scientists or not, they should have used some rudimentary security. When they're back on campus, they wouldn't leave their $1 million projects unattended for long stretches in buildings and labs that lack any kind of door locks.
If a bum came in at 3 a.m. and carted off a bunch of expensive equipment from a lab with no locks, would the appropriate response be to pontificate about how bad bums are, or should the response be to buy some frigging door locks?
Then we have to deal with average people joining the Republican party just because it offers a sane choice compared to the nutjob left wingers.
Well, at least the nutjobs on the left wing haven't blown up any federal buildings lately.
Re:Some of the changes (possible spoilers)
on
Star Wars on DVD
·
· Score: 5, Funny
If they were offering the original movies on DVD, I'd jump at it. I don't know how I feel about this revisionist version, but it leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.
I have altered the film. Pray I don't alter it any further.
The real question is that can SCO recall its copyright. Just because it offered the code does it preclude it from unoffering it. They can not sue people who have THAT code but can say that derivative works are illegal if there was such a clause in their license, which it seems there was.
However, in addition to their proprietary license, they chose to offer THAT code under a license, the GPL, that allows the recipients to recursively redistribute it. Since they still offer it, they have done this knowingly. SCO (or more likely, Novell) might retain a copyright on some code, but the terms of that license specify that it can't be "unoffered" from any recipients. These recipients may in turn redistribute it as they please.
In the worst case, IBM would just have to download the Linux code again from SCO's public FTP server and run a script to pointlessly replace any identical strings of text in IBM's kernel sources from SCO's source files.
Slashdot Mirror
I could hazard some guesses about why we don't currently see electrical transmissions in cars:
Weight: It seems to me that a motor/generator pair would probably weigh more than a mechanical transmission, which is just a few gears and/or hollow turbines. This isn't an issue on a locomotive, where heavier is better for creating traction (IIRC, some of the biggest steam locomotives weighed as much as a 747).
Power: A lot of people are used to having 300hp on tap. That's almost 1/4 of a megawatt. You'd need to have some serious power control circuits to handle that much juice. A locomotive is powerful, but pulling a train is really more about torque than raw horsepower. Electric drives do have excellent torque capabilities (and it's just about the only technology besides steam pistons with enough torque to start a freight train), but people in cars want neck-snapping acceleration. That would require a lot of copper and power controls.
CVT: Continuously variable mechanical transmissions have already been on the market for a few years. I would imagine that they can keep the engine running at a fairly constant rate. I think that they are somewhat more efficient than standard transmissions, but not by a huge factor. What makes hybrids special is that the engine produces almost constant power, not just speed, because it uses the batteries for power storage when it is generating a surplus. This allows for much more efficient operation than just a CVT. It's interesting that some of the hybrids use a mechanical transmission in addition to the electrical boost. I gather that that's because the mechanical drive was more cost-effective for transmitting that portion of the total power.
That might not be a bad idea for a casemod on some of the latest P4s. Run a heat pipe from the CPU over to a lava lamp.
However, IIRC a lava lamp works with just a 40W bulb. With some of the latest CPUs throwing off >200W of heat, you might need a whole row of lava lamps on top of the machine. Maybe the entire side of the case could be filled with gloop and made into a wall of lava.
Yes, Microsoft Office 1997 was truly a technology leader, blowing away all other personal productivity apps by requesting memory addresses above 512MB in the process address space. This was especially ahead of its time, given that most computers back then only had 64MB or less physical memory.
With the vast address space utilized by Office97, it was the first software that enabled the masses to write truly enterprise-class memos, emails and status reports. Only recently have competitors like KDE and Gnome piled enough bloat into their code to even approach address space utilization at this world-class scale.
Windows95 + Office97: Slinging those addresses with bit 29 set high and proud. No wonder they left all the other OSes and office suites in the dust.
With 64-bit Windows and the next version of Office just around the corner, who knows what heights of memory space allocation we'll be able to reach with Microsoft in the near future!
The grammar checker seemed to have been very picky about that point, and every single sentence where passive verb tense was used seemed to have been flagged by the checker. This may have been because it was targeted by Microsoft as a tool for use in business writing. Sometimes, however, it was thought by me that a little too much zeal may have been used by the grammar checker.
Given the available uranium resources, the only way that it would scale up significantly past it's current ~5% contribution to our total energy usage would be to switch to all breeder reactors. That would make handling weaponizable plutonium a universal day-to-day activity around the world, probably involving hundreds of reprocessing sites and tens or hundreds of thousands of employees under dozens of governments. The security and proliferation problems would be far worse than the current unacceptable situation.
The problem is security and proliferation. Many countries have used nuclear power plants primarilly as a cover and enabler to develop nuclear weapons. This activity continues even today in Iran and North Korea. Measures are supposedly in place to monitor for legitimate use of nuclear technology, but the world has shown little will to enforce them.
One day, nuclear power may help kill hundreds of thousands. If events spiral out of control after that day, it could help kill hundreds of millions.
I tend to agree: I prefer to say that the cars I had in high school were built largely out of "Brown Steel".
You forgot manually typing in the NIC's interrupt and I/O port addresses that are automatically scanned on modern OSes.
These were mainly imposed by the BIOSes of the day.
Needing to boot off the first primary partition? Having the "more advanced" OS not understanding the latest version of the old FS, and the "less advanced" OS never understanding the new FS? The one FS understood by all having a painfully small max size and then only with unreasonably huge cluster sizes? Unconditionally wiping the boot loader on each install? These came from BIOS?
Uh, wouldn't this be a problem with your VMWare setup? The drivers for the real hardware were there.
I had a good deal real hardware back then that had no NT drivers available. You had to carefully review the supported hardware lists before you made a purchase. I haven't done a scientific survey, but the proportion of popular unsupported hardware on the market in the early NT days certainly seemed larger than for Linux today.
You may be suffering from selective memory. I recently bought a copy of VMWare, so to play around with it I dug copies of Win3.1, NT3.51 and NT4 out of the basement.
When I installed them, all of my suppressed memories of configuration hell came flooding back. Arbitrary restrictions on partition sizes and filesystem types. Dismal driver support for the early NT versions (I was basically stuck in 640x480x4bit video modes). Painful networking setup. All sorts of other miscellaneous gotchas that I had long forgotten. (Back in the day, it would have been worse than that because I would have had to be pulling out adapter cards and moving jumpers around to get everything working right.) And after all that effort, I was faced with a stark ghetto of an OS that had zero useful apps or utilities preinstalled.
It's funny how these desktop OSes were able to generate billions of dollars of revenue in their day, but now people think that OSes which are lightyears beyond that level still aren't "ready for the desktop".
So it's 28 glorified track meets.
There are over 202 nations sending 10,500 athletes to compete.
Average of 375 athletes per glorified track meet. No bigger deal than a lot of high school state finals.
The event is televised world-wide whereas most high-school track meets only make a blurb in the local paper.
The networks make their own money selling ads. It doesn't cost the Olympics anything to do the broadcasting.
Your nation's prestige doesn't revolve around whether State Finals come off without a hitch.
So what? The vast majority of state finals go off without either a hitch or hundreds of $millions of corporate funding.
Bottom line: It's just some games. The majority of the events use equipment you could find in many high schools. It doesn't need to be so bloated. The only reason it is so bloated is because people expect it to be bloated. It's a self-perpetuating hype machine.
It's just a glorified track meet. High schools manage to host sports competitions every week without needing massive corporate funding.
Maybe the Olympics should pare down a little bit if they've grown so bloated that they have to pull these kinds of stunts just to operate.
That's why the GPL'd Unix clone is currently getting more attention than the BSD-licensed versions. The most free doesn't necessarily imply the most popular.
This is especially true of the big corporate code contributers. They are using the OS to sell hardware and support services. They just aren't going to release their improvements to the OS in a totally free manner that lets a competitor fork their code in secret to gain a competitive advantage.
Sometimes it's annoying that there's a lot of GPL'd code out there that would be nice to use in an incompatible fashion. However, that's just life. You don't get something for nothing all the time.
E.g. Global warming not caused by so-called greenhouse gases, but by waste heat generated by inefficient energy (esp. electricity) utilization..
Every day or two, the earth receives as much thermal energy from the sun as humans have harnessed in all of history. Any conceivable waste heat generated by humans would be an insignificant drop in the bucket.
Where we do have a measurable affect on the earth's temperature is changing the reflectivity of the ground so that the earth absorbs more of the massive solar influx, adding pollution to the atmosphere to change its transparency and cloud cover, and adding greenhouse gasses which slow the radiation of solar energy back to outer space. All of these effects work by throttling the balance between the unimaginably large amounts of solar energy that arrive and depart from the planet each day. Our puny addition of waste heat is lost in the noise.
Without a plentiful source of water, there wouldn't be a good way to cool a power plant in the desert. That's why so many of them are built on prime real estate on lake shores or rivers.
You seem to have forgotten people.
However, for some reason it seems highly unlikely that they would ever do it this way.
Except when the demand is highest, it costs them far more to generate or buy incremental power than at normal times. They may have peaking plants that are basically locomotive engines in sheds that generate the last few megawatts, but they are hugely expensive to run. Since they charge residential customers at a flat rate no matter what the demand, they're losing money vending additional power at those times.
If they were to propose non-flat rates to discourage peak demands, there would be a lynch mob at their headquarters. "Won't somebody please think of the fixed-income senior citizens!"
It basically makes more economic sense to cut the absolute maximum peak demand than to build a bunch of extra peaking power plants, which would raise everyone's electric rates. The overall cost savings are shared with the people willing to risk a few stretches of heat. In my case, they haven't used it in many years, and they say that they'll rotate the cutoffs so nobody is shut off for long stretches. If they start using it more than very occasionally, I'll unsubscribe from the program.
My house came with a wireless gizmo that allows the power company to cut out my air conditioning during a peak power crisis. In return, I save a couple of bucks a month on my bill. (They claim that they haven't had to activate this system in many years. We'll see.)
I wouldn't be surprised if these things were found to be totally insecure. However, I'm not too worried because it's basically a case of "Security through would anyone actually bother?". If it worked via the Internet, it might be different though. At least with the radio, would-be hackers would have to emerge from their parents' basements to set up an antenna, which will probably thwart most of them.
OK, it probably wouldn't wipe it out totally. However, file sharing enforcement could be more thorough than speeding enforcement because of automated scanning.
Then, again, meybe you live in some country where people don't speed, like Germany. Here in the States it's all hypocrisy at its finest.
Well, they're supposed to actually know how to drive over there before they qualify to get a license. If I had my druthers, we would also screen for better drivers and remove speed limits here where appropriate.
Likewise, not-for-profit duplication of copyrighted works should have been allowed starting from 1790. IP-based businesses would have evolved taking that into account, and we wouldn't have this huge enforcement issue today.
However, neither one is likely to happen here any time soon, so I was proposing a more palatable solution at least for file sharing.
For speeding, (which is arguably a more serious offense than file sharing because lives are put at risk) we have a system where people are caught and given a ~$100 fine on the spot. They can choose to drag it out in court later, but most don't.
Some items:
Cars have license plates. Likewise, IP addresses shouldn't necessarily be deep secrets. Put in place a system for instant subpoena of a suspected offending IP to obtain the user account.
Only cops hand out traffic tickets. Likewise, a copyright holder would have to work through law enforcement authorities to initiate any action against suspected violators. Remove all civil liability for small-time file sharing; make it purely a petty misdemeanor. An enforcement officer would verify that the copyrighted files in question were indeed available on the IP address in the complaint.
To prevent abuse of the above system, the suspected account owner would need to be notified in real time whenever such a subpoena is issued. This would detail who was requesting the IP address info and what for. This would be similar to the speeding system, where you usually can plainly see the police car with the radar on the side of the road once you get close enough.
If the suspected activity is confirmed, law enforcement authorities would mail out a ticket for ~$100. The fine would provide the funds to pay for this system. If the suspected infringer voluntarily pays the fine, it's the end of the story.
If the suspected infringer goes to court to defend himself and is found to have been falsely accused, they would be eligible for compensation of ~$5000 from the accuser. This would prevent excessive abuse from the **AA.
I think that this kind of system would essentially halt illegal file sharing (at least within the borders of a single country) without causing undue stress on anyone or violating too many civil rights. To me it makes a lot more sense than trying to make examples by handing out harsh punishments to a small handful of unlucky suspects.
One reason is the Goldilocks factor:
Lisp: too many parentheses
Smalltalk: not enough parentheses
Python: just right
Smalltalk: too many colons
Lisp: not enough colons
Python: just right
If a bum came in at 3 a.m. and carted off a bunch of expensive equipment from a lab with no locks, would the appropriate response be to pontificate about how bad bums are, or should the response be to buy some frigging door locks?
Well, at least the nutjobs on the left wing haven't blown up any federal buildings lately.
I have altered the film. Pray I don't alter it any further.
-GL
However, in addition to their proprietary license, they chose to offer THAT code under a license, the GPL, that allows the recipients to recursively redistribute it. Since they still offer it, they have done this knowingly. SCO (or more likely, Novell) might retain a copyright on some code, but the terms of that license specify that it can't be "unoffered" from any recipients. These recipients may in turn redistribute it as they please.
In the worst case, IBM would just have to download the Linux code again from SCO's public FTP server and run a script to pointlessly replace any identical strings of text in IBM's kernel sources from SCO's source files.