This is information about the precise orbits of satellites. This is what you would need if you want to shoot down a satellite.
If you were going to shoot down a satellite you would need a missile with an accurate guidance system anyway. Anyone who can build such a weapons system can most likely also build a radar system capable of accuratly tracking satellites. Especially given that minimising RCS is typically not a design requirement for a satellite.
Like the article says, this info is available, more accurately, from a global collaboration of amateur observers.
Which further negates any "someone could use this info for their A-Sat weapons system" claim.
I seriously doubt a government entity would depend on something as flimsy as an Access MDB file.
I wouldn't be suprised if plenty of organisations do "bet the farm" on all sorts of questionable things. Including MS Access, Office Macros, etc. Most likely justified as "the proper thing will be done sometime in the future."
While it may be great for keeping track of your cd collection real applications are written with real databases.
When it comes to proprietary software vendors all bets are off. If they can make money selling junk they will sell junk (with an EULA forbidding reverse engineering or telling anyone else anything the vendor dosn't want said about their product).
Most of the programmers are not employed by ISV's to write shrinkwrapped software.
Indeed the vast majority of software is not and could never be any kind of "off the shelf" product.
They're paid by companies who sell non-software services to support and enhance their software systems.
Where there is a business model involved here it is that of a tertiary industry.
So even if all software was free (as in beer), the impact on most programmers would be minimal (they suddenly get their tools for free).
Also free of having to consult with a lawyer if they want to use anyone else's software.
But that isn't the point. This is about "Free" as in speech. That means that you're allowed to make changes to the software and re-distribute it (under the restrictions of the various licenses).
In ways that proprietary software makes difficult or disallows. In the "proprietary world" in might actually be easier and cheaper to "reinvent the wheel". (Especially when lawyers are better paid than programmers.)
OK, 5.2 mil is definitely too low, that was rather naive, but the OP still has a point that you cannot deny: collectively, governments and corporations are paying so many tens of billions of $$ in Microsoft Office licensing fees that it would be possible, if only a fraction of those fees were diverted to a centralised managed fund instead, to develop an entirely new, better Office Suite in just a few years.
Actually most of the work would probably be along the lines of an administrative system to disable all the "features" which where not needed. Rather than adding much.
Gordon Haff, a senior analyst and IT adviser at Illuminata, said business value should be the main concern in transitioning to an open-source environment. "The decision-making for the state or local or federal government could be essentially the same as for a corporation," Haff said. "Does it save money when all the costs [are] taken into account? And that includes conversion costs, retraining costs, perhaps costs of getting and writing or converting software that doesn't run on an open-source platform.">
These are issues with any change. The thing about Microsoft is that they like to enforce change according to what suits their timescale. So rather than comparing proprietary licence fees with "change costs". The actual comparison is more likely to be proprietary licence fees and multiple changes against one change.
Yes, but you actually/looked/ for the missing menu item. Most of your average users will see that the option they want is missing, and will sit there waving their flippers like a thalidomide baby until they get a half hour retraining session for that one option.
Unless they are all using MS Office 97 under Windows 9x or NT4 they are likely to be doing this all of the time anyway. Due to the "feature" of the system rearranging menus Microsoft came up with. Let alone that the menus and toolbars in MS Office have been reconfigurable for quite a while.
And 99% of those employees probably aren't doing anything all that complicated with their word processor anyway. Offer a half day training session on OpenOffice, give everyone a quick reference card or something on "how to do common MS Office tasks in OpenOffice", and you're done.
Would these people get even this much training switching between different versions of MS Office. There is no single entity called "MS Office" any more than there is a single entity called "MS Windows". That's before you consider corporate branding and customisation. Odds on a sizable proportion of that 99% wouldn't know "how to do common MS Office tasks" in the first place. For whatever set of "common tasks" you cared to choose.
That does not refute conspiracy claims - just points out that you should not rush to believe in a conspiracy just because it involves people that you disagree with.
The other side of the same coin is dismissing any possibility of conspuracy out of hand because people they happen to agree with are involved...
It drives me crazy when I see the GPL text and the "I Agree" button on the installer for a GPL'd program.
Because, especially in the Windows world, people who package using such installers apparently cannot understand that EULAs are not mandatory.
It drives me crazy when I see the GPL text and the "I Agree" button on the installer for a GPL'd program. The GPL is a copyright and patent license, NOT a license to use the program.
This leads to confusion with people thinking the GPL, which is backed by statute and case law relevent to concept of copyright. Is somehow related to ELUAs, which perport to be contracts, whilst failing to conform to the basic paramaters of a contract.
You have the right to use it, whether you agree or not.
Regardless of if "you" are an individual or a truely transnational corporation operating everywhere on the planet. The conditions of the GPL apply if you were to supply copies of the program in question to a third parties. Something you may only do with the permission of the copyright holder(s) anyway. You always have the option of negotiating a specific licence with applicable copyright holders. Copyright licences make things easier for both holders and third parties who wish to distribute copies.
does per processor pricing have any point anyhow? double the speed of the machine and get off cheaper?
All other things being equal a single processor machine with a speed of 2x will be faster than a two processor shared memory machine with processors of speed x. Shared memory machines have overheads involving bus/peripheral access and cache management which are not applicable to single processor machines. Having more processors (or faster processors) will only make a difference if that is a limiting factor in the first place.
I have hyper threading on my P4 chip that allows an extra thread of execution - should I pay 2x? No. I don't do it currently. Currently, only dual chip mobo's require dual licenses - when I have more than 1 multicore chip then you can charge me more. 1 chip is 1 chip.
Strictly speaking it's none of an application's business what hardware it is running on. Managing the hardware effectivly is the task of the operating system. Indeed in a well written operating system all an application "knows" is a virtual machine, which may or may not have any correspondance with the actual hardware.
The consumer market won't care, when was the last time you paid per-core for software? A corporation on the other hand does, but when dual core chips become common licensing will change to reflect that.
If corporations really had a problem with it then they'd go to court. IIRC the 14 Ammendment to the US Constitution has been used far more often by "corporate people" than by ex slaves (and people who's ancestors were slaves) even though it was written with the latter in mind in the first place.
The only fair way to license software is by looking at the amount of silicon used to run it. This is no more intrinsically fair than per seat, per user or per anything scheme. Especially since the customer is providing the hardware to run it on. The only actually "fair" way to do things would be something along the lines of "The licence to use the piece of software (or a specific module) costs X".
I believe there are actual conspiracies, but I believe they are so complicated and likely to fail in an embarrassing way that they are rare.
You appear to be confusing cause and effect here. Whilst complex conspiracies, especially those involving many conspirators, are likely to be detected. Simple conspiracies, involving few conspirators, are less likely to be detected.
Is it a way of taking attendance? So a kid can't give their card to a friend and then ditch class?
They don't even have to give the card to another kid. It won't be long before some well behaved kid finds the cards for trouble makers have (magically) made their way into his/her pocket or bag. Then there is the senario of kids being bullied to hand over their cards (instead of their pocket money). No one appears to have properly examined the cost/benefit ratio of this idea. Including how it can be abused by the students, the school and third parties.
Why should a bunch of armed hooligans with guns fare any better than some ragtag bunch of illiterate, underequipped Asian peasants? Because such people could never hope for any sort of victory against the U.S. Armed Forces.
There is no guarentee that the military will side with the established government in any revolution. In several recent cases the military has remaind neutral. In the case of a possible US revolution there is the other factor of a large proportion of the US Military being elsewhere on the planet...
Ok, so... According to you, the UN didn't find anything in Irak, NOT because they weren't there despite the US's best efforts to find them after they marched in claiming to have 100% PROOF that they did, BUT because the UN inspectors were inept? Sure, buddy. Whatever you say.
This is the way Neocons have always thought. They know the enemy has weapons. In the past that enemy was the USSR. If there is no evidence then that must be because they are well hidden stealth weapons. In the case of Iraq apparently so well hidden that even the Iraqis couldn't find them when they were being invaded. The more intensive the search the more elaborate conspiracy theories Neocons are likely to come up with to explain nothing being found.
Perhaps it isn't actually Mutually Assured Destruction, but you have to admit, pointing those nukes at Seoul and Tokyo and then saying "Hey US, stay the F**K out of my country or I push the button!" could be rather persuasive.
May not be Seoul or Tokyo, so much as somewhere any potential invader could assemble an army close to the border. Similarly Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan and Iran would be mad not to be trying to get their hands on WMDs.
They'll spend billions on super computers [from $INSERT_CORPORATION_HERE] so the "good ol boys" club gets fed then they'll catch 1 or 2 extra people a year for selling a drug....
Meanwhile they'll let the roads, hospitals and schools rot. So that in say 20 years when kids can read only 37% of Hamlet in school [and not contigious] and get a good 43% of their Algebra lessons they'll be safe in knowing that the government sacrificed their education for a whopping 0.0001% more security!
Actually such a senario could easily result in less security. With law enforcement being too busy playing with their toys to actually do anything useful.
So, these guys are looking for more privacy-invading abilities so they can catch stupid and careless criminals who outline their crimes in electronic messages and send valuable data to one another without encryption.
What's the likelyhood that those doing the watching won't just be watching for criminals. As opposed to blackmail material and commercial information they can sell to a competitor. As has in practice been the case with the likes of "Echelon".
I prefer to think the most inappropriate comment possible would be:
GNU General Public License, version 2.0
As well as any other comment which implies piracy. If the developers are working on code they never expect to be seen by "outsiders" they are unlikly to be concerned about "borrowing" someone else's code.
It's becoming more common in Europe to add the international prefix to mobile phone numbers even if you're in the same country. All of my UK numbers are +44nnnnnnnn, as it avoids problems when internationally roaming.
It's part of the GSM spec that dialing the complete number should work. Quite a few phones will default to using the home country to store numbers if they are entered without a country code. Since it means that stored numbers will "just work" if the phone is roamed internationally. In many cases fixed networks will not allow you to dial the number with the country code.
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This is information about the precise orbits of satellites. This is what you would need if you want to shoot down a satellite.
If you were going to shoot down a satellite you would need a missile with an accurate guidance system anyway. Anyone who can build such a weapons system can most likely also build a radar system capable of accuratly tracking satellites. Especially given that minimising RCS is typically not a design requirement for a satellite.
Like the article says, this info is available, more accurately, from a global collaboration of amateur observers.
Which further negates any "someone could use this info for their A-Sat weapons system" claim.
I've been running Windows XP SP2 on all of my computers (which admittedly is a small population of 3) with no problems.
That simply demonstrates that SP2 may be ready for SOHO usage. It dosn't say anything about its suitability for enterprise usage.
I seriously doubt a government entity would depend on something as flimsy as an Access MDB file.
I wouldn't be suprised if plenty of organisations do "bet the farm" on all sorts of questionable things. Including MS Access, Office Macros, etc. Most likely justified as "the proper thing will be done sometime in the future."
While it may be great for keeping track of your cd collection real applications are written with real databases.
When it comes to proprietary software vendors all bets are off. If they can make money selling junk they will sell junk (with an EULA forbidding reverse engineering or telling anyone else anything the vendor dosn't want said about their product).
Most of the programmers are not employed by ISV's to write shrinkwrapped software.
Indeed the vast majority of software is not and could never be any kind of "off the shelf" product.
They're paid by companies who sell non-software services to support and enhance their software systems.
Where there is a business model involved here it is that of a tertiary industry.
So even if all software was free (as in beer), the impact on most programmers would be minimal (they suddenly get their tools for free).
Also free of having to consult with a lawyer if they want to use anyone else's software.
But that isn't the point. This is about "Free" as in speech. That means that you're allowed to make changes to the software and re-distribute it (under the restrictions of the various licenses).
In ways that proprietary software makes difficult or disallows. In the "proprietary world" in might actually be easier and cheaper to "reinvent the wheel". (Especially when lawyers are better paid than programmers.)
OK, 5.2 mil is definitely too low, that was rather naive, but the OP still has a point that you cannot deny: collectively, governments and corporations are paying so many tens of billions of $$ in Microsoft Office licensing fees that it would be possible, if only a fraction of those fees were diverted to a centralised managed fund instead, to develop an entirely new, better Office Suite in just a few years.
Actually most of the work would probably be along the lines of an administrative system to disable all the "features" which where not needed. Rather than adding much.
Now let's the MS price is $50 mill, OO price $40 mill. Now they consider switching, MS comes in with a $35 mill offer.
Microsoft then come up with some scam which means they get paid twice...
Gordon Haff, a senior analyst and IT adviser at Illuminata, said business value should be the main concern in transitioning to an open-source environment. "The decision-making for the state or local or federal government could be essentially the same as for a corporation," Haff said. "Does it save money when all the costs [are] taken into account? And that includes conversion costs, retraining costs, perhaps costs of getting and writing or converting software that doesn't run on an open-source platform.">
These are issues with any change. The thing about Microsoft is that they like to enforce change according to what suits their timescale. So rather than comparing proprietary licence fees with "change costs". The actual comparison is more likely to be proprietary licence fees and multiple changes against one change.
Yes, but you actually /looked/ for the missing menu item. Most of your average users will see that the option they want is missing, and will sit there waving their flippers like a thalidomide baby until they get a half hour retraining session for that one option.
Unless they are all using MS Office 97 under Windows 9x or NT4 they are likely to be doing this all of the time anyway. Due to the "feature" of the system rearranging menus Microsoft came up with.
Let alone that the menus and toolbars in MS Office have been reconfigurable for quite a while.
And 99% of those employees probably aren't doing anything all that complicated with their word processor anyway. Offer a half day training session on OpenOffice, give everyone a quick reference card or something on "how to do common MS Office tasks in OpenOffice", and you're done.
Would these people get even this much training switching between different versions of MS Office. There is no single entity called "MS Office" any more than there is a single entity called "MS Windows". That's before you consider corporate branding and customisation.
Odds on a sizable proportion of that 99% wouldn't know "how to do common MS Office tasks" in the first place. For whatever set of "common tasks" you cared to choose.
That does not refute conspiracy claims - just points out that you should not rush to believe in a conspiracy just because it involves people that you disagree with.
The other side of the same coin is dismissing any possibility of conspuracy out of hand because people they happen to agree with are involved...
It drives me crazy when I see the GPL text and the "I Agree" button on the installer for a GPL'd program.
Because, especially in the Windows world, people who package using such installers apparently cannot understand that EULAs are not mandatory.
It drives me crazy when I see the GPL text and the "I Agree" button on the installer for a GPL'd program. The GPL is a copyright and patent license, NOT a license to use the program.
This leads to confusion with people thinking the GPL, which is backed by statute and case law relevent to concept of copyright. Is somehow related to ELUAs, which perport to be contracts, whilst failing to conform to the basic paramaters of a contract.
You have the right to use it, whether you agree or not.
Regardless of if "you" are an individual or a truely transnational corporation operating everywhere on the planet.
The conditions of the GPL apply if you were to supply copies of the program in question to a third parties. Something you may only do with the permission of the copyright holder(s) anyway. You always have the option of negotiating a specific licence with applicable copyright holders. Copyright licences make things easier for both holders and third parties who wish to distribute copies.
does per processor pricing have any point anyhow? double the speed of the machine and get off cheaper?
All other things being equal a single processor machine with a speed of 2x will be faster than a two processor shared memory machine with processors of speed x. Shared memory machines have overheads involving bus/peripheral access and cache management which are not applicable to single processor machines.
Having more processors (or faster processors) will only make a difference if that is a limiting factor in the first place.
I have hyper threading on my P4 chip that allows an extra thread of execution - should I pay 2x? No. I don't do it currently. Currently, only dual chip mobo's require dual licenses - when I have more than 1 multicore chip then you can charge me more. 1 chip is 1 chip.
Strictly speaking it's none of an application's business what hardware it is running on. Managing the hardware effectivly is the task of the operating system. Indeed in a well written operating system all an application "knows" is a virtual machine, which may or may not have any correspondance with the actual hardware.
The consumer market won't care, when was the last time you paid per-core for software? A corporation on the other hand does, but when dual core chips become common licensing will change to reflect that.
If corporations really had a problem with it then they'd go to court. IIRC the 14 Ammendment to the US Constitution has been used far more often by "corporate people" than by ex slaves (and people who's ancestors were slaves) even though it was written with the latter in mind in the first place.
The only fair way to license software is by looking at the amount of silicon used to run it.
This is no more intrinsically fair than per seat, per user or per anything scheme. Especially since the customer is providing the hardware to run it on. The only actually "fair" way to do things would be something along the lines of "The licence to use the piece of software (or a specific module) costs X".
I believe there are actual conspiracies, but I believe they are so complicated and likely to fail in an embarrassing way that they are rare.
You appear to be confusing cause and effect here. Whilst complex conspiracies, especially those involving many conspirators, are likely to be detected. Simple conspiracies, involving few conspirators, are less likely to be detected.
Is it a way of taking attendance? So a kid can't give their card to a friend and then ditch class?
They don't even have to give the card to another kid. It won't be long before some well behaved kid finds the cards for trouble makers have (magically) made their way into his/her pocket or bag. Then there is the senario of kids being bullied to hand over their cards (instead of their pocket money).
No one appears to have properly examined the cost/benefit ratio of this idea. Including how it can be abused by the students, the school and third parties.
Why should a bunch of armed hooligans with guns fare any better than some ragtag bunch of illiterate, underequipped Asian peasants? Because such people could never hope for any sort of victory against the U.S. Armed Forces.
There is no guarentee that the military will side with the established government in any revolution. In several recent cases the military has remaind neutral. In the case of a possible US revolution there is the other factor of a large proportion of the US Military being elsewhere on the planet...
Ok, so... According to you, the UN didn't find anything in Irak, NOT because they weren't there despite the US's best efforts to find them after they marched in claiming to have 100% PROOF that they did, BUT because the UN inspectors were inept? Sure, buddy. Whatever you say.
This is the way Neocons have always thought. They know the enemy has weapons. In the past that enemy was the USSR. If there is no evidence then that must be because they are well hidden stealth weapons. In the case of Iraq apparently so well hidden that even the Iraqis couldn't find them when they were being invaded.
The more intensive the search the more elaborate conspiracy theories Neocons are likely to come up with to explain nothing being found.
Perhaps it isn't actually Mutually Assured Destruction, but you have to admit, pointing those nukes at Seoul and Tokyo and then saying "Hey US, stay the F**K out of my country or I push the button!" could be rather persuasive.
May not be Seoul or Tokyo, so much as somewhere any potential invader could assemble an army close to the border.
Similarly Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan and Iran would be mad not to be trying to get their hands on WMDs.
They'll spend billions on super computers [from $INSERT_CORPORATION_HERE] so the "good ol boys" club gets fed then they'll catch 1 or 2 extra people a year for selling a drug....
Meanwhile they'll let the roads, hospitals and schools rot. So that in say 20 years when kids can read only 37% of Hamlet in school [and not contigious] and get a good 43% of their Algebra lessons they'll be safe in knowing that the government sacrificed their education for a whopping 0.0001% more security!
Actually such a senario could easily result in less security. With law enforcement being too busy playing with their toys to actually do anything useful.
So law enforcement can just sit with a packet filter scanning for the word "drugs"? That's just absurd.
Which will get a large number of false positives.
If law enforcement has reason to believe that an individual is committing illegal acts, they can go and get a warrant.
Or even put a fraction of the resouces involved in the "war on drugs" into dealing with corporate criminals.
So, these guys are looking for more privacy-invading abilities so they can catch stupid and careless criminals who outline their crimes in electronic messages and send valuable data to one another without encryption.
What's the likelyhood that those doing the watching won't just be watching for criminals. As opposed to blackmail material and commercial information they can sell to a competitor.
As has in practice been the case with the likes of "Echelon".
I prefer to think the most inappropriate comment possible would be: GNU General Public License, version 2.0
As well as any other comment which implies piracy. If the developers are working on code they never expect to be seen by "outsiders" they are unlikly to be concerned about "borrowing" someone else's code.
It's becoming more common in Europe to add the international prefix to mobile phone numbers even if you're in the same country. All of my UK numbers are +44nnnnnnnn, as it avoids problems when internationally roaming.
It's part of the GSM spec that dialing the complete number should work. Quite a few phones will default to using the home country to store numbers if they are entered without a country code. Since it means that stored numbers will "just work" if the phone is roamed internationally.
In many cases fixed networks will not allow you to dial the number with the country code.