Ah, then let me throw in my knowledge of Latin, Greek and Klingon *grin*.
Yes, US English is more widely used than UK English, but in schools around the world, except in the US, it is still UK English that's being taught, and in official business in Europe, Asia and Africa, when English is required, UK English is used.
Privacy? That coming from a country with THREE three-letter agencies that are world-renowned for their unmatched database size, detail and accuracy about people all over the world, including but definitely not limited to citizens of the United States of America? Comments on occasional soccer-related violence from a country with so much drug- and crime-related violence?
I do agree on the height of taxes, though... But then again, taxes are what make a welfare state.
Here in the Netherlands we have the SOFI number, which is pretty much similar to the SSN that's used in the US. At first, it was meant only to identify people to their employers and to the fiscal services, but it has grown from there. Many other things require your SOFI number mentioned. Driving licences, passports, ID cards, banks, and lots of other companies, corporations, organisations and agencies require your SOFI number.
But they can't cross-reference their information with anything else anybody else has stored. Yes, the government stores employment and fiscal information, but only the government, fiscal agencies and your employer can get anything from there. Organisations don't require the SOFI number to cross-reference anything, but because it is a unique identifier that every person with a Dutch nationality has. Why would any organisation give their customers a unique identifier of their own, that their customers might lose or forget or that might cause other problems internally, when everybody already HAS a unique identifier that you can easily adopt to your own use?
And about phone numbers... Here it has been for a long time that there was only one phone company, owned by the government. That one phone company brought out one phone book - well, lots of phone books, assorted by region - with all numbers of everybody, and their addresses. You could also request to be listed differently, for example, to get a larger font, to be listed by a different name, or not to be listed at all, and all of that would cost you a rather arbitrary fee to cover the administration involved. So basically, if you knew somebody's name and location, you could find his/her phone number, but only if it was within your region, because you ofcourse only had a phone book for your region. Otherwise, you could call the information number to request their phone number, where they'd request the street address if there were more people with that specific name in that specific town. No real privacy issues there, imho.
The real privacy issues came with the "CDFoon Gids", the phonebook on CD. There was a little hack made named "foongrep" with which you could reverse search: find name and address when you have a phone number. Now THAT is a privacy issue...
Colour, Honour, Neighbour, Modularise, Polarise, Advertise, Realise, Centre, Theatre, Red Bus, Black Cab, Big Ben! Voilà. Eat that.
I'm Dutch, and the English I learned in school is British English, dispite the major language on Dutch TV being American English. At work I work with British people daily. And aside from that, the UK is a hell of a lot closer than the USA. So I speak and write British English. If you've got a problem with that, that's fine by me. Realise, however, that American English is only official in America. Wherever else you are, in Europe, Asia, Australia, Indonesia, if you are required to write English, you're required to write proper BRITISH English.
Please leave, and return when you speak as many languages as I do, as well as I do (Dutch, English, German, French).
In his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy he describes how a little mistake with Galactic Billiards caused billions of deaths when an inhabited planet was accidentally potted into a nearby black hole.
Wow, then you do have very acute hearing, or at least in that range. My hearing is also rather acute, and I can hear a good sized TV from across the room, but normally I either don't notice it, or it gets swamped by the sound.
Thing is, the high pitched area is first to go when you damage your hearing, and the worst thing for your hearing in that respect is loud rock music - dance and other electronic music is less damaging, because it doesn't have as many high-pitched tones. Ever notice your ears peeping after a party? The pitch of that peep is the pitch you've just become (a bit more) deaf to:)
No, you wouldn't want a stoned hippie driving you around town. But you also wouldn't want a DRUNK hippie driving you around town...
It is of no consequence, none at all, if you use drugs in your own time, whether it be marijuana, hash, opium, cocain, heroin, crack or alcohol, as long as you're sobre and accountable on the job. For the reasons you mention, you could just as well fire anybody who has ever had a beer or two, not even to speak of whiskey, vodka and other high alcoholic goodies.
Whether you're a driver, pilot, doctor, lawyer or VP, you should be sobre on the job, and you can be quite rightly fired if you're not. But what you do outside of company time is none of their business. None whatsoever.
Correct me if I'm wrong (IANAS), but this thing basically ionises hydrogen, then heats the hydrogen ions until it becomes plasma, and then spits it out. A real nice exhaust of positively charged matter. But aren't you then amassing surplus electrons in the hull? It would sure generate a real nice spark upon entering the Mars atmosphere:)
I'm a sports shooter. Air rifle (10m standing) and.22 longrifle (12m/50m kneeling/lying) are my preferred diciplins, and I've also done some archery for the fun of it. The quality of your vision doesn't have very much to do with hitting the target. Well, if your vision is so bad that you can't see the target, that will be detrimental, ofcourse, but with rifle shooting what you should do is "simply" to line up the three circles (target and sights) so they're perfectly concentric, then pull the trigger carefully to not move the rifle. Actually, what you do is pull the trigger slowly in a fluent motion to prevent trembling, taking away 2/3 of the trigger pressure in 1/3 of the time, and make sure you're on the target when you pull through. Much more a game of concentration, control and timing than of vision. And for archery it's pretty much the same.
wterm happens to be my preferred terminal emulator, and for a long time I used it happily along with Debian potato. Then all of a sudden it was gone. Just gone. Because it ended up under "absolete", I had removed it before I realised what I was doing. I then had to download the.deb and install it manually, because it was removed from the distribution. When I asked the package maintainer what that was all about, he responded that the package was dropped from potato because it had a release critical bug that couldn't be fixed: it is a bit lossy when using the Cyrillic alphabet.
Now what's up with that? Sure, because it's free Debian will definitely have a huge user base in Eastern Europe, but why drop a perfectly good package just because it can't quite cope with their alphabet? Apparently, wterm has always had problems with the Cyrillic alphabet, so nobody who uses that alphabet uses wterm. So basically what they did by dropping it is depriving people who were happily using wterm without any problems of their favourite terminal emulator.
I see this whole issue of dropping non-free in the exact same light. People who DEFINITELY want Free! software will simply not put non-free in their sources.list so they're not confronted with Evil Non-Free Software. So why don't they do it a little different? They could, for example, supply non-free, but not put it in the sources.list by default, so that people who want to install non-free software will have to explicitly point dselect to it. That way you keep non-free available to those who want it, and keep it out of earshot of those who resent it.
Or is that just too logical a solution?
)O( the Gods have a sense of humour,
Re:You've only got yourselves to blame
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 1
And this is from a demographic that is supposedly earning a lot more money than the rest of society.
Ahem, I'm a college student. I don't know how much the average college student in the US earns, but here in the Netherlands college students are the demographic that is earning about the least money.
... the "I'm not paying for that" mentality that seems to be the norm.
Exactly. I live in Linux 98% of my time. All I use MS Windows for is for a few hours of relaxed gaming in the weekends. SubSpace and Infantry mostly, both fully legal. That is literally the only thing I do with Windows, and I'll be damned if I pay the full price for that, especially considering my financial situation:)
Until this attitude of piracy being a good thing of course companies are going to try and impose additional restrictions on their software.
So, let me get this straight. It is alright to screw over millions upon millions of honest customers for a total sum far greater than what you lose over a few consumers allegedly screwing you over? Seems like a pathetic excuse for an excuse to me. They simply saw a way to squeeze more money out of the gullible masses and went for it.
Oh boy, I wouldn't want to be on the business end of Bill Gates' karma...
The way the US and most European countries went during the Cold War is very interesting. In response to the USSR going hard left, the US went hard right, while most European countries tried to walk the thin line inbetween. As a result, many European countries, especially the Scandinavian countries, Benelux countries, Germany and the UK display a rather elegant mix of capitalism, liberalism and socialism which seems to work out quite nicely.
I too watch with fear the development and growth of the monster companies in the US. One I especially fear is UPC, because it is taking over the cable nets in the Netherlands at the moment. Its coverage is already about 50%, and from experience I can say that their quality SUCKS. They change channels around without prior notice, the quality of some channels' signals is deplorable, and the quality of their cable internet service, Chello, is even worse. Once my parents were without internet for SIX DAYS, and all they said if you were ever able to get through the telephone queues was that they were working on the problem and that it would be resolved WITHIN TWO WORKING DAYS. Two working days to restore an internet connection? How would that sound if it were, for example, a telephone connection, or a power connection?
Ah, but I'm digressing, and ranting.
Standards should be there to make sure various programs by various companies are able to work together flawlessly. But currently all too many standards are created to do the opposite: make sure other companies' products CAN'T work together with yours, so everybody will have to buy yours to be compliant to your standard. To quote from Galaxy Quest: "Ewwwww, that just isn't right!"
There's generally some way to get around it. Here in the Netherlands for example licence agreements aren't valid unless they're also delivered in Dutch - not just in English. Oh, and what about the issue of somebody else installing software on your computer? THAT person agrees with the licence. The person who uses the software has never seen it, and hasn't agreed to it. Licencing in such a way is completely flawed. And that's also why I don't really read them. That, and that the ULA that comes with most software installed on my system is called GPL:)
I don't think there's anything stopping them from distributing it all in the non-free section, although I'd have to look at the license again.
As sources, there'd indeed be nothing wrong. The problem comes when you compile KDE. The KDE binaries would have to be distributed under GPL, but QT, which is then part of it, isn't, and thus you have a breach of licence if you distribute the binaries. And that's where the problem lies.
I'm absolutely sure the Debian developers would love to include KDE in Debian, even if it were in non-free, but by including it they would be breaking GPL. But that discussion is currently going on in a completely different thread here on/.:)
)O( the Gods have a sense of humour,
Re:Before the inevitable Stallman bashing starts .
on
RMS On 'Open' Motif
·
· Score: 3
Well, I may not be so happy in a few years when linux gets flooded with pseudo-open source garbage that trades popularity for freedom.
All the more reason to use Debian GNU/Linux. One of Debian's priorities is to keep GPL clean, guaranteeing in truly Free Operating System. This is exactly the reason that Debian is dumping KDE by the side of the road: distributing KDE binaries would be a breach of GPL due to a licencing glitch.
In the current Linux world, where I see more and more distros go more and more commercial, I'm really glad there's at least one distribution that stays true to its source (yes, pun intended). This is probably part of the reason why I'm so mysteriously attracted to Debian. Its packaging system and great abundance of packages are two other charms, ofcourse, but the fact that it's truly Free is also a large part of it.
Never in history have two countries been at war with eachother that at that time had McDonalds establishments. Which means that if you open a McDonalds in the Principality of Sealand, the US couldn't possibly go to war against them.
To extend the idea a little further, maybe there are other ways to flood DoubleClick and collectors of private information with fake data. Maybe some kind of distributed system where people set up little daemons that run in the background, pretend to be surfing, but are really just sending cookies designed to destory the integrity of their data. Would this be legal? hmmm...
OFCOURSE this would be legal! It's the data miner that asks the little daemon for its cookies without the owner's permission, and the daemon happily hands out those cookies - it's not at all illegal to give false information. How can it possibly be illegal to broadcast garbage information across the internet for semi-legal data miners to choke on? What could they do about it? Whine that the data they collect in such a controvercial way is false?
Doing this is rather similar to leaving a car unlocked as bait to catch car thieves, or putting up a box with a few juicy security holes and back doors as bait for script kiddies and other crackers.
)O( the Gods have a sense of humour,
Re:I work at the Philips helpdesk. What about Euro
on
More Napster Updates
·
· Score: 1
Well, as I said, many CDD2X00s are still around, writing along quite happily, churning out hundreds upon hundreds of CDs. We've got a few of them right here in our test systems, and never had any trouble with them. Are you sure it wasn't an issue with your SCSI card, for example?
And just 10 days out of warranty? Had you sent us a fax then, you'd probably have received another replacement even though it was out of warranty. Chances also are that the last replacement was less than 3 months before that one died on you aswell? In that case, you would have simply been a warranty case. But that is Philips PCP Europe, I don't know what the procedures in the US were...
*shrug*, we'll see what happens, and I'm truly sorry you had such a bad experience with Philips writers. By the way, 50% of ALL writers sold in Europe, if not even worldwide, are manufactured by Philips. Currently the Philips 3601, 3801, 4401 and 4801 are among the most OEM-ed drives out there. The CDD2X00 series were sold by various OEMs, among which indeed HP, but others aswell...
)O( the Gods have a sense of humour,
Re:I work at the Philips helpdesk. What about Euro
on
More Napster Updates
·
· Score: 1
Lubricant drying out? Yes, that's a known problem - if you operate the writer outside of its temperature margins. If you take care that the writer doesn't overheat, and stays within the recommended temperature margins, those writers can give you years and years of joy.
And the spring problem? That existed in the CDD2600 aswell, afaik. Up until now I had never heard of the CDD2200. Must be a US-only model? What speed is it?
)O( the Gods have a sense of humour,
Re:I work at the Philips helpdesk. What about Euro
on
More Napster Updates
·
· Score: 1
Is there any indication of the actual production fault in these products ? from my experience the problem was related to the SCSI / controlling part of the drive.
By my knowledge it is the ominous "spring problem". A certain spring holding a certain part of the writer in position was too weak, and would give up after some time, resulting in many early CDD2600s starting to cause buffer underruns after half a year or so. Most of those breakdowns were within the warranty period and therefor no real problem, and the spring was replaced by a stronger one in later revisions of the writer.
Unfortunately I haven't been able to read the original article because it's/.ed...
)O( the Gods have a sense of humour,
I work at the Philips helpdesk. What about Europe?
on
More Napster Updates
·
· Score: 1
I work at the Philips PCP technical helpdesk here in Europe, and I can already see all those people calling about wanting a replacement for that CDD2000 or CDD2600 they still have lying around in their attic somewhere. Besides, that whole quality issue was only with the first versions of those writers. The later revisions were quite reliable, and I've seen some of them in use up to now while other writers from that era have all gone dead by now. *shrug*, guess everything's relative.
Question remains, does this American lawsuit have any effect whatsoever on us here in Europe? Could I yank the CDD2000 and CDD2600 out of our test systems (yes, we actually have test systems with those things still in it. Working, too) and file for a replacement? I think two CDRW804Ks would do fine *grin*
No offense, but that doesn't make much sense. If all the "vigilantes" are monitoring for things that don't belong, wouldn't they be smacking each other far more often? That sort of script kiddy nonsense would definately qualify as something that "doesn't belong".
*shrug*, so somebody sniffs a few passwords? Here's to SSH and PGP. Just for the heck of it I too spent a few hours sniffing mail passwords. Within an hour I already had a whole A4 paper full. And then? I mean, it's no fun peeking at somebody's mail. The fun part was seeing how damn insecure this whole email thingy is.
True, sniffing doesn't belong. Just like guns don't belong, yet the police use them. (News flash: guns are illegal here). Nobody really cared about it unless you abused it. Just like when BackOrifice and NetBus were out. I had grand screwing with people's minds when I found them running one of those. Just like lots of other people on campus. But as far as I know nobody actually destroyed anybody. Just toy with them, then warn them and tell them how to get rid of it. After having played with a few, the fun kind of drops off, you know.
Sure, sniffing doesn't belong. But it's possible. SNT and CIV, the providers of the network, ofcourse couldn't use those methods, so they allowed the vigilantes to police the network. But if you stepped out of line one inch, you'd have your access revoked.
Now ofcourse sniffing isn't (easily) possible anymore, because we have switches now. But it IS possible to log in to those switches and look around. Which is also illegal, but nobody minds unless you start screwing with things. Backend networks are also illegal, but nobody minds as long as you have the gateway configured properly.
The rules are there to be able to bring those down who really go to far. They won't come after you for sniffing some packets, for breaking into the switches, for pulling other such tricks, as long as you keep it civil. But Big Brother is watching you, ofcourse... Step over the line, and you'll see the Man with the Scissors cutting you off. And ain't nobody going to risk a permanent 100Mbit conection for a mere 6 dollars per month over a little hack attack.:)
I'm on a big campus-wide LAN here, with 2000 students' computers connected to it, and out here I've seen in action, and participated in multiple "counter-hacks". When the whole network was still tied together with 10Mbit hubs instead of the 100Mbit switches we have now, it was quite standard practice to monitor the packets flying across your hub for stuff that didn't belong there, and retalliate if necessary. Winnuke, bonk, boing, nestea and other such exploits were used by vigilantes to police the network.
For example, it was not allowed to use the IPX protocol tied to Windows Networking because that caused much traffic. People trying to download files from eachother using IPX were often nuked. Once when I was monitoring, I found three people ping-flooding a third, who tried simultaniously to retalliate together with somebody else, also by pingflooding, usurping the entire bandwidth of the entire network. A few faulty packets spread between them quickly knocked that war out of existence, and returned the network load back to normal.
Playing vigilante on the internet is not bad as such, as long as you really know what you're doing, and aren't causing any damage beyond taking away an attacker's ability to attack you, possibly by crashing his system, but preferably by yanking his connection away.
Slashdot Mirror
Then I suggest sending him to Mars without an environmental suit so he can prove his assumption :)
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Ah, then let me throw in my knowledge of Latin, Greek and Klingon *grin*.
Yes, US English is more widely used than UK English, but in schools around the world, except in the US, it is still UK English that's being taught, and in official business in Europe, Asia and Africa, when English is required, UK English is used.
Privacy? That coming from a country with THREE three-letter agencies that are world-renowned for their unmatched database size, detail and accuracy about people all over the world, including but definitely not limited to citizens of the United States of America? Comments on occasional soccer-related violence from a country with so much drug- and crime-related violence?
I do agree on the height of taxes, though... But then again, taxes are what make a welfare state.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Here in the Netherlands we have the SOFI number, which is pretty much similar to the SSN that's used in the US. At first, it was meant only to identify people to their employers and to the fiscal services, but it has grown from there. Many other things require your SOFI number mentioned. Driving licences, passports, ID cards, banks, and lots of other companies, corporations, organisations and agencies require your SOFI number.
But they can't cross-reference their information with anything else anybody else has stored. Yes, the government stores employment and fiscal information, but only the government, fiscal agencies and your employer can get anything from there. Organisations don't require the SOFI number to cross-reference anything, but because it is a unique identifier that every person with a Dutch nationality has. Why would any organisation give their customers a unique identifier of their own, that their customers might lose or forget or that might cause other problems internally, when everybody already HAS a unique identifier that you can easily adopt to your own use?
And about phone numbers... Here it has been for a long time that there was only one phone company, owned by the government. That one phone company brought out one phone book - well, lots of phone books, assorted by region - with all numbers of everybody, and their addresses. You could also request to be listed differently, for example, to get a larger font, to be listed by a different name, or not to be listed at all, and all of that would cost you a rather arbitrary fee to cover the administration involved. So basically, if you knew somebody's name and location, you could find his/her phone number, but only if it was within your region, because you ofcourse only had a phone book for your region. Otherwise, you could call the information number to request their phone number, where they'd request the street address if there were more people with that specific name in that specific town. No real privacy issues there, imho.
The real privacy issues came with the "CDFoon Gids", the phonebook on CD. There was a little hack made named "foongrep" with which you could reverse search: find name and address when you have a phone number. Now THAT is a privacy issue...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Colour, Honour, Neighbour, Modularise, Polarise, Advertise, Realise, Centre, Theatre, Red Bus, Black Cab, Big Ben! Voilà. Eat that.
I'm Dutch, and the English I learned in school is British English, dispite the major language on Dutch TV being American English. At work I work with British people daily. And aside from that, the UK is a hell of a lot closer than the USA. So I speak and write British English. If you've got a problem with that, that's fine by me. Realise, however, that American English is only official in America. Wherever else you are, in Europe, Asia, Australia, Indonesia, if you are required to write English, you're required to write proper BRITISH English.
Please leave, and return when you speak as many languages as I do, as well as I do (Dutch, English, German, French).
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
In his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy he describes how a little mistake with Galactic Billiards caused billions of deaths when an inhabited planet was accidentally potted into a nearby black hole.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Wow, then you do have very acute hearing, or at least in that range. My hearing is also rather acute, and I can hear a good sized TV from across the room, but normally I either don't notice it, or it gets swamped by the sound.
:)
Thing is, the high pitched area is first to go when you damage your hearing, and the worst thing for your hearing in that respect is loud rock music - dance and other electronic music is less damaging, because it doesn't have as many high-pitched tones. Ever notice your ears peeping after a party? The pitch of that peep is the pitch you've just become (a bit more) deaf to
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
That, ofcourse, depends on your definition of "smart"... Personally, I define it as a cute little car that also comes as a convertable :)
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
No, you wouldn't want a stoned hippie driving you around town. But you also wouldn't want a DRUNK hippie driving you around town...
It is of no consequence, none at all, if you use drugs in your own time, whether it be marijuana, hash, opium, cocain, heroin, crack or alcohol, as long as you're sobre and accountable on the job. For the reasons you mention, you could just as well fire anybody who has ever had a beer or two, not even to speak of whiskey, vodka and other high alcoholic goodies.
Whether you're a driver, pilot, doctor, lawyer or VP, you should be sobre on the job, and you can be quite rightly fired if you're not. But what you do outside of company time is none of their business. None whatsoever.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Correct me if I'm wrong (IANAS), but this thing basically ionises hydrogen, then heats the hydrogen ions until it becomes plasma, and then spits it out. A real nice exhaust of positively charged matter. But aren't you then amassing surplus electrons in the hull? It would sure generate a real nice spark upon entering the Mars atmosphere :)
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
I'm a sports shooter. Air rifle (10m standing) and .22 longrifle (12m/50m kneeling/lying) are my preferred diciplins, and I've also done some archery for the fun of it. The quality of your vision doesn't have very much to do with hitting the target. Well, if your vision is so bad that you can't see the target, that will be detrimental, ofcourse, but with rifle shooting what you should do is "simply" to line up the three circles (target and sights) so they're perfectly concentric, then pull the trigger carefully to not move the rifle. Actually, what you do is pull the trigger slowly in a fluent motion to prevent trembling, taking away 2/3 of the trigger pressure in 1/3 of the time, and make sure you're on the target when you pull through. Much more a game of concentration, control and timing than of vision. And for archery it's pretty much the same.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
They're called schools.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
wterm happens to be my preferred terminal emulator, and for a long time I used it happily along with Debian potato. Then all of a sudden it was gone. Just gone. Because it ended up under "absolete", I had removed it before I realised what I was doing. I then had to download the .deb and install it manually, because it was removed from the distribution. When I asked the package maintainer what that was all about, he responded that the package was dropped from potato because it had a release critical bug that couldn't be fixed: it is a bit lossy when using the Cyrillic alphabet.
Now what's up with that? Sure, because it's free Debian will definitely have a huge user base in Eastern Europe, but why drop a perfectly good package just because it can't quite cope with their alphabet? Apparently, wterm has always had problems with the Cyrillic alphabet, so nobody who uses that alphabet uses wterm. So basically what they did by dropping it is depriving people who were happily using wterm without any problems of their favourite terminal emulator.
I see this whole issue of dropping non-free in the exact same light. People who DEFINITELY want Free! software will simply not put non-free in their sources.list so they're not confronted with Evil Non-Free Software. So why don't they do it a little different? They could, for example, supply non-free, but not put it in the sources.list by default, so that people who want to install non-free software will have to explicitly point dselect to it. That way you keep non-free available to those who want it, and keep it out of earshot of those who resent it.
Or is that just too logical a solution?
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
And this is from a demographic that is supposedly earning a lot more money than the rest of society.
... the "I'm not paying for that" mentality that seems to be the norm.
:)
Ahem, I'm a college student. I don't know how much the average college student in the US earns, but here in the Netherlands college students are the demographic that is earning about the least money.
Exactly. I live in Linux 98% of my time. All I use MS Windows for is for a few hours of relaxed gaming in the weekends. SubSpace and Infantry mostly, both fully legal. That is literally the only thing I do with Windows, and I'll be damned if I pay the full price for that, especially considering my financial situation
Until this attitude of piracy being a good thing of course companies are going to try and impose additional restrictions on their software.
So, let me get this straight. It is alright to screw over millions upon millions of honest customers for a total sum far greater than what you lose over a few consumers allegedly screwing you over? Seems like a pathetic excuse for an excuse to me. They simply saw a way to squeeze more money out of the gullible masses and went for it.
Oh boy, I wouldn't want to be on the business end of Bill Gates' karma...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
hear hear!
The way the US and most European countries went during the Cold War is very interesting. In response to the USSR going hard left, the US went hard right, while most European countries tried to walk the thin line inbetween. As a result, many European countries, especially the Scandinavian countries, Benelux countries, Germany and the UK display a rather elegant mix of capitalism, liberalism and socialism which seems to work out quite nicely.
I too watch with fear the development and growth of the monster companies in the US. One I especially fear is UPC, because it is taking over the cable nets in the Netherlands at the moment. Its coverage is already about 50%, and from experience I can say that their quality SUCKS. They change channels around without prior notice, the quality of some channels' signals is deplorable, and the quality of their cable internet service, Chello, is even worse. Once my parents were without internet for SIX DAYS, and all they said if you were ever able to get through the telephone queues was that they were working on the problem and that it would be resolved WITHIN TWO WORKING DAYS. Two working days to restore an internet connection? How would that sound if it were, for example, a telephone connection, or a power connection?
Ah, but I'm digressing, and ranting.
Standards should be there to make sure various programs by various companies are able to work together flawlessly. But currently all too many standards are created to do the opposite: make sure other companies' products CAN'T work together with yours, so everybody will have to buy yours to be compliant to your standard. To quote from Galaxy Quest: "Ewwwww, that just isn't right!"
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
There's generally some way to get around it. Here in the Netherlands for example licence agreements aren't valid unless they're also delivered in Dutch - not just in English. Oh, and what about the issue of somebody else installing software on your computer? THAT person agrees with the licence. The person who uses the software has never seen it, and hasn't agreed to it. Licencing in such a way is completely flawed. And that's also why I don't really read them. That, and that the ULA that comes with most software installed on my system is called GPL :)
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
I don't think there's anything stopping them from distributing it all in the non-free section, although I'd have to look at the license again.
/. :)
As sources, there'd indeed be nothing wrong. The problem comes when you compile KDE. The KDE binaries would have to be distributed under GPL, but QT, which is then part of it, isn't, and thus you have a breach of licence if you distribute the binaries. And that's where the problem lies.
I'm absolutely sure the Debian developers would love to include KDE in Debian, even if it were in non-free, but by including it they would be breaking GPL. But that discussion is currently going on in a completely different thread here on
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Well, I may not be so happy in a few years when linux gets flooded with pseudo-open source garbage that trades popularity for freedom.
All the more reason to use Debian GNU/Linux. One of Debian's priorities is to keep GPL clean, guaranteeing in truly Free Operating System. This is exactly the reason that Debian is dumping KDE by the side of the road: distributing KDE binaries would be a breach of GPL due to a licencing glitch.
In the current Linux world, where I see more and more distros go more and more commercial, I'm really glad there's at least one distribution that stays true to its source (yes, pun intended). This is probably part of the reason why I'm so mysteriously attracted to Debian. Its packaging system and great abundance of packages are two other charms, ofcourse, but the fact that it's truly Free is also a large part of it.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Never in history have two countries been at war with eachother that at that time had McDonalds establishments. Which means that if you open a McDonalds in the Principality of Sealand, the US couldn't possibly go to war against them.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
To extend the idea a little further, maybe there are other ways to flood DoubleClick and collectors of private information with fake data. Maybe some kind of distributed system where people set up little daemons that run in the background, pretend to be surfing, but are really just sending cookies designed to destory the integrity of their data. Would this be legal? hmmm...
OFCOURSE this would be legal! It's the data miner that asks the little daemon for its cookies without the owner's permission, and the daemon happily hands out those cookies - it's not at all illegal to give false information. How can it possibly be illegal to broadcast garbage information across the internet for semi-legal data miners to choke on? What could they do about it? Whine that the data they collect in such a controvercial way is false?
Doing this is rather similar to leaving a car unlocked as bait to catch car thieves, or putting up a box with a few juicy security holes and back doors as bait for script kiddies and other crackers.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Well, as I said, many CDD2X00s are still around, writing along quite happily, churning out hundreds upon hundreds of CDs. We've got a few of them right here in our test systems, and never had any trouble with them. Are you sure it wasn't an issue with your SCSI card, for example?
And just 10 days out of warranty? Had you sent us a fax then, you'd probably have received another replacement even though it was out of warranty. Chances also are that the last replacement was less than 3 months before that one died on you aswell? In that case, you would have simply been a warranty case. But that is Philips PCP Europe, I don't know what the procedures in the US were...
*shrug*, we'll see what happens, and I'm truly sorry you had such a bad experience with Philips writers. By the way, 50% of ALL writers sold in Europe, if not even worldwide, are manufactured by Philips. Currently the Philips 3601, 3801, 4401 and 4801 are among the most OEM-ed drives out there. The CDD2X00 series were sold by various OEMs, among which indeed HP, but others aswell...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Lubricant drying out? Yes, that's a known problem - if you operate the writer outside of its temperature margins. If you take care that the writer doesn't overheat, and stays within the recommended temperature margins, those writers can give you years and years of joy.
And the spring problem? That existed in the CDD2600 aswell, afaik. Up until now I had never heard of the CDD2200. Must be a US-only model? What speed is it?
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
Is there any indication of the actual production fault in these products ? from my experience the problem was related to the SCSI / controlling part of the drive.
/.ed...
By my knowledge it is the ominous "spring problem". A certain spring holding a certain part of the writer in position was too weak, and would give up after some time, resulting in many early CDD2600s starting to cause buffer underruns after half a year or so. Most of those breakdowns were within the warranty period and therefor no real problem, and the spring was replaced by a stronger one in later revisions of the writer.
Unfortunately I haven't been able to read the original article because it's
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
I work at the Philips PCP technical helpdesk here in Europe, and I can already see all those people calling about wanting a replacement for that CDD2000 or CDD2600 they still have lying around in their attic somewhere. Besides, that whole quality issue was only with the first versions of those writers. The later revisions were quite reliable, and I've seen some of them in use up to now while other writers from that era have all gone dead by now. *shrug*, guess everything's relative.
Question remains, does this American lawsuit have any effect whatsoever on us here in Europe? Could I yank the CDD2000 and CDD2600 out of our test systems (yes, we actually have test systems with those things still in it. Working, too) and file for a replacement? I think two CDRW804Ks would do fine *grin*
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
No offense, but that doesn't make much sense. If all the "vigilantes" are monitoring for things that don't belong, wouldn't they be smacking each other far more often? That sort of script kiddy nonsense would definately qualify as something that "doesn't belong".
:)
*shrug*, so somebody sniffs a few passwords? Here's to SSH and PGP. Just for the heck of it I too spent a few hours sniffing mail passwords. Within an hour I already had a whole A4 paper full. And then? I mean, it's no fun peeking at somebody's mail. The fun part was seeing how damn insecure this whole email thingy is.
True, sniffing doesn't belong. Just like guns don't belong, yet the police use them. (News flash: guns are illegal here). Nobody really cared about it unless you abused it. Just like when BackOrifice and NetBus were out. I had grand screwing with people's minds when I found them running one of those. Just like lots of other people on campus. But as far as I know nobody actually destroyed anybody. Just toy with them, then warn them and tell them how to get rid of it. After having played with a few, the fun kind of drops off, you know.
Sure, sniffing doesn't belong. But it's possible. SNT and CIV, the providers of the network, ofcourse couldn't use those methods, so they allowed the vigilantes to police the network. But if you stepped out of line one inch, you'd have your access revoked.
Now ofcourse sniffing isn't (easily) possible anymore, because we have switches now. But it IS possible to log in to those switches and look around. Which is also illegal, but nobody minds unless you start screwing with things. Backend networks are also illegal, but nobody minds as long as you have the gateway configured properly.
The rules are there to be able to bring those down who really go to far. They won't come after you for sniffing some packets, for breaking into the switches, for pulling other such tricks, as long as you keep it civil. But Big Brother is watching you, ofcourse... Step over the line, and you'll see the Man with the Scissors cutting you off. And ain't nobody going to risk a permanent 100Mbit conection for a mere 6 dollars per month over a little hack attack.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,
I'm on a big campus-wide LAN here, with 2000 students' computers connected to it, and out here I've seen in action, and participated in multiple "counter-hacks". When the whole network was still tied together with 10Mbit hubs instead of the 100Mbit switches we have now, it was quite standard practice to monitor the packets flying across your hub for stuff that didn't belong there, and retalliate if necessary. Winnuke, bonk, boing, nestea and other such exploits were used by vigilantes to police the network.
For example, it was not allowed to use the IPX protocol tied to Windows Networking because that caused much traffic. People trying to download files from eachother using IPX were often nuked. Once when I was monitoring, I found three people ping-flooding a third, who tried simultaniously to retalliate together with somebody else, also by pingflooding, usurping the entire bandwidth of the entire network. A few faulty packets spread between them quickly knocked that war out of existence, and returned the network load back to normal.
Playing vigilante on the internet is not bad as such, as long as you really know what you're doing, and aren't causing any damage beyond taking away an attacker's ability to attack you, possibly by crashing his system, but preferably by yanking his connection away.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humour,