How much can you slow down a 747.... would it no make it hard to hit the target at 600mph
That is cruising speed for an airliner. Aircraft takeoff and land considerably slower than their cruising speed. A critical number for takeoff is V2, which is the minimum airspeed where lift excedes weight. A firefighting aircraft will tend to climb as it makes a drop, since lift remains the same whilst weight is reduced.
if any law infractions revolved around named human beings, and not this non person person they call a corporation.
Or alternativly start treating a "corporate person" like a real person. Including hauling them off to jail or placing bail conditions on them pre-trial. Together with freezing assets and shutting down their operations until it had been decided if they were guilty or not.
If we re adjusted the laws back to named humans are responsible for their actions, and if the fines came out of personal bank accounts of whomever issued the orders that resulted in the crimes committed, you'd see a lot more honesty with companies.
The concept of "limited liability" originally only ment that if the company went bankrupt its investors could not be asked to contribute money to creditors. Their liability was limited to the money they had actually invested in the company.
And the government could mandate a price freeze as well on their products to go in conjunction with any fines,
Voiding of "intellectual property" might also be considerably more effective than fines. (In the case of proprietary software this might lead to secondary actions if placing the convict's software in the public domain produced evidence of "software piracy".)
or they could actually institute a "three strikes and you are out" provision like they have with human beings, and in the case of corporations, just completely revoke their charters after a third conviction.
Presumably following the same rules as if the company had gone bankrupt, with the exception that it might be possible to fully pay creditors and shareholders (according to the face value of the certificates, not whatever they were being traded at on stock markets.)
The issue is that if they weren't a monopoly it would be impossible to "pass such costs on to customers". It's basic econimics. Assuming no change in per-unit production costs, there is a single fixed product price that will maximize profits. A company would already be charging that price. Any increase in product price would then result in a decrease in profits.
Software dosn't follow the model of manufactured goods anyway. The cost of copying a piece of software is very close to zero. Also Microsoft has a highly complicated way of selling software which means that the same program can vary in price by upto at least an order of magnitude.
The only reason these additional costs exist is because MS is a monopolist. (Actually, they're a dominant firm operating alongside a competitive fringe, speaking economically).
With most of the actual innovation happening in the "fringe". Relevent because Microsoft has complained that fining them "hurts innovation".
You didn't understand the parent post; the only "laws" it refers to are those of economics. It made the point that Microsoft can simply pass on these costs only because it is a monopoly. If it were in a truly competitive industry prices would be set by the market, and if they attempted to raise prices unilaterally to cover extraordinary costs (like fines), they would lose business to their competitors.
In which case what kind of sanctions should be applied to companies who break the law?
It seems he was scared into just accepting whatever was handed to him. It never went to trial, never in front of any jury. I know the feeling...I was in a similar situation. Not from pornography, but something else. I didn't bother fighting it due to lack of resources:
This is more of a "lawyer problem" than a computer problem. There are cases of this kind of thing happening with people accused of all sorts of things.
He knows that he can't fight a system stacked against him. I wonder if he had a "public defender".
One who would prefer that his/her clients plead guilty or "plea bargin" rather than actually take any case to trial. In some cases this appears to be the specific policy of law firms. The people who tend to be "railroaded" in such cases are those unable to afford to pay their own lawyer and who are not habitual criminals (these tend to know how to "play the system".)
In the business world migrating desktops from Windows to anything else is problematic at best. Do you have any idea how many companies run proprietary desktop applications? For which they may not have the source (or it was lost long ago or they no longer have developers for the app)? Or even if they do have the source and the developers, how long do you think it would take to port the app from Windows to Linux?
Much the same applies to "upgrading" Windows in such an environment.
I have been flamed recently and been labelled a troll simply for getting ticked off about people "stealing" software. Apparently I am not allowed to call it theft, as nobody broke into Microsofts headquarters and stole the master backup tape,
Copyright infringement != theft and never has done. Calling it "theft" is simply wrong.
and it was not so kindly pointed out to me that once somebody purchases a copy, then it is their right to do what they please with it.
The only software you are free to do as you please is public domain software. You are not free to do as you please with either GPL or proprietary software. But whatever an EULA attached to a piece of software might say is a completly separate issue from the situation with respect to copyright.
I totally agree with you, and I wish there were more Slashdotters like yourself and less of the mouth frothing zealots that seem to have come by recently who will slam anything from Microsoft no matter how good and praise anything FOSS no matter how bad.
There is no lack of "mouth frothing zealots" who will slam anything related to FOSS/GPL and/or sing the praises of proprietary software/specific proprietary software companies. Ironically at the top of this thread was an advert for Microsoft's "get the facts" site.
I do not believe all Linux users are pirates.
It is perfectly possible to pirate GPL software.
Unfortunately there is a small but highly vocal group amongst Linux users that give a very bad name for the rest.
They make considerably less noise than either SCO or Microsoft though.
There is a place for everything, even commercial software.
"Commercial" != "proprietary". There is plenty of non commercial proprietary software around. Including that which is freely downloadable which daftly comes with an EULA forbidding redistribution, but not that you must not use a web cache when you download it in the first place:)
Either it is OK or it is not. You cannot have a stance where it is perfectly OK to break license agreements for one piece of software, but it is not OK to break the GPL or license agreements with Linux related software.
Actually you can quite easily. Since something like the GPL is grounded in copyright law (in a fairly straightforward way), where as EULAs are based around contract laws (often in ways which require a quite radical interpretation of the relevent statutes).
Re:Please.. Mr Blunket/Random authority.. Get a cl
on
Cry To Beat Iris Scanners
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Once they have a database they can at least make the comparison between citizens and aliens.
Assuming that the "database" is secure against alterations. Any government using such a system will require that falsified and completely bogus identities can be created and that they be indistinguishable from real identities. It wouldn't do for someone's ID to carry metadata which equates to "undercover law enforcement". It would only require one criminal or blackmailable person with the relevent access for this assumption to be false.
Terrorists: Is any (known) terrorist worth his/her salt going to fly on their own passport. What's stopping them getting a *real* passport with the correct Biometerics on a different name?
Especially if said terrorist has the resources of a nation state behind him or her. In any such ID system there will be mechanisms for issuing bogus identities with valid biometrics. For such things as undercover cops, spies, "witness protection", etc.
Stopping Criminals: Yes because criminals are moral enough not to have fakes!
Assuming also that the real issue is linking said criminal to said crime. As opposed to demonstrating that said suspect actually is who you think they are. If someone is either caught "red handed" or forensic evidence links them to a crime what does it matter if they arn't who they say they are. There is also the drawback that such a system would provide opportunities to criminals, especially in the field of identity theft.
As has been pointed out oh-so-many times, not even Microsoft can open their own documents in different versions of Word in the same way.
Sometimes things arn't even consistent between the same version of MS Office. You can even get strange changes in document formatting by changing the printer.
So close enough is good enough for most users.
Since that is what they get anyway. One other factor is that OpenOffice.org is capable of opening.DOC/.XLS/etc files which MS Office refuses.
And considering our shuttle was obsolete before the Enterprise even had it's test landing, that will mean this thing will be obsolete by 40 years or more when it launches in 11 to 16 years.
What eventually got built dosn't much resemble Von Braun's original plans anyway.
Why can't they just work on a 100% completely reusable Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) Verticle Takeoff and Landing (VTOL)? It could land anywhere that is flat enough and take off again if it still had sufficient fuel.
It would need a lot of fuel, both to get up there and to slow down on the way back down.
As much as everyone likes to dis the US shuttle as being expensive, it's the most affordable reusable VTHL SSTO vehicle in the world.
The "reusable" bit is rather questionable. Given that the shuttle orbiter needs what amounts to a complete strip down and rebuild after every flight. Originally NASA claimed that each orbiter would require only a two week service between missions. There is also the "bottleneck" of having only one facility for various parts of the pre-launch assembly, thus having more than one orbiter dosn't help much with time to get things ready.
The likelihood is that this torture will have more of an effect than, say, violence alone as it is used in conjunction with other "conditioning" such as stress positions, hooding, sleep deprivation, disorientation, loud noises, etc. (which are in themselves points of contention regarding classification as torture). Most soldiers have been trained, and are strong enough, to take a physical beating, but there are many, many other ways to break them.
Does this training apply as much to conscript soldiers let along militiamen?
If the terrorist are ever going to use a nuke they are going to have to buy it.
Or get given it by a sponsoring government. State sponsored terrorism is a tradition at least 2,000 years old.
While building an atomic bomb is not that hard, there are parts that would take quite a bit of work to perfect. Such as making sure the shockwave reached the core from the explosive charges at the same time. If you are off by a nanosecond from any of the charges....no joy.
Precision timers have improved a lot in the last 60 years. You only need this kind of mechanism with Pu-239, if you have a U-238 bomb the engineering is a lot simpler.
I'm no fan of MS, but what admin tasks do (or can, even) an end user perform?
Installing hardware and software are the most obvious. Thing is that in the "Windows world" the distinction between "user" and "admin" is very blurred even before adding in concepts of "power user". To the point where you get applications where the recomended way to make them work is to give everyone admin privs. Whilst there might be some alternative way to get them to work the "support" people for the software don't have a clue how that might be possible.
Wrong! You *can* use a jet engine to go into space. You just need to accelerate to 11,000 km/h, the escape velocity (lower if you are at higher altitude, or just want to go into orbit).
The major difficulty is that turbojets don't work well with supersonic air going into them. You'd probably want some kind of engine which could change from reheated turbojet to pure ramjet (and back again). Having engines gives you rather more options comming back down again (including being able to taxi off the runway, so other planes can use it), even if you need a tanker to top up the fuel tanks.
You can even go into space with a (really big) cannon.
Provided the vehicle and payload can handle the acceleration. Which is more likely to be the case with cargo than people.
but it does not work very well....
one problem are legacy applications or new ones not programmed right
and even if they are done right you hit a lot of walls due your daily work
The latter are still being written. It's a matter of programmer mentality as much as anything else.
The Monoculture problem. So yes, in this instance, MacOS, Windows, Solaris, NetWare, etc are all in the same boat, being closed source produts, if they have a large enough market share, they create a monoculture. The same is NOT true of "linux", it would be true of a particular distibution if it had a large marketshare, but I was talking Linux having large marketshare, and even the more popular distributions having mabye only 10% marketshare.
It is unlikely to be true of many distributions anyway. Since the typical Linux distribution offers alternatives for all sorts of applications, both system and user. Even starting from exactly the same distribution two different entities, be they corporate IT departments or OEMs insisting of preloading software, could end up with rather different end results.
If you don't like it, what do you do? Windows from Dell is as insecure out of the box as Windows from Compaq or Gateway, no choice, you can't buy a "safe" windows machine out of the box.
The agreements which Microsoft makes with big OEMs prevent them from doing anything about it easily too.
Keeping viruses like this from running is normally as simple as telling people "Do not login as root and run unknown commands".
Which is in turn only an issue with home/SOHO users. Since in most corporate environments there is no reason for the average user to need to even know the root password to their workstation. (Unlike the all too frequent situation in Windows where a user might need to be "local admin" in order to even run the progams they need,)
Maybe a future distro will display this message when someone logs in as root:
"DO NOT COMPILE AND RUN PROGRAMS AS ROOT UNLESS YOU TRUST THE SOURCE".
Or if logged in using a GUI put up a "loud" background to draw attention to the fact that you souldn't be here unless you really know what you are doing. As some distros do already...
Slashdot Mirror
How much can you slow down a 747.... would it no make it hard to hit the target at 600mph
That is cruising speed for an airliner. Aircraft takeoff and land considerably slower than their cruising speed.
A critical number for takeoff is V2, which is the minimum airspeed where lift excedes weight. A firefighting aircraft will tend to climb as it makes a drop, since lift remains the same whilst weight is reduced.
if any law infractions revolved around named human beings, and not this non person person they call a corporation.
Or alternativly start treating a "corporate person" like a real person. Including hauling them off to jail or placing bail conditions on them pre-trial. Together with freezing assets and shutting down their operations until it had been decided if they were guilty or not.
If we re adjusted the laws back to named humans are responsible for their actions, and if the fines came out of personal bank accounts of whomever issued the orders that resulted in the crimes committed, you'd see a lot more honesty with companies.
The concept of "limited liability" originally only ment that if the company went bankrupt its investors could not be asked to contribute money to creditors. Their liability was limited to the money they had actually invested in the company.
And the government could mandate a price freeze as well on their products to go in conjunction with any fines,
Voiding of "intellectual property" might also be considerably more effective than fines. (In the case of proprietary software this might lead to secondary actions if placing the convict's software in the public domain produced evidence of "software piracy".)
or they could actually institute a "three strikes and you are out" provision like they have with human beings, and in the case of corporations, just completely revoke their charters after a third conviction.
Presumably following the same rules as if the company had gone bankrupt, with the exception that it might be possible to fully pay creditors and shareholders (according to the face value of the certificates, not whatever they were being traded at on stock markets.)
This is a company with (supposedly) billions of dollars in the bank. How much does it cost them to mint a CD? Pennies.
In the case of an OEM "restore CD" the OEM would have paid for the pressing anyway.
You have to pay for phone support, so you aren't getting that for your purchase price.
Or whoever sold you the computer is expected to provide support...
The issue is that if they weren't a monopoly it would be impossible to "pass such costs on to customers". It's basic econimics. Assuming no change in per-unit production costs, there is a single fixed product price that will maximize profits. A company would already be charging that price. Any increase in product price would then result in a decrease in profits.
Software dosn't follow the model of manufactured goods anyway. The cost of copying a piece of software is very close to zero. Also Microsoft has a highly complicated way of selling software which means that the same program can vary in price by upto at least an order of magnitude.
The only reason these additional costs exist is because MS is a monopolist. (Actually, they're a dominant firm operating alongside a competitive fringe, speaking economically).
With most of the actual innovation happening in the "fringe". Relevent because Microsoft has complained that fining them "hurts innovation".
You didn't understand the parent post; the only "laws" it refers to are those of economics. It made the point that Microsoft can simply pass on these costs only because it is a monopoly. If it were in a truly competitive industry prices would be set by the market, and if they attempted to raise prices unilaterally to cover extraordinary costs (like fines), they would lose business to their competitors.
In which case what kind of sanctions should be applied to companies who break the law?
It seems he was scared into just accepting whatever was handed to him. It never went to trial, never in front of any jury. I know the feeling...I was in a similar situation. Not from pornography, but something else. I didn't bother fighting it due to lack of resources:
This is more of a "lawyer problem" than a computer problem. There are cases of this kind of thing happening with people accused of all sorts of things.
He knows that he can't fight a system stacked against him. I wonder if he had a "public defender".
One who would prefer that his/her clients plead guilty or "plea bargin" rather than actually take any case to trial. In some cases this appears to be the specific policy of law firms. The people who tend to be "railroaded" in such cases are those unable to afford to pay their own lawyer and who are not habitual criminals (these tend to know how to "play the system".)
In the business world migrating desktops from Windows to anything else is problematic at best. Do you have any idea how many companies run proprietary desktop applications? For which they may not have the source (or it was lost long ago or they no longer have developers for the app)? Or even if they do have the source and the developers, how long do you think it would take to port the app from Windows to Linux?
Much the same applies to "upgrading" Windows in such an environment.
I have been flamed recently and been labelled a troll simply for getting ticked off about people "stealing" software. Apparently I am not allowed to call it theft, as nobody broke into Microsofts headquarters and stole the master backup tape,
:)
Copyright infringement != theft and never has done. Calling it "theft" is simply wrong.
and it was not so kindly pointed out to me that once somebody purchases a copy, then it is their right to do what they please with it.
The only software you are free to do as you please is public domain software. You are not free to do as you please with either GPL or proprietary software. But whatever an EULA attached to a piece of software might say is a completly separate issue from the situation with respect to copyright.
I totally agree with you, and I wish there were more Slashdotters like yourself and less of the mouth frothing zealots that seem to have come by recently who will slam anything from Microsoft no matter how good and praise anything FOSS no matter how bad.
There is no lack of "mouth frothing zealots" who will slam anything related to FOSS/GPL and/or sing the praises of proprietary software/specific proprietary software companies. Ironically at the top of this thread was an advert for Microsoft's "get the facts" site.
I do not believe all Linux users are pirates.
It is perfectly possible to pirate GPL software.
Unfortunately there is a small but highly vocal group amongst Linux users that give a very bad name for the rest.
They make considerably less noise than either SCO or Microsoft though.
There is a place for everything, even commercial software.
"Commercial" != "proprietary". There is plenty of non commercial proprietary software around. Including that which is freely downloadable which daftly comes with an EULA forbidding redistribution, but not that you must not use a web cache when you download it in the first place
Either it is OK or it is not. You cannot have a stance where it is perfectly OK to break license agreements for one piece of software, but it is not OK to break the GPL or license agreements with Linux related software.
Actually you can quite easily. Since something like the GPL is grounded in copyright law (in a fairly straightforward way), where as EULAs are based around contract laws (often in ways which require a quite radical interpretation of the relevent statutes).
Once they have a database they can at least make the comparison between citizens and aliens.
Assuming that the "database" is secure against alterations. Any government using such a system will require that falsified and completely bogus identities can be created and that they be indistinguishable from real identities. It wouldn't do for someone's ID to carry metadata which equates to "undercover law enforcement". It would only require one criminal or blackmailable person with the relevent access for this assumption to be false.
Terrorists: Is any (known) terrorist worth his/her salt going to fly on their own passport. What's stopping them getting a *real* passport with the correct Biometerics on a different name?
Especially if said terrorist has the resources of a nation state behind him or her. In any such ID system there will be mechanisms for issuing bogus identities with valid biometrics. For such things as undercover cops, spies, "witness protection", etc.
Stopping Criminals: Yes because criminals are moral enough not to have fakes!
Assuming also that the real issue is linking said criminal to said crime. As opposed to demonstrating that said suspect actually is who you think they are. If someone is either caught "red handed" or forensic evidence links them to a crime what does it matter if they arn't who they say they are.
There is also the drawback that such a system would provide opportunities to criminals, especially in the field of identity theft.
As has been pointed out oh-so-many times, not even Microsoft can open their own documents in different versions of Word in the same way.
.DOC/.XLS/etc files which MS Office refuses.
Sometimes things arn't even consistent between the same version of MS Office. You can even get strange changes in document formatting by changing the printer.
So close enough is good enough for most users.
Since that is what they get anyway. One other factor is that OpenOffice.org is capable of opening
And considering our shuttle was obsolete before the Enterprise even had it's test landing, that will mean this thing will be obsolete by 40 years or more when it launches in 11 to 16 years.
What eventually got built dosn't much resemble Von Braun's original plans anyway.
Why can't they just work on a 100% completely reusable Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) Verticle Takeoff and Landing (VTOL)? It could land anywhere that is flat enough and take off again if it still had sufficient fuel.
It would need a lot of fuel, both to get up there and to slow down on the way back down.
As much as everyone likes to dis the US shuttle as being expensive, it's the most affordable reusable VTHL SSTO vehicle in the world.
The "reusable" bit is rather questionable. Given that the shuttle orbiter needs what amounts to a complete strip down and rebuild after every flight. Originally NASA claimed that each orbiter would require only a two week service between missions. There is also the "bottleneck" of having only one facility for various parts of the pre-launch assembly, thus having more than one orbiter dosn't help much with time to get things ready.
The likelihood is that this torture will have more of an effect than, say, violence alone as it is used in conjunction with other "conditioning" such as stress positions, hooding, sleep deprivation, disorientation, loud noises, etc. (which are in themselves points of contention regarding classification as torture). Most soldiers have been trained, and are strong enough, to take a physical beating, but there are many, many other ways to break them.
Does this training apply as much to conscript soldiers let along militiamen?
For the sake of Humanity and all of mankind, if a HF bomb really can create such chaos and destruction, we shouldn't build it.
:)
Since it would be redundent alongside all the other methods humanity has developed for creation chaos and destruction
If the terrorist are ever going to use a nuke they are going to have to buy it.
Or get given it by a sponsoring government. State sponsored terrorism is a tradition at least 2,000 years old.
While building an atomic bomb is not that hard, there are parts that would take quite a bit of work to perfect. Such as making sure the shockwave reached the core from the explosive charges at the same time. If you are off by a nanosecond from any of the charges....no joy.
Precision timers have improved a lot in the last 60 years. You only need this kind of mechanism with Pu-239, if you have a U-238 bomb the engineering is a lot simpler.
I'm no fan of MS, but what admin tasks do (or can, even) an end user perform?
Installing hardware and software are the most obvious. Thing is that in the "Windows world" the distinction between "user" and "admin" is very blurred even before adding in concepts of "power user". To the point where you get applications where the recomended way to make them work is to give everyone admin privs. Whilst there might be some alternative way to get them to work the "support" people for the software don't have a clue how that might be possible.
Do they use the frozen chicken launcher test method or do they use more historical (but less modern) live chicken?
Dead, but not frozen, chickens are fired at aircraft to ensure that they will survive birdstrikes.
Wrong! You *can* use a jet engine to go into space. You just need to accelerate to 11,000 km/h, the escape velocity (lower if you are at higher altitude, or just want to go into orbit).
The major difficulty is that turbojets don't work well with supersonic air going into them. You'd probably want some kind of engine which could change from reheated turbojet to pure ramjet (and back again). Having engines gives you rather more options comming back down again (including being able to taxi off the runway, so other planes can use it), even if you need a tanker to top up the fuel tanks.
You can even go into space with a (really big) cannon.
Provided the vehicle and payload can handle the acceleration. Which is more likely to be the case with cargo than people.
but it does not work very well ....
one problem are legacy applications or new ones not programmed right
and even if they are done right you hit a lot of walls due your daily work
The latter are still being written. It's a matter of programmer mentality as much as anything else.
The Monoculture problem. So yes, in this instance, MacOS, Windows, Solaris, NetWare, etc are all in the same boat, being closed source produts, if they have a large enough market share, they create a monoculture. The same is NOT true of "linux", it would be true of a particular distibution if it had a large marketshare, but I was talking Linux having large marketshare, and even the more popular distributions having mabye only 10% marketshare.
It is unlikely to be true of many distributions anyway. Since the typical Linux distribution offers alternatives for all sorts of applications, both system and user.
Even starting from exactly the same distribution two different entities, be they corporate IT departments or OEMs insisting of preloading software, could end up with rather different end results.
If you don't like it, what do you do? Windows from Dell is as insecure out of the box as Windows from Compaq or Gateway, no choice, you can't buy a "safe" windows machine out of the box.
The agreements which Microsoft makes with big OEMs prevent them from doing anything about it easily too.
Keeping viruses like this from running is normally as simple as telling people "Do not login as root and run unknown commands".
Which is in turn only an issue with home/SOHO users. Since in most corporate environments there is no reason for the average user to need to even know the root password to their workstation. (Unlike the all too frequent situation in Windows where a user might need to be "local admin" in order to even run the progams they need,)
Maybe a future distro will display this message when someone logs in as root: "DO NOT COMPILE AND RUN PROGRAMS AS ROOT UNLESS YOU TRUST THE SOURCE".
Or if logged in using a GUI put up a "loud" background to draw attention to the fact that you souldn't be here unless you really know what you are doing. As some distros do already...